643. Rome’s Greatest Enemy: Carthage Destroyed (Part 4)

Who has words to capture that night's disaster, tell that slaughter? What tears could match our torments now? An ancient city is falling, a power that ruled for ages, now in ruins. Everywhere lie the motionless bodies of the dead, strewn in her streets, her homes, and the god shrines, all over now. Devouring fire whipped by the winds goes churning into the rooftops, flames surging over them, scorching blasts raging up the sky.

Treasure hauled from burning temples, the sacramental tables, bowls of solid gold, and the holy robes seized from every quarter, the enemy piling high the plunder, children and trembling mothers rounded up in a long, endless line. So that was the greatest of all Roman poets, Virgil, and he was writing almost two centuries after Hannibal's Great War against the Romans, the subject of this epic series, And a century or so after the final defeat of one of the protagonists in this story, the Mediterranean city of Carthage. And Tom, in that poem, The Aeneid, which is translated there by Robert Fagels, Virgil is taking us back, isn't he, to the legendary beginnings of Carthage, so shrouded

In myth, the story of its foundation by the Phoenician queen Dido, and the colonists from Phoenicia are labouring to build the new city, they're raising the walls, they're building the palaces and temples, the harbours that the Romans will later destroy, and at this point this bedraggled group of refugees who've been shipwrecked off the African coast turn up, and these people are are Trojans. They are. So they are, as you say, refugees from the sack of Troy by the Greeks. And the man speaking the lines that you you read so powerfully is their leader, a prince called Aeneas, who is the son of Venus, the goddess of love and beauty.

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