CENTRE POINT
`To hunt, to bathe, to gamble, to laugh, that is to live'
SIMON JENKINS
Ihave spent a week under the rolling thunder-clouds of Carthage, seeking relics of its degenerate past. They were not what I expected. This is where Dido was burned on a pyre after her epic one-night stand with Aeneas. Here Hanno watched his Spartan captives flayed alive, as he lay in a bath of bitches' milk eating flamingo tongues stuffed with poppy seeds. Here the Ottoman Beys sent their Circassian pimps to steal boys for them from the souk and set them naked on waxed saddles as depila- tories. If there was one thing a Bey hated it was bodily hair. But of pyre, bath and sad- dle nothing remains. Carthage is now a smart suburb of Tunis. Princess Salammbo is reduced to a railway station. Tunisians seem detached from their exotic past as they cover it with a shimmering veneer of modern villas.
What does remain is a white palace in a nondescript suburb of Tunis called the Bardo. As far as I can tell, few people out- side Tunisia have ever heard of it. The Bardo is a shrine to a different past, that of the lotus-eaters of the Roman empire who lived for four centuries after the birth of Christ. It is a shrine also to an unyielding, unfamiliar art, that of the mosaicist. The mosaics of the Bardo are astonishing, loveli- er than those of Pompeii or Ravenna. They are a wonder of the Mediterranean world.
The ruling Beys converted one of their most sumptuous palaces into this gallery in 1888. French and Tunisian archaeologists have since filled it with finds from the tiny portion of Rome's North African provinces that have so far been excavated. Mosaics cover every wall, staircase, even light well of the Bardo. They fill its vaults. They spill out onto the floor. They bombard the senses.
Here are designs for the villas and palaces of Rome's most wealthy colony. Here are families eating, playing, going fishing, putting on cosmetics, making music and making love. Here are the animals of the woods that then coated the North African shore, and all the fish of its seas. Here is a pictorial record of each ship in Carthage harbour, of each incident in a boar hunt and of each. hold in a wrestling contest. These works are Rome's foretaste of the Tres Riches Heures of the Burgundi- an court, or the genre paintings of Hol- land's Golden Age.
The Bardo mosaics are displayed in rooms based on the sites where they were found. The El Jem sequence glorifies hos- pitality, eating, drinking, men playing dice and there is a still life of fishes, ducks and hares. An artist has teased his chips of stone to reflect the tones of skin and fur, the play of light on a tree or the shadow on a road. This is no petrified art. A Carthage mosaic shows us the remains of a meal on a dining table, broken eggshells, banana peel and the skeletons of fish. In the mosaic of the House of Lord Julius, a lady leans languidly on a pedestal looking at herself in a mirror while a servant hands her a necklace. Round the estate the family and staff busy themselves with the labours of the seasons.
Interwoven with daily life are the gods who suffused this gilded landscape with benefaction. They are not the simple household gods of Rome. They are the gods of leisure and pleasure, the cults of Bacchus and Venus, of the vine and of love. A young Bacchus lounges naked back-to- back with Ariadne, grapes and garlands dripping down on them. Venus lies volup- tuous on a barge, disrobed to the thigh, while cherubs on celestial birds swoop to give her jewels. Or she stands on one leg, smiling seductively and crowning herself queen of the house. Above her a virile pea- cock opens its tail. Buried for centuries from barbarian defacement, these images are effortlessly erotic. Over Bacchus and Venus presides ancient Neptune. He rises from a Mediterranean teeming with fish, and assures the million- aire merchants of Carthage of safe passage for their ships to Rome. A 3rd-century mosaic has him in a chariot with four stal- lions, their manes flowing, with tails of fish- es. Another Neptune found at La Chebba is drawn out of the sea by leaping horses that would do credit to a Bernini fountain. These Neptunes know no fury. Their seas are calm, their attendants serene. The inhabitants of Roman Carthage lived by and for the sea. They made the fish the symbol of mystery and love. They revered the dolphin. Fish decorate the Bardo's two other mas- `Hello, is that the National Lottery disillusionment hotline?' terpieces, panels from Dougga, one of the most complete classical cities extant. Here is Ulysses lashed to his mast, peering towards the shore where Sirens look sulkily back at him on ghastly bird-legs. Birds lured Greek sailors to their deaths, not the fish maidens so feared by the Norsemen. The other panel is of a seaborne Bacchus, grown Falstaffian, showing his companions how to fend off pirates. He turns them into fish and feeds them to his leopards.
These mosaics show a culture at its zenith. The barbarians were not pressing from the west, nor the desert from the south. This was Rome's bread-basket and its retirement home. Two thirds of Rome's corn came from this province of Africa, so did a third of the Roman Senate. It was home to Tertullian and St Augustine. Apuleius wrote of finding here a 'large and rich dwelling in the midst of a generous land which supplied a profusion of wheat, barley, wine, oil and all manner of fruits together with a host of four hundred slaves'. The state offered not only security but roads, baths, aqueducts, and harbours.
These Romano-Phoenicians lived as well as men had ever lived. They anticipated no doom. There was no war in their art, nor even thought of war. The only weapons are those of circus gladiators. Over the Bey's old dining-room sits a contemporary mosa- ic of Virgil, attended by the muses of histo- ry and tragedy. A line from the Aeneid lies across his lap, but he seems lost for words to describe his sybaritic surroundings. An inscription over a bathhouse says of this time and place, `To hunt, to bathe, to gam- ble, to laugh, that is to live.' I suppose the British once thought the same of Africa.
I have never seen art convey such joy without menace as in the Bardo. The French scholar of the mosaics, Georges Fradier, wondered if they could possibly have moved their creators as they move us, who know what was to come. 'Did the peo- ple of these lands ever question the wisdom of their artists or the meaning of their myths? Did they just like to be among images of benefaction, which proclaimed that their world was in order, that joy and love were in their proper place, that beauty was sacred and that hope was permitted?'
Hope was not permitted. It was shattered in 431 when the Vandals arrived from Spain and butchered them all.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
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