When my mother birthed me, they named me Elissa. It means ‘Oath of God’.
When I founded a city and died for it, the people screamed ‘Dido the wanderer’. And wandered I had.
Princess of Tyre had been my title. The King had only two children: myself, and my brother Pygmalion, heir to the throne. Rumour was that grief over my mother’s death had prevented him from bedding another woman, but I suspected that his failure to produce more offspring was due to something other than a lack of fervour.
For my first fourteen years, the life I led was lavish and secluded. I still recall the slapping of my running feet against cool marble and the morning ballads of the White-Throated Kingfisher. My only glimpse of reality came during a weekly deportment lesson, where my nurse Sabina would tell me with wide eyes “if a princess cannot ensnare a suitor, Eris must have conquered Olympus”. Despite her penchant for overly-dramatic warnings, my nurse and I had a bond of Philotes, and she travelled as my attendant wherever I went.
Every evening I dined with my father, my brother Pygmalion, and my uncle Sychaeus. The men engaged in heated debates whilst I sat sedately. However, one night shortly after my fifteenth birthday (and the monthly cycle that followed) I found myself speaking at the dining table. Sychaeus had insisted that “Women attending the theatre will encourage laziness around the household”, to which I had stated that “If watching a play can drive a man’s wife to laziness, then we may assume that she was never his to begin with”. This voice I couldn’t quieten remains my Hamartia even now.
Tragically, as Sabina put it, I never had the opportunity to practise my ‘ensnaring’. My uncle Sychaeus apparently fetishised insolence amongst female relatives, because a week later a maid was sent to me bearing the news that I was to become Sychaeus’ wife. I’ve never known why my father agreed.
During the three day wedding I wore shades of crimson, and on the fifth night when Sychaeus took what was not his, I did not cry out and I did not beg. I barely breathed. That night, I behaved more courageously than any of my father’s posturing soldiers. That night I endured, and when morning came I vowed to the goddess Diana that I would never again suffer the touch of a man.
Pygmalion and I were not close throughout childhood. There was no malice between us, but the weight of our separate responsibilities had wedged a gap between us. Yet he remained the only person I could ask this favour of, and so one morning before dawn I crept into his chamber. Shaking him gently, I whispered “brother, I need your help”. His body jerked into alertness and I flinched as his right arm reached for a dagger I’d never known lay under his pillow. He was fourteen. Yet when he spoke, it was to say “I am your hands in whatever you need of me”. Pygmalion would enact my Nemesis, or my righteous anger leading to revenge.
That very afternoon, Sychaeus was found unconscious in his chamber by an unlucky maid. I never found out what happened afterwards; by the time the priests had arrived to examine him I was long gone on the first ship departing from Tyre’s port. The only items I brought with me were a handheld jade mirror, a maid’s robes, and as many coins from the chest in Sychaeus’ chamber as I could pack into my bundle.
The ship’s unsteadiness made me regret my hasty departure. Owing to my beggar woman disguise, I had the smallest cabin, and when it rained the water leaked through my ceiling. We arrived in what I now know as Africa a week later, by which time the water had gathered halfway up to my knees and my feet had shrivelled into pasty white prunes.
This would have to change if I was to become the most irresistible woman in the land. I settled for a time in the town of Dougga, earning a small living with a band of seven other women in a launderette, stamping through clothes with the town’s urine. It was hard work, but I persevered in the knowledge that a bright future awaited me.
One morning on a visit to the docks to buy the day’s fish, I heard a group of sailors whispering about “Elissa, Tyre’s black wife”. Fixing my face into careful impassiveness, I continued to subtly monitor their conversation. I learnt that the Aidos they had built in my name after my departure from Tyre was so great that I could never visit my home city. I would never achieve my nostos. There was no proof, of course, but the danger remained.
It then became imperative to put my plan into action. The women from the launderette didn’t hesitate when I asked them to leave Dougga with me and make a new life. Neither did the group of dejected-looking fishermen to whom I posed the same question. Each had few family ties, making them ideal for my task. The women stole robes from the laundry to take as their own, and with our pooled wages (and some of Sychaeus’ leftover money) we bought six wagons and twelve horses. Into these we piled building tools, planks of wood, heavy blocks of limestone, sacks of pomegranate seeds, oats for the horses, warm furs, ample skins of fresh water, dried strips of cured meat, and several crates of pickled figs.
My aim for the journey was to go far enough that we couldn’t see another city, which meant three days on the road. We stopped at a gathering of maple trees for the shelter they provided, and for the water that had to be hidden underground. Mamercus, the most responsible of the fishermen, was entrusted with hammering a long wooden pole into the dirt. On it we’d inscribed the word ‘Carthage’, or “new town”. Over the coming days we erected a camp of sorts, and the men constructed a well. We women had a different focus: I was to become a noble again and these seven women my attendants. We dressed in our fine robes and joked that I was “Queen of Nothing”. When I started teaching decorum, I felt a pang in my heart for Sabina, my nurse in Tyre. Pygmalion and I had decided it was too dangerous for me to bring her with me, but that did not lesson my heartache.
That first month was spent irrigating the soil with water from the well, planting the pomegranate seeds, and making one solid building out of the limestone, which we dubbed “the palace”.
The first travellers stumbled upon our makeshift village soon afterwards, and I welcomed them under the name ‘Queen Dido’. They were provided with a room in the palace, as hearty a meal as we could muster, a lock of my own hair, and my royal company (Sabina had instructed me proficiently on the rules of Xenia). In exchange they offered two gold goblets. Thus Carthage’s treasury, and my Geras, began. I had won those goblets not through battle of the physical kind but through the battle of seduction. That very night, the more confident of the two asked for my hand. I replied that “your odds will become infinitely more favourable if you return to me with livestock, and tell all whom you know of Carthage”.
After that, Carthage quickly became a thoroughfare for every curious young man with money to throw. Everyone had to know who the mysterious young queen was, and I knew just how much of me to give them. A farming sector was erected, and some of my attendants married the fishermen we had arrived with. In those months, Carthage had its golden age and I achieved my Aristeia like no other woman had before me.
But then he came. His name was Iarbas and unlike the others, he wouldn’t be waved away with a promise of more. Indeed, I was so irresistible that he brought an entire army to ‘persuade’ me. My options were: marry or allow my town to be sacked and my women raped.
I cannot now allow him to destroy what we have built. But I cannot marry him, lest my vow to Artemis be broken and I bring the wrath of a goddess upon us.
As I build this pyre, I tell them it is a last funeral right for a long lost husband.
As I lift myself upon it, I tell them it is to inspect the thigh bones wrapped in fat scattered along its top.
And as I plunge the dagger into my stomach, I am quick as a dove and they cannot possibly stop me, only scream ‘Dido our Wanderer’ as the light leaves my eyes.