The most noteworthy thing about Salammbo is not the plot, but the style and atmosphere. Flaubert indulges in countless long descriptions of every building, every room, every character's clothing, and all of these things are elaborate, everything is studded with reflective materials, ivory, mother-of-pearl, gems and precious metals.
The plot of Salammbo is like that of an overly long Conan story, with mercenary armies, cruel merchants, a big snake and priests who sacrifice people to weird gods, though it lacks a central indomitable figure like Conan of Cimmeria, and instead has a large cast of main characters all of whom have tragic flaws and suffer terrible tragedies. The novel also has a pervasive sensationalist and exploitative element, much of the text given over to explicit and graphic depictions of injury and death in battle, mass murder, and torture, though I suppose you could get away with saying this is social commentary of an anti-war, anti-bourgeois elite, anti-religious establishment character.
The Punic War is over, the Romans and Carthaginians having come to terms, the Carthaginians getting the worst of it. Much of Carthage's forces during the war consisted of an army of mercenaries from all over the known world--Gauls, Greeks, black Africans, desert nomads, etc.--lead by Carthage's best general, Hamilcar Barca. Carthage can't or won't pay all that these men are owed, and, in an effort to appease this multicultural horde, the rulers of Carthage seize some of Hamilcar's assets (he is away from town) and hold a feast in the suburbs just outside the city walls, right by Hamilcar's opulent home. The drunken feast gets a little out of control, and the mercenaries free some prisoners, including a clever and ambitious Greek, Spendius, and break into Hamilcar's gardens where they wreck their former commander's plants, abuse his elephants and eat his decorative fish. Hamilcar's beautiful daughter, Salammbo, a priestess of the moon goddess Tanit who has lived in seclusion her entire short life, emerges to speechify at and sing to the out of control soldiers, somewhat calming them down.
Clever Spendius knows how to sneak into Carthage and leads Matho inside the city walls via the aqueduct. Once inside, he convinces Matho to steal from the temple of Tanit a sacred artifact, the goddess's veil or mantle, which sometimes is called the "zaimph." Spendius doesn't really believe the zaimph has magical powers and that anybody who touches it will die, but he thinks the loss of it will hurt Carthaginian morale. Matho, wearing the mantle, then insists on sneaking into Hamilcar Barca's palace and into Salammbo's bedroom, he awakens her implores her to accept his love and come away with him. Salammbo calls for help but Matho manages to escape the city because people are too afraid of touching or damaging the sacred zaimph to stab or shoot or tackle the Libyan interloper.This bold exploit makes Matho the foremost man among the mercenaries, and inspires many of the lesser cities of North Africa as well as country people, all of whom are sick of Carthaginian taxes and regulations, to ally with the mercenary army and seek to overthrow the current government. The war starts in earnest with Matho in command of a detachment of the mercenary army laying siege to Hippo-Zarytus and Spendius leading another force besieging Utica, these towns being unwilling to join the anti-Carthage coalition. Hanno sneaks an army out of Carthage by sea and attacks Spendius's force; his elephants (there are lots of elephants in this book) scattering Spendius's men. While Hanno is inside Utica resting, Spendius figures out how to disrupt the elephants and launches a counterattack which scatters Hanno's force; Hanno must creep back to Carthage in disgrace.
One of the themes of Salammbo is that Carthage has become rich through trade and is ruled by ruthless greedy merchants. Spendius the Greek is little better, a former pimp and slaver who looks at women and judges how much he could have made in the good old days selling them and their jewelry. While they may be equally avaricious and heartless, Spendius and Hamilcar, compared to the bulk of Carthage's ruling class, are courageous and clever; the Carthaginian ruling council, in their dealings with the Romans and with the mercenaries, are bunglers who allow their greed to blind them to the wisest course in negotiations or in war. Hamilcar Barca is one of the greatest generals in the world, but in his fighting against the Romans he was hamstrung by the jealous ruling council, which feared he would make himself dictator if given too much power and too many resources.
One of the mercenary officers, the Libyan Matho, falls madly in love with Salammbo. As the mercenaries march across farmland and desert to the sacred city of Sicca, where they have been asked to await payment from Carthage, Matho moans pathetically over the pale young girl. Spendius makes himself Matho's buddy and right-hand man; he is a charismatic and resourceful guy who has lived all over and had many adventures, and quickly ingratiates himself to all the mercenaries, mending their armor and entertaining them with juggling and so on.
At Sicca the mercenaries grow restless waiting for their pay, and when a Carthaginian representative, the wealthy but unhealthy Hanno, leader of the political faction opposed to Hamilcar's faction, comes by to explain they are going to get only a fraction of what they are owed, the soldiers are pretty angry; Spendius, playing the demagogue, rouses them further. Hanno flees and the mercenaries take up their weapons and march on Carthage!
Scared of the mercenary army, the Carthaginians send another official, Gisco, and a pile of treasure to the camp to try to pay them off, but Spendius with his oratory makes sure they are unsatisfied. Gisco is seized and mistreated by the mercs; periodically throughout the rest of the novel we check in with him to see what horrible shape he is in.
Hamilcar Barca returns and in a long scene has arguments with the ruling council--he doesn't get along with the rest of Carthage's ruing class. He then spends a lot of time visiting his treasure rooms and discussing with his staff his many business ventures.
Hamilcar is inclined to refuse to lead the defense against the mercenaries and rebels, but when he sees the damage done to his gardens and to his elephants on the day of the feast, he relishes the opportunity to crush the mercenaries. He spends months whipping the army into shape and then marches out, using a route over the sea to attack Spendius from an unexpected quarter and thrash his force. Flaubert describes much gory fighting, and when Hamilcar sends 2,000 captives to Carthage, Flaubert talks about how the common people of the city entertain themselves, relieving their fear and indulging their anger by shooting arrows into the POWs, who are tied to stakes.
We spend some time back in Carthage with Salammbo, who is worried about her black python, which is off its feed; this serpent is a sort of religious symbol for the people of Carthage and a source of auguries. We learn about Salammbo's closest companions, the two old people who raised her, and their long and complex relationships with the beautiful young girl. One is a eunuch priest, a sort of surrogate father to Salammbo, one of the most learned men in the world who over the decades has developed his own religious theories. This old codger thinks that Carthage's woes are the result of the loss of Tanit's mantle, and he suggests the innocent virgin Salammbo sneak into the mercenaries' camp, seduce Matho, and thusly retrieve the veil. When the black python recovers from its illness Salammbo thinks this a divine endorsement of the priests' scheme, and agrees to undertake the perilous mission. In preparation, aided by her surrogate mother, a slave and nurse who, I suspect, is supposed to be Chinese ("her rather flattened features were as yellow as her tunic"), Salammbo goes through a complicated ritual that involves dancing naked with the python and smearing all over her body "the blood of a black dog, slaughtered by barren women, on a winter's night, in the ruins of a tomb."
Because Flaubert bases the plot of his novel on the historical record and with some degree of faithfulness reproduces the course of the war, instead of the novel having one or two big thrill scenes depicting battles and/or inhuman cruelty with the object of bringing to the reader the experience of the triumph and the tragedy, the glories and the horrors of war, we get a long series of battles and riots and mass murders, each followed by vivid descriptions of their heartbreaking aftermath. After a while these passages lose their power to move the reader because we have already seen Matho and Spendius get beat and then make a comeback and we have already witnessed a surfeit of dreadful fates and gory crimes.
But then the multiracial army of rebels and mercenaries gets its act together and traps the Carthaginian army in a valley. Hamilcar has trenches and palisades built around his camp and waterholes dug within, and a long siege begins.
Salammbo, disguised as a boy with the plague, is led by a guide across the war-devastated countryside to Matho's camp. She appears before the lovestruck Matho, and then, by coincidence, Hamilcar's army bursts out of its besieged camp, aided by a significant portion of Matho's force, a bunch of Numidians who treacherously switch sides. Matho dashes out of his tent, and Salammbo grabs the mantle of the goddess and sneaks across no-man's-land to her father's tent. Everybody on the battlefield, Carthaginian, mercenary, and rebel, sees that the Carthaginians have the zaimph back and Carthaginian morale soars and the mercs and rebels are dismayed. Hamilcar gives his daughter Salammbo in marriage to the leader of the Numidians on the spot, though the ceremony and consummation must wait until the war is won. (We call this an incentive plan.)
The armies of Matho and Spendius and their allies are thrashed, and Flaubert gives us several pages of descriptions of corpses decomposing and being eaten by crows and dogs, of women mourning, and that sort of thing. Despite this victory Carthage is still in trouble; Utica and Hippo-Zarytus join the rebellion and the forces of Matho and Spendius begin to regroup; joined by people from all over the world who hate Carthage or covet its riches, the rebel army swells and lays siege to Carthage.
Flaubert describes the siege in some detail, all the different engines and techniques, tactics and countermeasures, as well as the horrible suffering of everybody involved. Seeking the favor of heaven, the priests of Moloch, with the enthusiastic participation of the Carthaginian populace, who indulge in an ecstatic orgy of bloodletting, sacrifice people, mostly children, in a long and involved ritual involving parades and huge machines that represent their ravenous god. Among those they select for sacrifice is Hamilcar's son Hannibal, but Hamilcar hides Hannibal and has some nobody's son sacrificed in sonny boy's place. Flaubert really pours on the horror and the tragedy here, but by this point he has cataloged so many catastrophes and atrocities that this reader, at least, was getting numb to it all.
After the mass sacrifice, things start looking good for Carthage: it rains, relieving the city's thirst (Spendius sabotaged the aqueduct); Hamilcar sails out of the town, avoiding the besieging army, and begins looting the countryside, drawing away the local rebels and leaving only Matho's and Spendius's forces to continue the siege; and the Numidians also manage to get around the besiegers, bringing food and reinforcements to Carthage. (All through the book the Carthaginians are able to outmaneuver the mercenaries and rebels in this way, again and again, entire armies moving in and out of the city unmolested by Matho and Spendius.) Spendius's force joins the rebels in pursuing Hamilcar, and they all fall into a trap, getting confined in a gorge with no way out. The mercs and rebels are stuck in this gorge for weeks and begin to starve, and Flaubert describes their descent into cannibalism. After half the men in this army have died the Carthaginians let the other half out of the gorge and murder them in spectacular ways--tying up hundreds of mercenaries and laying them out in a carpet for elephants to walk on, for example, or ordering friends to fight each other to the death. Spendius is captured.
Matho's force retreats to the rebel city of Tunis to be besieged by three armies, Hamilcar's, Hanno's, and that of the Numidians. The Carthaginians crucify Spendius before the city, and Matho sallies forth to defeat Hanno's army and crucify that guy. But Hamilcar takes the town. For months the Carthaginians pursue the fleeing remnant of Matho's army, as the countryside returns to obedience to Carthage and offers the mercs no haven. Finally, a conclusive battle is fought, and the mercenaries are wiped out--only one man, Matho, is taken captive.
As a preliminary part of the festivities on the day of Salammbo's wedding to the king of the Numidians, Matho is forced to run a gauntlet through the streets of Carthage that ends at the location of the wedding. As he passes by, ordinary people strike him and abuse him so that by the time he gets to where await Salammbo, her betrothed, Hamilcar, and all the wealthy people of the city, he is covered in blood and wounds and delirious with agony. Salammbo watches as he expires and then dies herself, I guess of a heart attack or something; Flaubert reminds us that Matho and Salammbo touched the mantle of Tanit, and the punishment for doing so is death.
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I enjoyed the first third or so of Salammbo, and the relatively few scenes in which we learn about the young woman herself and her household, but the many battle scenes and scenes of atrocity, and the long descriptions of things like parades, get monotonous and the final third or quarter of the novel felt like a real slog and I was relieved when it was over.
I've read Madame Bovary and some of Flaubert's short stories. Salammbo sounds like a Hard Pass for me.
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