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Carthage Must Be Destroyed and Recycled Stereotypes

I have just started reading Richard Miles’ Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization. I’m not very far into it, but it seems promising so far. Some of Miles’ comments in the introduction caught my attention. Miles describes here the enduring value of Carthage as a model for stereotyping other […]

I have just started reading Richard Miles’ Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization. I’m not very far into it, but it seems promising so far. Some of Miles’ comments in the introduction caught my attention. Miles describes here the enduring value of Carthage as a model for stereotyping other nations as untrustworthy or perfidious:

Many of the prejudices first found in Greek and Roman texts were enthusiastically adopted and adapted by the educated elites of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and America, who had grown increasingly interested in classical antiquity. The attitudes that they found in the Greek and Roman literature that they read quickly became their own. Thus the idea that the British–the inhabitants of ‘La perfide Albion–were in fact the Carthaginians of contemporary Europe firmly took hold in Republican France. The sentiment soon spread across Europe and beyond. Thomas Jefferson, president of the United States in 1801-09, wrote of Britain, ‘Her good faith! The faith of a nation of merchants! The Punica fides of modern Carthage.’ A nation of shopkeepers could not be trusted to keep its word. (p. 9-10)

It is fairly common to impute treachery and double-dealing with foreign adversaries, but the recurring habit of choosing Carthage as the model is interesting. Miles relates how some on the receiving end of foreign domination also identified themselves with the fate of Carthage, including certain Irish scholars:

Eighteenth-century Irish antiquarians, reacting against Anglocentric assertions that the Irish were descendants of the Scythians, an ancient people from the Black Sea famed for their barbarity, counterclaimed that in fact their forebears were the Carthaginians. Serious scholarly attempts were made to attribute megalithic passage tombs in the Boyne valley to the Phoenicians, and to link the Irish language to Punic. (p.11)

Miles concludes that these uses of Carthage all rely on the persistent habit of pairing Carthage and Rome, so that Carthage serves as the natural antagonist and opposite of the Rome that crushes it:

The continued ‘relevance’ of Carthage has always been contingent on our abiding obsession with Rome.

It may also be that the abiding obsession with Rome demands that we try to see contemporary rivals as another Carthage. From what I can gather so far, what is most valuable in what Miles is trying to do is to recover Carthaginian history from this built-in opposition with Rome to reconstruct the history of this civilization on its own terms as much as possible.

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