DIDO or ELISSA, the reputed founder of Carthage (q.v.), daughter of the Tyrian King Mutton, wife of Acerbas. Her hus band having been slain by her brother Pygmalion, Ditlo fled to Cyprus, and thence to the coast of Africa, where she purchased from a local chieftain, Iarbas, a piece of land on which she built Carthage. The city soon began to prosper and Iarbas sought Dido's hand in marriage, threatening her with war in case of refusal. To escape from him, Dido constructed a funeral pile, on which she stabbed herself before the people (Justin xviii. 4-7). Virgil, in defiance of the usually accepted chronology, makes Dido a contemporary of Aeneas, with whom she fell in love after his landing in Africa, and attributes her suicide to her abandonment by him at the command of Jupiter. Dido was identi fied with the Virgo Caelestis ; i.e., Tanit, the tutelary goddess of Carthage. Timaeus is the oldest authority for the story; the meaning of the name Dido is uncertain.
Rossbach in Pauly-Wissowa's Realencyklo padie; O. Meltzer's Geschichte der Karthager, 0879), and in Roscher's Lexik on.