Paul Cartledge
Delenda Est Carthago
Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization
By Richard Miles
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 522pp £30
Cato – the Elder, the Censor – probably didn’t say it in so many words, but there’s no doubt that he meant it, favoured it, and would have loved to have been alive to see it when it did actually happen in 146 BC, at the direction of the younger Scipio (he had died in 149). Move on a hundred years, and leading Roman moralists and historians (often the same people) were taking Carthage’s destruction as the tipping point between the reign of the good old solid Roman values and the present prevalence of decadence and vice. A little piece of Carthage was thus etched on every good – and indeed bad – Roman soul. After the sack of Rome by the Gauls (traditionally dated to 390 BC), Carthage’s destruction was probably the single biggest event to have occurred under what came to be harked back to as the free Roman Republic. Positively and in context, it sealed imperial Rome’s status as suzerain of the Mediterranean, a status she would maintain and indeed enhance over the next three centuries.
Our ‘Carthage’ is an anglicisation of the Romans’ Carthago. What the Carthaginians themselves called their city was Qart Hadasht, ‘New Town’. Well, it was new in 814 BC (as New College, Oxford was new in AD 1379), the date usually given for the foundation of the original settlement
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
When @djbduncan notices the text for a literary jigsaw puzzle had been written by a former colleague, his head spins. A wild surmise. Are jigsaws REF-able?
Dennis Duncan - The W Factor
Dennis Duncan: The W Factor
literaryreview.co.uk
In an effort to scold drinkers, Victorian temperance societies furiously marked every drinking establishment with a red X on city maps. It was a spectacular case of propaganda backfiring.
@foxtosser explores the history of drink maps
Edward Brooke-Hitching - From Beer Street to Gin Lane
Edward Brooke-Hitching: From Beer Street to Gin Lane - Drink Maps in Victorian Britain by Kris Butler
literaryreview.co.uk
How did a workers’ insurance agent who died of tuberculosis at the age of forty become a global literary icon?
@MortenHoiJensen on Kafka's metamorphosis
Morten Høi Jensen - Paranoid Humanoid
Morten Høi Jensen: Paranoid Humanoid - Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka by Karolina Watroba; Kafka: Making o...
literaryreview.co.uk