Summary: The ancient reception of the Dido story includes an anonymous hexameter epistle
from the Queen to Aeneas, which appears in a late antique anthology from North Africa.
While the poem shows debts to Ovid’s Heroides 7, it also has extensive points of contact
with Virgil’s treatment of Dido in the Aeneid. This article demonstrates that Virgil is in fact
the prevalent model in the text for passages and discrete lines, and links this strong Virgilian
presence to the ascendancy of the Aeneid and Virgil’s Dido in Latin literary culture.