Introduction [The Punic Mediterranean : identities and identification from Phoenician settlement to Roman rule]

Abstract

The poster for Giovanni Pastrone’s 1914 silent epic Cabiria evokes a luxurious and barbaric world of wicked priests, noble elephants, and child sacrifice in the belly of a giant brazen bull-headed god (Fig. 0.1. See also Plate 1). Cabiria, often described as the first feature film, told the story of a Sicilian girl kidnapped by Phoenician pirates and sold into slavery in Carthage (Pastrone 1977; Bertetto and Rondolino 1998). Once there, she is chosen for sacrifice to the god ‘Moloch’ – a modern invention who owes his name to a misunderstanding of the Phoenician term molk, or ‘sacrifice’, on votive inscriptions. In this scene, worshippers gather in anticipation at the temple of Moloch, while the heroic Roman general Fulvius Auxilla and his slave Maciste plan to rescue Cabiria from the fiery fate her Carthagin- ian captors have planned. This populist vision of the western Mediterranean in the third century bce was released just three years after the Italian invasion and occupation of Tripolitania, and closely equated Carthage and its Phoenician popula- tion with the Arab world (Garnand 2001; cf. Feig Vishnia 2008). In many ways it reproduced the horrified fascination of Greek and Latin authors with ‘Punic faithlessness’ and brutality (Prag, Chapter 1; Quinn, Chapter 9), and it coincided with a new scholarly interest in the Punic world, especially in North Africa, which was prompted in particular by the establishment of the French protectorate in Tunisia in 1883; Stéphane Gsell’s great Histoire ancienne de l’Afrique du Nord began to be published the year before Cabiria was released (Gsell 1913–28).