The Second Punic War was fought between Rome and the North African state of Carthage from 218 to 201 BC. Almost three hundred years later, a poet named Silius Italicus (c. AD 28–c. 103) celebrated Rome’s ultimate victory in his tremendously long Latin poem, the Punica. In this passage he charts the rise of Hannibal, the most fearsome fighter on the Carthaginian side, against the background of Dido’s foundation of Carthage in mythical times. Having fled her native Tyre after her brother, Pygmalion, murdered her husband, Sychaeus, Dido (‘Elissa’) was permitted to establish a territory as large as could be surrounded by a bull’s hide. Cleverly, she cut the hide into tiny strips and joined them together to encompass a significant plot. Aeneas, the ‘exile of Troy’, later arrived in Carthage and became Dido’s lover (see Story 49). Silius Italicus describes what inspired Hannibal of Carthage to war against the ‘kingdom of Latinus’, that is, the Italy Aeneas came to know, and become one of the most memorable enemies the Romans ever encountered.

When Dido long ago fled across the sea from the land of Pygmalion, leaving behind her the realm polluted by her brother’s guilt, she landed on the destined shore of Libya. There she bought land for a price and founded a new city, where she was permitted to lay strips of a bull’s hide round the strand. Here—so remote antiquity believed—Juno elected to found for the exiles a nation to last for ever, preferring it to Argos, and to Mycenae, the city of Agamemnon and her chosen dwelling-place. But when she saw Rome lifting her head high among aspiring cities, and even sending fleets across the sea to carry her victorious standards over all the earth, then the goddess felt the danger close and stirred up in the minds of the Phoenicians a frenzy for war. But the effort of their first campaign was crushed, and the enterprise of the Carthaginians was wrecked on the Sicilian sea; and then Juno took up the sword again for a fresh conflict. When she upset all things on earth and was preparing to stir up the sea, she found a sufficient instrument in a single leader.