The modern era, or at least the early modern era, had not served Dido well. As she explains in her introduction to Pandora’s Jar, Haynes was saying so on the radio when she was surprised to hear her interviewer describing the character as “a vicious schemer”, a version of Dido, it turned out, that was not Virgil’s, but Christopher Marlowe’s. Dido is a supremely sympathetic literary figure: dignified, humane, tragic. Dido, ruler of a nascent north African nation, was the queen with whom Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid, fell in love – before abandoning her to seek his destiny in Italy.
I t was actually a Roman mythological figure that compelled Natalie Haynes, author of the Women’s prize-shortlisted A Thousand Ships, to make female characters in the Greek myths the subject of her new work of nonfiction.
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