The Rest Is History - 262: Tunisia: Dido of Carthage

Episode Date: November 24, 2022

Join Tom and Dominic as they tell the story of the tragic heroine of Virgil’s Aeneid - Dido of Carthage. Listen as they discuss the origins of Carthage, recite top Latin phrases, and are joined by Juliette Pochin for a beautiful rendition of Dido’s Lament. Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello and welcome to The Rest Is History. And today, Tom, we are going to be talking about a country that I've actually seen play at the World Cup, which is Tunisia, a country with a... Have you? I have in... I know you don't want to talk about football too much, but I saw them play against Colombia in 1998 in the French World Cup.

How did they do? Colombia won 1-0. That's a shame. Tunisia generally, well, I mean, generally better known, it's not as well known for football as it was for Barbary Pirates. Child Sacrifice. Well, come to Child Sacrifice. It was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.

And before that, it was the centre of the great city of Carthage, Rome's deadly rival. And which, according to legend, was founded by a woman called Dido. And so I thought that today's episode, in honor of Tunisia, we would go right back to the beginnings and look at Dido, who is the founder of Carthage. And she's a legendary figure, but her best known incarnation is as the great tragic heroine of the Roman poet Virgil's epic, the Aeneid. And the Aeneid, it's an epic that tells the story of the founding of Rome, how Rome comes to be founded by a band of exiles from Troy. And these Trojans are led by Aeneas, who is the son of Venus. He has escaped from Troy. He's come with a fleet of ships.

And the epic opens with them being shipwrecked off the coast of what is now Tunisia. And they go wandering off, trying to find someone to help them. And they discover this great city being built. It's in the process of being constructed. And Virgil gives this great city being built. It's in the process of being constructed. And Virgil gives this great phrase. It's one of the great Latin tags, Dux Femina Facti. A woman was the leader of the enterprise. And this woman is the Queen Dido, who has come from the Phoenician city of Tyre. So Phoenicia is now Lebanon. And the leader of this expedition is Dido, who is a queen from the Phoenician city of Tyre. So Phoenicia is now Lebanon. And the leader of this expedition is Dido, who is a queen

from the Phoenician city of Tyre. Phoenicia is current day Lebanon. She's gone into exile. And she's arrived at this promontory sticking out into the sea in North Africa. And she has been given land to construct the city. And she's very keen on Aeneas. She plays host to him. Aeneas tells her the story of the Trojan War, the Trojan horse, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. That's where that tradition comes from. And they fall in love.

Oh, it's a lovely story. It is a lovely story, but it doesn't end well because they go off hunting. There's a thunderstorm. They end up in a cave and whoosh uh it it's all kinds of shenanigans that are happening there now juno the queen of the gods is very happy about this because she wants to frustrate the destiny of aeneas to found this city that in turn will lead to the founding of rome And Venus, who is Aeneas' mother, is very keen

because she wants to see her boy settle down with a nice girl. So she's very keen. But Jupiter, the king of the gods, bury cross because it is Aeneas' destiny to go off and do all the founding that will culminate in the founding of Rome. So if he's hanging out in a cave with Dido, it's not going to happen.

Getting up to no good. So he's frustrating destiny. Yeah, exactly. So he sends down Mercury and Mercury says, what are you up to, to Aeneas? And he comes up with another cracking Latin tag, varium et mutabile semper femina, fickle and ever changing is woman, which is absolute classic of mansplaining, of course. And Mercury would be in deep trouble now. Yeah, he would. Because actually, the person who's being fickle is Aeneas,

because he's dumping on his own destiny and he's leading poor Dido astray. So Aeneas bunks off and sails away. And Dido is so upset about this that she piles all the finery for her wedding that she's been gathering together into a great big pile. She stands on top of it, and then she incinerates herself. And she offers herself as a kind of sacrifice to the gods. And as she dies, she swears eternal enmity to the descendants of Aeneas and prophesies that a great scourge will come who will be the great kind of the bane of the Roman people. And that scourge, of course, is Hannibal, the Carthaginian, who will lead the elephants over the Alps and is going to be Rome's greatest enemy. And so poor Dido dies on the funeral pyre.

And in due course, Aeneas goes down into the underworld to consult with his father to get kind of various guidance on how to set about fulfilling his destiny. And down there, he meets Dido and Dido refuses to talk to him. So this is the great Roman epic. And since Virgil wrote it, there probably hasn't been a day when people haven't been reading it. It is absolutely the foundational text of European literature. And so Did dido as this great tragic heroine kind of stands at the wellspring of european literature as well as uh you know as as the legendary founder of carthage so the whole thing raises all kinds of interesting i was going to say there's an awful lot to unpack here tom so let me just ask you a couple of questions first of all about the aeneid

so it's written by virgil and it is written in ways the reign is Augustus emperor so Carthage has been long defeated and long destroyed it has and so Carthage gets destroyed burnt to the ground in 146 BC uh Virgil isn't writing it as history as anything like history it is a it's a celebration of Augustus and his regime and Rome's destiny and, I guess, Roman imperialism, you could say. And Dido, am I right in thinking, so the big enemy for the Romans was Cleopatra. That was who Augustus had beaten to become top dog. So is Dido, is there a bit of Cleopatra in Dido, do you think? I think there absolutely is.

And I think that to appreciate the full radicalism of what Virgil is doing and the Cleopatron spin that he is giving to the legend of Dido, the best thing probably is to look at the alternative sources because there are other traditions. There are other traditions. So there's this guy called Macrobius who's writing a few centuries after Virgil has written the Aeneid. And he says that this tale of Dido, that she died for the passion of Aeneas, is universally acknowledged to be false. So he's saying that Virgil has actually spun this story and presented Dido in an unflattering light. And he says it's universally acknowledged. So that suggests that there is quite another strain of tradition that is running in parallel to what Virgil has written. And if you look at that, there are a kind of number of fragments, of sources, of kind of echoes of traditions that precede Virgil. So Cato the

Elder, who is this very stern, strict Roman figure who inspires the Romans to attack Carthage when it's been defeated after Hannibal and end up immolating it, destroying it completely. There's a fragment from a speech that he gives where he says that city, so that is Carthage, was founded by a woman, a Phoenician in origin, so that's all right, called Elissa. So Elissa is an alternative name for Dido. And we might come to why and how that name originated in a few minutes. And then we have a Roman writer living in the third century BC with the splendid name of Trogus. Trogus. Trogus. And basically we have him through a Christian writer who's writing in the third century AD. And he gives the story that Elissa, stroke Dido, is the daughter of the King of Tyre. She has a brother called Akerbis. And he's also a priest of Heracles.

And he rules while Pygmalion is a young boy. Pygmalion comes of age. And Akerbis is very, very rich. And Pygmalion wants to grab all his gold. And so he has him murdered. And Ido is incredibly upset at this. Yeah. And so she gives orders that all Akerbis' gold should be put into sacks and thrown into the sea as an offering to his shade.

And then she sails off. And of course, Pygmalion is furious because he thinks he's lost all the gold and silver. No, he's right. But he hasn't. Oh, oh. No, he hasn't. Well, he has.

He has. But it hasn't been thrown into the sea because actually those sacks were full of sand oh so what a twist it's alissa who's taken them so she then sails off um she gets to cyprus and there very very groovily she rescues 80 temple prostitutes okay as you do nice that's good so she takes them because she's only got men she's only brought men from tyre so these 80 temple prostitutes will will enable the Carthaginian race to- Be pressed into service.

Exactly, exactly. And she wanders off and she wanders and wanders and wanders across the Mediterranean. She comes to Africa and in Africa, they call her Dido, which in the local language means wanderer. So this is how Elissa comes to get the name of Dido. She lands in what will become Tunisia and there she meets the king of the Berbers, a man called Iarbas. And Iarbas says to Dido, you can have as much land as will be contained within an ox hide. And so what Dido does is to cut the ox hide up into very, very, very thin strips.

And then she places it round a hill, which comes to be called Birsa. And in Greek, Birsa is an ox hide. And so this is an illustration of the cunning, the subtlety, the cleverness that will be a leitmotif of the Carthaginians to come. Well, I like that story. I think I may have heard that ox hide story about other people in other places. That's the sort of formula, isn't it? I think this is the classic one. Okay.

This is the kind of the foundational, the definitive story, the canonical story. And in this version, so in the story told by Trogus and in one told by Timaeus, who is a Greek historian from Sicily writing in basically the age of Alexander, it's Iarbus who fancies Dido. And Dido is a very chaste woman. Just to remind people, he's the Berber king. He's the local king. Yes. So he starts going after Dido.

And Dido piles, you know, she raises this great pile and immolates herself. But she's doing it to keep the king of the Berbers at bay. So it's, and this is obviously what Macrobius, who's complaining that Virgil has distorted the story, is complaining about. That actually, you know, in Virgil's story, she's dying out of love for this stranger. But in the traditional accounts, she's dying because she's being true to the memory of her murdered husband. So she's a kind of model being true to the memory of her murdered husband so she's a kind of model of wifely chastity and and there's there's a actually the poem written by by a greek a few centuries again after after the Aeneid after Virgil's written it and it has these I never laid

eyes on Aeneas Dido says I did not come to Libya at the time Troy was sacked Muses why did you equip dread Virgil with weapons against me? So that's her ghost complaining that her memory has been produced. Now, the other question, of course, that hangs over all this is how accurate is it? Well, that's the key question, isn't it? This isn't one of these things that we do and the rest is history that turns out to be utter bunkum, is it? Well, maybe, maybe not. Because what is intriguing about this story is that there are elements within it that are clearly Carthaginian. They are clearly, or perhaps Phoenician. And it's likely that they are drawing on Phoenician or Carthaginian records that were

kind of translated in the age of Alexander by a Greek writer, perhaps by a man called Menander of Ephesus. So just to leap in for a second, when do we think Carthage was founded, roughly? That's a hugely open question because Virgil is required to have it founded at the same time as the sack of Troy. But the traditional dates are that it's a little bit later. So it's either kind of the 12th century if you're if you're virgil bc or others say the the 10th the 9th the 8th century it's old i mean it's an old foundation still immensely old and and do we think tom just a one more question so we're on the coast of north

africa the promontory basically that's now tunis um i mean i've been to tunis you can see the remains of what they say is Carthage. So do we think, is it generally felt that it was genuinely was founded by people from what's now Lebanon, from the Phoenicians? So that's absolutely, that is absolutely, yes, it is a Phoenician city. Carthage is the greatest of the many colonies that the Phoenicians found across the Mediterranean. Yes, that is absolutely true. And it is a colony founded by people from Tyre. So that is true. So, and what is even more suggestive is that the names that the Greeks give these characters,

Pygmalion, Elissa, Akirbas, we know what the Phoenician originals would be. So it would be probably Pumiaton is Pygmalion, Elishat is Elissa, Zakabal is Akabas. So these are clearly Greek versions of original Phoenician names. But you mentioned right at the beginning that one of the things for which the Tunisians are famous or were famous is burning children in what were called tophets. So this was something that appalled the Greeks and the Romans, this practice that the Carthaginians and the Phoenicians more generally had. And it is generally accepted

now because the archaeology seems to back up the tradition that in times of immense stress, the Carthaginians would sacrifice their own children. And to the Greeks and the Romans, this seemed evidence of their kind of monstrous cruelty. But you can frame it in a different way and say that it is actually, they're showing how much they love their children because they're offering to the gods their most precious, their most treasured possessions.

And it's this that gives the whole story of Dido immolating herself. Again, it suggests that it's coming from a Carthaginian tradition. So Trogus in his account says that the pyre is on the edge of Carthage. And archaeology has shown that the Tophet, the place where these immolations happened, was indeed on the southern edge of the town. And although the tradition

implies that it's children, it's not only children. So right at the end of Carthage in 146, when the Romans storm, they capture the city, they're going to absolutely destroy it, level it to the ground, leave it as a cursed site. The wife of the defeated Carthaginian commander, Hasdrubal, she is in a temple. And as the flames lick at the tower, she hurls herself into the flames, herself and all her children. So she's consciously immolating herself in a way to try and win the favor of the gods. And is she doing that, do you think, because she's conscious of the myth of Dido and she wants to kind of, that's a model for her? Or do you think that's not right?

That may well be it. That may well be it. Or it may well be that she is part of a continuum that reaches back to Dido, that the story of Dido has kind of originated to explain why this is a tradition among the Carthaginians. We don't know. But what it does suggest is that the origins of this story that get taken up by Virgil do indeed lie in Carthaginian tradition. And I think that there are other elements as well within the Carthaginian tradition that suggests that there may well be something to this. So it's very important to the Carthaginians that they're not assimilated into the native African population. So the story of Dido killing herself rather than allowing herself to be married to the King of the Berbers, that may well be a kind of originating story designed to justify

this kind of Carthaginian hands-off approach. And isn't it interesting that they're not the only people in North Africa to have done that? Because in previous podcasts, Tom, when we talked about the Ptolemies and Cleopatra, I mean, they were Macedonian Greeks who, again, didn't marry into the local population. Keeping their bloodline pure was very important to them. And here we've got an older dynasty, I suppose, more than a dynasty, a settlement where they don't intermarry with the local Berber tribes at all. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and so the relationship of Alexandria to Egypt and the relationship of Carthage to the African hinterland is very similar. These remain naval powers looking out to the sea rather than inland and determined to preserve a sense of their identity. And perhaps

the only clue we have, material clue we have to Dido's identity or the sense that the Carthaginians had of her as their foundress is that there were coins minted by the Carthaginians that have been found in Italy in the fourth century BC. And they show a woman, very stylish looking woman, wearing a kind of Phrygian, so a kind of Asian tiara. No name, but it was the custom for Greek cities to put the image of their founder. And so it may well have been the same for the Carthaginians. So it may be that the head of this woman is meant to represent Elissa. Well, so you put all this together, and I think you can see that there's a really fascinating swirl there in which the figure of Dido could be cast by the Romans

as a representative of Carthage, and therefore very much a kind of villainous figure. Savage, cruel, treacherous. This is the image that the Romans have of the Carthaginians. But what's fascinating about what Virgil is doing is actually, despite what Macrobius is saying, that you've produced the name of Dido, actually what he's doing is casting Dido and the Carthaginians as rather Roman, really. The city that they're founding is very like Rome. So Tom, let's just take a break here because in good Roman style,

we're all about the commerce. So that's more Carthaginian, I think. Is it more? Yeah, I suppose Phoenician entrepreneurs. Trading city. Right. Well, let's allow a bit of trading to take place and then reconvene.

You keep that thread in mind. We'll reconvene post-trading and you can tell us about what appears to be the transformation of Dido in the Roman imagination. So we'll see you in a minute for more Tunisian-based podcasting. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking today about Tunisia, one of the North African competitors in the World Cup. And Tom has chosen to focus on the story of Dido, the legendary queen of Carthage. Probably, I mean, one of the two or three single most well-known,

most sort of culturally important people to come out of Tunisia, I would say, wouldn't you, Tom? I mean, obviously, Tunisia itself is a later creation, but to come out of that part of the world. Yeah. So Carthage is a great rival to Rome for the control of the Western Mediterranean. And it's the defeat of Carthage that enables Rome basically to rule as mistress of the whole, not just the Western Mediterranean, but the whole Mediterranean. So the conflict with Carthage is the great foundational story for Rome. And so that's why Virgil chooses to center it, I think. And you were just saying before the break,

before I rudely interrupted you to do some Phoenician-style trading, that you were saying that Virgil had changed Dido's image. So she'd become almost this idea of the sort of founding of the city and a Rome-style myth. So what's going on there? Because she's not a villain in the need, and you'd think she would be. Well, it's very, very interesting. So Ineos turns up, and Dido is very welcoming, and she provides tremendous hospitality. And Virgil gives a description of the building of Carthage that makes it sound very much like an kind of, you know, an exemplary Roman city. And I think that what then changes is that Aeneas is told to go off

and he sails away. And it's then that Dido's character starts to darken. So she's so upset that she kind of contemplates cutting up Aeneas into little pieces and scattering the body parts into the sea, rather like Medea does with her brother in the Legend of the Golden Fleece. And she thinks about burning the Trojans in their ships, all this kind of stuff. But then, of course, she doesn't do any of this. And instead, what she does is she immolates herself and she calls vengeance down on the descendants of Aeneas as she dies. And so I think that what Virgil is doing is saying that although Aeneas is being obedient

to his destiny, he has to do what he has to do. Nevertheless, it does come with costs. And one of those costs is the creation of the kind of malevolent, dark city that Carthage becomes. That in a sense, Aeneas' sense of piety, he's pious Aeneas. It's not exactly pious, he's kind of dutiful. He's respectful of the charge laid on him by the gods. He has to stick to that. But it's that that makes Carthage what it is as well, and sets in train this kind of great cycle of wars that will, in the long run, enable Rome to emerge as the mistress of the world. But it comes at cost.

And that, I think, is the mirror that is also being held up to Antony and Cleopatra, because there are obvious parallels there. So Antony is a great Roman hero, but he has been seduced, according to the Virgilian perspective, the Augustan perspective, by the wiles and the seductions of Cleopatra. And so that is an obvious kind of echo. But I think that the Aeneid is a great poem. It's a powerful poem. It's a moving poem. It's a complex poem, because Virgil is not just writing Augustan propaganda and he's not even writing just Roman propaganda. He's acknowledging the costs of empire. He's acknowledging the costs of duty and responsibility. And it's that that

makes the story of Dido, I think, properly tragic. Because it gives it an ambiguity, I suppose. Yeah. And it becomes the tragedy of carthage as well as of of dido but um but dominic i'm very glad that you um that you asked about the parallel between dido and this is always this is always ominous when you say you're glad about that i've asked something yes because it provides me a scope for some for some self-promotion so i may have mentioned that i wrote an opera about geopatra yeah in which all the um all the arias so it's a kind of the mamma mia of of opera um all the arias come from 19th century um come from the 19th century but we when dido dies there's the

famous lament purcell's opera dido and anias yeah we're Very, very famous. And I just very, very slightly tweaked it because that's written in English, unlike all the other arias we use. I very, very slightly tweaked it to make it appropriate for Cleopatra to sing rather than Dido. I did it with two friends, James Morgan and Juliet Pochin. And Juliet was a singer herself. And she's very kindly sung the aria. Oh, so you're not going to sing. That is disappointing. I'm not going to because Juliet is the great singer. So Juliet has very kindly agreed to sing Cleopatra's Lament.

It's Dido's Lament reworked by me. And so, Julietiet take it away May my love create no trouble, am laid in earth, No trouble, no trouble in my breast. Remember me For you are my fate Remember me You are my friend Remember me Remember me You are my faith Remember me

You are my faith. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment it's your weekly fix

of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched

our members club if you want ad free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com