| The memory of Carthage haunts the history of ancient Rome – this talk will explore why and how we remember Carthage, the Punic Wars, Queen Dido and Hannibal in the ways we do. |
| The story of Carthage haunts the history of Rome – the Punic Wars, Dido, war elephants, Hannibal crossing the Alps. This paper explores the intersection between memory and history at Carthage: between the popular image of ancient Carthage as Rome’s great enemy, and the real evidence for a successful, powerful city that thrived for almost 700 years on the shores of the Mediterranean before the Romans burned it to the ground. Because Roman memory shaped how Carthage’s history came down to us, we will look at how the city’s physical destruction, and its demise at Roman hands, generated very particular ways of remembering Carthage – ways of remembering that are still with us today. |
Eve MacDonald is historian and archaeologist who teaches at Cardiff University. She is the author of Hannibal: A Hellenistic Life (Yale, 2015), Carthage: An Archaeological History (with Sandra Bingham, Bloomsbury, 2024) and Carthage: A New History of An Ancient Empire (Ebury, 2025). She is interested in the intersections between memory, landscape and history and has worked in the field in North Africa and across the Middle East and Iran. Her forthcoming book is called The Last Persian Empire: A History of the Sasanians and will be published by Yale University Press in 2027
