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David Anthony Durham explains his interest in Hannibal, the protagonist of his first novel, Pride of Carthage; and refutes the historical concept of him as a brutish barbarian.
I met the protagonist of Pride of Carthage while I was still a boy in
elementary school. I'm not sure just who it was that brought tales of Hannibal
Barca into my house, but whoever that forgotten relative or family friend was I
owe them thanks. He or she filled my head with images of armies riding elephants
over snow covered mountains, of great battles and triumphant heroes. I was
fascinated by the exoticness of Hannibal's war, by the bravery and barbarity of
ancient battle, by the notion of such a titanic clash of African and European
powers. It's the first instance I can remember of being enthralled by a distant
historical event and by the persons who featured prominently in it. I never
forgot this initial enthusiasm.
It was with considerable excitement, then, that I began to write the story of
the Second Punic War several years ago. Beginning the novel I was aware that the
same things that attracted me to it where the things that might do me in. How
would I capture the polyglot diversity of Carthage's army? How would I write of
an event like at Cannae, when seventy thousand Romans were cut, stabbed,
trampled and suffocated to death in the dusty heat of summer afternoon? How
could I convey the largeness and complexity of the political turmoil of the time
while still maintaining a narrative drive? And from where would I find the
wisdom to breath credible, multi-faceted characters like Hannibal Barca and
Publius Scipio (the man who eventually defeated him) back into life?
The answer is strangely simple and potentially anticlimactic… I just dug in
and did it. For about two and a half years I got up every morning, turned on the
computer, paced from one side of my tiny cottage to the other, looked out at the
changing Scottish landscape (I lived in Dunkeld, Scotland, while writing this),
and then I sat down and imagined myself into a different time and place. I had
the pleasure of a taking several extended trips to the Mediterranean. I drove
and walked as much of the territory of the novel as I reasonably could. I also
read everything I could find about Hannibal, the Punic Wars and the Ancient
Mediterranean World. In terms of other fiction, I was influenced by Mary
Renault's work, like The Persian Boy and The Bull From the Sea, by
some of Gore Vidal's historical epics, like Creation, by Lewis Grassic
Gibbon's Spartacus, by Gustav Flaubert's Salammbo, as well as by
novels considered more commercial in objective, like Steven Pressfield's Gates
of Fire. Those are all set specifically in the ancient world, but there were
other novels that I looked to for inspiration in a more general sense of
historical fiction. Beloved by Toni Morrison, Cloudsplitter by
Russell Banks, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, and Madison Smartt
Bell's novels on the Haitian Revolution: all of these are epic works of literary
fiction that served as models for what was possible from a historical novel.
At the heart of it all, of course, is Hannibal Barca himself. I believe
you'll find the Hannibal of this novel to be a complex character composed from a
variety of known facts and imagined possibilities, a person more interesting
than either the villain or the hero that some camps wish to reduce him to. Most
of the serious works on Hannibal make it clear that he was a military genius, a
well educated man, a multi-lingual, talented orator, loved by his troops, feared
by his enemies, respected by military figures ever since. I've written Hannibal
as living by a code that he would've thought of as innately fair and honest -
even though he's also a cunning killer who used any and all means at his
disposal to achieve his goals. Some believe that Hannibal was driven by simple,
unbridled hatred of Rome. But his actions throughout the campaign suggest that
his ultimate goal was primarily to see Rome reduced in power - to see them
remain a city-state just like any of the other city-states in Italy. He and his
father recognized that Rome was gearing itself up to build an empire, and he
knew Carthage could not remain as prosperous as it was if Rome had its way. His
offensive can be seen, I believe, as a preemptive strike. Hannibal believed Rome
was going to attack Carthage eventually, so he decided to do it on his time
frame instead of waiting for theirs.
But Pride of Carthage is about more than one man. Instead of writing
it as a limited first person account I chose a cinematic third person voice, one
that tells the stories of a myriad collection of characters. Thus the novel
follows the Carthaginian foot soldier, Imco Vaca, and also tells of a Numidian
horseman, Tusselo, and of a Greek scribe, Silenus, and of the camp follower,
Aradna, and it recounts the tale of Masinissa, a young man who enters the story
a prince, looses his throne part way through, and yet perseveres to become one
of the classical world's most prosperous kings. The women of Carthage are also
important players. Sapanibal, Hannibal's older sister, is a strong-willed women
who would have made a fine soldier. With her husband dead and with no children,
she finds herself exerting influence behind the scenes, both within her own
family and in dealings with Carthage's aristocracy. Hannibal's mother, Didobal,
is a wise older woman who knows a great deal about the trials of war and fate of
nations. Imilce, Hannibal's wife, is a foreigner sent to live in Carthage. She's
dropped into an alien society of women that she has difficulty navigating. And
in Hannibal's youngest sister, Sophonisba, I found the story of one of
antiquities greatest, most tragic love affairs.
Pride of Carthage is my first offering of the style of novel I want to
build my career on. When the reader turns that last page I want them to feel
saddened that the book is over. I want them to have been so involved with these
character's fates, so familiar with them and their struggles that they feel a
loss at not being able to spend more time with them. In my own life a few books
have given me that feeling - although not in a while. It's mostly the books that
I read as an adolescent that did that for me, fantasy-adventure books like The
Lord of the Rings or The Mists of Avalon or Dune. I'm not
writing fantasy here, but the story is on such a scale that rarely can
fact-based material be so grandly plotted. I wanted to regain some of that lost
enchantment with the majesty of a complex story unfolding in epic form. From
page one of this book I'm writing about human beings caught up in the swirl of
one of history's greatest conflicts. The things these characters witness are
triumphs and calamities beyond what any of us are likely to experience in our
lives. There are love stories of Shakespearian complexity within these pages,
twists of fortune, tales of retribution, personal tragedies, and lessons on the
virtues and follies of war. I fortunate to have been able to put this episode of
human history into words. The material was all I could have asked for and more.
I feel it's improbable that I'll ever find another story so grand. But I'll try.
I will certainly try.
Misunderstanding Hannibal
A note on discovering the virtues of one the West's most notorious enemies
by David Anthony Durham, author of Pride of Carthage: A Novel of
Hannibal
A quick search for information on Hannibal on the internet provides an array
of perspectives on his character and legacy, many of them negative. It never
takes long to come across the declaration that Hannibal was driven only by
hatred, or that he sacrificed children, or that he wanted to destroy Rome
completely. He was a brute, a barbarian, an ogre that we should be thankful Rome
saved civilization from. Quite often I've heard his accomplishments belittled by
those who wish to point beyond all his successes to highlight his ultimate
defeat and promote his victor, Publius Scipio, as his superior.
As I began the research that led to my novel, Pride of Carthage, I didn't
have definitive refutations of these claims. Hannibal simply drew me toward his
story, and I assumed telling it would require a sometimes uncomfortable
partnership with a man of considerable ill-repute. During the course of my
readings, however, I found none of these negative claims to have much validity.
I found him to be a nobler character than I expected, grander of vision, driven
by complex emotions, often exceeding the norm in terms of acts of benevolence.
And I was not looking outside the traditional sources on the subject: the
ancients Polybius and Livy, and the many contemporary scholars working
comfortably within the academy. Why then does the understanding of Hannibal that
I reached seem to differ so greatly from much of the popular, censorious
rhetoric surrounding him? I think the answer lies firmly on one particular
factor: the effective use of propaganda
Almost everything we know about Hannibal and Carthage comes either from Roman
historians or from Greeks writing under the sway of Roman authority. These
scholars had the unenviable task of explaining why their patrons eventually
sieged, overran, and sacked Carthage in a door-to-door killing spree that left
only fifty thousand survivors out of an estimated population of seven hundred
thousand. No, the Roman and Greek sources were not--by any modern
standard--reliable. They certainly weren't fair and balanced. Yet they are the
only source through which the identity of Carthage and its heroes was passed to
the world.
Hannibal was, of course, a man of his times. And a warrior. As such it goes
without saying that he orchestrated the deaths of a great many people. In this
he's no different than any of the historical figures of the period. But what
truly fascinated me--and what informs the novel--was my discovery of a great
many virtues in this often demonized man. To name a few of the many details the
public may find surprising about Hannibal:
Such are just some of the details I discovered in the process of writing about this remarkable figure. It still surprises me that there have been so few fictional treatments of Hannibal, and that those there are have often reaffirmed old prejudices while selectively ignoring aspects of the historical record that suggests he was so much more. Pride of Carthage is not an attempt to turn/revise Hannibal into a hero. The novel is, however, an effort to bring to life a man who has been both seen and unseen, spoken of and misunderstood for two thousand years. I'm hoping the book will help, in a small way at least, to kindle a debate about this man and the history he influenced, a discussion that any desire for a fair understanding of Western civilization demands that we undertake.
Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.
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