Dido is one of the most fascinating female characters in the realm of classical literature, a figure who symbolizes both the ways in which women in her time and place had their lives circumscribed by both the authority and the treachery of men and the ways in which women strove to define the meaning of their own lives. For those whose acquaintance with the Aeniad is only a passing one, Dido's suicide may seem to be a relatively trivial gesture, the sacrifice of self of a woman scorned by the man she loves. But considered within the whole context of the epic, we see her immolation as the act of a woman who has decided that if she cannot live life according to her own terms then she can at least die on her terms. Her death should be read not simply as a reaction to Aeneas's visit but rather as a response to the entirety of her life. Taken in the context of her life and of her encounters with not just Aeneas but also other powerful men, her resentment towards the last man to betray her is indeed justified. "The Aeniad" tells the story of Aeneas, who is the son of the mortal Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite. Virgil presents us with a very different story of these characters than does Homer, in whose sagas they also appear. In this later work, Virgil relates how Aeneas, after the sack of Troy, carries his father away from the conflagration of the city and decides that it is his fate to create a new nation. He - like Moses - then wanders in wilderness for a number of years, acc
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