Dr Josephine Crawley Quinn: List of publications

<p>"The Roman people, destined to acquire wealth by conquest, and by the spoil of provinces; the Carthaginians, intent on the returns of merchandise, and the produce of commercial settlements, must have filled the streets of their several capitals with men of a different disposition and aspect. The Roman laid hold of his sword when he wished to be great, and the state found her armies prepared in the dwellings of her people. The Carthaginian retired to his counter on a similar project; and, when the state was alarmed, or had resolved on a war, lent of his profits to purchase an army abroad."</p> <br/> <p>So the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson summarized the fundamental differences between Romans and Carthaginians, and between their attitudes to empire, in 1767. This is a typical intervention in a conversation carried on throughout the long eighteenth century about the right way to think about Carthage and Rome, and, through them, about emerging European states. This conversation tended to emphasize the differences between the two cities, contrasting in particular their imperial practices—Roman territory with Carthaginian colonies, Roman conquest with Carthaginian trade, Rome’s citizen militia with Carthage’s reliance on mercenaries—and distinguishing between fundamentally different approaches to geopolitics: empires of the land and empires of the sea.</p> <br/> <p>This set of contrasts, which long framed and conditioned modern understandings of the two cities and their empires, was based on ancient sources, and in particular the account found in the histories of Polybius.3 My contention here, however, is that a narrow focus on the differences of detail between Carthage and Rome noted by contemporary commentators has led to a neglect of the larger parallels and inheritances they underlined, and in so doing obscures the extent to which Rome inherited Carthaginian practices and ideologies of empire. My aim is not to establish whether the two cities really were fundamentally similar or different in this respect: like “continuity and change,” this is a yes/yes question, and it is in any case now widely accepted that they both exercised significant power over both land and sea, at least from the fourth century BCE.4 Instead, I want first to explore the contrast between modern and ancient perceptions of the relationship between the two empires in more detail, and then to investigate some specific examples of imperial practices and ideologies that might have transferred to Rome along with Carthage’s territory and subjects.</p>

© The British School at Rome 2014. The role of the Phoenicians in the economy, culture and politics of the ancient Mediterranean was as large as that of the Greeks and Romans, and deeply interconnected with that ‘classical’ world, but their lack of literature and their oriental associations mean that they are much less well-known. This book brings state-of-the-art international scholarship on Phoenician and Punic studies to an English-speaking audience, collecting new papers from fifteen leading voices in the field from Europe and North Africa, with a bias towards the younger generation. Focusing on a series of case-studies from the colonial world of the western Mediterranean, it asks what ‘Phoenician’ and ‘Punic’ actually mean, how Punic or western Phoenician identity has been constructed by ancients and moderns, and whether there was in fact a ‘Punic world’.