2026-02-12
1 小时 0 分钟Who has words to capture that night's disaster?
Tell that slaughter.
What tears could match our torments now?
An ancient city is falling, a power that ruled for ages, now in ruins.
Everywhere lie the motionless bodies of the dead,
strewn in her streets, her homes, and the gods' shrines.
All over now.
Devouring fire whipped by the winds goes churning into the rooftops,
flames searching over them, scorching blasts raging up the sky.
Treasure hauled from burning temples, the sacramental tables, bowls of solid gold,
and the holy robe seized from every quarter, the enemy piling high the plunder.
Children and trembling mothers rounded up in a long, endless line.
So that was the greatest of all Roman poets, Virgil,
and he was writing almost two centuries after Hannibal's Great War against the Romans,
the subject of this epic series,
and a century or so after the final defeat of one of the protagonists in this story,
the Mediterranean city of Carthage.
And Tom, in that poem, the Aeneid, which is translated there by Robert Fagels,
Virtual is taking us back isn't he to the legendary beginnings of carthage so shrouded in myth the story of its foundation by the Phoenician queen died on the colonists from Phoenicia laboring to build the new city.
They're raising the walls they're building the palaces and temples the harbours the romans will later destroy.