Follows the American consuls as they begin to become cultural brokers linking Americans to remnants of the great Mediterranean empires as America begins to consider an imperialistic turn in the wake of the Monroe Doctrine.

‘Hannibal’s legacy’ is an influential 1965 book by a controversial historian, Arnold Toynbee. It set the agenda for the next half-century and more of scholarship by arguing that the ‘legacy’ consisted of lasting damage to the agricultural economy of Italy and the political stability of Rome. Its contemporary reception is presented and analysed. The (disputed) extent of Italy’s devastation, as divinely promised to Hannibal in an alleged dream while still in Iberia, is assessed, and manpower difficulties discussed. Hannibal’s legacy at defeated Carthage was more obviously damaging, though the city did not fall until 146. Hannibal’s literary legacy in Latin and Greek literature was systematically ambiguous: fear, horror, fascination, and even admiration. Scipio’s literary afterlife and perceived qualities are explored initially through the medium of the ‘Dream of Scipio’, a fictional work by Cicero in imitation of Plato: Scipio Africanus appears to his adoptive grandson Aemilianus in his sleep.

Polyarchies (rule of the many) require more social and political skills than monarchies (rule of one) and hence arose later – from monarchies rather than directly from tribes. Carthage, some Greek city-states, and early Rome are almost the only ancient republics. All were at or near the Mediterranean coast. These republics mostly were oligarchies (rule of the few), but even democracies meant rule of the many but not all: Slaves and free noncitizens often outnumbered citizen families. The Greek states, monarchies or republics, formed a mutual fighting community, often vicious. Republics depended on a committed citizenship and faced a size trap. If they remained small, they remained vulnerable externally. If they expanded, they lacked mechanisms to include subdued people as citizens and became fragile internally. Only Carthage and Rome attempted major expansion, and only Rome succeeded, but this was the end of the republic. It may also be the peak of chattel slavery in world history: Soon three out of seven million people in Italy were slaves. By the year 1, republics looked like evolutionary dead ends. Monarchies, hereditary or not, prevailed.

This chapter charts the rise and fall of Virgil’s Carthage to explore some of the ways in which the paradoxical resonances of this city are productive of a sublimity that expresses its ambivalent status in the Aeneid. Under construction in Book 1, Carthage surges up before us offering a glimpse of the city’s glorious Augustan refoundation, but also a vision of the nascent Punic menace that would become Rome’s greatest enemy. In Book 4, Carthage has lapsed into an almost ruinous state threatening imminent collapse, a threat partly realised in the image of the city’s destruction that is a fantasy of its Roman conquest (4.669–70). From the start of the poem, though, it is clear that this city is not just Carthage, it is also Troy and Rome, so the vision of its destruction is not only a reassuring affirmation of Rome’s eventual triumph but a disturbing reminder of vulnerability. Virgil’s paradoxical Carthage encapsulates the Burkean sensation of the sublime ‘delight’ that ‘turns on pain’, its Augustan space sublime and thrillingly unstable.

Two horned gods, similar in their iconography yet different in their cultic significance, seem to have expressed notions of foundation and territoriality. The cult of Apollo Karneios forged a chain linking Sparta, Thera, and Cyrene and thus expressed, in Greek terms, what often eludes the observer: the Greek awareness of the ’world of Spartan colonization’. Zeus Ammon became the national god of Cyrene and his cult spread to Sparta and other Greek cities. The metaphorical perception of the ’precinct’ of this god and the locations of his cult-sites also delimited Cyrenaica, the Greek colonial territory in Libya. Libya belongs to the world of Spartan colonization in both reality and aspiration. As we have seen, in the Archaic period it was believed that Sparta had founded Thera and thus was grandmother city to Cyrene, Thera’s colony in Libya. The three cities were consistently regarded as a single chain of foundations. It has also been suggested that Sparta had an active role in the settlement of Cyrenaica, perhaps even by sending Chionis as a co-founder with Battos. Even if one rejects any real Spartan participation, Greek perceptions of Sparta’s role as a colonizer in North Africa will still seem coherent and long-lasting.

Chapter 1 introduces the Iohannis and sets the book in its intellectual context. It discusses the particular difficulties associated with the epic and the different approaches scholars have adopted to it. It argues that the poem cannot be read as an extended panegyric and suggests that the poet was motivated to address the perceived shortcomings of imperial rule, rather than simply to celebrate recent military victories. The chapter provides a survey of the chapters to follow and closes with a detailed summary of the narrative of the Iohannis itself.

This chapter argues that the representation of the inhabited world by the Periegesis of Dionysius of Alexandria, dateable between 130 and 18, is not, as sometimes suggested, timeless, but very alert to the impact of Rome on peoples it has incorporated into its empire, and displays pride in the Hellenic culture that has spread even beyond that empire’s frontiers.

Since the work of Maurice Halbwachs, the spatial dimension and conditionality of memory – its connectedness and links to space and place – have been well known.1 Halbwachs asserts that collective memory is only possible if it is ‘localized’.2 Hence, the trope of a city or town as a landscape of memory has become fixed in memory studies and has even given rise to the term ‘urban memory’.3 Urban memory can refer to anthropomorphic phenomena (as when the city is said to have a memory of its own). More commonly, however, it points to the city’s status as a physical place and an ensemble of objects and practices which enables recollections of the past and embodies it through traces of successive building and rebuilding.4 The inhabitants of a city thus draw upon its image to identify with its past and present as a political, cultural, and social entity. In that sense, the urban landscape of Republican and Imperial Rome has thoroughly been investigated and reconstructed as a landscape of memory.

This chapter explores the mediation of experience in Middle Republican Rome. Mediation ‘facilitates the externalization of memories we produce in our minds … [and] through the internalization of mediated memories … we participate in collective memory’.1 In what follows, I will suggest that the First Punic War was the first event in Roman history to be mediated in certain ways that held the real potential to transmute lived experience and personal recollection, supplementing them, or even replacing them, with a different set of narratives that emerged from innovations in Roman artistic production. In Rome in the late third and early second centuries BC, especially in the years after Rome’s first war with Carthage, we encounter the first time that memories of conflict were tied to Latin poetry and public narrative art. Accordingly, this chapter will track the impact that these new memorial media made on Rome’s cultures of memory.2

In 146 BCE, Rome destroyed the cities of Carthage and Corinth, and in 133 BCE the Spanish stronghold of Numantia. The destruction of a city in the Greco-Roman world was a deeply symbolic act, and these particular acts of ‘urbicide’ – as we now call the intentional destruction of a city – were viewed by Greco-Roman authors as pivotal moments in Roman the expansion of Rome’s power. All three acts can be understood through the prism of retributive ‘conspicuous destruction’, designed to deter others from revolting against Rome’s power. In each case, Rome effaced individual responsibility for any perceived acts of disloyalty, and collectively punished the community through its effective elimination: after many perished in the siege and or sack of the city, the surviving population was enslaved, and the city itself destroyed – not to be re-inhabited by the survivors. When viewed through the prism of the definition of ‘genocide’ in the ‘Genocide Convention’, these actions of Rome could be viewed as intentional acts to destroy these civic communities ‘as such’, and thus warrant consideration as genocide. Of the three, Carthage stands out in the predetermination on the part of some at Rome – fueled by existential anxieties - to destroy the city, before an actual pretext existed.

The depiction of Troy and Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid is influenced by the very recent events of the civil war between the future Augustus and Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The orientalising propaganda directed against Cleopatra and her city of Alexandria has left its mark on the depiction of Carthage and Dido, whose temptations for Aeneas recall the temptations of Alexandria and Cleopatra for Mark Antony. The victory at Actium over Antony and Cleopatra represents the defeat of a threat of a Roman reversion to their Eastern origins in Troy.

The chapter discusses Juno’s reconciliation with Jupiter at the end of Virgil’s Aeneid, arguing that the scene follows a model in Ennius’ Annales in which Juno and Jupiter reach an agreement over the foundation of Rome. It is argued that in both poems Juno’s reconciliation is partial and provisional and that she is not fully reconciled to Rome until the Second Punic War.

This paper examines the Gens Augusta altar from Carthage dedicated by P. Perelius Hedulus, which is often said to replicate an image panel from the Ara Pacis, in order to understand the mechanisms by which imperial images were reproduced across the empire. Where conventional models have focused simply on image correspondence, I trace the movement of artists, architectural materials, religious concepts, and ideological knowledge in order to map out the diverse and distributed networks by which images circulated in the Roman empire. In so doing, the paper upends our traditional models that see Rome as a source of images that are then reproduced on the imperial periphery. Rather than a straightforward example of replication, I argue that the altar had no direct relationship to a particular Roman model, contending instead that the images on this altar were designed in Carthage and reflect the interplay between local social dynamics and imperial ideology.