Aeneid book 1 characters Flashcards. Dido in The Aeneid. Dido is many readers' favorite characters in the Aeneid, and with good reason.
It is clear that Virgil spent a great amount of energy developing her character, and the extended description of her and Aeneas's doomed love affair in Book 4 represents one of Virgil's significant innovations in the genre of epic poetry. For the earliest precedents to the character of Dido, you'd have to turn to the sorceress Kirke (or Circe) and the nymph Kalypso (or Calypso) from Homer's Odyssey. These women, especially Kalypso, who is holding Odysseus prisoner when the story begins, play a similar role in the plot of the Odyssey as Dido does in the Aeneid: they distract the hero from his main mission of getting home (Virgil puts a different spin on this in the Aeneid by making Aeneas look for his new home.) A more immediate precedent for Dido is the character of Medea in the epic poem The Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes.
But that's just the issue: she is loyal to his memory. The Aeneid. Aeneid by Virgil CliffsNotes - Study Guide and Help.