Ancient Carthage the site of the city. Nearly all of the other Phoenician city-states and former Carthaginian dependencies subsequently fell into Roman hands. According to Roman sources, Phoenician colonists from modern-day Lebanon, led by Dido (also known as Queen Elissa), founded Carthage "circa" 814 BC. Queen Elissa (also known as "Alissar") was an exiled princess of the ancient Phoenician city of Tyre. At its peak, the metropolis she founded, Carthage, came to be called the "shining city", ruling 300 other cities around the western Mediterranean Sea and leading the Phoenician world. Elissa's brother, Pygmalion of Tyre, had murdered Elissa's husband, the high
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