Sympathy for Queen Dido

Sympathy for Queen Dido
After reading The Aeneid, the question often arises, does Virgil primarily want readers to feel sympathetic or unsympathetic towards Queen Dido?   Some feel unsympathetic towards Dido because the gods had it planned that Aeneas would rebuild Troy in Italy, but it seemed as if she was directly disobeying this plan.   While Aeneas was trying to leave Carthage she kept holding him back, attempting to get him to stay and rebuild Troy in Carthage.   Some readers believe that Virgil presented her in this way so that the readers would feel she was evil and they would not have any sympathy for her.   After all, Roman readers would have thought of someone who had contradicted the gods as impious and evil.   Despite this, Virgil primarily wants readers to feel sympathetic towards Dido.   Throughout the poem, Virgil leads readers to feel this sympathy by giving her tragic backstory, and by showing the terrible effects of the imposed love with Aeneas.
By detailing Dido’s horrific backstory Virgil leads readers to feel sympathy for her.   The audience can see one of her earliest sorrows when Virgil tells of the death of her husband.   Rather than having her husband, Sychaeus, die of natural causes, Virgil chooses to have him die by the hand of Dido’s brother:
…Pygmalion
Took Sychaeus by surprise and killed him
With a dagger blow in secret, undeterred
By any thought of Dido’s love.   He hid
What he had done for a long time, cozening her,
Deluding the sick woman with false hope. (16)
The readers are struck with pity after they realize the cowardice of Pygmalion as he surprised Sychaeus and stabbed him in secret.   Dido didn’t even know how her husband had been killed and Pygmalion lied to the poor queen giving her a “false hope” (16).   The death of her husband scarred her so much to the point that Virgil described her as a “sick woman” (16).   In Book IV Dido says the “blood [her] brother shed stained our hearth gods,” suggesting her brother...