The Woman in the Street

Although ignored in current treatments of Roman political culture, women were active in the streets of Rome and throughout Italy in the war-torn mid-Republic. Comedy is the best contemporary witness, developing as it did from the 270s BCE onward. City sackings entailed rape, enslavement, loss of kin, and the movement of refugees across Italy, and the resulting issues inflect the content of comedy, emblematized in a slave-woman’s fake jewelry in the shape of the goddess Victoria. Comedy addresses women in the audience, while, onstage, women move through the city and participate in political actions and discourse, laying claim to rights. In Livy’s later accounts of the Punic Wars, women appear in religious worship and reacting to war news, demonstrating bereavement like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They even join in the fighting, in ways seen in Vietnam and Northern Ireland, or as Cicero’s wife Terentia defended her own home.

Carthage

This chapter analyses the relationship between Agathokles and the Carthaginians as part of a long-term historical process and a wide-ranging pan-Mediterranean system of interaction. The Carthaginians sought to maintain a dominant situation in Sicily and prevent attacks from the eastern part of the island by keeping the Greek poleis there divided. This approach clashed with Agathokles’ priorities (as outlined in chapter 6) and with the aggressive model of engagement that had been laid down by Agathokles’ predecessors. Agathokles’ invasion of Africa was a novel expansion of earlier Sicilian leaders’ approach to war with Carthage. Various structural features—especially the disparity in the naval power of Carthage and Syracuse—made its failure nearly inevitable, but it provided the template for the conduct of both the Romans and the Carthaginians in the Punic Wars.

Identity, regional ethnicity and nationality in Carthaginian discourse

This paper explores the sociopolitical and state dynamics of the Carthaginian statehood, early manifestations of nationhood and nationalism and also unpacks issues such as the identity and regional ethnicity in Carthaginian discourse. This study argues there were indeed ancient nations and that Carthage represents one of the best examples. Carthaginian citizens and allies exhibited their national affiliation in a variety of ways, most notably via a willingness to fight for the Carthaginian national collective in the face of extreme duress during the Punic Wars.

“Bellator Equus”. Roman Republican Cavalry Tactics in the 3rd-2nd Centuries Bc

One of the most interesting periods in the history of the Roman cavalry were the Punic wars. Many historians believe that during these conflicts the ill fame of the Roman cavalry was founded but, as it can be observed it was not the determination that lacked. The main issue is the presence of the political factor who decided in the main battles of this conflict. The present paper has as aim to outline a few aspects of how the Roman mid-republican cavalry met these odds and how they tried to incline the balance in their favor.

Dido in the light of history

This paper provides an examination and new analysis of the Dido story in the first six books of Virgil’s Aeneid in light of Augustan attitudes towards Carthage. The paper examines the sources, finding no traditional evidence for a meeting between Aeneas and Dido, and debunks the view of Virgil having drawn Dido as a sympathetic figure. Instead the paper shows how Dido’s Carthage displays characteristics linked by the poet to the old hatreds of the Punic Wars, which had left an ineradicable legacy of fear and hate in the face of alleged Carthaginian cruelty and perfidy.