'What is the female role of Dido or other women in the Aeneid?'

The female prototypes for the character of Dido are copious; the choices are such that, instead of Virgil choosing to model Dido specifically on one female character, he often combines several characters into one. It is important to note that characters are relational, and work together for the furthering of the plot. Then, we cannot look at Dido with an isolated eye, but we must see that her role influences and is influenced by other characters. Aeneas could be seen as an imitation, in the first 6 books, of Odysseus, and so there would then need to be a female figure who would offer him hospitality. Dido could be seen as this figure; in fact, she could be seen as a mould of Medea, Arete, Alcinous, Circe and Calypso from both of Homer’s works, and from Apollonius’s Argonautica. Arete is the wife of King Alcinous in both texts. The word ‘arete' (αρετή in original Greek) can be translated as ‘moral virtue’, and is often used to describe heroes. In the Argonautica, she receives Jason and Medea hospitably, even though they are from foreign lands, acting morally virtuous, defending the protagonists when they cannot defend themselves. Similarly, she is an honourable figure in the Odyssey. Athena describes her as an honourable figure: people ’honoured her as no other woman on Earth is honoured’ (the emphatic repetition of ‘honour’ recalling the reader’s attention to her central characteristic) to the extent that they ‘looked upon her as a goddess’; plainly, she is a woman who is respected and is positively viewed by the poet, reader, and characters in the poem. Virgil alludes to this presentation of Arete in the first description of Medea — he describes Dido as ‘pulcherrima’ and ‘like Diana’, ‘the tallest of all the goddesses’. By doing this, Virgil is clearly showing that he is building on Homeric context, and a Homeric context which presents her as a morally virtuous Queen with a monarch so successful that she is like a ‘goddess’ presiding over her kingdom.