Following the battle between Aeneas and his men with the harpies, Celaeno directs them to leave her island and head for Italy, where she prophesies that they will become so hungry that they will eat their tables, before finding their destiny.

They eventually round the south-eastern tip of Italy, but are caught in the whirlpool of Charybdis when trying to pass between the mainland and the island of Sicily, and are forced ashore. There they rescue one of Odysseus’ men and escape the giant Polyphemus. Anchises then dies of old age, and they again head north towards their destiny.

Juno has it in for Aeneas and his men, so gets Aeolus, King of the Winds, to blow the fleet south once more. This angers Poseidon, who brings calm to allow the remains of the fleet to shelter off the coast of north Africa. There Aeneas’ mother Venus appears to her son and encourages him to enter the city of Carthage. She then tells Cupid to visit Dido, the Queen of Carthage who has recently been widowed, and encourage her to love Aeneas.

Dido and her brother Pygmalion (not the better-known Pygmalion who made and fell in love with a statue) are of royal blood, probably the children and heirs of the King of Tyre. Dido married Sychaeus, but Pygmalion wanted their riches too, so had her husband murdered when he was at the altar in their own home.

Dido took her riches and fled to North Africa, seeking sanctuary on a plot of land she acquired from the Berber king Iarbas, whom she rejected as a suitor. He gave her as much land as could be encompassed by an oxhide, so Dido ingeniously cut the oxhide up into thin strips, which she fastened end-to-end to enable her to circumscribe an entire hill. There she built the city of Carthage, into which she drew those who had fled with her, local Berbers and many others. The city grew to be wealthy and powerful with her as its queen.

JMW Turner depicts this in one of his works inspired by Claude Lorrain: Dido building Carthage, or The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire (1815). Dido is seen on the left bank, dressed in blue. On the opposite bank is the monumental tomb of her husband Sychaeus.

Once ashore in Carthage, Aeneas meets Dido, as shown in Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s Aeneas tells Dido the misfortunes of the City of Troy, painted in about 1815. He tells her the story of his escape from the ruins of Troy, and of his guilty secret: his wife Creusa had become separated from the rest of the family, and had presumably died.

It is Cézanne, in his watercolour sketch of Aeneas Meeting Dido at Carthage, painted in about 1875, who expresses this situation most clearly. Queen Dido is at the left, surrounded by her court. The warrior figure of Aeneas stands to the right of centre, and to the right of him is the shrouded spectre of Creusa.

Dido had sworn to her late husband that she would love no other, but as she and Aeneas get to know one another, both Juno and Venus (through her other son, Cupid) conspire to grow that into love. Venus wanted Dido to provide her son with a safe haven, and Juno wanted to halt his progress. This comes to a head when the couple go out with a hunting party, and take shelter from a torrential rainstorm, brought by Juno, in a cave. Both Virgil and Ovid make it quite explicit that they made love in that cave.

Francesco Solimena’s painting of The Royal Hunt of Dido and Aeneas from about 1712 shows the moment that Cupid has loosed his arrow at Aeneas.

As so often happens, Dido and Aeneas made love under different assumptions. For Dido, given her commitment to her husband, she consented on the basis that this was also the act of union in marriage. For Aeneas, who had made no such commitment to his wife, who had disappeared in dubious circumstances anyway, there was no such agreement, and he remained free to pursue his destiny.

The next external influence on the couple’s relationship then comes into play: Jupiter, wanting to chivvy Aeneas on his journey to start the founding of Rome and to appease Dido’s rejected suitor, sends Mercury his messenger to tell Aeneas that he must not tarry with Dido, but must prepare to sail, leaving the queen behind. Aeneas instructs his crew to get their ship ready to resume its journey, but in complete secrecy. He then goes to Dido to break the news to her, only to find that she already knew of his intention to desert her and abandon her as he had previously abandoned Creusa.

Pompeo Batoni’s painting of Dido and Aeneas (1747) draws on ambiguity in an ingenious way. It could be read as showing the couple after their lovemaking in the cave, with Dido still partly undressed, and Aeneas adjusting his clothes. However, the presence of Aeneas’ ship in the left background implies that this is the moment that Aeneas has returned to break the news to Dido that he must sail shortly.

Behind the couple is Dido’s sister Anna. In Virgil’s account in the Aeneid, she goes to Aeneas to plead Dido’s case before the queen’s suicide; in Ovid’s later version in his Heroides, Anna takes Aeneas the letter written for her by Ovid.

Dido’s letter, as supposed by Ovid, is a tour de force, and truly elegiac. It expresses her side of the story and her view of their relationship brilliantly. She points out that she could well be pregnant with a brother for Aeneas’ son Ascanius. She appeals to the emotions in a calculating and crafted way. And most of all, she raises questions about Aeneas’ abandonment of Creusa, which should have had greatest impact on his heart. No matter what Mercury might say, how could Aeneas abandon a second wife too?

Another of Claude Lorrain’s late paintings shows Aeneas’s Farewell to Dido in Carthage (1676). His fleet awaits him now, despite Dido’s passionate pleas for him to remain as her husband.

Mercury intervenes again, and Aeneas is driven to sail forthwith. When Dido sees this, her only option is to fall on her sword, taking her own life.

In Joseph Stallaert’s The Death of Dido (1872), the queen has fallen on the sword given her by Aeneas, and now lies dying on the couch on which the couple had previously made love, pointing at his ship leaving harbour by the light of the early dawn. Resting her hand on Dido’s chest wound, her sister Anna comforts the queen in her dying moments, as the queen’s nurse and a maidservant are in attendance. There is no sign of a funeral pyre, but suggestive smoke is made by the small altar at the extreme left.

Normally titled The Death of Dido, Tiepolo’s painting from 1757-70 shows an odd composite scene in which Aeneas, packed and ready to sail with his ship, watches on as Dido suffers the agony of their separation, lying on the bed of her funeral pyre. A portentous puff of black smoke has just risen to the left, although it’s surely far too early for anyone to think of setting the timbers alight.

Henry Fuseli’s Dido (1781) has mounted her funeral pyre, and is on the couch on which she and Aeneas made love. She then fell on the sword which Aeneas had given her, and that rests, covered with her blood, beside her, its tip pointing up towards her right breast. Her sister Anna rushes in to embrace her during her dying moments, and Jupiter sends Iris (shown above, wielding a golden sickle) to release Dido’s spirit from her body. Already smoke seems to be rising up from the pyre, which will confirm visually to Aeneas that she has killed herself, as he heads towards the horizon, and history moves to the founding of Rome.

Was it Dido or Aeneas? Or the pair of them? Ovid implies, but dares not state, that it was all down to the play of the gods. Given the conflicting interests of Venus, Juno, and Jupiter, their relationship was surely doomed from the start.