New Vigor, 26: Learning

I like to try to absorb the feel of a place before we get there, especially by reading a work of well-researched historical fiction.

Years ago, I read Death Comes for the Archbishop so I’d have an idea about Acoma and Santa Fe when we road-tripped there from Seattle while Peter was doing his master’s thesis work on Willa Cather.

Before we went to Paris in 2002, I plowed through a triliogy about Josephine Bonaparte .  To prep for another trip to the south of France, I read Everybody Was So Young,  about Gerald and Sara Murphy, the American ex-patriates whose home on the Cote d’Azur welcomed Picasso, Hemingway, Cole Porter, and Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

It doesn’t always work that way, though.  Last month I finished (and wrote about) A Mountain of Crumbs — after we returned from our Baltic trip. The same is true for A Russian Winter.

Just last night, I finished reading Pride of Carthage: A Novel of Hannibal by David Anthony Durham. I had picked it up more than two years ago, before the trip where we hoped to go to Tunisia from Rome. Although this set records in my delayed-absorption timing, the way I look at it — better late than never.

I knew only the bare minimum about Hannibal: he crossed the Alps, right? And he used elephants (of all things) to help wage war against the Romans. Yep, that was the guy.

He’s still an iconic figure in Tunisia. This mosaic, a huge enlargement of a postage stamp, adorned the wall of an entry-way into a Carthage museum, not too far from the main archaeological area by the waterfront.

That day I learned that the ruins we saw did not date from Hannibal’s era, at the end of the Second Punic War.  Carthage had been wiped off the map (literally) by the Romans after their ultimate victory ending the Third Punic War (146 BC). What survives there now is from the rebuilding of the city by the Romans.

The Durham book was one of the most violent things I’ve ever read; human life didn’t count for much 23 centuries ago. Hannibal’s army spent almost 15 years in Italy; his forces wiped out something like one of every four Roman men of military age. His nemesis, Scipio Africanus (a name he earned after defeating Carthage), is widely credited with picking up some of Hannibal’s most vicious tactics — ambush, fire of innocents, destruction of countryside, rampant rape and enslavement. You get the idea.

I’m still glad I read it. When he describes the port at Carthage, I can recall the geography of the harbor. When he talks about the volcano above Naples, I recognize Vesuvius. When he talks about Hellenistic influences (of art and beauty and philsopohy), I remember those from Greece.

Reading and learning, even about death and destruction — all part of the journey.

“Travel, voyage, and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” ~Seneca