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
HMS Dido (1896) HMS Dido (1896) HMS "Dido" was an protected cruiser built for the Royal Navy in the mid-1890s. Eclipse-class second-class protected cruisers were preceded by the shorter Astraea-class cruisers. "Dido" had a displacement of when at normal load. It had a total length of , a beam of , a metacentric height of around , and a draught of . It was powered by two inverted triple-expansion steam engines which used steam from eight cylindrical boilers. Using normal draught, the boilers were intended to provide the engines with enough steam to generate and to reach a speed of ; using forced