A Hungry Fire

When Queen Dido, founder of the great city of Carthage, was abandoned by her lover, the Trojan prince Aeneas, she asserted her power by climbing a funeral pyre, thus sealing 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 Dido has striven to become as fearsome as her ancient counterpart. A driven and artistic civil engineer who dreams of designing her own Carthage, she navigates the thirteen-year pursuit of a diagnosis for her chronic, unexplained pelvic pains through the lens of the Roman epic. Princes and gods become doctors and protectors who follow her through years of tests, educated guesses, and medications. Her Aeneas is not a lover but a gynecologist. Through the ages, the muses have sung of the rage of Achilles and the cunning of Odysseus. Now, with acerbic humour, they bear witness for a modern audience to the wrath of Dido as she waves a wonky speculum aloft.