A Hungry Fire

After Queen Dido, founder of the great city of Carthage, was abandoned by her lover, the Trojan prince Aeneas, she asserted her power by choosing the method by which she would die. Stabbing herself atop a funeral pyre with a gifted sword, she sealed a curse on his descendants for generations to come.

Her twenty-first-century namesake, however, doesn’t want her life to end in flames. She needs answers.

Since encountering Vergil’s Aeneid in the paintings of a childhood book, modern-day Dido h...