Dido kills herself because Aeneas leaves her to fulfill the order of the gods to sail to Italy, and because she, after begging in vain that he at least wait for an easier sea, decides to die: she has a pyre built with his weapons, hurls a curse on the Trojan line, and wounds herself with the Trojan sword.
Her love is born armed. Venus has Cupid take the face of Ascanius to set her aflame, and Juno later proposes to marry the two to keep Aeneas away from Italy. In the cave, during the storm, the narrator says that Dido "calls marriage" what she has lived and with that name covers her guilt. Meanwhile, Fama spreads that the two forget their kingdoms, and Jupiter sends Mercury to rebuke Aeneas for raising a city for another people.
Dido discovers the fleet's preparations before hearing a word from him. Aeneas replies that he never promised marriage or planned to flee in secret, but that the oracles send him to Italy: "it is not of my own will that I follow." She reads his immobility as lack of feeling and calls him a son of stone and of tigers. She sends her sister Anna to ask only for time, and the narrator says that "the fates oppose it" and that a god stops her ears.
Seeing the harbor empty, Dido asks that he reach Italy but exiled, torn from his son's embrace, unburied, and that an avenger rise from her bones, which the poem presents as the origin of the enmity between Rome and Carthage. On the pyre she takes stock of her life: she founded a city, avenged her husband, and would have been too happy if the Trojan ships had never touched her shore. The narrator explains that she died before her time, in a sudden frenzy, with neither fate nor punishment asking for it. In the world of the dead, Aeneas meets her again, and she does not answer him.