Meggie Macdonald

Review of Carthage:  A History by Serge Lancel, translated from the French by Antonia Nevill, Paris, 1992.

Having recently finished reading much of archaeologist Serge Lancel’s book, Carthage:  A History, for my own research, I felt that a review was due for this piece of work based on its scope and its accessibility.

This book consists of an overview of this city as it relates to the socio-political dynamic of the Ancient Mediterranean.  At once an ancient colony that developed its own identity fused with Libyo-Phoenician culture, a commercial maritime power, and a powerful threat to Roman expansionist aims, Lancel presents Carthage as a linchpin or hinge of history it is own right.  The author’s archaeology background figures highly into the structure and layout of this book, beginning with the foundation of the city in the 8th century BCE and the earliest material remains available for study.

His exploration of the city continues with the material evidence that points to a developing international trade of wine and oil, identified using the pottery sherds found in the tophet (roughly a kind of garbage dump, where vast quantities of artefacts have collected over time) and those found throughout the ancient Mediterranean.  Lancel points to the fact that despite Greek being the international language of commerce, it was Carthage who established themselves as a central hub or distribution centre for some of the most sought after items on the market.

Lancel’s ability to sum up the First and Second Punic Wars in less than half a dozen pages without losing the thread of events or the emphasis on their importance is laudable.  In fact, his clarity draws attention to the general importance of the wars with Carthage to the history of the ancient Mediterranean world.  One of the most spectacular pieces of data, something that is nearly always omitted from Roman histories of the Punic Wars, is the fact that, ten years after the treaty of Scipio Africanus, the Carthaginian Senate petitioned Rome to allow them to repay the balance of the war indemnity in full.  Not only that, but shortly thereafter Carthage was regularly ensuring that supplies of grain reached the Roman expeditionary forces.  Lancel is careful to note that, although the Second Punic War was a dire and hard-fought affair, Carthage was able to recover much faster than Rome had anticipated.  No wonder Cato continued to shout ‘Kartago delenda est!’

Serge Lancel excavated the Hannibal Quarter on the Byrsa in Carthage during the 1970s and has subsequently published his team’s findings in two volumes.  Carthage is a sort of historical supplement to that archaeological work and acts as the first of a pair of books about the famous city, the other being Hannibal (Paris, 1995).  The entire text is based largely upon this archaeological work, as well as the earlier work done by Pierre Cintas among others.  As the book moves from the foundation of Carthage into its commercial and maritime exploits, Lancel moves from a solely archaeologically-based analysis of culture and begins to incorporate the Latin and Greek primary source material (Livy and Polybius primarily).

This book is an incredible piece of work, accessible in nearly all respects – a rarity for archaeological texts – and comes ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’, in a manner of speaking.  Serge Lancel, one of the world’s most renowned archaeologists highly decorated in France, produced a useful guide to the intricacies that dogged the development of Carthage and what eventually brought about its downfall at the hands of Rome.  His analyses of the interactions between Carthage and other Mediterranean powers, most particularly Rome, speaks to those gaps in the historical record left by Livy and Polybius that most scholars bemoan as hopelessly lost.  Lancel has shown that literary sources used in conjunction with the archaeological record available can produce a much more rounded scope.  However, it can only be Lancel’s expertise and engaging writing style (effectively transmitted into English by Antonia Nevill) that makes this archaeological work a work of scholarly strength.