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Carthage: A Lost Empire

Remembering Carthage

Carthage: The Roman city
Polybius and the Roman historians
Literature
Music
Art

Carthage was destroyed in 146 BC, but not forgotten. Not only has the story of an empire that was virtually wiped out continued to fascinate historians, archaeologists, writers and artists, but it gripped the imaginations of the Romans themselves.

Carthage: The Roman city
For a century after its destruction, Carthage lay dormant, but in 46 BC it was refounded by Julius Caesar. The resurgence of the city was a symbolic piece of imperialism: Carthage would now be a Roman city, assimilated into the Roman world. Byrsa Hill, at the heart of Punic Carthage, was flattened and covered with a concrete platform on which the new city was built. It grew to become the second largest of the empire.

Carthage was very different under the Romans. Once known for its agricultural excellence, its vineyards and olive groves had been destroyed and abandoned to prevent competition with Italy, which now dominated the wine and oil markets of the Mediterranean. Rome’s economic and political requirements meant that Roman Carthage would be a one-crop province. Under the Romans, north Africa produced only wheat, providing 1,260,000 quintals (34.3 million kilograms/75.6 million lb) of wheat annually, meeting two-thirds of Rome’s needs (the other third came from Egypt).

Of Carthage’s Roman remains, the Antonine Baths stand out as particularly impressive. The most extensive example of Roman baths in north Africa, they were once the largest in the Roman world, with a central pool the size of a present-day Olympic swimming pool.

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Polybius and the Roman historians
The Greek Polybius was actually present at the destruction of Carthage. In his Rise of the Roman Empire, he set out to show how and why the civilised countries of the world came to be under the domination of Rome, but unfortunately much of his work has been lost. Many later historians relied on Polybius for their own accounts, and his is the version most favoured by modern historians. Philinus is known to have written a pro-Carthaginian history but none of it survives.

The other surviving histories give us the Roman perspective on Carthage. Julius Caesar was succeeded by Augustus as the Roman republic turned into the Roman empire. As well as rebuilding Rome and ushering in a golden age of peace and prosperity, he commissioned Livy to rewrite Rome’s history with a distinctly anti-Carthaginian slant.

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Literature
Augustus also had the poet Virgil enshrine the myths of Rome's foundation in The Aeneid. The tragic love story of Dido, queen of Carthage, and Aeneas, legendary founder of Rome, The Aeneid is political myth-making on an epic scale – and evidence of a powerful smear campaign. In it, Carthage is branded as foreign, decadent, perverted, cruel and treacherous, slurs that have lingered throughout history.

Carthage continued to fascinate writers centuries after its demise. The French novelist Gustave Flaubert, best known for his novel Madame Bovary (1856), travelled across north Africa between 1849 and 1851. He was so fascinated by the archaeological digs he saw at Carthage that he was inspired to write his historical novel Salammbo (1862). He combined considerable archaeological detail with a vivid imagination, and although the book only received a lukewarm critical response at the time, Flaubert’s interpretation of a child-sacrificing people is an image that has endured.

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Music
The tragic love story of The Aeneid has lent itself successfully to the stage, most famously in Henry Purcell’s 1689 opera Dido and Aeneas. This celebrated piece of early English opera is regularly performed.

Hector Berlioz’s Les Troyens is also based on Virgil’s writings. Inspired by the composer's childhood memories of reading Virgil, it is a somewhat weightier work than the Purcell, lasting around four hours, but has enjoyed a renewed popularity in recent years.

Handel devoted one of his operas, Scipione (1726), to the career of Hannibal's nemesis, Scipio Africanus. Like most of his operas, it is rather neglected, although the overture is often heard as a regimental march. Flaubert’s tale inspired the 19th-century Russian composer Mussorgsky to start an opera, but it was never finished, although one of the arias – ‘Song of the Balearic Islander’ – is occasionally performed. Two other French composers have taken on Flaubert’s novel, Ernest Reyer (1823-1909) and Philippe Fénelon (b 1952), but their works are little known.

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Art
Among the most spectacular paintings of Carthage are the three 16th-century friezes in the Capitoline Museums, Rome. These frescoed decorations attributed to Jacopo Ripanda show scenes from the Punic Wars.

The English artist J M W Turner (1775-1851) was clearly fascinated by Punic history. His Snow Storm: Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps (1812) is one of his most memorable pieces, while Dido Building Carthage (1815) and The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire (1817) capture the majesty of this once great city.

A popular theme of 17th- and 18th-century art was the 'continence of Scipio’. During the Second Punic War, Scipio captured the city of New Carthage (now Cartagena) in Spain and, according to Livy, could have taken the most beautiful girl in the city as his concubine. However, being a noble Roman, he returned the girl to her beloved, an act of virtue that inspired the artists Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641), Giovanni Pellegrini (c 1700) and Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) among others.

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Chronology

Carthage life

Why Carthage failed

Remembering Carthage

What remains?

Find out more

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