Last week, you participated in the Ulysses 2009 Project accompanying the group led by French Ambassador Daniel Rondeau to Tunis, the second stop on the journey which is to end in a fortnight's time at Beirut. What are your impressions?

Whenever I hear Tunisian scholars lecture about the history of their country, side-lights on Malta always emerge. For instance, on this occasion, the point was made that the Ottoman Turks actually decided to occupy Tunis, as happened in 1574, as an alternative way of confrontation with the Knights, after the failure of the Siege.

Moreover, the regime to be established was supposed to be modelled on that of the Knights in Malta, i.e. the Turks were to relate their position towards the local Arab and Berber population more or less as the Knights related to the Maltese.

There was furthermore a parallel development. It is well-known that Grandmaster Pinto is portrayed not actually wearing a kingly crown but with one almost at hand as a sign of the desire for full sovereignty in place of feudal dependence on the King of the two Sicilies.

Likewise, the Bey of Tunis indulged in symbolic and other expressions of the desire to become a full monarch independent of the Sultan in Turkey. In Malta we tend to be aware of the inextricable interweaving of Maltese and Sicilian history, but to be less aware of the light that can be obtained on Maltese history from more careful attention to happenings in Tunis than is usually given.

In Malta, Ulysses was the figure on whom by far most attention was focussed. That was natural given that the Odyssey actually begins with Ulysses on one of the Maltese islands, if it is accepted that one of them is Homer's Ogygia and there were important parallels to be drawn with the present situation in the Mediterranean.

In Tunis, attention naturally went more on North-African figures with mainly Carthaginian and Algerian associations. Actually, Hannibal and Augustine were less extensively evoked than Dido (as depicted by Virgil in the Aeneid or in alternative celebrations by Tunisian poets such as Moncef Ghachem, (who delighted us in Malta with his schoolboy reminiscence) and Albert Camus.

What are the connections of these Mediterranean heroes with Malta?

In the first years of the 19th Century, Sir William Drummond had claimed that he had found the tomb of Hannibal himself in Malta on the basis of an inscription found in Benghisa. This claim was soon after controverted, as were other claims to discoveries of tombs of relatives of Hannibal. (The name Barca found in inscriptions was of course very widespread).

I have often amused myself imagining a scene in Malta in the year 216BC, i.e. not long after Hannibal's arch-famous victory at Cannae over the Romans. (It was certainly not due to the participation of the solitary elephant who had survived the journey down to the south of Italy, including crossing the Alps, but to brilliant strategy).

Hannibal had then despatched his own brother, Mago Barca, to Carthage, to ask not for reinforcements for an attack upon Rome itself, but for a naval enterprise to challenge Roman superiority at sea.

There has been much speculation about why Hannibal wanted this change of confrontation zone from land to sea. My own speculation is prompted by what happened after Hannibal was defeated in 228 by Scipio in Africa.

Only a few years later, Hannibal was rejected by the Carthaginians themselves from his position as their leader. This was almost certainly because he was adamantly against the domination of the Mediterranean world not only by the Romans but also by Carthage. Hannibal seems to have been the enemy of the idea of Empire in itself. He seems to have favoured instead the perpetuation of the Mediterranean world as a network of autonomous, port-centred or island states not subject to any imperial-minded capital.

So, my guess is that, even as far back as 216, Hannibal wanted rather than the destruction of the city of Rome itself that of its Empire-building capacity, essentially its navy.

Clearly, Hannibal's Mediterranean policy, if I have deciphered it correctly, would have been in the best interests of the Maltese. Even more impressively, it seems a very good model for today's needs. It is almost an anticipation of Nicolas Sarkozy's idea of the Union of the Mediterranean, before its corruption into that of the Union for the Mediterranean, which one might call its Romanisation.

Does Camus have any special relationship with Malta?

It was not pointed out in the very moving personal recollections that Jean Daniel, of France Observateur fame, gave in Tunis, last Monday, of their exchanges when Camus received the Nobel Prize and voiced his ambivalent feelings to his much younger friend. But in Malta Anthony Aquilina, who has translated several Camus works into Maltese, had pointed out that the mother of Camus was of Maltese descent and that a witness at the registration of his birth was also Maltese (Gozitan) by the name of Frendo.

Rondeau several times said that highlighting the centrality of Malta to all projects of Mediterranean integration was part of the intention behind Ulysses 2009, but the overall purpose was rather that of multi-disciplinary, multi-nodal and multi-level networking across the region as a whole. The aim will need to continue to be pursued even after the supply-tanker Meuse leaves Beirut after the book fair.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.