Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/338

324 wishes of Dido, and her infant colony, it was begun, and called Carthada, or Carthage, which, in the Phœnician language, signified the New City.

What Virgil has related concerning this princess, is only to be considered as a poetical fiction; since it appears that she lived at least two hundred years before the time of his hero, Æneas; and, at last finished her days, not, as he represents, a victim to love, but to conjugal fidelity, it being then considered criminal to marry a second time. Dido was courted by Jarbas, king of Getulia, who threatened her with war in case of a refusal. Her subjects also urged her to accept his hand; and she foresaw that she should either be obliged to violate her vows to Sichæus, or bring a powerful enemy on her infant colony. To extricate herself therefore from the difficulty, she threw herself upon a funeral pile, to which she had previously set fire, and that her subjects had erected, unconscious of the purpose to which she meant to apply it.

When we consider that a city, which soon became the first in arts and commerce, and the second in power, owed its political existence to Dido; that, during her life, she governed it with so much prudence, and, at her death, made so disinterested a sacrifice for its safety; we must class her in the first rank of heroines. . Socrates in Philosophia Amatoria, or how, from corporeal beauty, to find out that of the soul, the mind, and God. . DODANA,