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
Dido twelve times in his plays: four times in "The Tempest", albeit all in one dialogue, twice in "Titus Andronicus", and also in "Henry VI Part 2", "Antony and Cleopatra", "Hamlet", "Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream," and most famously in "The Merchant of Venice", in Lorenzo's and Jessica's mutual wooing: In 1794 Germany, Charlotte von Stein wrote her own drama named "Dido", with an autobiographical element - as von Stein had been forsaken by her own lover, the famous Goethe, in a manner which she found reminiscent of Aeneas. Even today, Dido appears in Sid Meier's strategy games "Civilization