Dido's Problem/Historical Note

Historical Note on Area of Carthage
There are several more or less romantic legends of the origin of the Area of Carthage.

One of the more prosaic is that the founders were granted as much land as a man could plough a furrow round it in a day, given that a ploughman works at a constant rate.

A more fanciful one concerns Queen Dido, who was given a bull's hide, and told she could take as much land for her new city as she could enclose. According to the legend, she cut it (or arranged to have it cut -- she was a queen, after all) into one long strip of leather.

In both cases, the resulting length was used to measure out a semicircle.

The legend of the bull's hide is repeated throughout history in the contexts of the founding of several cities.