only a "meager picture" of the cultural life of the earliest pioneers in the city can be conjectured, and not much about housing, monuments, or defenses. The Roman poet Virgil (70-19 BC) imagined early Carthage, when his legendary character Aeneas had arrived there:

"Aeneas found, where lately huts had been,
marvelous buildings, gateways, cobbled ways,
and din of wagons. There the Tyrians
were hard at work: laying courses for walls,
rolling up stones to build the citadel,
while others picked out building sites and plowed
a boundary furrow. Laws were being enacted,
magistrates and a sacred senate chosen.
Here men were dredging harbors, there they laid
the deep foundations of a theatre,
and quarried massive pillars... ."