"Wandering Dido: Reclaiming a Carthaginian Queen"

Dido the founder-queen of ancient Carthage was immortalized - and killed off - by Virgil’s Aeneid. As a result, she is too often read through a Roman lens for what she can tell us about Roman culture and ideas. I will focus instead on earlier versions of the story, and I will argue that although they survive in Greek and Roman accounts, they reflect not just a story told about the Carthaginians, but a Carthaginian myth. I’ll also investigate why the story was so important at Carthage from the fourth to second centuries BCE, before it transformed from a local colonial myth to a Roman imperial one.