Those who discovered Salammbô at an impressionable age, before reading any conventional histories of the Punic Wars, know how difficult it is to shake off Flaubert's intoxicating vision of the doomed Carthaginian Empire. Brimming with war and lust, vast riches and bizarre rituals, violence and tragedy verging on melodrama, his novel about the North African power that rivalled Rome in the third century BC received mixed reviews, but Salammbô herself - a high priestess of strange Punic rites, the femme fatale of Carthage - inspired operas by Rachmaninov and Mussorgsky, appeared in voluptuous Art Nouveau and Symbolist paintings, and even influenced Parisian fashions. In the illustrated 1927 edition I read in the 1960s, Mahlon Blaine's Aubrey Beardsley-on-ecstasy drawings made Flaubert's tale even more eidetic.

LRB 24 June 2010 | PDF Download