4 stars
First Sentence: It was in the gardens of Hamilcar at Megara, an outskirt of Carthage.
Thoughts: The First Punic War has ended. With sighs of relief all around, the Romans have gone back to Rome and the Carthaginians back to Carthage where they’re faced with a problem. All the mercenaries they hired to fight on their side are still there and they all want to be paid. That is, after all, why they fought for Carthage.
Hamilcar Barca, one of the leaders of the city, hosts a grand feast for the mercenaries at his home. He’s not there a the time because he’s sailing around the Mediterranean for reasons that aren’t important right now. The important thing is that the mercenaries are left pretty much to themselves. The party goes the way you’d expect with it to go once a bunch of soldiers who’ve been fighting for the last however long it was get hold of some good food and liquor in a luxurious setting. When a couple of soldiers catch and eat some fancy fish from a pond in the garden, Hamilcar’s daughter Salambo has finally had enough.
Instead of listening to her scold them, the men are all taken by her beauty. Especially Matho, the commander of the Libyan forces and Narr Havas, the Numidian commander. There’s an instant rivalry for her affections, but Salambo isn’t having any of it. She wants to be a priestess of the moon goddess, Tanit, not some drunk merc’s wife. She makes good her escape before any of the men decide to act on their ideas.
The next day the Carthaginians ask the mercenaries to leave the city and hang out a few towns away. Not long, just until they can collect the money to pay them. Off the mercenaries trot. A few days later one of the Balearic slingers shows up at their camp in a pitiful state. He tells the others that a troop of the slingers had been left behind in the city where they were slaughtered by the populace. A freed Greek slave named Spendius siezes this opportunity. When Hanno the Leprous (the other leader of Carthage) arrives to distribute the pay, Spendius gets the mercenaries riled up. Hanno flees back to the city, followed by an army of angry, unpaid mercenaries.
Many battles follow, described in excruciating detail. People who like reading about such things would like these chapters. I don’t and didn’t. However, in between battles there was scheming, which I do like. Spendius and Matho come up with a plan to demoralize the Carthaginians. They sneak into the city via an aqueduct and break into the Temple of Tanit where they sneak into the innermost chambers and steal the Holiest of Holies, the “zaimph” or cloak of the goddess.
And it might have worked, too, if Matho hadn’t gotten it into his head to show off the zaimph to Salambo. She was properly horrified at the desecration and raised the alarm. It didn’t do any good. Anyone who touched or harmed the zaimph was doomed to die, so Matho put it on and strolled out the gates.
More battles happen. Hanno tries and fails to stop the mercenaries. Hamilcar returns to try himself and almost succeeds. Then he hears that his daughter was seen in the company of one of the mercenary commanders. Alone. In her room. At night. The only way Salambo can redeem herself is to recover the zaimph from Matho.
Despite the fact that the novel is full of violence, bloodshed, cannibalism, crucifixion, human sacrifice (you know, all the good stuff) it’s written in a lyrical style that reminds me a lot of Salome. Which was also filled with murder, blood, and human sacrifice. And was also originally written in French. Which makes sense, they did invent the guillotine.
Warning: a lot of elephants die horrible deaths in this book. The Carthaginians used them as weapons of war, but even the armor they put on the poor animals didn’t stop them from being mutilated and killed. I feel sorry for all the elephants in northern Africa in the 200s B.C. It would be safer to be an oliphaunt in Return of the King than an elephant in Carthage.
The Eclectic Reviewer 