rbas (more correctly Sicharbas; Sychaeus in Virgil), a priest of
Hercules. Her husband having been slain by her brother Pygmalion, Dido
fled to Cyprus, and thence to the coast of Africa, where she purchased
from a local chieftain Iarbas a piece of land on which she built
Carthage. The city soon began to prosper and Iarbas sought Dido's hand
in marriage, threatening her with war in case of refusal. To escape from
him, Dido constructed a funeral pile, on which she stabbed herself
before the people (Justin xviii. 4-7). Virgil, in defiance of the
usually accepted chronology, makes Dido a contemporary of Aeneas, with
whom she fell in love after his landing in Africa, and attributes her
suicide to her abandonment by him at the command of Jupiter (_Aeneid_,
iv.). Dido was worshipped at Carthage as a divinity under the name of
Caelestis, the Roman counterpart of Tanit, the tutelary goddess of
Carthage. According to Timaeus, the oldest authority for the story, her
name was Theiosso, in Phoenician Helissa, and she was called Dido from
her wanderings, Dido being the Phoenician equivalent of [Greek:
planetis] (_Etymologicum Magnum_, s.v.); some modern scholars, however,
translate the name by "beloved." Timaeus makes no mention of Aeneas, who
seems to have been introduced by Naevius in his _Bellum Poenicum_,
followed by Ennius in his _Annales_.

For the variations of the legend in earlier and later Latin authors,
see O. Rossbach in Pauly-Wissowa's _Realencyclopadie_, v. pt. 1
(1905); O. Meltzer's _Geschichte der Karthager_, i. (1879), and his
article in Roscher's _Lexikon der Mythologie_.

DIDON, HENRI (1840-1900), French Dominican, was born at Trouvet, Isere,
on the 17th of March 1840. He joined the Dominicans, under the influence
of Lacordaire, in 1858, and completed his theological studies at the
Minerva convent at Rome. The influence of Lacordaire was shown in the
zeal displayed by Didon in favour of a reconciliation between philosophy
and science. In 1871 his fame had so much grown that he was chosen to
deliver the funeral oration over the murdered archbishop of Paris,
Monseigneur G. Darboy. He also delivered some discourses at the church
of St Jean de Beauvais in Paris on the relations between science and
religion; but his utterances, especially on the question of divorce,
were deemed suspicious by his superiors, and his intimacy with Claude
Bernard the physiologist was disapproved. He was interdicted from
preac