More than most ancient cultures, Carthage has suffered from her silence"”her story told only through the eyes of Roman adversaries, sympathetic Greek accounts lost, an authentic native voice erased or perhaps never set down in writing, reduced to an Orientalist stereotype by a Victorian scholarship we have yet to fully escape. But Carthage was, like Rome, an imperial republic. Each was governed by elected magistrates, and each dominated by oligarchic families whose rivalries fed imperial ambition. In the late fourth century B.C., when Rome was still just a middling regional power, Aristotle honored Carthage as the...
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