A Writer's People (16 page)

Carthage was a great Mediterranean trading power. It lived by the sea and had a powerful navy. Because it had no
great land area and no great population its army was an army of mercenaries. This worked well enough until Rome developed Mediterranean ambitions and came into collision with Carthage. The Romans, supreme on land, knew very little about naval warfare. They didn't even have decked ships; they learned how to build one from a Carthaginian wreck. And then they learned fast. The first war between Rome and Carthage, centred mainly on the island of Sicily, lasted for twenty-three years, from 264 to 241
BC
. It ended with a Carthaginian defeat and a humiliating peace treaty.

Almost immediately then, when the Carthaginian mercenaries had been taken back to Carthage, they rebelled. They had seen their masters defeated, and they hadn't been paid for some time. This mercenary war, exceptionally brutal and cruel, lasted for three years. The mercenaries were crushed, but the war almost destroyed Carthage. It is the background to
Salammbô
.

Flaubert found the main story in the Greek historian Polybius (about 200–118
BC
). The mercenary war was before Polybius's time, but he knew about military matters (even about naval tactics), and he had a good understanding of the institutions of both Carthage and Rome. He admired Rome, knew aristocratic people there, and he accompanied the Roman commander during the third and final war against Carthage in 146
BC;
Polybius saw Carthage burn. As a writer he is simple and direct, with a gift of narrative; he makes complicated things easy to follow.

In Polybius the mercenary war is only an interlude between
the two great Carthaginian wars; it occupies thirty-two pages in the Loeb edition. Flaubert's novel is more than two hundred and sixty pages in the Penguin Classics. The translator, A. J. Krailsheimer, quotes Flaubert as saying, “I … wanted to fix a mirage by applying to Antiquity the processes of the modern novel, and I tried to be simple … Yes,
simple
, not sober.” This is the self-publicist at work. It is obvious that to turn Polybius's spare but sufficient outline into his novel Flaubert had to pad, and pad relentlessly. He said that everything in
Salammbô
had a source; he had read two hundred books on the subject; but that doesn't make the padding less intrusive.

This is Flaubert, near the beginning of his book, speaking of the composition of the mercenary army:

Much varied research has gone into that paragraph (the languages, the jackal-cries, the Lydians painted with vermilion), and Flaubert is determined to use it all, though the paragraph could have stopped halfway, without loss, since the reader cannot in that single paragraph, and on the second page of a novel, take in all the detail and colour with which the writer is in love.

Look in Polybius for what might have prompted that paragraph, and you find—in the Loeb translation—something drier but profounder, something actually from the ancient world, more full of true concern:

Polybius is writing about events less than a hundred years old. He cannot be wholly detached; for him the pressures of war and mercenary armies are still the same; the situation might recur. This moral attitude gives a reality to what he writes. It might also be said that it makes him more modern. About the cruelties and general barbarism of the mercenaries Polybius writes, “Of such a condition the origin and most potent cause lies in bad manners and customs and wrong training from childhood, but there are several contributory ones, the chief of which is habitual violence and unscrupulousness on the part of those in authority over them.”

Flaubert, whatever his feelings, will not go so far. For him antiquity is antiquity; he is not to judge; his duty is only to lay out what he has found. So his roster of barbarians at the beginning of his book makes only a tableau, something from the theatre. And Flaubert maintains this attitude even when, near the end, the besieged and helpless mercenaries turn to eating the dead and dying among themselves. Flaubert, it might be said, makes a meal of this horror; he lingers over it for four pages. Polybius, Flaubert's direct source here, does it in half a page, and he finds room to say that it was a fitting punishment of the mercenaries by Providence for their violation of human and divine law. Flaubert's detachment sets up a barrier
between the reader and what is being described; it is theatre, far away.

In a later section of the
Histories
Polybius writes about his way of accommodating new places in his narrative. He thinks it is wrong to interrupt his story and divert attention from his theme. “Those readers who insist on such topographical digressions at every point fail to understand that they are acting like the type of gourmand at a dinner party who samples everything on the table, and so neither truly enjoys any dish … nor digests it well enough to derive any benefit from it afterwards.” The same can be said of the laborious detail in the first hundred pages (at least) of
Salammbô
.

Gone are the brevity and the cleanness of the details from the second chapter of
Madame Bovary
, details from the writer's own mind (the winter dawn, the boy with the sabots beside the ditch, the farmer's nightcap flung far away on the floor), gossamer details opening up a landscape and a society which no work of scholarship could have provided.

Polybius, writing of things by which he is still more or less surrounded, is always simple. Flaubert is elaborate. Of the temple of Venus on Mount Eryx in Sicily, where the famous last battle of the first Carthaginian war was fought, just before the mercenaries' revolt, Polybius can write directly, like a guide book: “Eryx is a mountain near the sea on that side of Sicily which looks towards Italy … On its summit, which is flat, stands the temple of Venus Erycina, which is indisputably the first in wealth and general magnificence of all the Sicilian holy places.” Flaubert, when he comes to do the temple or
temples of Carthage (it isn't clear how many), will strain; and reader and writer will strain even more at the time of the sacrifice of the children to Moloch.

Everything now, in
Salammbô
, is big and concrete and overstated, part of the purple that lay at the back of the writer's mind during the grey days of
Bovary
. Everything no doubt comes from the two hundred books Flaubert says he read. But there is too much jewelled description, too much colour; the reader cannot take it all in, and the mass of detail actually makes for a further unsteadiness in the difficult narrative, with the writer—already like a man waiting for applause—seeming to move in and out of the nineteenth century, now close to his material, now holding it at arm's length.

T
HE NAME
S
ALAMMBÔ
does not occur in Polybius. Flaubert makes her the daughter of the great Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca; and he probably has his sources. This daughter is mentioned by Polybius in a sentence but given no name. At a bad time during the mercenaries' war a Numidian chieftain comes to Carthage (Numidia the vast North African territory at the back of Carthage) to offer his services to Hamilcar. Hamilcar is moved; he offers his daughter in marriage to the Numidian if the Numidian remains loyal. That is all.

Flaubert takes this blank figure of the daughter and involves her in a sexual intrigue with the Libyan leader of the mercenary revolt. This is something he has added to the Polybius story. For more than half the novel it goes side by side
with the terrible war. It is Flaubert's invention and as such it stands naked against Polybius's spare and moral narrative. Its artificiality shows. You can see the various pieces of this invention being put into place and you feel you can always see how Flaubert's mind is working. This wasn't possible in the second chapter of
Bovary
, with its constant small surprises. To see Flaubert's mind at work in
Salammbô
is not like following “the processes of the modern novel,” to use Flaubert's words. It is more like seeing a writer imprisoned in a borrowed form—the theatre, the opera—and striving to do what he has seen others do.

Salammbô is a priestess or attendant in the Carthaginian temple of Tanit. She is slender (or gives that impression, which would have made her unusual in 1862) and beautiful and inscrutable. She has a python and a eunuch spiritual instructor. He has studied in many places and is full of wisdom. “Strange words sometimes escaped from him, flashing in front of Salammbô like lightning illuminating an abyss … ‘The souls of the dead,' he said, ‘are dissolved in the moon as corpses are in the earth. Their tears provide its moisture; it is a dark place full of mud, ruins, and storms …' ” Salammbô slinks about her jewelled temple interior, never less than beautifully described, but since she has little to say it is hard to know what she feels or does or how she actually passes her days. She is a creature of bad nineteenth-century fiction, gothic, orientalist, a lay figure, meant to be seen from a distance. If she were to say too much there would be no illusion.

•   •   •

I
T IS OUR LUCK
that a religious novel, in Latin and more or less whole, has come down to us from the ancient world. The
Metamorphoses
, by the second-century Roman writer Lucius Apuleius, is better known as
The Golden Ass
, and down the centuries it has been loved for its bawdy passages; which probably helped it to survive. By a further chance Apuleius was born in Roman Africa, and was partly educated in the university of Carthage. This is four hundred years after the mercenaries' war, but enough of the older world might adhere to Apuleius to take us into the ways of old belief.

The Roman Empire is now solid; many of the famous Roman names have come and gone. Purely Egyptian Egypt has been dead for a thousand years (overrun by Persians, Greeks, and then Romans); but the Egyptian goddess Isis has been taken by the Roman army all over the empire, and her cult, absorbing other beliefs, now has the makings of a universal religion. Apuleius, with his classical education in philosophy and oratory, had also undergone an initiation, perhaps a treble initiation, into the rites of Isis; and
The Golden Ass
is about the glory of the goddess.

The hero, also named Lucius, like the author, is travelling in Thessaly. Through his infatuation with a slave girl he allows himself to become interested in black magic; the girl's mistress is a practitioner. Lucius thinks he would like, just for the experience, to be turned into an owl. But there is a confusion about the ointment, and he turns instead into an ass. The slave girl is aghast. She tells him there is an antidote: to become a man again the ass must chew roses. Those roses are hard for an ass to come by, and the rest of the novel, all but
twenty pages, is made up of Lucius's adventures as an ass. They are not always funny; through them we see the underside of the Roman Empire.

Lucius is at last redeemed by the goddess Isis. She has taken pity on him. On a night of the full moon, at a particularly awful time for him, she rises out of the sea in all her majesty and shows herself to him. Thereafter she speaks to Lucius in his dreams. She makes him a man again and then she guides him through his threefold initiation into her cult. She is always radiant and joyous; after his trials Lucius doesn't like being away from her. These twenty pages about his redemption by the great goddess are humane and moving and beautiful.

As Queen Isis she is all the goddesses of the Mediterranean, worshipped in many different ways. She is Ceres, Artemis, Aphrodite, Proserpine, goddess of the underworld; she is even Belladonna, goddess of battles. She is, in fact, Nature. She makes the earth a sacred place. It is a beautiful idea of religion; and though Apuleius's Latin is strange his narrative style or manner is straightforward enough for some of his episodes to appear almost as they are, twelve hundred years later, in Boccaccio and afterwards in Chaucer.

T
HIS IDEA
of ancient religion was available to Flaubert. He would have known
The Golden Ass
(there are some indications in
Salammbô
), but it didn't suit his purpose, which was operatic. He wanted horror; he wanted the tableaux. He wanted the mass sacrifice of children to Moloch. He wanted Salammbô slinking about the temple of Tanit in her tight white gown
and with her black python. Over the image of the goddess in the temple there is a sacred veil. It is called the “zaimph” (perhaps made up by Flaubert, perhaps not). It partakes of the power of the goddess and carries or even controls the good luck of Carthage. This bit of Flaubert's invention is of no great subtlety; it is like something in a boy's magazine or (later in the imperial period) like something from Rider Haggard or the
Wide World Magazine
. But Flaubert makes it important in the intrigue in this part of his book.