Ancient Carthage her rule. Her subjects adore her and present her with a festival of praise. Her character is perceived by Virgil as even more noble when she offers asylum to Aeneas and his men, who have recently escaped from Troy. A spirit in the form of the messenger god, Mercury, sent by Jupiter, reminds Aeneas that his mission is not to stay in Carthage with his new-found love, Dido, but to sail to Italy to found Rome. Virgil ends his legend of Dido with the story that, when Aeneas tells Dido, her heart broken, she orders a pyre to be built
Parallels between Virgil's Aeneid and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey of the "Aeneid" reveals a prophecy for Aeneas by the Sibyl of Cumae stating that a Latin-born Achilles, who is also the son of a goddess ("Aeneid", Book VI, lines 89–90), exists. There are many scholarly debates on who this Latin-born Achilles is, whether he is Aeneas, Turnus, or some other character, and if so, is the opponent symbolic of another character from the "Iliad"? If comparing Aeneas to Achilles and Turnus to Hector, several parallels can be drawn. One example is when Aeneas is absent from the battlefield, Turnus lays waste to the Trojan army, just as Hector did