A
nna looks around the ruins of her wrecked city and does not dare breathe. She feels perhaps while she holds her breath she can pretend it’s a dream, or some kind of vision. Perhaps while she holds her breath it isn’t true. But she can’t hold her breath forever. The exhale, when it finally comes, clouds on the glass she’s pressed against. She doesn’t wipe the mist away. Instead, she turns her back on the Extract from window. She has seen enough.
Will they remember hers? What will people say, she wonders, when they talk about Carthage? What will they say when they talk about Dido? Anna is old enough to recognise the difference in the way they talk about the gods and the way they talk about the goddesses. Baal is strong, powerful, regal. Astarte is shamed and hated. Melqart is fierce and brave. Anath is naked and vain. She has no doubt that when they tell her sister’s story, it will not be full of her military exploits, as Aeneas’ will be. It will not be about her legacy, about her foundation of the mighty city of Carthage. It will not be a story about her life.
Amnis Perennis
She walks through the halls of her palace, the stone cracked beneath her bare feet and the plaster crumbling onto her hair and shoulders. She wonders if the white dust makes her look like a ghost.
More important - most important - will be her death. Already Anna is hearing whispers from the few remaining Carthaginians she has come across. They talk about Dido’s lust, her shallowness. They say she was driven mad by love, driven to her own destruction and the destruction of her own city.
The doors to the palace have been torn off their hinges, and the giant wooden slabs lie broken and charred on the dusty ground. There are Guérin: Dido and Aeneas, oil on canvas 1815 splashes of deep red sprayed across the dark oak, and Anna pauses to wonder whose it is. If she closes her eyes, she can imagine the terror shining in his tear-studded eyes as the sword glinted towards him. But she They say she was driven mad by love. By her own cannot imagine his face. She cannot remember his arrogance. Never, Anna thinks, by the gods. name. They don’t dare ascribe that fault to the gods. No. It is the fault of the woman. It is always the fault Will they remember his name, in years to come? of the woman. Photography by Amelie Soames 7
By Francesca Wolff
