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Updated: June 12, 2025
It was built on a fortified peninsula of about twenty miles in circumference, with the isthmus. Upon this isthmus was the citadel Byrsa, surrounded with a triple wall, and crowned at its summit by a magnificent temple of Æsculapius. It possessed three hundred tributary cities in Libya, which was but a small part of the great empire which belonged to it in the fourth century before Christ.
It lived to traffic and get rich. It was washed on all sides, except the west, by the sea, and above the city, on the western heights, was the citadel Byrsa, called so from the word βύρσα, a hide, according to the legend that Dido, when she came to Africa, bought of the inhabitants as much land as could be encompassed by a bull’s hide, which she cut into thongs, and inclosed the territory on which she built the citadel.
The whole line of the coast was deeply indented with bays, where rode at anchor the ships of the mercantile navy. Broad inland lakes dotted the plain; while to the north of Byrsa, stretching down to the sea and extending as far as Cape Quamart, lay Megara, the aristocratic suburb of Carthage.
Indeed the Carthaginian captives could distinguish the velaria spread over the courtyards of their houses, beyond the gulf on the slopes of Byrsa. But sentries marched round them continually. They were all fastened to a common chain. Each one wore an iron carcanet, and the crowd was never weary of coming to gaze at them.
Carthage, as well as Rome, had her Capitol and Palatine upon Mount Byrsa, where rose no doubt a temple consecrated to the Capitolean triune deities, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, not far from the great temple of AEsculapius, a modern transformation of the old Punic Eschmoum. Hard by these sanctuaries, the Proconsul's palace dominated Carthage from the height of the acclivity of the Acropolis.
At last they came beneath the walls of Carthage to implore the protection of Ceres and Proserpine, for in Byrsa there was a temple with priests consecrated to these goddesses in expiation of the horrors formerly committed at the siege of Syracuse.
Carthage indeed has fallen, and from her once famed Byrsa the writer has been able to count on his fingers the local remains of her greatness, yet the people who made her what she was remain the Berbers of Tunisia.
If so, be sure he was soon comforted as he reviewed the shadowy procession of his posterity of kings. The episode of Byrsa would scarcely trouble his conjugal happiness, or make him more indulgent to the mildest flirtation of Lavinia.
The hill of the Acropolis, in the centre of Byrsa, was hidden beneath a disordered array of monuments. There were temples with wreathed columns bearing bronze capitals and metal chains, cones of dry stones with bands of azure, copper cupolas, marble architraves, Babylonian buttresses, obelisks poised on their points like inverted torches.
Hanno had at its commencement, accompanied by a strong body of his friends, ridden to Byrsa, and had called upon the soldiers to come out and quell the tumult They, however, listened in sullen silence, their sympathies were entirely with the supporters of Hannibal, and they had already received orders from their officers on no account to move, whosoever might command them to do so, until Hamilcar placed himself at their head.
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