Dido the time of Dido. Even with the date of 864 BC that historical revisionist David Rohl gives for the end of the Trojan War, Aeneas would have been about 77 years old when Dido fled Tyre in 825 BC and 88 when she began to build Carthage in 814 (following Peñuela's reconstruction), hardly consistent with the romantic intrigues between Dido and Aeneas imagined by Virgil in the "Aeneid". Virgil's references in the "Aeneid" generally agree with what Justin's epitome of Trogus recorded. Virgil names Belus as Dido's father, this Belus sometimes being called Belus II by later commentators to distinguish
Dido will, a deceitful explanation for the building of the pyre, and Dido's final suicide. In both versions Dido is loyal to her original husband in the end. But whereas the earlier Elissa remained always loyal to her husband's memory, Virgil's Dido dies as a tortured and repentant woman who has fallen away from that loyalty. Virgil consistently uses the form "Dido" as nominative, but derivates of "Elissa" for the oblique cases. Letter 7 of Ovid's "Heroides" is a feigned letter from Dido to Aeneas written just before she ascends the pyre. The situation is as in Virgil's "Aeneid". In Ovid's