Salammbô

This book is an imaginative mystical reconstruction of events in Carthage in the third century BCE. The novel is filled with astonishing and mysterious rites and rituals from different peoples and tribes, steeped in eroticism and described wonderfully.

Flaubert’s words create magic. The harshest scenes of war and sacrifices, cannibalism, rendered with naturalistic realism, are vividly and colorfully depicted in a marvelous language that conjures exotic epic images.

This is a book about war and the subsequent destruction of the Carthaginian state. This is a book about passion and love, with astonishingly precise descriptions that seem to take on “flesh and blood” in our imagination. Even smells become tangible.

This is the story of the love of the leader of Libyan mercenaries, the cruel warrior Mato, for Salammbo, the maiden, daughter of a Carthaginian military commander and aristocrat Hamilcar—raised away from human eyes and knowing nothing of life in society. It should be noted that not all of Flaubert’s contemporaries accepted this book, and some modern readers experience mixed aesthetic feelings about it.