Dido or Elissa as she was known in Phoenecia, the femina, dux, and regina of Vergil's Aeneid, figures at the intersection of three great Mediterranean cultures, Phoenecian, Carthaginian, and Roman. The noblewoman who suffered her husband Sychaeus' death at the hands of her tyrannical brother Pygmalion, King of Tyre, the hostility of North African tribes upon her migration there, and abandonment in her new homeland by her Trojan lover, Aeneas, is the courageous leader who escaped her murderous brother, crossed the Mediterranean with her followers, and founded the flourishing city of Carthage (coin). As Vergil narrates her story, Amor, the boy-god, at the request of his goddess-mother Venus and Juno, conquered Dido when neither guile, aggression, nor obstacles could. In this passage Dido turns in prayer to the dark god of the underworld Pluto (Jupiter Stygius). Having resolved to take her life, Dido deceives her sister Anna and her husband's nurse Barce, asking them to help her prepare an animal sacrifice for a ritual of expiation. Instead of participating in the planned ceremony, she became the sacrificial victim. At the top of a mound she constructed of Aeneas' gifts and possessions she placed her "marriage bed," which became her funeral pyre and her funeral bier. The meter is dactylic hexameter. The Baroque composer Henry Purcell wrote the opera Dido and Aeneas (1689), Act III of which contains the lovely aria "Dido's Lament" (Soprano Maria Ewing sings "When I am laid in earth").