Not one Dido but a variety of Didos have engaged European cultures since antiquity. Reaching toward politics and eroticism and domesticity, exciting fear and admiration, encoding stereotypes of Orient and West, this variety helps account for the continuity of her presence as culture meets culture and era encounters era. By unravelling Dido's purse strings, through consideration of Carthage and its queen as a focus of moveable wealth, cunning trade, and technology, this essay is led to reflect upon an intriguing dynamic of medieval textuality, the impact of the margin, by which multiple figures of Dido vie for dominance within the transmission of Virgilian narrative from late antiquity through the later Middle Ages. Concealed in the obscure term byrsa, the story's suppression in a fold or bay of the text is undone in that text's own margins.