Français – عربي – ⵜⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵜ – English
The Aeneid is an epic written by the Roman poet Virgil, that narrates the journey of Aeneas, the legendary ancestors of the Roman people, after he fled the ruins of Troy, his native city, to find an unknown land: Italy, where the gods promised him that his descendants would found a new Troy: Rome, a city destined to dominate the world. The story happens over 1.000 years before the Roman Empire was founded, but, through a skillful use of typologies, it also contains references to more recent characters and events of Roman history. One of these characters was Hiarbas, a North African king who is inspired from a historical Numidian king.
According to the Aeneid, Hiarbas was the son of Jupiter Hammon (an association between the supreme god of the Romans and the Phoenicians/Carthaginians) and a Garamantian nymph, who became King of the Getulians. Before Aeneas arrived in Carthage, he had asked Dido to marry him: their union would have represented the mingling between the indigenous North Africans and the Phoenician newcomers. However, Dido refused his marriage proposal, because of her promise to her late husband that she would never remarry.
When Hiarbas heard that Dido had fallen in love with Aeneas, he was furious and threatened to attack them. When Aeneas abandoned Dido, she expressed her fears that Hiarbas would now come to make her his wife by force.
Other latter poets borrowed the character of Hiarbas from Virgil, its inventor. According to Ovid, Hiarbas invaded Carthage after Dido’s suicide, a reference to the part the Numidian kings played in the fall of Carthage.
Hiarbas bears the same name as a historical character: Hiarbas, who, a few decades before Virgil wrote the Aeneid, had allied with Roman rebels to usurp the throne of Numidia. The character of Hiarbas is clearly inspired by this historical character. The fact that Virgil makes Hiarbas the King of the Getulians gives the impression that the historical Hiarbas might have had Getulian origins.
