Parallels between Virgil's Aeneid and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey of Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians, who hospitably take Odysseus in and ask him how he has come to their land. Odysseus spends Books IX through XII recounting his journey from Troy to where he was presently. In Aeneas' case, upon arrival in Carthage, Dido asked Aeneas to share his story, so Books II and III were narrating the fall of Troy and how Aeneas and his people arrived at Carthage. Both heroes sail over the same sea, sometimes visiting the same locations and experiencing the same difficulties. In Book III of the "Aeneid", Aeneas and his men come
Carthage like clay masks. "Thanks to this burial archaeology we know more about archaic Carthage than about any other contemporary city in the western Mediterranean." Already in the eighth century, fabric dyeing operations had been established, evident from crushed shells of murex (from which the 'Phoenician purple' was derived). Nonetheless, 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