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Carthage

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lex_aver

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I'd appreciate good remarks and criticism.

Carthage

At the African coast of Mediterranean lies Carthage, a city of great heroes and history.

According to a legend, Carthage was founded in 814 BC. The founder of the city, exiled Phoenician princess Elissa, came to the seashore seeking a place for settlement. She asked locals to give her as much land as covered by ox hide. When they agreed, she cut it to stripes and encircled nearby hill with them. There the city of Carthage was founded, and Elissa became known as Queen Dido.

Carthage quickly rose to prominence and became center of its region. Its great political influence ensured a conflict with another rising power—Rome. For Carthage this conflict, known as Punic Wars, ended tragically. Despite great effort by Commander Hannibal, who invaded Italy and had been sustaining menacing army there for 15 years, Carthage had lost Second Punic War and was destroyed by Roman forces.

However, Romans subsequently rebuilt Carthage and it had been one of Rome’s greatest cities till the fall of the Empire. Now it is in ruins, but its glory lives.

Edited by lex_aver
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  • 3 months later...

On the coast. Proper names standing in for geographical features require a definite article ("the Mediterranean"). Saying "According to a legend" implies a degree of specificity that you don't mean (i.e. there are a bunch of legends and one of them says....), in contrast to "according to legend" which refers to a vague mass of legend -- we don't have competing myths about Carthage. "As much land as covered by ox hide" is really strange: it implies that there is land already covered by oxhide (it's a short form of "as is (already) covered by oxhide", which would be "none", and that would mess up the story). The oxhide also has a generic interpretation in your text, meaning "covered by any oxhide", whereas you mean "by an oxhide" (the hide of one ox, unlike "oxhide" which could be 'any number of oxhides'). The word "strip" refers to long thin things that you could cut a hide into, and a "stripe" is a pattern like this. You need an article to go with "hill" (the rules for articles are the hardest). Same deal with "center", "Punic Wars" and "Romans". I can't say exactly why "effort" should be plural. You gotta totally reboot the "sustaining menacing army" sentence ("sustain" means roughly "suffer", not "maintain"). For one thing, it is much more direct to say that he occupied Italy (you can "menace" from outside, but you have to occupy from the inside). The simple past is the right tense to be using; the rules for "had been sustaining", "had been" may differ in US and UK English, but generally, you would use that tense only to describe something that is done with at some point in the past when some other event took place (for example "I had cut the tree down by the time John got back" where the tree cutting was done with before John's return in the past).

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