Once upon a time, then, there were the Phoenicians, busily making the Mediterranean their own. Among the most important of the Phoenician cities was Sur (Phoen. ‘rocky island’), which the Hebrews called Tzor and the Greeks and Romans Tyre (Τύρος/Tyrus). It stands to this day, in what is now Lebanon. When it came into being nobody knows; the earliest mention dates to the 14th century BC—correspondence survives between the prince of Tyre and his overlord, the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten.
You will remember my writing about the purple dye the Phoenicians extracted from molluscs? In the ancient sources, the genuine article went by precisely that name: “Tyrian” (πορφυρό της Τύρου, purpureus Tyrianus).
Mentioned more than once in both the Old and New Testaments, Tyre also left its mark on Greek mythology: Europa, carried off by Zeus, was the daughter of Agenor, king of Tyre and son of Poseidon—and it was by her brothers’ search for her that the Greeks explained the beginning of Phoenician colonisation across the Mediterranean.
The Birth of Carthage: An Oxhide and Eighty Companions
The most significant of Tyre’s colonies was Carthage (Phoen. Qrt-ḥdšt ‘new city’), founded in the 9th century BC. Legend has it the city was founded by Dido, daughter of the king of Tyre, who fled her brother’s persecution with several dozen supporters in tow. En route they called in at Cyprus, from which they carried off eighty women of easy virtue to populate the future colony.
Landing on the Tunisian shore, Dido wished to buy land for a settlement from the local tribe, but the money she had brought sufficed only for a plot that could be covered by an oxhide. Dido was not in the least put out: she ordered the hide cut into fine ribbons, which she knotted into a rope, and with it encompassed an entire hill. And on that hill Carthage duly arose—while mathematics acquired the first problem in the calculus of variations, known as Dido’s problem.
Aeneas and the Fateful Curse
After his defeat, and long wanderings at sea, the Trojan prince Aeneas put in at Carthage, and Dido joyfully married him to herself. But the intrigues of Aeneas’s mother, the goddess Venus, obliged Jupiter to send Aeneas on his way once more—he was, after all, fated to found Rome.
Dido, in despair, took her own life, prophesying eternal enmity between Carthage and Rome. Such was the Roman public-relations account of the nature of their centuries-long antagonism—the Punic Wars. But of that, in the next post.
