Virgil’s Aeneas has landed on the coast near Carthage in North Africa as the city is being built by Dido, its Phoenician Queen, and is being told her story. The speaker appears to be a beautiful local huntress, but is actually the goddess Venus, Aeneas’s mother, in mortal disguise.
Aeneas is destined soon to begin a disastrous love affair with Dido which will have fatal consequences and lay the foundations for the deadly enmity in future centuries between Carthage and Rome. Agenor is a mythical Phoenician king.
The story of the ox-hide is that the Libyans offered to sell only as much land as could be bounded by one hide, in other words virtually none. The purchasers got round this by cutting the hide into extremely thin strips that could enclose large amounts of territory. “Byrsa” was the name of the Carthaginian citadel and “borsa” in Greek means an ox-hide.
See the illustrated blog post here and link to the next episode here.
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