Dido

Profile

Dido, queen of Carthage, is recalled by Dante above all through the great Virgilian tradition: the love story with Aeneas, narrated in Book IV of the Aeneid, the hero's abandonment of her to follow his destiny, and the tragic death of the queen, who killed herself for love and for the wound of abandonment, breaking the promise of fidelity she had made to the ashes of her husband Sychaeus. Her figure was read in the Middle Ages as an allegory of the contrast between reason and passion. In the Commedia Dido gives her name to the band of the lustful (the band where Dido is), struck by the passion of love that drags one to death when reason does not resist it. The emblematic force of her character is such that only her story, among those of antiquity, can in some way approach in intensity the reality of Francesca. The mention of Dido's lap returns in Paradiso VIII to indicate the place where, according to tradition, Aeneas sat.