Dido, Queen of Carthage (play) on books 1, 2 and 4 of The "Aeneid," but the author makes several deviations from this material. Pigman draws attention to how imitators 'exploit... the historical distance between a text and its model', leading to 'crucial departures from, sometimes criticisms of, the model'. Stump suggests that these changes in "Dido, Queen of Carthage" make a mockery of Aeneas. They notably include: Jupiter is fondling Ganymede, who says that Jupiter's wife Juno has been mistreating him because of her jealousy. Venus enters, and complains that Jupiter is neglecting her son Aeneas, who has left Troy with survivors of the defeated
Virgil the "Aeneid" in "Amores" 1.1.1–2, and his summary of the Aeneas story in Book 14 of the "Metamorphoses", the so-called "mini-Aeneid", has been viewed as a particularly important example of post-Virgilian response to the epic genre. Lucan's epic, the "Bellum Civile" has been considered an anti-Virgilian epic, disposing with the divine mechanism, treating historical events, and diverging drastically from Virgilian epic practice. The Flavian poet Statius in his 12-book epic "Thebaid" engages closely with the poetry of Virgil; in his epilogue he advises his poem not to "rival the divine "Aeneid", but follow afar and ever venerate its footsteps." In