PrintAn extensive amount of the work of the Roman poet Ovid has come down to us today. His 'Heroides' are a series of poems that use the metre of elegaic couplets and take the form of letters written by women expressing grievances to their male lovers in Greek and Roman mythology. Letter seven is the epistle of Queen Dido of Carthage to the Trojan prince Aeneas, who came to Africa's shores after fleeing Troy and being shipwrecked. Aeneas became Dido's lover, before choosing to abandon her to sail to Italy where he was destined to establish the precursor of the Roman realm. Devastated, Dido then committed suicide. The story itself is best remembered in Virgil's epic Aeneid.
I came across Ovid's epistle in more recent times while reading the Historia Romanorum ("History of the Romans"), which is essentially the second volume of 13th-century Toledan archbishop Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada's 'History of Spain' project. The primary purpose of that volume is to explain how the Romans contributed to the series of invasions and calamities that befell Spain, and includes an account of how the Romans came to be. While it is an interesting question about whether Virgil and/or Ovid thought that Aeneas actually met Dido, Rodrigo treats the story as historical fact and even tries to situate it in parallel with Biblical chronology, citing Ovid's poem as evidence of Dido's pleading and address to the Trojan hero! Here I provide my translation of the poem (generally close to the Latin text, but also readable) together with annotations. The poem reflects Dido's wild sways of emotion as she eventually resolves to commit suicide. The edition of the Latin text used is that contained in Corpus Poetarum Latinorum (ed. William Sidney Walker, 1840).
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