Christine de Pizan's "Book of the City of Ladies" (1405) was written to counteract the lies and misrepresentations about
women's character that the author found in the male dominated world of
literature. The paper shows that Pizan's main example was Dido, the Phoenician widow of Sychaeus, who escaped her brother's tyranny by fleeing from Tyre to North Africa. There she founded and ruled over the great city of Carthage. The paper explains how, in her book, Pizan went about rehabilitating Dido's reputation by recounting her great prudence as leader of her people and her constancy in love. It shows how this account of Dido counteracts, in very different ways, the versions of Dido's career in Virgil's "Aeneid" and in Dante's "Divine Comedy" in which she is portrayed as "one of the most vilified
women of world literature".