Servants or slaves making preparations for a feast, mosaic, Carthage, 2nd century.

Photograph: Getty Images

Apr 23rd 2025|3 min read

MANY LEGENDS attend the beginning of Carthage, an ancient city in modern-day Tunisia. Its founder, Queen Dido, a refugee from the Phoenician city of Tyre (now in Lebanon), is supposed to have made an agreement with the local king to take as much land for her putative city as could be bounded by a bull’s hide—and then cut the hide into narrow strips and attached them end to end to encompass the hill that became and remained the city’s centre. Later, she is said to have taken as her lover Aeneas, a Trojan prince fleeing his own native city after its destruction by a Greek army.

Japanese glass eels in a fisherman's container.

The Carthaginians weren’t who you think they were