What do we know about Dido (and Anna) before Virgil?

• Entry from On Women, by an anonymous author, reporting what the historian Timaeus (ca. 300 BCE) said about Dido:
• "Theiosso: Timaeus says she is called Elissa in the Pheonicians' language, and that she was the sister of Pygmalion, king of the Tyrians. He reports that the Libyan city Carthage was founded by her. For when her husband was killed by Pygmalion, she put her belongings into boats and fled with some fellow-citizens. After having suffered many ordeals she landed in Libya. She was called Dido by the Libyans because of her great wandering. Having founded the aforementioned city (Carthage), when a Libyan king wanted to marry her, she refused. But being pressured by the citizens, on the pretext of accomplishing a rite to fulfill an oath, she prepared and lit a great pyre near her house and cast herself into the fire from her house." ANON. De mul. 6 p. 215 West: Timaeus 566F fr. 82 in FGrH
• Aetius Philologus (1st. c. BCE: before Virgil) wrote a treatise called Did Aeneas Love Dido?
• Varro (116-27BCE) reports that Anna, not Dido, killed herself on a pyre (Servius on Aeneid 4.682)
• Ovid (generation AFTER Virgil) includes the story that Anna fled from Iarbas to Italy, where she fell in love with Aeneas! (Fasti 3.543-656)
  

• Virgil thus drew on a mythological tradition: Homer, tragedy, and hellenistic poetry shaped the story too, in an inter-textual way:
• Compare Homer's comparison of Nausicaa to Artemis (6.102-9) with Virgil's comparison of Dido to Diana
• Compare Apollonius of Rhodes Argonautica, the scene where Medea first sees Jason (he too was cloaked in a cloud) at Argonautica 1.284, with Aeneas beclouded then revealed to Dido and company. For arrival cloaked in cloud, see Odyssey: Odysseus' arrival in Aeëtes' palace (and also, his arrival back on Ithaca).
• For Dido abandoned, cf. Catullus 64 (where Ariadne is abandoned by Theseus)
• Dido appears again in the underworld (Aeneid 6.450f.): compare that to when Odysseus tries to speak to Ajax (Odyssey 11.543f.)
• ....
  
• Note how Dido's curse forms an aetiology for the enmity between Carthage and Rome: 4.607f.
• the idea of an avenger of Dido arising will have called Hannibal to Roman minds, but also perhaps Cleopatra
• There is a long parallel tradition that Dido remained chaste and preserved her virtue (starts with Tertullian, 3rd c. CE)

• TEXT
• A couple papyrus scraps found in Egypt: scrolls, but highly fragmentary.
• "Vatican Vergil": an illustrated manuscript from ca. 400 CE
• exceptionally early and extensive
  
• Vatican Vergil Website
• Image from Vatican Vergil of Aeneas leaving Dido
• Image from Vatican Vergil of Dido on the Pyre
• Other 5th c. codices exist, one of which is highly scholarly, with only a few lines of Virgil per page, surrounded by scholia.
• Our current text depends mostly on 3 5th-6th century manuscripts, M, P, and R: but by that time, there was already substantial variation, so we don't have Virgil's ipsissima verba.
• Virgil's friend Lucius Varius Rufus evidently tried his hand at completing or improving here and there, and we can't know how much he did.
• But still, we are in a much better position for Virgil than almost any other author of antiquity.
  

Worth thinking about: subversive/pessimistic voices were found in Vergil most prominently by scholars who were keenly aware of the Vietnam War. Is all reading inevitably autobiographical?