Elissa Silver Earrings (OR 020-AR)

Description

Dido / Elissa (Queen of Carthage)

Dido was, according to ancient Greek and Roman sources, the founder and first Queen of Carthage (in modern-day Tunisia). She is best known from the account given by the Roman poet Virgil. In some sources she is also known as Elissa.
The person of Elissa can be traced back to references by Roman historians to lost writings of Timaeus of Tauromenium in Sicily (c. 356–260 BC).
Eventually Elissa and her followers arrived on the coast of North Africa where Elissa asked the local inhabitants for a small bit of land for a temporary refuge until she could continue her journeying, only as much land as could be encompassed by an oxhide. They agreed. Elissa cut the oxhide into fine strips so that she had enough to encircle an entire nearby hill, which was therefore afterwards named Byrsa “hide”. (This event is commemorated in modern mathematics: The “isoperimetric problem” of enclosing the maximum area within a fixed boundary is often called the “Dido Problem” in modern Calculus of variations.) That would become their new home. Many of the locals joined the settlement and both locals and envoys from the nearby Phoenician city of Utica urged the building of a city.
The foundation of Carthage occurred 72 years before the foundation of Rome.