SOUSSE, WHICH IS HADRUMETUM

A hundred miles or so south of Carthage Bay, on the now bare and scorched shore which faces the Levanter, stands Sousse.

If Cefalu is the type of an antique town, prehistoric, then Punic, then Greek, then under Roman rule, then swamped by Islam, but so early recovered by our race that the whole trace of the Orient has been wiped out of it, Sousse is the best type of the other extreme: prehistoric, then Punic, then Græco-Roman—but so changed by Islam that it has lost its ancient body and soul, and is wholly turned Mohammedan to the eye and mind. Palma of Majorca, as I have said, is the link between the two types of the recovered towns.

Sousse has lost everything, down to its very name; yet it was a port; Punic in origin, and Tyrian, therefore, for centuries—perhaps for nearly a thousand years. It was next Græco-Roman, and after the brief Vandal misrule continued to be Græco-Roman until the Arab cavalcade overwhelmed it more than twelve centuries ago. But once that shock had been delivered its transformation and degradation began, and, so far as it is possible to destroy the strong things of Pagan and Christian antiquity, here they were destroyed.

The Crusades failed to affect the town; Europe never recovered its foothold until our own time, quite lately; and when Europe came back two-thirds of the town area and the great old port of the ancients, the chief haven of all that coast after Carthage, had disappeared. Nothing remained but a miserable square of Saracenic tunnel markets, low, rough, whitewashed domes, and little cubes of huts or houses, with here and there the rough, lime-splashed tower of a minaret, and round it all the patched, degraded walls of what had once been a Roman City. The surrounding country lost its impress of Rome. The marble was looted and broken, the columns fell. In the place of temple and statue and arch you have the Eastern village suburb in its groves.

For Sousse was _Hadrumetum_, and in its harbour and outside its triple line of defence was played the first act of a great drama among the stories of the world; the final triumph of Cæsar. No one to-day could guess that ever Sousse had had such dignity of name and function; so thoroughly does Islam ruin what it has occupied.

To face page 96]

But Hadrumetum had played a great part long before Cæsar. Hannibal, at the end of the second Punic War, fighting that last despairing fight upon the soil of his own country, made it his base. In the third Punic War it deserted Carthage, and was rewarded by its new Roman masters with a local freedom. They loaded it with wealth and made it greater than ever it had been before, building three great ports with a breakwater of half-a-mile to shelter them, crowding it with Grecian art and noble, ponderous stone. It became (after Utica, and while Carthage was still in ruins) the second town of Africa. And now it is what you may see, a whitewashed collection of small, barbarous things, shrunk to a third of its old size, or less, and having for a memory of its past nothing but a few stones here and there; hardly any of them in the city.

All about it, ten miles one way, twenty another, forty another, a hundred another, stand the monumental ruins which still bear witness to the ravaging evil of the Mohammedan tide. But in Sousse nothing. Even those great works of the harbour disappeared, and the French, when they brought Europe back forty years ago to begin the recovery, had to build up a new port from first to last.

I have said that it was here that was played out the first scene in that great drama, the final triumph of Cæsar.

After Pharsalia, the republican leaders had taken refuge in Africa. They had twenty legions. Cæsar from Sicily proposed to take the initiative and to attack. He had with him but one legion, which grew to no more than five: six hundred Gallic horsemen, who increased to no more than two thousand. His opponents had behind them, in alliance with them and almost in command over them, all the forces of the native kingdom which lay inland behind the coast towns. Even this small force of his Cæsar failed to concentrate, and the story of what followed is very good proof that fortune has more to do with the greatness of soldiers even than character. It was on the twenty-seventh of December, in the year 707 of the city, that Cæsar left Sicilian land; a storm dispersed his convoys, and when he saw Cape Bon on the morning of the third day he had with him not more than two thousand men and a squadron of his French cavalry. Nevertheless, in the same temper which had made him march north in Gaul, eight years before, after suffering defeat in Auvergne—the temper of audacity which had always hitherto befriended him—he determined to land that small force and risk all upon the throw, trusting to some favour of heaven (which he mocked) for the return and concentration of his remaining ships.

He went on all that day, until, in mid-afternoon, he stood opposite the triple harbour of Hadrumetum, and could see from his decks the large town reaching gently upward inland more than a mile every way, and its suburb, almost as great as itself, lying off along the shore to the south; beyond the centuries-old wall the new Roman additions and the great ditch which bounded all. Within were two legions under Considius. It must have been the superiority of his human material which permitted Cæsar’s landing in the face of such a threat, and although to his few score of French horsemen there were opposed within the walls of the city, large bodies of the irregular native cavalry.

He spent the morrow, the last day of the year, in recognising every part of the defence. He saw that assault was out of the question with his small numbers, and on the first of January he marched off south to Monastir, fighting (as he broke contact with the enemy garrison of Hadrumetum) small rear-guard actions, in which the Northern riders had overwhelmingly the better of opponents more than ten times as numerous. This safe escape of Cæsar, this bold landing in the face of odds, and unwounded retirement, was the inception of the campaign which ended in Thapsus.

You would never guess it to-day. To see Sousse as it stands now you would think it had never known the great hour or the nobility of our blood.

Two long days’ march to the south there still stands that huge relic and proof of what the ancient civilisation was, the ruined amphitheatre, which the Mohammedans called, and call, El Djem: like a ruined coliseum in the midst of the sand. In the hill country to the north still stand the noble temple of Sbitla, the columns of Djebba and fifty other remaining proofs of what we lost by that catastrophe of Asiatic invasion. But in Sousse all I could find of the past were the huge Punic stones at the base of the wall, a fragment of a figure, a fragment or two of a column and one small building from the depths of the Dark Ages, an old fossil of the ninth century, in which one can still see how dependent the invader was for stone and for all permanent work upon the Roman order which he had destroyed.

For in that little building the pillars supporting Moorish arches are the last pillars of Grecian art, and the very lintel of the door is made of a fragment of column set flat. Just as in those Arab baths of Palma, the new men could not build even their little dwarf things without the material of the world which they ruined.

Nevertheless, Sousse-Hadrumetum did remain; the town was not allowed to die—and why that was I have often wondered. Perhaps the presence of some great treasure, well kept in some strong building of the Acropolis which became the Kasbah and is to-day the seat of the French garrison, pinned the Arabs to the place; or perhaps that noble harbour, which their negligence and incapacity allowed to decay into nothingness, still maintained a trade which Carthage had lost. But, at any rate, these enemies of the Roman name who so thoroughly depopulated Carthage continued to inhabit Sousse, and it has thus held a life uninterrupted for three thousand years; three great and almost equal periods: Punic (with Greek models and influences), Roman, Islamic.

To face page 100.]

If it were possible to call up the past visibly and to see the successive fates of landscape under those successive waves of religion (which are the determinants of all changes in culture) the roadstead of Sousse assuredly would be the best standpoint to take up in all the Mediterranean area.

First you would see, before the beginning of recorded history, some little group of native Berber huts grouped round a small rocky elbow of the beach which gave a tiny refuge from the Levanter. Next a fleet of merchant vessels from the east coming to trade and settle, and a Phœnician city rising before you, girdled by a wall of great rough stone, its citadel crowned by the temple of some vile Tyrian god, its colour that vivid yellow with which the Semitic culture of all this coast marked its erections. You would see the first little natural refuge expanding into the old and mighty port of Hadrumetum, and from the groves all about it, the very fertile fields, the grey sweeps of olive and the mile-wide stretches of corn, wealth pouring on to those quays for export to other lands; wealth springing up everywhere from that famous plain to the very roots of the mountains rising miles away inland: a land still watered and with many trees.

Then you would see a slow transformation in colour and in form as the centuries drew on toward the moment of the Incarnation and of the chief revolution in human affairs: the yellow turning to marble-white; statues, by the quays, of a newer and more perfect kind; the Corinthian column everywhere and the flat triangle of the Grecian temple front. It was from such a city that the last reserves of Hannibal poured out, and it was such a city that increased for four hundred years and more, under the universality of the Empire.

With the misrule of the Vandal Federates you might have marked some touch of ruin—but not much: a burned building here and there unrestored; a column fallen and not raised again. But still that same wealth all around; trees and the human climate which trees bring and dense growth for human sustenance in corn and olive all over the plain to the rocky hills on the horizon.

That was what Belisarius found and took when Justinian restored the Empire in Africa and gave his own name to the city; that was still what the first Arab horsemen saw who came swarming in like locusts from their over-running of Cyrene and their mastery of Egypt—many squadrons, clad in large white cloaks and sitting the small, nervous, desert horses.

They conquered, and the evil transformation began. Century after century you would have seen the trees grow less and less, the plain lying baked and naked, more and more burned under the sun, the harbour works crumbling, all the high and noble buildings of the town falling to a baser level, and its area shrinking at the same time, and all the monuments of the days of its greatness ruined and at last forgotten.

TOWN, TRANSFORMED AND TURNED MOHAMMEDAN.

To face page 102]

Now Europe has come back, but with what chance of permanence here? And what new town, if any, will Europe build, worthy of the old and proud widespread Roman city which has disappeared?