Tea at Trianon: The Queen of Carthage

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, July 31, 2025

The Queen of Carthage

From The Collector:

Dido and Aeneas are perhaps the two most iconic lovers in an ancient epic. Their brief relationship becomes a haunting episode in the Aeneid, creating profound repercussions for Aeneas and his quest. Dido, the legendary queen of Carthage, and Aeneas, a Trojan prince fated to establish the Roman race, meet in book one of Virgil’s Aeneid and soon fall passionately in love with one another. However, their intense romance is soon transformed into tragedy, as Aeneas leaves Dido to fulfill his mission, which drives the Carthaginian queen to despair and suicide. (Read more.)

From The Times:

Eve MacDonald, a historian and archaeologist at Cardiff University, sets the record straight in these pages about Carthage, whose ruins can be found near modern Tunis. She discards the priestesses and perfumed altars and disentangles the truth from the fog of Roman disinformation and Flaubertian fantasy. Her Carthaginian Empire — which stretched across north Africa, southern Spain, Sardinia and Sicily — is no more barbarous than Rome, and just as sophisticated.
For one thing, they were pretty high-tech with iron and steel production, which we know thanks to archaeometallurgical analysis. Politically, too, they were advanced. From the 6th century BC, Carthage functioned as a “republic-style oligarchy” complete with a senate and term-limited rulers. The ancient Greek historian Polybius conceded that they were rather democratic, although for him this was not praise; like his contemporaries, he disdained hoi polloi. What’s more, the Carthaginians were accomplished seafarers. The explorer Hanno apparently sailed round the west African coast — which was teeming with hippopotamuses and active volcanoes — in the 5th century BC with his crew of 30,000. Ancient chroniclers were incorrigible exaggerators.
What of Carthage’s unpleasant association with child sacrifice? Here again, Flaubert is one of the culprits, having leant heavily on the discovery of cremated infant remains at a Carthaginian necropolis to tart up his morbid tale. MacDonald briskly points out that the matter is still unresolved. We have no mass graves, just individual burials. Archaeological evidence, moreover, gives the lie to the 1st-century BC historian Diodorus’s claim that 200 noble children were slaughtered to appease the gods during a Syracusan siege. Besides, even if true, human sacrifice was hardly unusual in that age. Even the Greeks and Romans resorted to it, when push came to ritual shove.
All of which is to say that writing about Carthage is a tricky business. Nearly everything we know is refracted through Roman propaganda, some of it outright lies. All sources have to be read against the grain –— especially Polybius, who was in the employ of the Scipio family that duked it out with the Barcids (Hannibal’s family) in the final decades of the Carthaginian Empire. MacDonald, having excavated at Carthage, is well placed for the job. Her book is admirably lucid and free of tendentious axe-grinding, although some lay readers might prefer the more urbane, literary style of Richard Miles’s Carthage Must Be Destroyed, published in 2010, with which MacDonald’s account will inevitably be compared. Still, she has the merit of brevity and a no-nonsense command of her material. (Read more.)