The Libyan's War: Mathos and the Truceless Fury of Carthage - Paperback
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The Libyan's War: Mathos and the Truceless Fury of Carthage
In 241 BC, a bankrupt Carthage tried to stiff twenty thousand veteran soldiers out of their wages, and nearly paid with its life. This is the story of Mathos, the Libyan officer who turned a mercenary pay dispute into a three-year war that came within a hair's breadth of destroying one of the ancient Mediterranean's great powers. Drawing on Polybius, Diodorus, and the rebellion's own surviving coinage, this book recovers a man the ancient sources tried hard to erase: a career soldier who built a functioning rival state at Tunis, struck his own silver shekels, mobilized seventy thousand volunteers, and twice brought Carthage to the edge of annihilation, once through Hamilcar Barca's desperate generalship, once through his own. It follows the war's descent into mutual atrocity, the crucifixions before Tunis's walls, and Mathos's final capture and death at the hands of a Carthaginian mob, before tracing the war's astonishing afterlife: the Barcid military reforms that produced Hannibal's army, and Gustave Flaubert's transformation of Mathos into the doomed hero of Salammbô. A rigorously researched, richly told account of history's most consequential forgotten war.
Cahir Dolan grew up in County Leitrim and studied history at University College Dublin, where his interest in the ancient and medieval worlds first found its focus in the civilisations of the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea basin. He has spent the better part of two decades reading, writing, and thinking about the great pre-modern empires of northeast Africa, drawn above all to the Aksumite world - its astonishing commercial reach, its theological creativity, and the extraordinary durability of the culture it produced long after the empire itself had dissolved. He is the author of several works of narrative nonfiction spanning ancient Africa, the late antique world, and the history of the Red Sea. He lives and writes in Ireland.
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