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The Romans under the Emperor Augustus experienced a golden age of literature. The best Roman writers were concentrated in this period. Of these writers, many consider Vergil to have been at the top of the list. His masterpiece is known as the Aeneid. It tells the story of the Roman prince Aeneas, who unlike most of his family, survived the burning of the city of Troy when the armed Greek soldiers emerged at night from the belly of a giant wooden horse to torch the city where Paris had taken the beautiful Helen. Aeneas left the burning city with a handful of followers and set out on his divinely appointed mission to found Rome. In the Roman tradition, Aeneas is usually viewed not as the founder of Rome, but of a settlement that preceded Rome, and Romulus, the twin brother of Remus, is credited with the actual founding of Rome itself.
A romantic Carthaginian legend included in The Aeneid tells us that Mattan (Methres according to Servius AJPh Vol 68 no 1 p. 79) was a wealthy king of Tyre who gave his daughter, Elissa (Elishat), to his brother, Sichaeus (or Acerbas, priest of Melqart), in marriage. In addition to giving his brother a bride, he passed on to him the kingdom. This made Elissa queen. Elissa had a brother, Pygmalion, who assumed that he would be heir to the throne. In order to win back what he felt to be rightfully his, he killed his uncle, but kept secret from Elissa his part in their uncle's death. Pygmalion pretended to comfort his sister in her loss, but still takes the throne and the royal treasure. Sichaeus, as a ghost, worried about his widow, so he came to her in a dream warning her that she is not safe around Pygmalion. He urged her to gather all her household goods and gods, as well as those that Pygmalion has taken, and flee. This Elissa does: with her attendants, she seizes a fleet, and sets sail.
An alternative version of this is told in a work known as Justin's Epitome of Trogus' History. [Trogus lived at the time of Augustus; Justin wrote about 200 A.D.]Since the Epitome is historical, it deletes the supernatural detail found in Vergil. When Elissa sails off, her brother Pygmalion wants to pursue her, but is dissuaded by his mother and the seers who tell him it is against the will of the gods because Elissa is destined to found the most prosperous city in the world.
The royal refugees from Tyre land first on the Greek island of Cyprus and then on the north coast of Africa, near modern Tunis and opposite Sicily. In Vergil's story, the name Dido (meaning wanderer) is then given to Elissa. A second legend tells how Elissa/Dido came to command the area that is known as Carthage.
Dido asks the local ruler if she can buy a bit of land for her people so they might rest after their voyage. It's unclear whether this purchase is for permanent possession or just a rest stop. The local king agrees and tells Dido she can have as much area as fits in an ox hide. Some say the word for ox hide is the same as the word for citadel and what Dido was really offered was a citadel, but crafty (a typically Phoenician trait according to the Greeks) Dido took an ox hide and cut it into thin slivers which she lay out end-to-end in a large crescent shape with the Mediterranean shore on its inside arc. The area thus circumscribed by the ox hide was large enough to give the settlement command of Mediterranean trade.
This settlement was a colony of Tyre that received the name Carthage (Kart hadašt), which means "New City". As it was a colony, it is clear that however the settlement began, it either kept or re-established bonds with the mother kingdom of Tyre.
Later, in a third legend about the formation of Carthage, Aeneas stops to rest in Carthage on his way to Italy to fulfill his god-given mission to found Rome. Dido welcomes him and his followers. Perhaps Dido believes that when he said “stop to rest” he meant what she had meant, or else she thinks he can be dissuaded from continuing his journey. At any rate, Dido and Aeneas have an affair that Dido considers essentially a marriage. When she finds that he is about to abandon her in order to resume his divine mission, Dido kills herself, but not before cursing Aeneas and his descendants, the Romans. In Trogus’ version, Elissa falls on a sword to avoid marriage to an African king.
Romans date the founding of Rome by Romulus to 753 B.C. This is several generations after Aeneas founded a settlement in Italy that would become Rome. Thus, the story of Aeneas' sojourn with Dido does not help to figure out when Carthage was founded, although the historical work by Trogus mentioned above claims Carthage was founded 72 years before the founding of Rome, which could conceivably be enough time for Aeneas to leave Carthage, found a colony in Italy and still leave time for Romulus and his twin Remus to be born by 753.
Turning from legend to history to look at the founding of Carthage, we run into problems. The Romans hated Carthage. Carthage was a trading nation, used to luxury rather than the virtuous, hard life the Romans prided themselves on, but even so, the two nations came to a virtual stalemate at the end of the First Punic (the Roman version of the Greek “Phoenician”) War. At the end of the Second Punic War, the Romans won, but not decisively, and in the Third Punic War, the elephants and troops under the Carthaginian general Hannibal invaded Rome and destroyed Roman legions. Rome was not only mortified, but also in danger of being destroyed. When the tide finally turned, Rome was in no mood for mercy. Its rallying cry was "Carthago delenda est" ("Carthage must be destroyed").
In 146 B.C., at the conclusion of the Third Punic War, Rome sold the surviving, defeated Carthaginians into slavery, destroyed everything in sight, and (supposedly) salted the earth so no crops could grow. Some pottery sherds remained, but not much else. As if this were not enough to make it difficult for future researchers to learn about ancient Carthage, a century after obliterating the city, the Romans built up a new city of Carthage on the same site. The new Roman Carthage lasted until the Arabs destroyed it in the 7th century.
Because of the destruction of most of what the Carthaginians had created, there is almost no physical material on which to make judgments about when Carthage was founded. This means that we must rely mainly on ancient writers.
In his epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer (fl. c. 8th century B.C.) describes the Phoenicians as craftsmen and craftymen, traders and thieves. The talented but cheating Phoenicians, who are capable of making intricate metalwork cups that are fit gifts for kings, make their great wealth from trade in tawdry costume jewelry.
Herodotus, known as "the father of history" (and also as "the father of lies"), and later writers believed that Homer’s mention of the Phoenicians authoritatively placed them in the Mediterranean at the time of the Trojan War; that is, in about the tenth century B.C. In reality, Homer may simply have been incorporating data from his own age. This complicates attempts to date the Phoenicians' founding of Carthage.
Herodotus describes as factual some of the myths and legends of the Phoenicians, like the migration of Cadmus from Tyre to Thebes in search of his lost sister Europa who had been carried off on the back of a beautiful white bull that was really the king of the Greek gods, Zeus. Coupled with this myth is the historically plausible note that Cadmus brought the semitic alphabet of the Phoenicians with him to Thebes, and so introduced writing to the Greeks.
Following Herodotus, Thucydides, who gave the ignominious label to his predecessor, is accepted as the more reliable of the Greek historians. His story of the Phoenicians is that they inhabited Sicily before the Greeks arrived there in the seventh century. Archaeological evidence from Sicily suggests this may be true.
Removing the fictional details, the tales of the Phoenicians show that there were Phoenicians in the Mediterranean by the 8th century and that the Phoenicians were great sailors and traders. Archaeologists using radiocarbon dating believe that Carthage was founded in the late 9th century B.C. This would put it approximately right in line with Trogus’ dating.