Aeneid Book 1, lines 338-370

Dido’s story

by Virgil

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.

To listen, press play:

To scroll the original and English translation of the poem at the same time - tap inside one box to select it and then scroll.

“Punica regna vides, Tyrios et Agenoris urbem;
sed fines Libyci, genus intractabile bello.
Imperium Dido Tyria regit urbe profecta,
germanum fugiens. longa est iniuria, longae
ambages; sed summa sequar fastigia rerum.
huic coniunx Sychaeus erat, ditissimus agri
Phoenicum, et magno miserae dilectus amore,
cui pater intactam dederat, primisque iugarat
ominibus. Sed regna Tyri germanus habebat
Pygmalion, scelere ante alios immanior omnes.
quos inter medius venit furor. Ille Sychaeum
impius ante aras, atque auri caecus amore,
clam ferro incautum superat, securus amorum
germanae; factumque diu celavit, et aegram,
multa malus simulans, vana spe lusit amantem.
ipsa sed in somnis inhumati venit imago
coniugis, ora modis attollens pallida miris,
crudeles aras traiectaque pectora ferro
nudavit, caecumque domus scelus omne retexit.
tum celerare fugam patriaque excedere suadet,
auxiliumque viae veteres tellure recludit
thesauros, ignotum argenti pondus et auri.
his commota fugam Dido sociosque parabat:
conveniunt, quibus aut odium crudele tyranni
aut metus acer erat; navis, quae forte paratae,
corripiunt, onerantque auro: portantur avari
Pygmalionis opes pelago; dux femina facti.
devenere locos, ubi nunc ingentia cernis
moenia surgentemque novae Karthaginis arcem,
mercatique solum, facti de nomine Byrsam,
taurino quantum possent circumdare tergo.
sed vos qui tandem, quibus aut venistis ab oris,
quove tenetis iter?”

“It is a Punic realm and Phoenicians that you see, a city of Agenor, on its borders are the Libyans, a people formidable in war. Dido rules here, and has fled from her brother and begun a Tyrian city. It is a long and complicated tale of injustice, but I will tell the main points. Her husband was Sychaeus, richest of the Phoenicians in land, dear to the poor woman by her great love for him. Her father gave her to him when a maid, and joined them under the best of auspices. But the ruler of Tyre was her brother Pygmalion, whose crimes made him the foulest of all men. Madness was at their core: sacrilegiously, blind with the love of gold, he secretly cut the unsuspecting Sychaeus down at the altars, regardless of his sister’s love. Wickedly, he long hid the deed with many pretences, and deceived the lovesick woman with vain hope. But her unburied husband’s ghost itself came to her in dreams and, lifting its strange, pale face, revealed the cruelty at the altar and the stab-wounds in its breast, and laid bare all the house’s hidden crime. It persuaded her to flee her homeland at once, and to help the journey revealed ancient buried treasures, uncountable weights of silver and gold. Shaken, Dido found companions for her escape. Men to whom the tyrant’s cruel hate or his fear were a danger banded together.  They took ships which happened to be in readiness and loaded them with gold, and, with a woman as leader, the riches that Pygmalion lusted for were put to sea. They came to this place where now you see the great walls and citadel of new Carthage rising, where they bought only so much land as they could ring with an ox’s hide, named Byrsa after the deed. Now, who are you, what shores have you come from and where are you going?”

`

More Poems by Virgil

  1. Turnus is lured away from battle
  2. Virgil’s perils on the sea
  3. The Harpy’s prophecy
  4. Souls awaiting punishment in Tartarus, and the crimes that brought them there.
  5. Dido and Aeneas: Hell hath no fury …
  6. Aeneas rescues his Father Anchises
  7. Aeneas comes to the Hell of Tartarus
  8. Mourning for Pallas
  9. The death of Dido.
  10. New allies for Aeneas
  11. Aristaeus’s bees
  12. More from Virgil’s farming Utopia
  13. A Fury rouses Turnus to war
  14. How Aeneas will know the site of his city
  15. The death of Euryalus and Nisus
  16. Rumour
  17. Dido falls in love
  18. The death of Priam
  19. Omens for Princess Lavinia
  20. Aeneas’s ships are transformed
  21. The journey to Hades begins
  22. Laocoon and the snakes
  23. Catastrophe for Rome?
  24. Aeneas is wounded
  25. The portals of sleep
  26. The Trojan Horse enters the city
  27. The Aeneid begins
  28. Aeneas reaches the Elysian Fields
  29. Aeneas saves his son and father, but at a cost
  30. The Syrian hostess
  31. The natural history of bees
  32. Aeneas prepares to tell Dido his story
  33. Virgil begins the Georgics
  34. Aeneas arrives in Italy
  35. King Mezentius meets his match
  36. Virgil’s poetic temple to Caesar
  37. Juno’s anger
  38. Vulcan’s forge
  39. Palinurus the helmsman is lost
  40. Aeneas tours the site of Rome
  41. Rites for the allies’ dead
  42. Aeneas sees Marcellus, Augustus’s tragic heir
  43. Juno is reconciled
  44. Aeneas’s oath
  45. The death of Pallas
  46. Juno throws open the gates of war
  47. The farmer’s starry calendar
  48. Turnus the wolf
  49. Dido’s release
  50. Aeneas finds Dido among the shades
  51. Charon, the ferryman
  52. The Fury Allecto blows the alarm
  53. In King Latinus’s hall
  54. Virgil predicts a forthcoming birth and a new golden age
  55. Love is the same for all
  56. Help for Father Aeneas from Father Tiber
  57. Dido and Aeneas: royal hunt and royal affair
  58. Anchises’s ghost invites Aeneas to visit the underworld
  59. Turnus at bay
  60. Aeneas and Dido meet
  61. Mercury’s journey to Carthage
  62. Storm at sea!
  63. Hector visits Aeneas in a dream
  64. Aeneas’s vision of Augustus
  65. Signs of bad weather
  66. Fire strikes Aeneas’s fleet
  67. The Trojans reach Carthage
  68. Aeneas learns the way to the underworld
  69. The farmer’s happy lot
  70. Aeneas joins the fray
  71. The infant Camilla
  72. King Latinus grants the Trojans’ request
  73. The Trojans prepare to set sail from Carthage
  74. Sea-nymphs
  75. Jupiter’s prophecy
  76. Laocoon warns against the Trojan horse