"Few people can guess how despondent one has to be in order to resuscitate Carthage." - Flaubert

Technically this is historical fiction, based on a few brief chapters of Polybius that could be read in the space of a lunch break. But the sensibility is closer to a fantasy novel, (a pulpy one, even) all about conjuring the atmosphere of a lost world.

The plot: after losing the second Punic war to Rome, the geniuses running Carthage try to haggle down the backpay owed to their mercenary army. They get understandably upset, have a big orgiastic party, and get exiled to a neighboring city where their resentments are whipped up by a crafty Roman ex-slave named Spendius and his himbo sidekick Matho. A Curb Your Enthusiasm style series of misunderstandings and accidents escalates to a multi-year war of extermination and hundreds of children getting sacrificed to Moloch before the mercenaries finally get wiped out.

Salammbo is the daughter of the top Carthaginian general & the object of Matho's obsessive love (never fully explained; it just is), but she has pledged her virginity to the moon goddess Tanit. Alongside the historical narrative, this drives a spiritual/interpersonal subplot in which Matho steals Tanit's holy veil and Salammbo sleeps with him to steal it back, leading obliquely to the eventual triumph of the masculine cult of Moloch.

Salammbo bursts with with lists of strange & vivid details that make lavish 50's sword & sandals blockbusters seem like cheap Netflix anime adaptations. Every character is decked out with elaborate jewelry, the aroma of perfumed oils mingles with putrescent corpse-gas, carbuncle-encrusted temples are pulverized by intricate siege-engines in exacting detail.

There were small open cells along their sides, and tabourines and cymbals hung against their cedar columns from top to bottom. Women were sleeping stretched on mats outside the cells. Their bodies were greasy with unguents, and exhaled an odour of spices and extinguished perfuming-pans; while they were so covered with tattooings, necklaces, rings, vermilion, and antimony that, but for the motion of their breasts, they might have been taken for idols as they lay thus on the ground.

There were callaides shot away from the mountains with slings, carbuncles formed by the urine of the lynx, glossopetræ which had fallen from the moon, tyanos, diamonds, sandastra, beryls, with the three kinds of rubies, the four kinds of sapphires, and the twelve kinds of emeralds. They gleamed like splashes of milk, blue icicles, and silver dust, and shed their light in sheets, rays, and stars. Ceraunia, engendered by the thunder, sparkled by the side of chalcedonies, which are a cure for poison. There were topazes from Mount Zabarca to avert terrors, opals from Bactriana to prevent abortions, and horns of Ammon, which are placed under the bed to induce dreams.

Flaubert especially revels in the diversity in the mercenary army:

Men of all nations were there, Ligurians, Lusitanians, Balearians, Negroes, and fugitives from Rome. Beside the heavy Dorian dialect were audible the resonant Celtic syllables rattling like chariots of war, while Ionian terminations conflicted with consonants of the desert as harsh as the jackal’s cry. The Greek might be recognised by his slender figure, the Egyptian by his elevated shoulders, the Cantabrian by his broad calves. There were Carians proudly nodding their helmet plumes, Cappadocian archers displaying large flowers painted on their bodies with the juice of herbs, and a few Lydians in women’s robes, dining in slippers and earrings. Others were ostentatiously daubed with vermilion, and resembled coral statues.

They had crossed the desert, drinking at the brackish wells walled in with camels’ bones; the Zuaeces, with their covering of ostrich feathers, had come on quadrigæ; the Garamantians, masked with black veils, rode behind on their painted mares; others were mounted on asses, onagers, zebras, and buffaloes; while some dragged after them the roofs of their sloop-shaped huts together with their families and idols. There were Ammonians with limbs wrinkled by the hot water of the springs; Atarantians, who curse the sun; Troglodytes, who bury their dead with laughter beneath branches of trees; and the hideous Auseans, who eat grass-hoppers; the Achyrmachidæ, who eat lice; and the vermilion-painted Gysantians, who eat apes.

There's ambivalence here -- do the mercenaries represent white European fears of anarchy & racial degeneration, or some kind of ~liberatory multitude of nomadic intensities~? Probably both!

My favorite parts evoke a whole world in passing, like this bit that reminds me of something from Gormenghast:

Outside the fortification [around Carthage] there were people of another race and of unknown origin, all hunters of the porcupine, and eaters of shell-fish and serpents. They used to go into caves to catch hyenas alive, and amuse themselves by making them run in the evening on the sands of Megara between the stelæ of the tombs. Their huts, which were made of mud and wrack, hung on the cliff like swallows’ nests. There they lived, without government and without gods, pell-mell, completely naked, at once feeble and fierce, and execrated by the people of all time on account of their unclean food. One morning the sentries perceived that they were all gone.

I fuck with lists & descriptive reveries but I'd give the wrong impression if I didn't note that the writing moves at a sharp clip most of the time and has a pulpy action-adventure side. There's a heist, several battles, an extended siege -- even campy moments like when a general is attacked by angry city councilors and dramatically pulls two swords out of his sleeves. I don't know how much direct influence it had on later fantasy & pulp but I can see traces of it in everything from Dune to Indiana Jones.

Salammbo is also gross & violent, with crucifixion, cannibalism, castration, war crimes, child sacrifice, torture, mutilation, live burial, and animal cruelty. Soldiers murder each other over petty insults and pillage with impunity. There are no truly sympathetic characters -- the Carthaginian general Hanno resembles Baron Harkonnen (Lynch's version) and literally oozes pestilence from his bloated body, while his relatively normal counterpart Hamilcar casually executes disobedient slaves. Flaubert narrates it all with a matter-of-fact detachment that reminds me of McCarthy in Blood Meridian. The effect is so desensitizing that by the time children were being herded into Moloch's furnace it was barely shocking.

The horror is tempered by moments of heroism & pathos. Every character except Hanno exhibits some kind of amoral virtue or courage. One side's massacre is always another's brilliant gambit. But the upper hand trades off so often that the overarching feeling is of futility and exhaustion. By the end every desire has been frustrated except that of carrion-eating animals and the priests of Moloch. (I'm certain we're expected to read this with Carthage's subsequent annihilation in mind -- they 'win' but their future has been devoured by Moloch). The melancholy tone kept the lurid parts from feeling pornographic.

The lions were resting with their breasts against the ground and both paws stretched out, winking their eyelids in the bright daylight, which was heightened by the reflection from the white rocks. Others were seated on their hind-quarters and staring before them, or else were sleeping, rolled into a ball and half hidden by their great manes; they all looked well fed, tired, and dull. They were as motionless as the mountain and the dead. Night was falling; the sky was striped with broad red bands in the west.

Anyways, Salammbo left a vivid impression, more than most other books I read this year. I like that it's very weird and doesn't neatly fit into any one genre. I don't have an insightful takeaway to wrap this up but I was enthralled from start to finish and would definitely recommend it.

Alternate review titles: Bronze Age Blood Meridian, Gamemaster Anthony's Mercenary Army

Salammbo

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