Chris S Saladin (University of Minnesota-Twin Cities)
This paper considers the reception of the legend surrounding Carthage’s destruction by Rome and locates a new origin in the historiography and folklore of the medieval Maghreb. When the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus captured Rome’s longtime rival of Carthage in 146 BCE, he burned the city to the ground and declared it cursed ground, forbidden to any future settlement. In many modern renderings of this story, Scipio infamously sowed the city’s fields with salt to prevent their future cultivation and ensure Carthage’s abandonment. The legendary salting of Carthage, however, never happened. As originally observed by R.T. Ridley, the legend is a later interpolation that appears in no ancient source (Ridley 1986). This observation launched a spirited hunt by scholars to identify the earliest reference to Carthage’s ritual plowing and salting. Ridley and Visonà both traced the story back to early 20th century scholarship, while Stevens suggested an inspiration from tales of ritual salting in medieval Italian cities (Visonà 1988; Stevens 1988). This medieval origin is further supported by Warmington, who pins it to a Papal Bull from 1299 in which Pope Boniface VIII compared his plowing and salting of Palestrina to that Carthage (Warmington 1988). This interpretation firmly situated the legend of Carthage’s destruction in the historiography of the medieval Latin West.
The memory of Carthage’s past, however, was equally important to inhabitants of medieval North Africa. Islamic historians in medieval Al-Andalus and the Maghreb were deeply familiar with the Roman historical tradition, as received through Arabic translations of such works as Orosius’ Historiarum Adversus Paganos (Christys 2002, 144-7). This tradition partially informed the 11th century Andalusian geographer Al-Barki, who provides a vivid account of the ruins of Carthage and their history (Al-Bakri 101-9). As part of this account, Al-Bakri tells a puzzling story of the city’s destruction supposedly relayed by a local inhabitant. Not only does the man claim to have lived in the city at the time of its destruction, but he also recalls that an ill omen of salt accompanied the city’s abandonment. While a confused narrative, this story appears to preserve a North African folk legend that associated salt with the destruction of Carthage.
Considering this new evidence, I argue that the legend of Carthage’s salting, as received and expanded in later historiography, originates not in the Latin West, but in the medieval Islamic world. Whether transmitted through Andalusian texts like Al-Bakri’s or directly from the local tradition informing him, a North African folktale made its way into European historiography surrounding the Roman and Pre-Roman past. As such, the salting of Carthage stands as a compelling case of cross-cultural transmission and raises deeper questions about premodern classical reception beyond the Latin West.