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Отличная книга! Честная (и явно удачная!) попытка взглянуть на историю древнего Карфагена без влияния клише и стереотипов, созданных древнеримскими пропагандистами. Я не мог удержаться от восхищения. Майлзу не нужно было проводить прямые параллели, и так все очевидно. Но он их провел:
"In recent years the ongoing crisis in Iraq has also afforded political commentators many opportunities to equate the situation in that unfortunate land with what had befallen Carthage. The following words by the American sociologist and historian Franz Schurmann are typical of the kind of emotive comparisons that have been drawn: Two thousand years ago the Roman statesman Cato the Elder kept crying out, ‘Delenda est Carthago’–Carthage must be destroyed! To Cato it was clear either Rome or Carthage but not both could dominate the western Mediterranean. Rome won and Carthage was levelled to the ground.
Iraq is now Washington’s Carthage.
The inconvenient truth that the Punic world incorporated considerable areas of southern Europe has often been put to one side as a strange historical anomaly as we in the West have become accustomed to seeing ourselves as the heirs of Greece and Rome. Indeed, the casting of Iraq as the new Carthage is emblematic of that close association, which is an admission of the clear distinctions that we draw between ourselves and not only the Iraqis but also the Carthaginians. Schurmann’s words, rather than making a convincing case for Iraq being the new Carthage, simply highlight the current (equally bogus) obsession with America being the twenty-first-century Rome. One might legitimately ask, What do modern Iraq and eighteenth-century Ireland have in common with ancient Carthage? The answer is, Very little besides their conquest and suppression by a self-appointed new ‘Rome’, whether Georgian Britain or present-day America. The continued ‘relevance’ of Carthage has always been contingent on our abiding obsession with its nemesis, Rome."
Для меня было особенно интересно читать именно об истории Карфагена, а не Пунических войнах (к чему для нас, собственно, сводится история Карфагена). Очень познавательно распутывание финикийской наследственности и генетическая связь карфагенской культуры с Древней Греций - штука для дилетантов подобных мне совершенно неочевидная. Очень рекомендую.