Review of Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed

A BOOK REVIEW of Richard Miles's Carthage Must Be Destroyed has been published by Daniel Metcalfe in the Guardian. Excerpt:

When most people think of Carthage, they picture Hannibal and his elephants or Dido, the suicidal queen, cursing her perfidious lover, Aeneas. But as every schoolboy used to know, Carthage is inextricable from the Punic wars – its very own 100-year conflict with Rome (264-146 BC). Almost all our stories of this once-great north African empire, says Richard Miles, come to us through a biased Roman filter. Carthage never had a chance to tell its own tale – its library was lost to its Numidian neighbours. But drawing on archaeological and written sources, Miles helps to fill in the blanks with this thoughtful and meticulous book. Carthage was rather more sophisticated than history gave it credit for, and its people were certainly no more war-mongering than their regional neighbours.

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