On 6 March 1856, Londoners woke to the news that ‘the Royal Italian Opera House, Covent-garden, was totally destroyed by fire’. Twenty-five fire engines had prevented this conflagration from spreading; however, unlike in Dibdin's Troy, there was no reprieve from the flames. The Illustrated London News immediately devoted several pages to the fire-fighters in action and the Queen's tour of the strikingly ancient-looking ruins (Figure 5.17). Yet this traumatic event, like the controversy over the Society of Antiquaries's request for funding to excavate Troy, would remain potent in the public imagination: further images of the fire circulated and, just over a year later, ‘a serio-comic opening address’ written by Robert Brough – who would soon write the Lyceum's Siege of Troy – was the ‘gem of the evening’ at opening night festivities nearby. Brough turned the Italian Opera's destruction to comic account in comparing the manager as a young actor to:

At first sight, this burlesque joke, like those we saw in the previous chapter, simply exploits outrageous anachronisms to conflate past and present. It is no surprise that Brough's allusion – to the consul Caius Marius in exile among the ruins of Carthage – and his humorously pedantic linguistic correction distinguishes between spectators who did, or did not, know their Classics.

This chapter will explain why Brough's choice of this specific comparison to Carthage is neither random nor superficial.