Just as we make the mistake of studying geography with the aid of large-scale maps, so we are prone to use a magnifying-glass in the study of ancient history. We envision the classic sites as being far larger than they really were because we see them through the eyes of the classical writers. To the stages on which the ancients enacted those mighty dramas, which shook the world and shaped the course of history, we have attributed a spaciousness they did not possess. We think of them in the terms of our own far-flung, mushroom cities, we measure them by modern municipal standards, when, as a matter of fact, they were comparatively insignificant in extent according to present-day ideas. Compared to Greater London, with its area of seven hundred square miles, or to New York, with its three hundred, the famous cities of antiquity—Troy, Tyre, Jerusalem, Nineveh, Palmyra, Babylon, Athens, Rome—would be reckoned to-day as little more than medium-sized communities and classified as cities of the second and third class by the Post Office Department at Washington. And Carthage, despite her wealth and world-power, was no exception, for the Empress of the Seas never had as great a population as has Baltimore, and her area, as delimited by the city walls, probably did not equal that of Camden, New Jersey. The city, as has been said in the preceding chapter, stood on the outer edge of a small, fan-shaped peninsula bounded on the north by a large salt lake, the Sebkha en Rouan, on the east and southeast by the Gulf of Tunis, and on the south and southwest by the lagoon of El Bahira; while on the west a narrow isthmus, barely two miles in width, afforded communication with the mainland. The entire area of this peninsula does not exceed half a hundred square miles, if that, and considerably less than a fourth of this was contained within the ramparts, which are said to have measured twelve and a half miles in circumference. Of none of the famous cities of antiquity do we possess a more careful description than that which Appian has given us of Carthage as she stood at the outbreak of the Third Punic War. In its wealth of facts and figures it is worthy of Herr Baedeker himself.