History of Tunisia for centuries assigned its foundation to a queen of Tyre, Elissa, also called Dido. The Roman historian Pompeius Trogus, a near contemporary of Virgil, describes a sinister web of court intrigue which caused Queen Elissa (Dido) to flee the city of Tyre westward with a fleet of ships. The Roman poet Virgil (70–19 B.C.) portrays Dido as the tragic, admirable heroine of his epic the "Aeneid", which contains many inventions loosely based on legendary history, and includes the story about how the Phoenician queen acquired the Byrsa. By the middle of the sixth century B.C., Carthage had grown into a
Legendary progenitor and the personages whose names are associated with these sites have often only a mythical, or, to speak technically, an "eponymic" existence." In various Greek myths, Melampus is the "legendary founder and progenitor of a great and long-continued family of prophets". Along with his brother Bias, they became kings of territory in the Argeian and was acknowledged as a leader in Homer's Odyssey. His grandson is recorded as the prophet Theoklymenos. Niccolò Machiavelli discussed how in Ancient Rome, both Aeneas, the Trojan and Romulus were both who said to have been the legendary founders. He considered how people's view of