The East in the West

On January 18th 1807, after a long and dangerous journey from Alexandria, François-René de Chateaubriand finally disembarked at the port of Tunis. His expectations of meeting here the imposing remains of the once splendorous Carthage were quickly disappointed. Those places and buildings no longer existed, and the ruins of those that replaced them were confused with the modern texture of a ruralised town ignorant of its past. Having almost forgotten its own name, Carthage could hardly recognise now its own ruins. ¹ Chateaubriand’s imagined city was strongly clothed with the enchanting descriptions of Virgil, Polybius, Livy, Diodorus Siculus and other ancient authors who also nourished his topographical curiosity. From the Acropolis of Byrsa the author imagined Queen Dido inhabiting a once splendid building now in ruins and tried to distinguish the topographic traces of the Punic and Roman city. In the absence of proper ruins to evoke the past, he speculated about the fate of a city inexorably trapped between myth and history: “I thought of Dido, Sophonisba, and the noble wife of Hasdrubal; I contemplated the vast plains where are buried the legions of Hannibal, Scipio and Caesar …” Chateaubriand’s evocative list of relevant personalities compensates for the elusive physical reminders of the ancient city. While the male figures on the list are all military heroes that defended, conquered and, ultimately, reinvented Carthage, the three women incarnate the spirit of the city and its tragic fate. Chateaubriand reminds the reader that it was from this very hill that Dido and Hasdrubal’s wife threw themselves into flames, “one in order not to survive her disgrace, the other her city.” This is the story that began with the foundation of the city by the fugitive Tyrian Queen Elissa/Dido and her suicide/sacrifice and that concluded in 146 BC with an unnamed woman, who preferred death to the ignominy of slavery.