feared their king and (prompted by her husband’s helpful ghost) unearthed a secret hoard of gold to fund her expenses. Seizing some ships in the harbor, she and her followers made good their escape.
They were building Carthage (Phoenician for “new city”) on part of a large promontory backed by two lagoons to the north and south when the Trojans arrived, storm-shaken, caked with brine, and exhausted. They were amazed, and doubtless a little jealous, at what they saw.
Virgil, Rome’s national poet and the author of the
Aeneas looked wonderingly at the solid structures springing up where there had once been only African huts, and at the gates, the turmoil, and the paved streets. The Tyrians were hurrying about busily, some tracing a line for the walls and manhandling stones up the slopes as they strained to build their citadel, and others siting some building and marking its outline by ploughing a furrow.
Dido welcomed the strangers and, hearing their story, sympathized with Aeneas for his misfortunes. The goddess Juno now found herself in an uncomfortable position; if Aeneas could be persuaded to make Carthage his home, he would abandon the glorious future in Italy that had been prophesied for him and there would no longer be any risk of a new Troy rising from the ground. Unfortunately, though, the despised Trojan would have to marry Dido, a favorite of hers, as indeed was Carthage. This was a bitter sacrifice, but she had no choice but to make it.
Arrangements were made with the cooperation of Venus, and the queen of Carthage duly fell in love with the exile. On a hunting expedition in the hills, Juno arranged for a fortuitous thunderstorm and the couple took refuge in a cave, where nature followed its pleasant course. Dido called the encounter a wedding.
Unfortunately, a local African chieftain had had his eye on Dido for himself, and did not want to lose her. He was a great devotee of Jupiter and prayed to him for help. He complained, “Now this second Paris, wearing a Phrygian bonnet to tie up his chin and cover his oily hair, and attended by a train of she-men, is to become the owner of what he has stolen.”
Jupiter had known nothing of his wife’s plot and was furious. He immediately dispatched a messenger to warn the Trojan prince to remember his destiny and leave at once for Italy. Aeneas the True (so called because of his reputation for loyalty) was thunderstruck by the rebuke and abandoned Dido without delay.
Thoroughly embarrassed, he tried to justify himself to her, placing the blame on the king of the gods. “So stop upsetting yourself, and me too, by these protests,” he said. “It is not by my own choice that I voyage onward toward Italy.”
Dido, spurned, chose to die. She had a great funeral pyre built, letting it be known that her purpose was to incinerate a sword Aeneas had left behind, some of his clothes, and his portrait. This was a ruse, for the pyre was for her own use. She climbed up onto it and stabbed herself. Before dying, she uttered a curse, predicting eternal enmity between her new city and the one her Trojan lover and his posterity would found in Italy:
Neither love nor compact shall there be between the nations. And from my dead bones may some avenger arise to persecute with fire and sword these settlers from Troy, soon or in after-time, whenever the strength is given! Let your shores oppose their shores, your waves their waves, your arms their arms. That is my imprecation. Let them fight, they, and their sons’ sons, for ever!
At long last, Aeneas and his companions reached Italy. As they sailed along its western coast, a large wood came into view through which the yellow waters of the river Tiber poured into the sea; and here the Trojans disembarked. Their voyage was at an end. They were greeted by Latinus, the old and henpecked king of the Latini, a tribe living between the Tiber and Anio rivers, from which Latium (today’s Lazio) gets its name. He and his people were of Greek origin. Thanks to his wife’s influence, his daughter Lavinia had been promised to Turnus, the young and energetic chief of the Rutulians. The king for once stood up for himself; he now changed his mind and gave her to the Trojan newcomer.
War was the inevitable outcome, and Aeneas killed Turnus in single combat. Following this victory he founded the city of Lavinium, named after his wife. The Rutulians were down but not out. Hostilities were resumed and a great battle was fought beside the river Numicius, near Lavinium. There were many casualties, and when night fell the armies separated.
Aeneas, though, had vanished. Some thought he had been translated to the gods, others that he had drowned. His mother, never knowingly worsted, arranged for him to be deified. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, an antiquarian who flourished in the first century A.D., reports that, in his day, a memorial was still standing on the site of the battle. It was a small mound around which stood regular rows of trees. An inscription read, “To the father and god of this place, who presides over the waters of the river Numicius.”
Seven years had passed since Aeneas left the smoldering ruins of Troy.
2
Kings and Tyrants
THE RIVER TIBER ROSE FROM TWO SPRINGS IN A beech forest in the Apennine Mountains, which run down Italy like a rocky spine. In three great zigzags, it crossed a plain for some two hundred and fifty miles and emptied itself into the Mediterranean. About fifteen miles from the coast it wiggled into the shape of the letter
It was here that one of the greatest heroes and demigods of the ancient world, Hercules, slew Cacus, a fire-breathing monster who lived on human flesh and made his home in a cave in one of the hills. A larger-than-life figure, Hercules had numerous lovers of both sexes. He was the son of Jupiter by a mortal woman and so incurred the hatred of Juno, seldom one to control her emotions. Driven mad at her instigation, Hercules killed his own children and in expiation undertook twelve “labors,” or feats requiring superhuman strength and bravery.
Hercules became known as a protector of Greek colonists and traders who voyaged dangerously across the Mediterranean, and the story grew of a long wandering, as labor succeeded labor. He began his journey in the city of Gades (today’s Cadiz), which he founded in southwestern Spain; this was a community of Phoenicians, merchants who competed with the Greeks and revered Hercules under the name of Melqart. He made his way up Spain, along the south of Gaul (today’s France), across the Alps, and down into Italy, then over the sea to Sicily and ending up in Greece. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus:
Hercules, who was the greatest commander of his age, marched at the head of a large force through all the territory that lies on this side of the Ocean [meaning the Atlantic Ocean], destroying any tyrannies that oppressed their subjects, or states that outraged and injured their neighbors, or organized bands of men who lived like savages and lawlessly put strangers to death. In their place he established lawful monarchies, well-ordered governments and humane and sociable ways of life. In addition, he mingled barbarians with Greeks, and inland communities with those who lived on the seacoast, groups which had previously been distrustful and unsocial in their dealings with each other.
The hero arrived at the cluster of hills by the Tiber, driving the cattle of a fearsome, three-faced giant he had killed in his tenth labor. He crossed the river and, heavy with food and wine, fell asleep on a grassy bank. Cacus seized the moment and stole a number of the finest bulls. He dragged them into his cave by their tails, so that their hoofprints would point in the wrong direction. When Hercules woke up, he noticed that some cattle were missing but could not work out where they were (demigods were evidently of a dimmer wattage than mere mortals today). However, some heifers mooed when the herd moved off and the captive bulls lowed in response, betraying their
