Sweating Truth in Ancient Carthage
Mayor, Adrienne (Stanford University)
Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics (June 2010)
Abstract
Those who discovered the phantasmagoric novel Salammbô (1862) at an impressionable age, prior to studying conventional histories of the Punic Wars, know how difficult is to shake Gustave Flaubert’s intoxicating vision of the doomed Carthaginian empire. Brimming with visceral images of war and lust, vast riches and bizarre rituals, violence and tragedy verging on melodrama, Flaubert’s bestseller about the North African power that rivaled Rome in the third century BC received 
mixed critical reviews. Unlike the bored, provincial Emma Bovary, Flaubert’s new heroine Salammbô—a high priestess of strange Punic rites—inspired operas by Rachmaninoff and Mussorgsky. The femme fatale of Carthage was featured in voluptuous Art Nouveau and Symbolist paintings, Rodin’s erotic sketches, and she even influenced Parisian fashions. In the illustrated 1927 edition that I pored over in the 1960s, Mahlon Blaine’s diabolical Aubrey Beardsley-on-Ecstasy drawings rendered Flaubert’s evocative tale even more eidetic.
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