Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Review: Carthage Must Be Destroyed

REVIEW: CARTHAGE MUST BE DESTROYED:
Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilisation by Richard Miles
Rome tried hard to eradicate its sworn enemy Carthage, but Richard Miles wants to resurrect the city and its culture


The Sunday Times review by Christopher Hart

Carthage holds an almost mythical place in the western imagination. A powerful city state on the north African coast in what is now Tunisia, it looked during the 4th and 3rd centuries before Christ just as likely as Rome to become the dominant Mediterranean empire. A clash of the titans was inevitable, and when it came, grim Roman determination proved superior to Carthaginian military brilliance, led by Hannibal and his elephants.

To justify their final destruction of Carthage, the victors were obliged to depict the city and its civilisation as decadent, cruel and oriental, the “moral antitype to Rome”, their own ­triumph being decreed by Providence. It is this myth-making as much as the narrative history that fascinates Cambridge classicist Richard Miles, who now seeks to offer us an alternative, de-Romanised and more nuanced view of this lost civilisation.

[...]
Hart is somewhat skeptical of Miles's effort to rehabilitate Carthage.

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