Dido — Queen of Carthage

When she fled Tyre with a small band of followers after her brother murdered her husband, Dido asked the local Berber king for as much land as an oxhide could cover. He agreed, amused. She cut the oxhide into a single continuous strip thin enough to encircle an entire hilltop, and on that hilltop she founded Carthage. Dido was the greatest political founder in the ancient world — a woman who escaped murder, crossed the Mediterranean, outwitted a king, built a city from nothing, and created what would become Rome's most dangerous rival. Virgil wrote her death as tragedy. She would have seen it as the final act of a person who never surrendered control of her own story.

These signs carry the oxhide, the walls of Carthage rising from the hill, the crown of the founding queen, and the woman who turned a refugee's flight into a civilization.