The term poenus, and its modern English equivalent ‘Punic’, is one of the most problematic in the classical tradition. There is hardly any evidence for its use in self-definition by individuals in antiquity, and the word itself is used almost solely in literary contexts. Nonetheless, it is freely, often uncritically, employed across all branches of scholarship in the study of the ancient Mediterranean, and rarely is it clearly defined. Although, as I shall suggest in this chapter, ‘Greek’ is probably the nearest equivalent term (in use, not meaning), even this equivalence is only partial: ‘Greek’ is, most would accept, an ethnic label; but whether ‘Punic’ can really be so defined, when to the best of our knowledge no-one defined themselves as ‘Punic’, seems much less obvious (Prag 2006). ‘Punic’ has, for example, no equivalent in ancient literature to the notorious passage in which Herodotus offers a definition of what constitutes ‘hellenicity’ (Hdt. 8.144, on which Thomas 2001; cf. Hall 2002), and there is little modern debate of the sort which that passage has engendered – as opposed to very extensive accounts of the negative image of the Punic (cf. Bernal 1987 (chapters 8–9); Vella 1996; Liverani 1998; Bonnet 2005; Bonnet and Krings 2006). The essential difficulty of the term is well illustrated by the virtual absence in modern English usage of a noun for those described as ‘Punic’. The observation in fact begs the question: whom would we wish to describe as ‘Punics’? As is noted in the introduction to this volume, the term ‘Punic’ has been applied most commonly to those peoples of primarily Phoenician origin settled in the western Mediterranean, often with a chronological terminus post quem of the sixth century bce (advocated by Moscati (1988d; cf. Moscati 1995a: 1–3)).
