In Barbary

Just as we make the mistake of studying geography with the aid of large-scale maps, so we are prone to use a magnifying-glass in the study of ancient history. We envision the classic sites as being far larger than they really were because we see them through the eyes of the classical writers. To the stages on which the ancients enacted those mighty dramas, which shook the world and shaped the course of history, we have attributed a spaciousness they did not possess. We think of them in the terms of our own far-flung, mushroom cities, we measure them by modern municipal standards, when, as a matter of fact, they were comparatively insignificant in extent according to present-day ideas. Compared to Greater London, with its area of seven hundred square miles, or to New York, with its three hundred, the famous cities of antiquity—Troy, Tyre, Jerusalem, Nineveh, Palmyra, Babylon, Athens, Rome—would be reckoned to-day as little more than medium-sized communities and classified as cities of the second and third class by the Post Office Department at Washington.

And Carthage, despite her wealth and world-power, was no exception, for the Empress of the Seas never had as great a population as has Baltimore, and her area, as delimited by the city walls, probably did not equal that of Camden, New Jersey. The city, as has been said in the preceding chapter, stood on the outer edge of a small, fan-shaped peninsula bounded on the north by a large salt lake, the Sebkha en Rouan, on the east and southeast by the Gulf of Tunis, and on the south and southwest by the lagoon of El Bahira; while on the west a narrow isthmus, barely two miles in width, afforded communication with the mainland. The entire area of this peninsula does not exceed half a hundred square miles, if that, and considerably less than a fourth of this was contained within the ramparts, which are said to have measured twelve and a half miles in circumference.

Of none of the famous cities of antiquity do we possess a more careful description than that which Appian has given us of Carthage as she stood at the outbreak of the Third Punic War. In its wealth of facts and figures it is worthy of Herr Baedeker himself.

The side of the city toward the isthmus was defended by a wall forty-five feet in height (Diodorus says sixty) and thirty-three in thickness, interrupted at intervals of two hundred yards by lofty towers; the “topless towers,” no doubt, for which the city was famous. The seemingly unnecessary thickness of these tremendous ramparts is explained by the fact that they were hollow and contained four floors of rooms or casemates. On the ground floor were stables for three hundred elephants; on the second, stalls for four thousand cavalry-horses, together with space for the storage of vast quantities of fodder; while in the two upper stories were quartered twenty-four thousand fighting-men, who had with them supplies sufficient to last through a siege of several years’ duration. This single landward wall was, in short, a great fortress, containing more men and animals than are comprised in two modern army divisions.

Carthage within the walls—I am referring, of course, to the Punic city—consisted of three distinct districts. Atop of a small hill, six hundred feet in height, from which it dominated the entire city, stood a vast walled inclosure, half-citadel, half-temple, known as the Byrsa. From this, three broad thoroughfares and an imposing flight of marble steps led down to the Cothon, or military harbor, which lent its name to the entire mercantile quarter of the city. To the northward, climbing part way up the mountain slopes, lay the vast suburb of Megara, where the wealthy merchants had their villas.

Perhaps the most singular features of the most singular and interesting city of its time were the two great harbors, both artificial, which together covered an area of seventy acres. The outer, or commercial, harbor, a long quadrilateral in shape, had direct access to the sea, or rather to a sheltered bay, by a canal, the entrance to which was closed by enormous chains. From the commercial harbor another cutting led into the Cothon, or naval port, which was circular and fringed by 220 slips, each large enough to accommodate a war-galley. Flanking the entrances to these slips were massive Ionic columns, the effect produced being that of a vast circular arcade. In the center of the Cothon, connected with the shore by a narrow jetty, was a small round island, on which stood the Admiralty Palace, surmounted by a lofty lookout tower from which the grand admiral could obtain an unobstructed view of the harbors, the city, and the sea. At the back of the slips lay arsenals, storehouses, workshops, and the barracks of the marines and galley-slaves, the whole encircled by a wall so high that no inquisitive eye in the outer harbor or in the city could see what was going on within. In these two great harbors were respectively fitted out the argosies which made Carthage the greatest commercial power of her time and the armadas which threatened Rome with destruction. When, in the seventh century, Carthage was destroyed by the Arabs under Hassan, he filled up the harbors for fear the city should rise from its ruins to rival his capital at Tunis. In recent years, under the direction of French archæologists, they have been dug out, but only in part, so that to-day the sites, but not the size, of the original ports are indicated by two insignificant-looking ponds.

A few paces to the west of the Cothon, between it and the Byrsa, lay the Agora, or Forum, within whose precincts the legionaries of Scipio bivouacked on the night preceding his final onslaught on the city. It was one of the most important public buildings of Carthage, frequented by orators, politicians, merchants, and bankers; a combination, as it were, of the House of Representatives, the New York City Hall, the Law Courts, and the Stock Exchange. In its spacious colonnaded courtyard were crucified the admirals and generals who, in accordance with Carthaginian custom, paid the price of defeat with their lives. From his lofty watch-tower in the Cothon the grand admiral could look down upon the scene, could see quite plainly the stark figure of his unfortunate predecessor gasping out his life upon the cross.

In the Forum, under Roman rule, numerous Christian martyrs died by torture, though the great amphitheater was probably the scene of the wholesale executions of the followers of the Nazarene which took place in the third century of the Christian era. And from the Forum started the great trade-routes which led into the far interior.

Now it should be clearly understood that the meager remains which the archæologists have thus far unearthed on the site of Carthage are almost wholly Roman or Byzantine, and that, barring a number of archaic Phenician tombs, some enormous blocks of stone which were probably used in the construction of the Admiralty Palace, and a miscellaneous collection of objects—vases, votive tablets, inscriptions, utensils, sacred images, fragments of sculptures—which have been brought together and arranged by the White Fathers in the little museum they have established on the Byrsa, almost nothing which can positively be identified with the Punic city has been found. This is scarcely a matter for surprise, however, when it is remembered that the Carthage of the Phenicians was literally wiped out—not merely laid in ruins, you understand, but the ruins plowed under—upward of two thousand years ago, and that the great Roman city which later rose upon the site was in its turn razed to the ground, so that the remnants of Punic civilization must be buried under many feet of débris, earth, and ashes.

These russet hill-slopes, patched with grass and sprinkled with wild flowers, present, indeed, an epitome of human history, for they have been built upon, over and over and over again, by Phenicians, Romans, Vandals, Greeks, Arabs, Spaniards, Turks, and French. To drive a shaft straight downward through this blood-drenched soil to a depth of, say, a hundred feet, would be equivalent to retracing the march of mankind for three thousand years—from the Tunisia of the French to the Karthadasht of Queen Dido.

It was a perfect spring morning—one of those mornings when one congratulates one’s self on being alive—when we motored out to Carthage. Fleecy clouds drifted lazily across the sky, like newly washed sheep browzing on a hillside pasture. Under the brilliant African sun the placid surface of the Mediterranean gleamed and glittered as though strewn with diamonds. The weather was warm, but not too warm for comfort, and the gentle land-breeze brought to us the fragrance of the wild flowers which lay in bands of the most vivid colors—scarlet, purple, bright blue, yellow—across the lower slopes of the encircling ranges.

It is rather less than a dozen miles from Tunis to Carthage, and during nearly the whole distance the road runs within sight of the great Roman aqueduct, whose rose-brown arches stride in an undeviating line across the plain. This titanic work was constructed by the Emperor Hadrian at a time when the country was threatened by a devastating drought in order to bring water to Carthage from Zaghouan, eighty miles away. Some idea of the immensity of the undertaking may be gained from the fact that it delivered six million gallons a day, part of the way by means of underground canals, and over the intervening valleys by thousands of magnificent arches, hundreds of which are still standing. The aqueduct was destroyed by the Vandals, who appear always to have justified the modern significance of their name; was restored by the Byzantines; was again destroyed by the Spaniards; and in 1859 was rebuilt by the reigning bey in order to supply Tunis, as well as Carthage and the other suburbs, with pure water. Though iron pipes were used to replace the arches which had been demolished, the Roman route was followed, and wherever possible the European builders utilized the ancient masonry channels constructed by Hadrian’s engineers. They built well, the Romans. I wonder if two thousand years hence the Croton Aqueduct will be utilized in some form to supply water to New York.

Of all the famous sites of antiquity, save only Troy (and I speak as one who has seen all, or nearly all, of them), Carthage is at first view the most disappointing. It is not difficult to identify the principal features at Nineveh and of Babylon, both of which probably antedated the Phenician city by many centuries; but of Carthage literally nothing remains above the level of the ground, its obliteration having been so methodically carried out, first by Scipio and then by Hassan, that it is only within very recent years that the archæologists have succeeded in obtaining even a general idea of the ground-plan.

Particularly disappointing is the Byrsa, the six-hundred-foot hill on which stood the citadel and the great temple of Eschmoun. Instead of being an abrupt, clearly defined eminence, like those on which the Italian hill-towns stand, it gives the impression, when approached from the land side, of being not much more than a low ridge topped by a rather insignificant knoll, so gradual is the ascent from the plain. Its seaward face, however, falls away quite abruptly.

Looking down from the summit of the Byrsa, one’s attention is immediately attracted by two small, curiously shaped ponds which lie within a few yards of the shore. Seen from above, they bear a striking resemblance to a sickle, the elongated lagoon corresponding to the handle of the implement and the crescent-shaped one to the blade. And, in a manner of speaking, a sickle, is what they were; the sickle with which the Carthaginians reaped the sea-trade of the world and all but mowed down the Roman sea-power. For the larger of the two ponds is the sole remaining vestige of Carthage’s great commercial harbor; the smaller, of the naval port, or Cothon.

It requires a sturdy and well-oiled imagination, however, to recreate on the grassy shores of these two insignificant ponds the wharves, slips, dockyards, workshops, storehouses, walls, and watch-towers which made this now tranquil spot the greatest naval base of ancient times; to realize that this was once the emporium of all the sea-borne trade of the world from Syria to Cornwall; that here were launched those terrible war-galleys, with their brazen prows and bristling banks of oars, which enabled the Carthaginians to keep the Mediterranean for centuries a Punic lake. But cross by the narrow isthmus to the little island—an island no longer—on which the Admiralty Palace stood, and look down into the great pit dug by the excavators, and any lingering doubts you may have as to the authenticity of the site will disappear; for on the huge hewn blocks which lie tumbled pell-mell in the bottom of the cavity is still plainly discernible the Tanith in red paint which was the Punic sign manual and crest.

Of the excavated, or partly excavated, remains of Roman Carthage, the most interesting are the Odéon, the Amphitheater, and the Circus. The Odéon, or opera-house, a semicircular building with a roof, was erected in A.D. 204, when the Carthaginians obtained permission to hold the Pythian Games. Little of it now remains, but its ruins have yielded two of the finest statues yet unearthed at Carthage, those of Juno Regia and Venus.

The Amphitheater, judging from what is left of it, must have been a structure of enormous size—it measured a fifth of a mile in circumference—and of extreme magnificence, for it was built when Rome was intoxicated by her wealth and power. Here, during those blood-drenched years when pagan Rome sought vainly to stamp out the steadily spreading cult founded by the Man of Nazareth, that “white-robed multitude” of martyrs died horribly—some on the cross, some at the stake, others by the claws and fangs of snarling beasts. How little could their executioners have dreamed that, in the fullness of time, one of the dungeons in which the martyrs awaited death would be transformed into a Christian chapel dedicated to two of the most illustrious of them, the twenty-two-year-old Perpetua, who, accompanied by her friend Felicitas, left her parents and her baby-in-arms behind, and walked unafraid into the arena to meet the lions! No wonder that Tertullian of Carthage wrote, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” For the simple, loving faith preached by the humble peasant of Judea has spread around the world and is to-day a living force, while the men who sought to stamp it out are remembered only by virtue of that fact.

Doubtless because of its tragic associations with the early days of Christianity, more excavating work has been done in the Amphitheater than anywhere else in Carthage; the dens for the wild beasts, the dungeons in which were confined the Christians who were sentenced to fight them, and a portion of the vast arena in which these dreadful ordeals took place have been laid bare. They were terribly unequal, those combats between naked men and savage animals, but, despite the fearful odds, a Christian occasionally emerged from them alive, as is testified by the inscription found upon a marble column in one of the subterranean chambers, probably a dungeon. It was scratched with some sharp instrument—perhaps the point of a sword—and consists of the single pregnant word, “Evasi”—“I have escaped.”

The Circus, of which only the outline remains, was an enormous structure, twenty-three hundred feet in length and accommodating nearly a quarter of a million spectators. The Yale Bowl, the Harvard Stadium, the stands at the Polo Grounds, are insignificant in comparison. In the Circus were held the chariot-races to which the Carthaginians were as whole-heartedly devoted as Americans are to baseball; for if a passion for racing was ingrained in the character of the European Romans, even more was such the case with the peoples of their African possessions, where the love of horses was indigenous.

The colorful and stirring scenes presented by these great race-meetings need not be left to the imagination, for they are illustrated with a wealth of detail in the mosaics which have been brought together in the Musée Alaoui at the Palace of the Bardo, and are described at great length by the writers of the period. How thoroughly human, how like a similar event to-day, is the description given us by Ovid, who relates how he took a girl to the races, how he shielded her face from the sun with his race-card, how he admired the shapeliness of her leg, and how he wished that he might see more.

The racing world was divided into four great parties or factions: the Reds, the Whites, the Greens, and the Blues. The members of each party regarded those of the others with deep-seated animosity and suspicion, and, when they eventually developed into political factions, their rivalries shook the Roman world. Four chariots, each of one color and each drawn by four horses, raced in a heat. The “racing silks” of the charioteers consisted of round vizorless caps with floating ribbons and cloth jerkins in the colors of the faction for which they drove. Round their bodies were tied the ends of the reins, an arrangement which added greatly to the excitement of the races by insuring the death of any one who was thrown, for no Roman holiday was considered complete without its quota of fatal accidents.

Down the middle of the elliptical course ran the spina, a marble barrier 330 yards in length, adorned with statues, carvings, and columns. At either end of the spina stood the metæ, the turning-points for the chariots; on these were placed marble dolphins and eggs, seven of each, corresponding in number with the laps of the race, one being removed by the attendants as each circuit was completed, very much as signals are hoisted for the information of the spectators at the conclusion of each lap of an automobile race. Judging by this, and by the length of the spina, each heat must have been close to three miles in length.

The charioteers received from their enthusiastic adherents the admiration and adulation which is to-day accorded to a famous baseball player, a champion prize-fighter, or, in Spain, to a successful matador. Though they did not earn as much, perhaps, as a Babe Ruth, a Jack Dempsey, a Red Grange, or even a Tod Sloan, they were lavishly rewarded according to the standards of the time; for it is recorded that in ten years an African driver named Crescens won prizes totaling upward of a million and a half sesterces, or about seventy-one thousand dollars in our money. And one of the handsomest residences unearthed at Carthage is that of Scorpianus, one of the most famous charioteers of his time.

The Carthaginians were confirmed gamblers, and enormous sums were frequently wagered on the outcome of a chariot-race. This, as might have been expected, gave rise to the bitterest jealousy between the adherents of the various factions and to demonstrations of hostility toward a charioteer who was a favorite in the betting. Many curious exemplifications of this spiteful spirit may be seen on the tabulæ execrationis which have been discovered at Carthage. These, as the name implies, were tablets, usually thin sheets of lead, on which were scratched execrations or curses directed against those to whom the authors wished evil. In order that they might speedily gain the attention of the gods of the underworld to whom they were addressed, they were either tied by leathern thongs to the gravestones in the cemeteries, or dropped down the funnel with which each grave was provided so that libations could reach the ashes of the dead. Of the thousands of such tablets, dealing with matters of love, lust, war, politics, and sport, which have been found in the cemeteries of Carthage, one of the most interesting, as it is one of the most venomous, runs, in part, as follows:

As a really polished and comprehensive example of high-class cursing, I don’t know of anything which can compare with that effort unless it is the outburst of the exasperated golfer, who, after spending ten strokes in a sand-bunker, damned “everything over a minute old and an inch high.”

It is a curious and disappointing fact that the largest and most conspicuous monument on the site of Carthage, the Cathedral of St. Louis, is not even remotely associated with the great city of antiquity, but was erected during the eighties to commemorate the achievements of a French king, Louis IX, who, as has been remarked elsewhere, died in 1270 of the plague when encamped on the Byrsa plateau while leading the eighth and last crusade. Louis who was canonized in the fullness of time, sleeps in the church of Monreale, above Palermo, but some relics of the royal crusader have been brought from Sicily and enshrined in the cathedral which bears his name. Not far away a small and unimposing chapel, not much better than the koubba of some Arab marabout, built by Louis Philippe in 1841, marks the spot where the monarch actually expired while murmuring the words, “Jerusalem ... Jerusalem....”

But in a tomb under the high altar of the cathedral rests the body of another fighter for the Faith, who, though as yet uncanonized, deserves sainthood if the word has any meaning. I refer to Charles Martial Allemand Lavigerie, cardinal-archbishop of Carthage and Algeria, primate of all Africa, superior of the Order of White Fathers, successor to the see of St. Cyprian, who at Algiers, in 1892, hung up his red hat forever. Of all that remarkable company of courageous men who have entered the Dark Continent on missions of exploration, civilization, colonization, or proselytism, none rendered a greater service to suffering humanity than this devoted missionary-statesman. He founded the Pères Blancs, that remarkable order of African missionaries whose humanitarian activities extend from Morocco to Mozambique; in his relentless war against the slave-trade he established a chain of missions right across the Sahara and the Sudan; his tactful and statesmanlike handling of native problems so raised the prestige of France in North Africa as to draw from Gambetta the celebrated declaration, “L’anticlericalisme n’est pas un article d’exportation.” Though he has been dead these thirty years and more, the name of Cardinal Lavigerie is still one to conjure with among those strange and barbarous peoples who inhabit that vast region which stretches from the Mediterranean to the Congo, from the Atlantic to the Nile.

The scientific researches on the site of Carthage, though under the official supervision of the Department of Antiquities and Arts of the beylical government, are being mainly conducted by a small group of White Fathers under the personal direction of the celebrated archæologist and explorer, Père Delattre. With his powerful frame, his ruddy cheeks, his twinkling eyes, and snowy, patriarchal beard, Father Delattre is one of the most picturesque and interesting figures whom I met in Africa. In accordance with the highly sensible custom of the order, he wears a modified form of the native costume—a flowing burnous of creamy white and the red chéchia with its long blue tassel—so that he resembles a jolly old Moslem mollah rather than a Christian priest. An octogenarian, he is as robust and agile as most men of half his years, and I must confess that as he strode across the rugged terrain where the work of excavation is being carried on it taxed my endurance to keep pace with him.

Father Delattre’s chief interest is the Lavigerie Museum, housed in a modest building on the Byrsa, where, thanks to his indefatigable effort, there has been brought together an absolutely unique collection of columns, statues, sarcophagi, mosaics, amphoræ, stellæ, inscriptions, bas-reliefs, jewelry, and utensils of various kinds illustrative of the various phases of the city’s long and varied history. Here, brought from the early Punic tombs behind the Byrsa, are tear-glasses of Phenician glass, fragile and iridescent as the wing of a butterfly, in which the great ladies of Dido’s time carried their cosmetics just as American women carry “compacts” to-day. In this glass case is a necklace of as exquisite design and workmanship as anything that Tiffany or Cartier could show; perhaps—who knows?—it once encircled the white neck of Sophonisba. Over there is an extraordinary collection of lamps, the finest and most complete in existence: cheap little lamps of terra-cotta which gleamed from the windows of humble dwellings; elaborately carved lamps which shone on the sumptuous dinner-tables of great nobles and rich merchants; lamps of porphyry and marble which guttered on the altars of the gods. And there are thousands and thousands of bas-reliefs and inscriptions, on which appear such familiar religious symbols as the fish, the lamb, the anchor, and the crown, associated with the worship, persecution, and martyrdom of the early Christians.

The most interesting objects in the museum, however, according to my way of thinking, are three or four sarcophagi, some of them dating back to seven hundred years before the Christian era, which have been brought here from the ancient tombs. Their immense significance to the student of history lies not so much in their great age, or in the tolerable state of preservation of the bodies which they contain, but rather in the recumbent figures of the dead which are carved upon the lids and which enable us to know how they looked in life. For, as careful comparison with the bodies has shown, they are unquestionably portraits of the deceased. One of them represents a priest of Eschmoun, a man with serene and dignified features, an abundance of curling hair, luxuriant mustaches and beard. So benign is his expression that it is difficult to conceive of him as having laid the quivering bodies of little children on the brazen, white-hot arms of Baal. Another, judging by the richness of the dress and the extreme refinement of the features, is evidently that of a lady of the aristocracy, her hair combed back from her brow and braided into two long plaits which fall down to frame her face, her slender figure clad in a girdled robe of some soft, diaphanous material which sweeps down in stately lines to her little sandaled feet, half concealing, half revealing, her exquisitely proportioned figure. A third, which has been identified as that of a priestess of Tanith and is the finest of all, shows a grandly modeled woman in the prime of life clad in a semi-transparent garment of rose-color. In one hand she holds a dove, in the other a bowl of offerings; the Egyptian head-dress which enframes her graciously beautiful face is surmounted by a vulture, the symbol of Isis. They must have been, on the whole, a fine-looking race, these people of Punic Carthage, the innate dignity which stamps their faces causing one to overlook the over-prominent Semitic noses and the sensual Eastern lips.

Throughout our visit to Carthage we had been pestered almost beyond endurance by a horde of Arab ragamuffins who clamorously besought us to purchase coins of bronze and silver of whose authenticity I was more than a little doubtful, but which they claimed to have picked up on the site. One of these importunate youngsters, bolder than his fellows, followed us into the museum garden. I was about to purchase his wares in order to get rid of him when Father Delattre intervened.

“Would you care,” he asked, “to have a genuine Carthaginian coin?”

I assured him earnestly that few things would give me greater satisfaction, whereupon he presented me with a sesterce of the Roman period bearing on its face in high relief a portrayal of a chariot drawn by four horses; one of the very sesterces, it pleases me to think, which were flung into the arena of the Circus to reward the famous charioteer Scorpianus, the Pop Geers of his time. I carry it in my purse, along with a coin of Alexander the Great which I picked up in Macedonia, and another, minted during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, which I acquired in Babylon. They serve to remind me, these tiny pieces of silver, that there have been other civilizations than those epitomized by Fifth Avenue and Piccadilly and the Rue de la Paix; that there were great cities, mighty empires, culture, luxury, in those dim and far-off days when history was beginning and the world was very young.

Before he would say good-by Father Delattre insisted on presenting us with his picture, to obtain which he ran as nimbly as a boy up the steep Byrsa Hill on which the monastery of the Pères Blancs stands. With my fountain-pen he wrote his name across it; then we shook hands with the grand old man and stepped into the waiting car.

“Just a moment,” I said to Harvey, as we breasted the brow of the plateau and the road to Tunis unrolled its twenty kilometers like a lariat tossed idly upon the ground. “Stop the car. I wish to take a final look.”

Standing in the tonneau, I looked down upon that stage on which has been enacted so much of the history of the world—the little bay where Dido landed; the harbor in which the galleys of Hamilcar were moored; the slopes up which the legionaries of Scipio fought their bloody way; the site of the Amphitheater in which the martyrs died; the traces of the Forum which was turned into a stable by Genseric’s Vandal horsemen; the rolling plain across which surged behind their green standards the Moslem hordes of Hassan; the little knoll on which St. Louis pitched his final camp.... “Sic transit gloria mundi,” I thought.

But my reflections were rudely interrupted as, with a great wheezing and puffing, a little covered motor-van came rocking toward us. It was driven by a fresh-faced, blue-eyed youngster in khaki trousers and a flannel shirt, bare of head and neck and arm. Beside him on the narrow seat sat two other youngsters similarly clad. They waved their hands in friendly fashion and shouted greetings to us in our own language. As the car plunged past on its way to Carthage we could see the legend, painted in staring black on its gray sides:

Department of Archæology
Carthaginian Section
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, U. S. A.