Salammb‪ô‬

Carthage has won no peace. Having lost the long first war with Rome, the city cannot pay the foreign soldiers who fought it — Gauls, Libyans, Greeks, Numidians — and the unpaid mercenaries, feasting in the gardens of the great general Hamilcar Barca, rise in a revolt history remembered as the War without Mercy. Into this savage conflict Flaubert sets Mâtho, a Libyan chief seized by a violent obsession with Salammbô, the daughter of Hamilcar and priestess of the moon-goddess Tanit. With the cunning Greek Spendius, Mâtho steals from the temple the zaïmph — the sacred veil on which the safety of Carthage is believed to depend — and the theft draws the priestess alone into the enemy camp, toward the man who took it and toward the catastrophe that binds them both.

Published in 1862, Salammbô was the novel Flaubert wrote after Madame Bovary, turning from the gray monotony of provincial France to an ancient world he labored five years to raise from the dead — reading Polybius and a library of antiquity, traveling to Tunisia to walk the ruined ground. The result is one of the supreme feats of historical reconstruction in fiction: a prose of jeweled density that builds Carthage detail by detail — its purple opulence, its idols and armies, the human sacrifices to Moloch, the famine and the slaughter — and lets its beauty and its horror stand together without apology.

Written under the banner of art for its own sake, Salammbô is the great monument of nineteenth-century literary exoticism: gorgeous, cruel, and deliberately strange, a vision of the ancient East at once dazzling and disquieting. Beneath the spectacle runs a single force — desire that destroys what it reaches for — with the zaïmph, beautiful and forbidden, as its perfect emblem.

This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation by J. S. Chartres with an editor's foreword on the novel's making, technique, and meaning, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.