Wordless Wednesday: Count Belisarius Takes Carthage

All great cities, even those upon a hill, eventually fall. Carthage was an outpost founded by the seafaring Phoenicians, whom Lebanese like to call their ancestors, in 814 B.C., in what is today Tunis, the capital of Tunisia. Quite a distance from Phoenicia's cities back then (Tyre, Sidon, Beirut).

It was twice a Roman city, belonging to Vandals in between those two eras, the Vandal years coming to an end courtesy of the great Roman general Belisarius, who enteretd Carthage on this day 1475 years ago. He’d been battling Geilimer, king of the Vandals, for three months.

The great British poet and novelist Robert Graves, in Count Belisarius (1938), re-imagined Geilimer’s, or Gelimer’s “pitiful and strange” surrender: “For, as he came toward Belisarius, he smiled, and the smile changed to hysterical laughter, and the laughter to weeping. There were tears in Belisarius’s eyes, too, as he took the former monarch by the hand and led him into a neighboring house for a drink of water. He laid him down on a bed and comforted him as a woman comforts a sick child.” Belisarius died in 565, five years before the birth of the Prophet Muhammad.

See Also:

• October 15 in Middle East History
• Wordless Wednesday archive at Kathy Gill's About site