Salammbo

Set in the aftermath of the First Punic War, Gustave Flaubert's Salammbô plunges into the brutal Mercenary War, when Carthage's unpaid foreign soldiers turned on the city that hired them. Against this vast historical canvas, Flaubert stages a doomed and feverish story of desire and sacrilege.

Salammbô, the mystical daughter of the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca, is devoted to the moon goddess Tanit. When the mercenary leader Mâtho steals the sacred veil of the goddess — the zaïmph, on which the fate of Carthage is said to hang — his obsession with Salammbô and hers with recovering the veil bind the two together across a landscape of siege, famine, and horrifying violence.

Meticulously researched and famously lush, cruel, and strange, Salammbô is Flaubert's great exercise in exotic historical spectacle: a hypnotic, blood-soaked epic of religion, war, and the destructive power of longing in the ancient world.