The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean
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Mention should also be made of the Journal of the Trojan War, an exercise in fictional hyper-authenticity allegedly written by Dictys of Crete, a follower of the hero Idomeneus (Ní Mhellaigh 2013). This historical novel was originally written in Greek in the second century, then translated into Latin, possibly during the reign of Septimius Severus, by one Serenus Sammonicus (Champlin 1981), though this is not certain. The prefatory letter says that the text was discovered in Dictys’s tomb at Knossos during the reign of Nero, written in Greek but in Phoenician letters (litteris Punicis…oratio Graeca fuerat). Dictys himself says in the text (5.17) that he was writing in Greek but using Phoenician letters, “the ones that were brought to us by Kadmos.” The tablets were allegedly translated into Attic Greek for Nero. The later Latin translation was dedicated to one Quintus Aradius Rufinus, whose name may allude to the Phoenician island-city of Arados. It has been suggested that all this may “be connected with the Neopunic origin of Septimius Severus” (Romeo 2010: 82–84). But the Greek version was probably written before that reign, and Dictys was not writing in Phoenician. The author historicized Dictys’s authorship by having him use the first version of the Phoenician script adopted by the Greeks to write their own language. The Phoenician script functions as a marker of authentic antiquity and establishes a priority over Homer’s account of the war.
Why were there so many Phoenicians in the ancient novel (Morales 2004: 48–56, 191–92)? Those stories featured much travel across the Mediterranean and beyond, deceptions, and frequent abductions and pirate raids. The image of the Phoenicians in Homer and Herodotus was precisely that of far-faring travelers, deceitful merchants, pirates, and kidnappers. Their city-states on the Levantine coast were as near a foreign analogue to the Greek polis as one could find, and were conveniently situated for the action. Long treks overland would have disrupted the quick alternation of locales required by the pace of these dramas; it was easy to sail from Rhodes to Tyre and then to Egypt. The Phoenicians of the Roman world were, as we have seen, thoroughly Hellenized, especially their elites, but their ethnonym carried a whiff of unusual sexual practices, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and “Oriental” religion. Therefore, they could be cast as essentially Greeks with a trace of otherness that satisfied the novels’ need for exoticism. Needless to say, that otherness was constructed through a Greek lens: the novels offer up a Phénicie imaginaire.
The ethno-religious “archaeology” of Christian polemics did the same. Josephus, the grandfather of Christian historical apologetics, had invoked Phoenician testimony to buttress Jewish antiquity, and in this he was copied by Christian writers (he also claimed that the Phoenicians were biased against Jews; Joseph. Ap. 1.13). It was not until Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea (d. 339), that they were given a more important role. According to Eusebius, the Phoenicians and the Egyptians were the original perverters of God’s will; it was they who deviated into polytheism and unnatural practices, which they transmitted to the Greeks (Johnson 2006: 62–74). The evidence of Philon of Byblos (lifted from Porphyry) was central to his arguments in the Praeparatio Evangelica, which is why we have its fragments. Child sacrifice, violence among the gods, temple sex, deification of animals, false theology, and incestuous marriages were the Phoenician-Egyptian legacy. The Phoenicians as a religious type thereby entered the repertoire of Christian polemic and apologetics (cf. Ath. Gentes 25–26). It is fitting, therefore, that the pagan Platonists of late antiquity continued the inclusive ethnophilosophical project of Porphyry and Iamblichus by including the ancient Phoenicians as contributors to the store of divine knowledge. In the sixth century, Ioannes Lydos made antiquarian notes on Phoenician religion (Azize 2005: 243–52) and Damaskios, the last scholarch of the Athenian Academy, quoted and discussed Hellenistic Phoenician cosmogonies (López-Ruiz 2009: 134–35, 152–53).
It is appropriate to conclude with a brief Latin poem, the Phoenix (attributed to the Christian writer Lactantius, d. ca. 325), that recounts the life cycle of the mythical bird. The Phoenix lives in a paradisiacal place in the far east, but when the time comes, she flies to the land that she had named Phoenicia, and settles in a grove of trees that the Greeks had named after her (i.e., palm trees). There she is reborn and flies off to the City of the Sun (which is presumably in an otherworldly realm, not Emesa). “She herself is her own offspring…she is both herself and not herself, achieving eternal life through the gift of death” (167–71): a suitable image for the many reinventions of ancient Phoenicia.
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Chapter 46
Phoenicians and Carthaginians in the Western Imagination
Brien K. Garnand
Introduction: Sister Cities
On March 20, 1953, civic leaders gathered in the lobby of the stately Drake Hotel in Carthage (Missouri) to officially accept an assemblage of relics from ancient Carthage (Tunisia). A delegate from the Chamber of Commerce held one end of a red ribbon, a board member of the local public library held the other end, together representing the “ties between the two Carthages” (Joplin Globe 1953a). C. “Rex” Carter, president of the Chamber of Commerce and the official representative of the mayor, ceremoniously cut the ribbon to reveal the artifacts that were meant for a permanent purpose-built museum display case in the Carthage Public Library. Also in attendance were representatives of Missouri-based Trans World Airlines (TWA), chief among them J. L. “Bob” Verlaque, the district operations manager in Tunisia who had collected the artifacts. His ceremonial role involved presenting an official “certificate of exportation” from the Tunisian Direction des Antiquités, which had authorized their transfer (Joplin Globe 1953a; TWA Skyliner 1953a).
Two divergent depictions of ancient Carthage arose during the course of this initial ceremony. On the one hand, Verlaque regaled attendees with romanticized stories about burial urns containing the ashes of sacrificed “firstborn sons,” and about small glass vessels, which had once been “passed among the mourners to collect their tears” (Joplin Globe 1953a; TWA Skyliner 1953a). Carter, on the other hand, spoke of international trade:
Quite a parallel is found in the economic and national aspect of these two cities, centuries apart in their development. Ancient Carthage was an important commercial trading center. It imported and exported, using the sea lanes for commercial enterprise. Carthage, Mo., likewise is a commercial center. It imports and exports. It uses the air, land and sea lanes in its commercial enterprise. (Joplin Globe 1953a)
As evidence of its enterprise, the Missouri town could boast about their Carthage Marble Corporation (one of the “largest gray marble quarries in the world”; Vangilder 1962), about Smith Brothers (garments), and about Leggett & Platt (manufacturing; cf. Hansford 2000; Utter and Hansford 2013). As evidence of their trade routes, the city sat astride key intersections of both railways (e.g., the Missouri Pacific and the St. Louis & San Francisco) and highways (e.g., U.S. Route 66 and Route 71).
Verlaque’s amateur interest in archaeology led him to encourage TWA clients to visit the ancient sites in his district, even serving as a one-man tourist agency for the occasional stranded passenger (TWA Skyliner 1953b; Baroukh 1953). His efforts coincided with those of Gilbert-Charles Picard, who led the Direction des Antiquités, and his wife, Colette Picard—the pair promoted the general touristic valorization of Tunisian archaeological sites during the last years of the French protectorate, with specific attention paid to the Antonine Baths (Weller 1955; Altekamp and Khechen 2013: 477). Both TWA and the Direction des Antiquités hoped to reap the benefits of an increased prominence for the ancient city.
Few American cities have embraced their ancient namesakes with the fervor of Carthage, Missouri. Perhaps Rome, Georgia, might contend, but their exchange occurred only once, when the Milan-based company, La soie de Chantillon, arranged for a copy of the Capitoline Wolf to be sent to their Georgian rayon factory, which arrived in 1929, a replica purportedly authorized by Mussolini himself. They installed the statue in front of City Hall, put it into storage during World War II (Brattain 2001: 59–60, 86), then reinstalled it in 1952.
The donation of multiple artifacts to Carthage in Missouri began a series of exchanges and initiated a semiformal sister-city relationship that continued through the 1970s. Verlaque arranged pen-pal correspondence between English-language students at the Lycée de Carthage and students from the Carthage School District (Joplin Globe 1953b). Meanwhile, he had convinced the Carthage Marble Corporation to donate the labor and the stone, with TWA to provide transport, so that a commemorative plaque from the Carthage quarries could mark the first anniversary of the donation (Joplin Globe 1953c). Morris Hughes, the U.S. Consul General (1953–1956), unveiled the plaque, which they had imbedded in the ruined baths:
FROM CARTHAGE MISSOURI
U.S.A.
TO
CARTHAGE TUNISIA
MARCH 1954
The installation ceremony was attended by representatives of the French resident general, the bey of Tunis, and the municipality (Joplin Globe 1954; Schrantz 1958). The donation had been characterized as a “‘good will’ gift” (Joplin Globe 1953a), by which the Missouri town was hoping to make a “gesture…in repayment” (Joplin Globe 1953b).
After Tunisian independence, semiformal ties continued. The Pro-Western Bourgiba regime had turned from France and leaned toward the United States, which had early recognized his government and had elevated Consul General Hughes to the ambassadorship in 1956. In 1961, even as the Tunisians were preoccupied with expelling the last French military garrisons, the Missourians upheld and monumentalized cultural ties between their two cities by embedding marble replicas of six Punic coins, each 1 m in diameter, into the southern exterior wall of the new Bank of Carthage building (Utter and Hansford 2013
: 21–22). In this same era, Betty Ketcham, a native of the Missouri city and former reporter for the Carthage Press, visited the young republic as a sort of citizen-ambassador; she posed next to the commemorative plaque and reconfirmed links with the North African city (Vangilder 1962; cf. Carthage Press 1971i). Then, in 1971, the Tunisian ambassador, Slaheddine el Goulli, and his wife made a well-orchestrated visit to Missouri, stopping at factories and farms, at the local high school, and at the public library to view the donated artifacts (Carthage Press 1971a–g). The ambassador proposed a formal “sister-city relationship,” with the full support of the Tunisian municipal officials (Carthage Press 1971c). Despite the fact that the city council then voted to pay a registration fee with the Town Affiliation Association of the National League of Cities (Carthage Press 1973), and despite another Tunisian contingent visiting Missouri under the auspices of the State Department’s International Visitor Program (Attoun 1976), a formal relationship never materialized.
These newspaper articles from Missouri, documenting specific attempts to foster Carthaginian filial relations, provide a general guide as to how Phoenicians, specifically Carthaginians, feature in the Western imagination. At the initial unveiling of artifacts, sensational depictions of tears and sacrificial infanticide competed against images of industry and commerce. References to ancient Carthage in this series of articles maintained such a dichotomy. We find negative depictions of depravity—Moloch-worshiping infant-sacrificing Canaanites (i.e., Phoenicians) and the bloodthirsty persecution of Christians—gratuitously invoked by the Pulitzer Prize winner, Relman Morin, in his account of Tunisian resistance to lingering French occupation: