This is CBSI on the world.

I'm John Batchel.

The Romans is the book, a 2000-year history.

Edward J. Watts, the endowed chair and a distinguished professor of history at the University of California, San Diego.

And we go to Carthage.

Why?

Because once upon a time, there is a legend that Carthage was

founded by men and women who escaped from the destruction of Troy by the Greeks. You remember the

Iliad. It's a beautiful story written by a man named Virgil, a modest poet who was elevated by his emperor, Octavian

later Augustus, to become the poet of the first century BCE and the founding of the empire.

But in that story is a moment that everybody I've ever talked to about reading Aeneid recognizes that the story is stolen not by Aeneas, the hero, but by Dido, the queen of Carthage.

It's not real. It's better than real. Professor, I mentioned Dido because Carthage is forever associated with her.

That's a lucky city. Why did Rome take on Carthage? Why did Rome need

that beautiful story of Dido to justify what happened to Carthage? Yeah, basically, when you look

at the geography of the Mediterranean, the Mediterranean has kind of, it's one basin, but there are

two parts of it. The eastern Mediterranean in this moment in antiquity was the wealthy, urbanized center of production.

And the western Mediterranean was the center of raw materials.

And in the middle was the Italian peninsula and what's now Tunisia and Sicily.

So whoever controlled that middle controlled the access of the access to raw materials

that those wealthy urban areas in the Eastern Mediterranean needed.

And Carthage initially was founded by Phoenicians coming from the Eastern Mediterranean

to set up trading colonies that would allow them to participate and dominate that exchange.

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