CHAPTER XII
ROME AND CARTHAGE
I am afraid you will have suffered disappointment from time to time in the course of the telling of this greatest of great stories. I am afraid that I have been obliged to speak rather slightingly of that beautiful lady for whose sake you will have heard that the Trojan War was fought, the lady about whom Homer sang. I have made my excuses for that disrespectful treatment.
There is another famous lady of whom Virgil, the great Latin poet, sings—Queen Dido, of Carthage. His story goes that Æneas, the Trojan, escaping over-sea after the fall of Troy, was swept by storms into Carthage, where Dido entertained him pleasantly. From her court he went to Italy, and from him the Romans were said to be descended. The Æneid—that is, the story of Æneas—is the name of Virgil's poem in which this tale is told. You may believe as much or as little of it as you like, for there is no evidence at all that it is true; but it is a fine tale, finely told.
Then there is the story about Romulus and Remus and the good old wolf-mother, and the rest of it—all very pleasant too. But I do not think that you need believe any more of that either than you like.
The Gauls in Rome
They are not very ancient stories, nothing like as old as some of the stories about Egypt and Babylonia for which there is plenty of evidence. A thousand years or so B.C. could cover them all. Yet for what was really going on round about what came to be called Rome we have very little evidence until a great deal later. One other pretty tale certainly has some truth in it—the story that the Gauls came down upon Rome, and that the Capitol, or strong citadel, on which the sentries must have gone to sleep, was only saved by the alarm being given by some geese. There may be some doubt as to whether the geese really were there, and were the city's saviours, for it is possible that this too, like other tales, may have seemed to the poets to be a pretty story to tell, and they may have told it to please their hearers without inquiring closely into its truth; but however it may have been about the geese, there is no doubt at all about the Gauls. They were there, and in terrible numbers, and they only consented to go away on being bribed to do so with an immense sum of money. So it is not a very dignified appearance that this great Rome makes on her first appearance in our story—saved from Gauls, in the first instance, by geese, and in the second place by bribes! This happened in 390 B.C.
GALLIC WARRIORS.
(From the British Museum.)