LAUSR

IN PUTTING CARTHAGE AND ROME side by side in this special issue, we are following in a long tradition. From the ancient period until the modern, the twin Western Mediterranean powers of Carthage and Rome have been paired, compared, and contrasted. These exercises have tended to encourage reductive polarizations that are all too obviously topical and self-serving, and this is the case not only in the ancient world, as Josephine Crawley Quinn entertainingly demonstrates in her opening tour of attitudinizing from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, the dice have been loaded against the losing side in these acts of comparison, not just because they lost, but because we have no direct access to the Carthaginian or pro-Carthaginian version, or versions. If any Carthaginian wrote a historical account of his city, whether in Punic or Greek, no trace of it has survived, and we have lost even the Greek historians who wrote about the wars against Rome from the Carthaginian side, such as Philinus of Acragas (a major source for Polybius on the First Punic War), together with Sosylus of Lacedaemon and Silenus of Caleacte, who accompanied Hannibal’s expedition—and others besides. As a result, even at a fine level of detail the default focalization has generally been a Roman one, so that it can be a bracing check to encounter the opposite perspective, as whenDexter Hoyos refers, engagingly, to “the consuls, Rome’s equivalents of sufetes,” rather than the other way around. Our decision to entitle this special issue Carthage and Rome, rather than Rome and Carthage, is a first, modest step in the same direction of defamiliarization. We aim to put these two remarkable entities into a fresh dialogue with each other, avoiding preconceptions and hierarchies as far as we can, and building on recent scholarship that refuses to marginalize Carthage and her Punic network in favor of the eventual winners. Indeed, as Richard Miles’ essay shows, Carthage got a surprising late opportunity to rewrite the story and become the winner herself.