The Carthaginians: The Empire Built on the Sea — Sleep Podcast

You are lying on a stone floor, on a mat of reeds, in a room built by a people whose name you have almost forgotten. It is evening. Through a low window you can hear the sea, though you would swear you could not be so close to water. You can. You are on a little peninsula of rock that pokes out into the open sea, and on two sides of it the water is black and still, and in that water, in the gathering dark, hundreds of ships are at anchor. A slow bedtime history of the Carthaginians: the empire built on the sea, and the city that would not let it go.

Almost two hours, in the voice of the show. We sit in the cedar and the sea; we meet the queen who built a city; we walk the city in the horn, and the two judges and a hundred and four; we stand before the lady, the lord, and the tophet; we watch the web of harbours and the richest city in the west; and then the day the sea closes, the republic across the water, and the war: oars, bridges, and fire; the war against itself; the boy at the altar; the long road south; the greatest defeat in a day; Africa and the turning of the elephants; and Carthage must be destroyed — and what endures.

A slow, unhurried reading, for the edge of sleep. About an hour and a half. Where the sources disagree, the disagreement is preserved in the text.

Sources (a selection): Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 21–30 (Duckett trans.); Polybius, Histories (Walbank ed.; Paton trans.); the Tophet stelae (Carthage, National Museum); the Carthaginian inscriptions (Punic); Appian, Histories 8; the Roman Senate’s resolutions after the Third Punic War; the Carthage harbour excavations (Salaam, Carthage); the Phoenician and Punic trade evidence from the western Mediterranean; World History Encyclopedia, “Carthage” and “Punic Wars” entries.