The tragedy of Dido and Aeneas is, to many Latinists, the one high point of Virgil’s dreary epic that is getting extra attention this year because of productions at the Royal Opera House and the Young Vic, and from Ursula le Guin’s Lavinia (she was Aeneas’s future bride). The tragic queen who established the great city of Carthage has always excited sympathy as a woman betrayed. Now her courage, pride and vulnerability has inspired an excellent children’s novel from Adèle Geras.

Dido is a return to the form showed in Geras’s earlier Greek-inspired novels such as Troy and Ithaka. Where Mary Renault emphasised the strangeness and savagery of Bronze Age culture in her unforgettable retelling of the Theseus myth, The King Must Die, and Rick Riordan updated it with his hilarious Percy Jackson adventures, Geras’s thesis is that people have not changed much. Her adolescent girls are just as confused, passionate and misguided as the modern variety as they struggle out of childhood into love and its revenges. In showing us what it might have felt like to be a princess reduced to slavery, or a royal nursemaid such as Elissa, the author wins our sympathies, making the remote past vividly interesting to a modern teenager.

Geras’s approach, though it may be too emotional for some boys, is wise. Roger Lancelyn Green, who probably did more than any children’s author to popularise Greek myths, used a similar approach in his novel about the kidnapped son of Helen and Menelaus, The Luck of Troy (which some publisher ought to reprint for a new generation). What would it have felt like to be caught up, as a child, in great, myth-shrouded events? In Dido the action is seen through the eyes of the Queen’s maid Elissa, the passionate teenager who will ultimately light the bonfire that consumes her grieving mistress. Like all the palace inhabitants, she sees and doesn’t see the exquisite gods that play with mortal lives. Hermes, Hera, Hades and Aphrodite casually appear and, after talking superciliously to mortals, confuse their memory. It’s a delightful conceit, because it allows the reader to enjoy a knowledge denied the protagonists; yet these gods feel for the human beings whose lives they have wrecked, and weep for them, even if what they call a “drama” is an individual’s life.

The novel is framed by the discovery that Aeneas and his ships are leaving, and by Dido’s suicide, but Elissa is not only a witness to Dido’s agonised suffering, she is an unexpected player, too. Her sensitivity to every shift in her mistress’s mood is matched by heartbreak of her own. The story of how Dido tricked the chiefs of her new country — by asking for enough land that could be bounded by the skin of an ox then cutting its hide into the finest ribbon — Aeneas’s arrival, and how the Queen of Carthage and future founder of Rome were led astray by a thunderstorm and Aphrodite is all backdrop.

Elissa’s take on all this seems to be that of a child who adores two quarrelling parents, but it becomes clear that something else is afoot, and Aeneas emerges as even worse than he does in Virgil’s poem. Geras’s ability to weave a touching new tale in with the well-known one is unique to modern children’s authors; Dido is a shining new jewel to her crown.

Dido by Adele Geras
David Fickling, £12.99 Buy the book

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