Going down fighting

Both the Greeks and the Jews were haunted by the image of a burning city. Indeed, there is a sense in which their radically differing attempts to exorcise it served to define their respective cultures. Among the Greeks, it was believed that everything most glorious about mortal achievement, and everything most terrible about mortal suffering, was to be found in the narrative of the siege and sack of Troy. Among the Jews, nothing did more to shape their understanding of the divine purpose than their anguished attempts to fathom why it was that their god had permitted Jerusalem to fall. Even today, millennia on, the aftershocks of these twin calamities continue to reverberate. The Iliad and the Bible: what would our own civilisation have been without their influence?

A question which only serves to emphasise how utter was the obliteration of the one other ancient city whose sack still serves to resonate in the modern imagination. The annihilation of Carthage by the Romans in 146 BC remains to this day a potent archetype of superpower vengefulness. Yet aside from a ghostly, off-stage presence in Virgil’s Aeneid, the episode generated no great literature, nor do we have any idea how the Carthaginians themselves might have interpreted their own tragedy. The libraries of Carthage, along with all the other buildings of the city, were systematically razed by the Romans, and their treasures — the odd agricultural manual excepted — either dispersed or destroyed. What is more, those few fragments of Punic narrative that we do have tend not to be tremendously inspiring. ‘And this mtnt,’ so one inscription read, ‘at the new moon ‘It. year of Esmunamos son of Adnibaal the i and Hanno son of Bodastart son of Hanno the rb.’