DIDO

My name is Dido. I had to flee my homeland, Phoenicia, to escape the violence of my brother, Pygmalion, who brutally murdered my husband, Sychaeus. I reached Africa, where I founded a new city, Carthage, of which I became queen.

I am a young, beautiful, intelligent, strong, energetic and determined woman, but at the same time deeply marked by the tragic experience I have lived through. I carry within me an unresolved drama and pain, which make me a woman “not unaware of evils”.

At the behest of the goddess Aphrodite, I fell in love with Aeneas when he arrived shipwrecked in Carthage, thus betraying my oath of eternal fidelity to my late husband.

In the grip of desire, I wander deliriously around the palace and the city, my voice fails me, I can no longer sleep, I no longer care for my people and even the construction work on the new city has stopped, jeopardising not only my personal stability but also my public dimension as a ruler.

I know very well that the Trojan leader cannot stay in my kingdom – on the other hand he has been clear with me from the beginning. But my balance, already precarious, is wavering more and more: so I believe I am his wife and imagine I am the mother of little Ascanius. I am willing to do anything to prevent Aeneas from leaving: I offer him my city, my dynasty, my house and even go so far as to reproach myself for not having given him children. I feel the need to cling to him and his love, perhaps because I am not enough for myself, perhaps because I believe I can only exist as someone’s wife.

A victim of my own pain, drained and with no desire to live, I finally choose to die. But not as women usually do. Rather as a man might do, using the sword.

My shadow will meet Aeneas again, during his descent into the Underworld. Although he will show me affection and pity, he will also tell me that he could not believe that his departure would cause me so much pain. I will turn my back on him and with my face as still and hard as stone I will flee far from him, into the shadows.

For a long time I have been remembered, and celebrated, as the symbol of unrequited love, as the wounded lover, as the woman who goes mad with love, as the defenceless princess whose romantic dream shatters against the insensitivity and coldness of a man who cannot give up the destiny the gods have chosen for him. But I am much more than that, even if I only realised it when it was too late. I am a woman with her dignity and her pain, authentic and profound, whose exploits Virgil wanted to narrate to stage the drama of life in all its many facets.

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