Time and memory in Carthage

Abstract

Rome and the Roman idea of imperium – a centring, totalizing military and legal right to rule and command obedience – looms large behind innumerable historical instances of geopolitical aspiration. Yet the story of ancient Rome and the empire it shaped does not belong to Rome alone. From the very beginning, and throughout its history, it was linked repeatedly and inextricably to a peripheral alter-ego: Carthage, established in present-day Tunisia by Phoenicians settlers from Tyre. Much has been written about the historiographical representation of the conflicts between the two cities. The focus of ‘Time and Memory in Carthage’ is instead on the city's spatial and memorial presence, and on the raking light it throws across the narrative of empire that European tradition inherited from Rome. Using a range of material from Virgil's Aeneid to medieval and Renaissance visual depictions of Carthage, this essay attends to the strange tricks that the city of Carthage plays with both time and space, both in the Roman imagination, and in the early modern world – opening up spaces of conversation and alterity that survived even as the city's architectural space was destroyed, reappropriated, rebuilt, and reimagined.