The City of Carthage

From Cyprus they sailed to the coast of North Africa along with a band of Tyrian and Phoenician Cypriot followers, including among them eighty temple prostitutes to provide for the future growth of the colony. Elissa and her followers settled very near the present-day city of Tunis, and there established the city of Carthage. Some time later, when a native chieftain tried to force Queen Elissa to marry him, she committed suicide by leaping into a fire.

To anyone at all acquainted with classical literature, this story is likely to have a curious pseudo-familiarity. In Virgil's Aenead, Carthage is also founded by a queen, who commits suicide by leaping into a fire after a marriage plan goes awry. In Virgil's version, however, the queen is named Dido, and she commits herself to the flames not to escape a marriage, but in despair after Aeneas deserts her, sailing from Carthage to Italy, where his descendents would eventually found Rom

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the archeologists' spades turned up much to enchant the modern observer. Maritime and commercial peoples have often been inarticulate in the written word. In a later age, Venice contributed nothing to Renaissance Italian literature, nor did the Dutch in their great age contribute any literature of note. Both, however, expressed themselves magnificently in the visual arts, and the Venetian and Dutch masters speak with the voice their writers lacked. Now, very little painting has survived from antiquity, but great art is usually accompanied by fine craftsmanship, and the Carthagenian craftwork that has been found is of indifferent quality. Carthage's importance as an entrepot seems never to have been matched by any role as a production center, save of purely utilitarian objects, and we can only speculate that the puritanical reaction after Himera ruled out any developments the Carthagenians might have made in this direction. Finally, a further feature of the conservative movement ensured lasting opprobrium. The ancestral religion of the Phoenicians and related peoples featured human sacrifice by immolation; the legend of Elissa casting herself into a fire may be an early echo of such rites. Sacrifice of male children wa
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Approximate Word count = 8710
Approximate Pages = 35 (250 words per page)

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