Pussy Galore but no Punic Heirs
Send in the Elephants
Hannibal was a Carthaginian ruler who terrorised the Roman republic during the 2nd Punic War (notably by taking an army of elephants over the Alps).
Unfortunately, his family line died out shortly after he was buried in the Necropolis and there were no further heirs to the Carthaginian throne (although, like the German Nazis after World War 2, it seems that some of them may have successfully escaped to Latin American and become Brazilians).
Carthago Visitari Est
The Romans were so obsessed with the utter destruction of Carthage that a couple of generations later not only did they launch yet another (third) Punic War, but the statesman Pliny habitually finished each of his speeches in the Senate with the phrase “All other things being equal, let’s have another pop at Carthage” (which bears remarkable similarities to the current Western obsession with starting Punic War III with Russia, Iran and China).
They did quite a good job — reputedly ploughing salt into the rich agricultural landscape of what is now Tunisia — but a few hundred years later had a change of heart, decided they rather liked the place, and went back to colonise it; as a consequence most of the remaining archaeological monuments now date from the later Roman Empire
Invasion of the Moggies
The legions and the orgies have sadly long since gone, and the ruins have now been taken over by hundreds of feral cats
These wild beasts — although far less ferocious than the Lions and Tigers which featured heavily in Roman Gladiatorial fights — are only slightly less predatory than the droves of local street vendors, who peddle a wide range of authentic Chinese souvenirs amidst the splendour of what was clearly once a very upmarket city
And so unfortunately nowadays Hannibal’s epic contribution to the cause of transalpine elephant migration is commemorated only by way of a solitary railway station, touchingly located on the trunk line to Tunis zoo
A classic story ending in Tragedy
The Romans never really lost their obsession with Carthage, and the author Virgil was so invested in the history of the place that he ended up inserting a Dido into his own epic Aeneas
Unfortunately, the tragedy didn’t end there, and even two millennia later, Dido is still exerting a traumatic influence on Western culture, nowadays by way of a sequence of lamentably awful dirges dressed up as popular music, and one cannot help but long for the silence of the lambs which once strolled the barren hillsides after the Romans had buggered up all the productive cornfields
I visited the ruins of Carthage in May 2023
