A TOUR OF TWO CITIES
Peter Jones says there's plenty of evidence that Carthage was as the ancients said it was; shame about Troy
IN THIS season of planning holidays, none of the special travel issues, such as The Spectator's last week, mention two of the world's greatest cities — give or take a few millennia. But how about a trip to Troy or Carthage? Historians will wonder whether it really was besieged by Homer's Greeks and, sucking their pencils, start searching for signs of siege and sack. Romantics will assume it was and, sucking theirs, will start thinking of words to rhyme with 'Agamemnon'.
Troy, like Carthage, is an ancient but archaeologically ravaged site. It is the liter- ary connection that makes them both come alive for the Western traveller. Take Homer to Troy, and Virgil and Livy to Carthage.
Troy, in fact, is the name not of the city, but of the area. The name of the city is (W)Ilion or (W)Ilios (Ilium is its Latinised form). No signpost has ever been found announcing 'Welcome to Wilion (twinned with Paris)'. There is no firm archaeologi- cal evidence for a Trojan War, let alone over a woman. As the Greek historian Herodotus argued, no king would be so mad as to allow his own city to be besieged for ten years and sacked simply because his son had come back from holiday with a foreign floosie. As for Homer, his Iliad was Composed c. 700 BC, some 500 years later. For all its faint memories of a long-lost past, it was not history but heroic epic, full of features typical of that universal genre. But whatever the Homeric connection, Hisarlik (the modern Turkish name) became a city of immense importance and wealth between c. 3600 and c. 1000 sc. It is no great shakes now: bare fields in all directions, sea in the furthest distance, Ilium itself a disappointingly small, cruelly slashed mound, its 50 different building phases, grouped into nine 'cities', impossi- ble to disentangle. Yet there are enough stretches of fine masonry to give a sense of its splendour — is that Homer's Scaean gate? — and make you wonder whether Achilles really did pursue Hector right there (Iliad, Book 22). Recent excavation, moreover, has shown that the mound is but the inner citadel: Ilium was in fact ten times larger. We also know that it originally abutted a huge bay stretching down from the Hellespont. Imagine it as a magnificent port, control- ling the southern entrance to the Black Sea as Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul does the northern. Hence its greatness and decline. As the Rivers Scamander and Simoeis silted up the bay, so Ilium's importance waned.
Classical Greeks, and then the Romans, knew the site as ancient Troy, and men like the Persian king Xerxes, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar paid their respects. Alexander raced naked at Achilles' grave, but that is an optional excursion. Caesar and the emperors Augustus and Constan- tine had ambitious plans for it, none quite fulfilled: their efforts survive in temples, theatres and council chambers. Homer's Iliad begins: 'Sing, goddess, the fury of Peleus' son, Achilles./Accursed, destructive, it brought countless sufferings on the Greeks;/it tossed down into Hades many mighty souls/of heroes; and it made them prey for the dogs,/and food for the birds. And Zeus's plan was fulfilled....' If those first great words of Western literature do not make your hair stand on end now, wait till you hear them at Troy. In Greek.
Carthage, the modern metropolis Tunis, shared a similar fate. Like Troy, it has been colonised by Western myth — Dido and Aeneas. Again, little of the original city, founded in the eighth century BC by Phoenician (i.e. Lebanese) colonists, has been uncovered. Outskirts have been exca- vated on the Byrsa hill, where the excellent Carthage Museum also stands. Indeed, by the 13th century AD virtually every other physical sign of its magnificent past had also been erased — Classical, Christian, Byzantine and Arab. St Augustine was here in AD 371, 'crackling in the frying-pan of dissolute loves', as he later admitted. But he was a bishop by then.
We know Carthage primarily as the city of Hannibal, which took on Rome in the Punic Wars of the third century BC and came within an ace of victory. Livy tells all (Books 21-30). Our viewpoint is as Romanised as the names: Carthago is Rome's shot at Semitic Qart Hdasht ('New City'); Punici derives from the Greek Phoinikes; Hannibal = Semitic Chenu Bechala (`grace of Baal').
As the elder Cato urged, Rome 'It's the people we were held hostage with that time at the airport. Do we want to get involved in a reunion dinner?' destroyed Carthage in 146 BC, ploughing its fields with salt, cursing it for all time. But Africa was too rich in grain and olive oil to remain unexploited, and Carthage was refounded as a Roman colony in 29 BC, to become the second largest city in the West- ern Empire. So what you will mostly see is Roman remains — baths, villa, theatre, cir- cus, aqueduct (in Wadi Milyan) and the Roman refashioning of the great Punic dou- ble harbour (one military, one commercial). Best of all are the acres of quite unbeliev- able mosaics (an African speciality) in the Bardo Museum. My favourite wittily depicts a tiger rug. Inevitably, they are displayed on the wall; so walking round them is a bit of a challenge.
In Virgil's Aeneid, Book 4, the Phoeni- cian queen Dido, whose palace overlooked the harbour, saw her lover Aeneas leave to found Rome. Cursing him and swearing eternal enmity, she constructed a funeral pyre and committed suicide on it. Read the episode looking down over the har- bour, but not from the heavily guarded presidential palace. This overlooks the main Roman site, and, photography being forbidden, is the most photographed build- ing in Tunisia. Avoid too enthusiastic a reconstruction of Dido's final moments. The local fire service is an unknown quan- tity.
Peter Jones lectures in Classics at Newcastle University.
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