Carthage: A New History by Eve MacDonald; W. W. Norton, 368 pp., $39.99
As the title of her book promises, classicist Eve MacDonald does indeed offer a fresh understanding of Carthage, the much-maligned city of lore. The Punic Wars, ending with Rome’s destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE, are one of history’s most storied spectacles. Told from the victor’s point of view: Romans are the heroes, Carthaginians not so much. MacDonald, however, presents the ancient city as a multicultural “place of connectivity,” prosperity through trade, and technological accomplishment. She admires its “heroic warriors, beautiful queens and intrepid explorers” and is tolerant of its flaws, if flaws they be.
While acknowledging Greek and Roman characterizations of the Carthaginians (barbaric, wily, greedy, deceitful), MacDonald is determined to hear what the Carthaginians had to say for themselves. Not easy, as their voices were largely erased from history. To listen for them at all is like sitting at the top of a coliseum and trying to decipher what’s being said on the field over the shouting of the spectators. The extent to which MacDonald succeeds in hearing them (sometimes extrapolating from the example of other Mediterranean peoples) is of considerable interest; if she happens to fail at times, well, the shouting is stirring and the show on the field is still quite a spectacle.
The Roman statesman Cato ended his every speech in the Senate by calling for the destruction of Carthage until his implacable hatred was rewarded. The idiom Punica fides—bad faith of the Carthaginians—was invented later by the Romans to justify their annihilation of Carthage, as if to suggest that they had done the world a favor. In the 18th century, England was known as the modern Carthage, and the revolutionary French, who saw themselves as modern Catos, regularly shouted for its destruction. Sixty years later, the French historian Jules Michelet asserted that the Romans and Carthaginians represented two races (the Indo-Germanic and the Semitic), as well as two spirits (the heroic and the mercantile), both irrevocably opposed. And in America at that time (as in Britain), Carthage was linked to “mammonism,” a Punic word in itself, meaning the greedy devotion to wealth. Hatred of Carthage was vividly expressed in the apocryphal story (a 19th-century creation) that Rome salted the remains of Carthage to prevent anything from growing there again. The Nazis later picked up on Michelet’s racialist association, labeling America, with its Jewish influence, the Carthaginian enemy. Today, would-be Romans on the far right shout for the destruction of American Carthage, hated for its multiculturalism and globalism.
This modern tradition of hating Carthage, not part of MacDonald’s story, is rooted in antiquity, and she is at pains to show that the enmity the city suffered was never deserved—not even for the practice for which the Carthaginians were most vilified: child sacrifice. MacDonald doesn’t say it never happened, but she notes that because of high infant mortality, “viable children were even more precious then than they are today.” She concludes: “to dedicate a child for the flourishing of the city and to ensure its wellbeing was the greatest surrender of all.” A practice long judged barbaric, then, MacDonald places in the realm of civic virtue.
That Carthage (a republic) relied on mercenaries historically has been another strike against it, more evidence of the selfish, transactional mentality of the Carthaginians juxtaposed with the “virtue” of Greek and Roman citizen-soldiers. But recent excavations at Himera, the site of a famous battle between Carthaginians and Greeks, show that the Greeks used mercenaries as well. This leads MacDonald into an illuminating discussion of these ancient soldiers of fortune (identified by strontium analysis of their teeth) and of their integration into the city-states they fought for—more evidence “that the genetic make-up of those we consider to be Greek or Carthaginian was not what made them citizens.” MacDonald subverts any emphasis on ethnicity that slides into “othering,” telling us, for example, that Hamilcar Barca, father of Hannibal, led “a multicultural army” and was himself Phoenician, Greek, and Libyan.
MacDonald is friendly not only to Carthage but also to the reader. Her writing is calm and clear of academic scaffolding. Her new history is shorter and less dense than Richard Miles’s similarly sympathetic 2010 book, Carthage Must Be Destroyed. And there are appealing personal touches as well. MacDonald shares her impressions of ancient sites, including the “otherworldly feel to the landscape” of the pass where Hannibal crossed the Alps, and the poignancy she feels in looking at Nestor’s cup, “a captured moment of cultural fusion” between Greek and Phoenician. She imagines the fragments of an ivory figurine as a Carthaginian business card, half of it associated with negotiation, half with delivery. And she asks us to imagine what it must have felt like to lose one’s father, as Hannibal did, or be trapped in Carthage under siege, or live with the past as a descendant of a Punic survivor.
The classical world is a venerable subject, and historians who treat any part of it, including Carthage, tend toward formality. Not MacDonald. When we read her description of Hannibal as “a man’s man” who dared venture “outside his comfort zone,” we know this really is a new history! She gives us a Carthage for our times, as she sees them, but times change, and the celebration of multiculturalism and connectivity may be coming to an end. Yet another Carthage may soon be on the way.
