CHAPTER XXIV

THE GLORY THAT ONCE WAS CARTHAGE

Carthage, redolent of the memories of Dido, of Æneas, of Hannibal, of Cato, of Scipio, and a thousand other classic souvenirs of history, is the chief sight for tourists in the neighbourhood of Tunis. All we have learned to expect is there, deformed ruins and relics of a grandeur long since past. The aqueduct which plays so grand a rôle in the opera of "Salambo" is there, but it is manifestly Roman and not Punic. Thus did Flaubert nod, as indeed did Homer before him.

Carthage, as Carthage is to-day, is not much. It is but a vast, conglomerate mass of fragmentary ruins, a circus whose outlines can scarcely be traced, a very much ruined amphitheatre, various ground-plans of great villas of other days, the cisterns of the Romans, some Punic tombs, and the two ports of Carthage around which history, romance and legend have woven many tales. The rest is modern, the great basilica of St. Louis, the palaces of the Bey, and the princes of his family, the villas of the foreign consuls, the seminary of the White Fathers and a hotel or two. That is Carthage to-day.

Thus the history and romance of a past day must supply the motive for the visitors' emotions, for there is little else save the magnificent site and the knowledge that one is treading historic ground. The tract might well have been made a sort of national park, and kept inviolate; but it has been given over to the land exploiter like Tottenham Park and South New York, and the overflow from Tunis is already preëmpting choice plots.

Through the gates of the Venice of Antiquity, all the wealth of the East was brought to be stored in the warehouses of the ports of Carthage, but to-day all this is only an historic memory. The palaces and warehouses have disappeared, and the two mud-puddle "ports" have silted up into circular pools which glisten in the African sunlight like mirrors of antiquity,--which is exactly what they are.

Carthage, or what is left of it, is a dozen or fifteen kilometres from Tunis, by a puffing little steam-tram (to be supplanted some day by an electric railway, which will be even less in keeping).

One gets off at La Malga, and, in a round of half a dozen kilometres "does" Carthage, Sidi-bou-Saïd, and La Marsa in the conventional manner in half a day. If he, or she, is an artist or an archæologist, he, or she, spends a day, a week, or a month, and then will have cause to return if opportunity offers.

According to tradition the Tyrians founded Carthage in 813 B.C., being conducted thither by Elissa, a progressive young woman, the sister of Pygmalion. _Cart-hadchat_ was its original name, which the Romans evolved into _Carthago_, signifying "the new city," that is to say, probably, the "_New Tyre_." Owing to its proximity to Sicily, to all the vast wealth of Africa, and the undeveloped and unexplored shores of the Western Mediterranean, Carthage was bound to prosper. As Tyre fell into decadence, and the Greeks menaced the Phoenicians in the East, Carthage came to its own very rapidly, not by a mushroom growth, as with new-made cities of to-day, but still rapidly for its epoch.

The riches of the people of Carthage became immense, every one prospered, and its merchants trafficked with the Soudan and sailed the seas to Britain, while Hanno, the Carthaginian admiral, first discovered and explored the full extent of the West African Atlantic coast.

In the first Punic war Carthage disputed the ownership of Sicily with Rome, but without success; though indeed she was able to hold the gateway of the Western Mediterranean, and thus remain mistress of the trade with the outside world.

With the second Punic war Carthage lost further prestige, and her military and maritime strength was reduced to such an extent that her hitherto vast African Empire was restricted to the city itself and a closely bounding suburban area.

Even then Carthage ranked as the richest city in the world, with a population of 700,000 souls. In the year 146 B.C. the Romans rose again and gave Carthage a sweeping knock-out blow so far as its independence went.

Cæsar and Augustus came, and the city, peopled anew, was restored to something resembling its former magnificent lines and made the capital of the Roman African Province. A commercial city, wealthy, luxurious, gay, and cultivated, it became, next to Rome, the first Latin city of the Occident.

Christianity was introduced in the early centuries, and through the gateway of Carthage was spread over all North Africa. Religious partisanship was as rife and violent here as elsewhere, and Tertullian tells how, in the great circus amphitheatre, whose scantly outlined ruins are still to be seen as one leaves the railway at La Malga, Saint Perpétua and her companions were put to death by ferocious beasts, and how, in 258 A.D., Saint Cyprien, who was bishop at the time, was martyred.

The Vandals captured the city in 439 A.D., and the Byzantine powers under Justinian's general, Belisarius, got it all back again in 533 A.D., though they held it but a hundred and sixty years. The city finally succumbed, in the seventh century, to Hassan-ben-Nomane, who destroyed it completely. How completely this destruction was one may judge by a contemplation of the ruins to-day. The Tunisians and the Italians have used the site as a quarry for centuries, and Pisa's cathedral was constructed in no small part from marbles and stone from glorious Carthage.

Dido, Hannibal, and Salambo have passed away, and with them the glory of Carthage. To-day tourists come and go, the "White Fathers" exploit their vineyards, and the promoters sell land in this new subdivision to the profit, the great profit--of some one.

The Punic remains at Carthage, the tombs and other minor constructions, are of course few (the Musée Lavigerie on the height now guarding all the discoveries of value). But the fragments of the great civic buildings of the Romans are everywhere scattered about.

These ruins cannot even be detailed here, and the plan herewith will serve as a much better guide than a mere perfunctory catalogue.

Various erudite historical accounts and guide-books have been written concerning this historic ground; shorter works, of more interest to the tourist, can be had in the Tunis book-shops.

The discoveries of the last ten years on the site of the ancient Carthage have been many and momentous. They are of intense interest, revealing a people who possessed a far higher development than had been supposed, and who were, contrary to the general belief in modern times, something more than mere traffickers and merchants, and who evolved an art of their own, a unique and fascinating blend of the ideals of the Semitic and the Greek.

Our knowledge of the Phoenicians is still

shadowy and fragmentary; but the work conducted by the "White Fathers" of Carthage, under the direction of Père Delattre, has provided at least a foundation for further researches and comparisons, which no doubt will soon be undertaken.

The recent discoveries of Carthage may well be described as fascinating. Take for example the sarcophagus of a Phoenician priestess unearthed in 1902. It is believed that she lived in the third century B.C. The coloured marble sarcophagus is of the best period of Greek workmanship. A Greek carved this tomb, no doubt, but in the representation of the priestess we have a figure of a type unlike any Greek art known,--a type of beauty delightfully strange, a countenance of a noble loveliness and charm.

A sympathetic French _archéologue_ puts it in the following words:

"The brilliancy of colour and strangeness of attire, far from detracting from the dignity of her presence, seem to enhance the noble simplicity and reserve suggested by the figure. A rare and lovely personality seems to have been the inspiration of the sculptor. She was not a Greek, nor an Egyptian, and the Semitic features are hardly recognizable. The dove in the figure's right hand may well be taken as a symbol of her own gentle beauty and sweetness. Surely this is a pure type of Phoenician womanhood. That majestic calm which is the outward and visible sign of the highest courage within comports well with the reputation of the women of Carthage, and their bearing in that terrible siege which tried them unto death."

This is the sort of sentiment which still hovers over Carthage; but to sense it to the full, one must know the city's history in detail, and not merely by a hurried half a day round, out from Tunis and back between breakfast and dinner. Another recent find is the unearthed Roman palace built up over an old Punic burial-place. Luxurious, though of diminutive proportions, this palace, or villa, possesses a pavement in mosaic worthy to rank with that classic example of the Villa Hadrian at Tivoli. It may be seen to-day at the Musée, and is one of the things to be noted down by even the hurried traveller.

_En route_ from Tunis to Bizerta, thirty-five kilometres from the former city and about the same from Carthage, is the ancient Utica, founded by the Phoenicians centuries before the beginning of the Christian era, and which, after the destruction of Carthage, became the first city of Africa.

To-day the domain of Bou-Chateur, belonging to a M. Chabannes, contains all that remains above ground of this vassal city of Carthage. Once a seaport of importance, like Carthage, it gradually succumbed to a sort of dry rot and is no more.

The remains existing to-day are extensive, but very fragmentary. Only bare outlines are here and there visible; but from them some one has been able to construct a plan of the city on something approaching its former lines.

Immediately neighbouring upon Carthage is Sidi-bou-Saïd, easily the most picturesque village around Tunis, if one excepts the low-lying fishing village of La Goulette, better known by its Italian name of La Goletta. La Goulette itself played an important rôle in the sixteenth century. Charles V occupied it in 1535, and it became a fortified stronghold of the Spanish; but in spite of the fact that it was further fortified by Don Juan of Austria, after the battle of Lepanto, it was captured by the Turks under Sinan-Pacha the following year after a memorable siege. For the devout, La Goulette is of great interest from the fact that Saint Vincent de Paul was a captive here in the seventeenth century.

The little _indigène_ village of Sidi-bou-Saïd sits on the promontory called Cap Carthage and has a local colour all its own. It is purely "native," the land agent not yet having marked it for his own. The panorama of the snow-white walls and domes and turrets of the little town, the red-rock base on which it sits, the blue sea offshore, and the blue sky overhead, is a wonderful sight to the person of artistic tastes. Certainly its like is not in Africa, if elsewhere along the shores of the Mediterranean.

Beyond Sidi-bou-Saïd is La Marsa, without character or history, save that the Bey's summer palace and the country residences of the foreign consuls are here. The site is delightful and looks seaward in most winning fashion. On the hillsides round about is grown the grape from which is made the celebrated "_vin blanc de Carthage_," as much an accompaniment of the shrimps of the Lac de Tunis as is the "vin de Cassis" of _bouillabaisse_, or Chablis of oysters. In the neighbourhood are numerous caves, forming the ancient Jewish necropolis of Carthage under Roman domination.

Due north from Tunis a matter of nearly a hundred kilometres is Bizerta, now a French Mediterranean naval base as formidable, or at any rate as useful, as Gibraltar. It was the Hippo-Diarrhytus of the ancients, whose inhabitants were at continual warfare with those of Carthage. Under the Empire it was a Roman colony, and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries became one of the refuges of the Moors expelled from Spain.

The French occupation has made of Bizerta and its lake a highly active and prosperous neighbourhood, where formerly a scant population of the mixed Mediterranean races gave it only the dignity of a fishing village. It is very picturesque, its waterside, its canals, and its _quais_, but the primitiveness of other days is giving way before the moves in the game of peace and war, until everywhere one hears the bustle and groan of ships and shipping, and sees clouds of smoke piling up into the cloudless sky from the gaping chimneys of machine-shops on shore and torpedo boats and battle-ships on the water. It is old Bizerta rubbing shoulders with new Bizerta at every step.

Bizerta is now the most important strategic point in the Mediterranean. Gibraltar is covered by the Spanish fortifications at Algeçiras and Ceuta, and Malta is merely a rock-bound fortress that could be starved out in a month. The Mediterranean is French,--a French lake if you will,--as it always has been, and as it always will be. Tripoli in Barbary and Morocco, when they come under the French flag, as they are bound to do, will only accentuate the fact.