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 and "righteous" Aeneas mercilessly slaughters Turnus. The "Aeneid" appears to have been a great success. Virgil is said to have recited Books 2, 4, and 6 to Augustus; and Book 6 apparently caused Augustus' sister Octavia to faint. Although the truth of this claim is subject to scholarly scepticism, it has served as a basis for later art, such as Jean-Baptiste Wicar's "Virgil Reading the Aeneid". Unfortunately, some lines of the poem were left unfinished, and the whole was unedited, at Virgil's death in 19 BC. According to the tradition, Virgil traveled to Greece in about 19 BC to revise