Carthage

A Waterstones UK Best Book of 2025

A landmark new history of ancient Rome’s most famous rival—home of Hannibal, jewel of North Africa, and foundational power of the western Mediterranean.

For six hundred years, the city of Carthage dominated the western Mediterranean. Founded in the ninth century BCE as a small colonial outpost, by the third, it had grown into the area’s largest, richest empire. When, inevitably, it clashed with Rome for supremacy over the region, the conflict spanned over one century, three wars, and forty-three years of active fighting. After Carthage fell at last, the city was razed, and the tale of its defeat became a mere foundation stone in Rome’s legend. But in this landmark new history—the first in over a decade—rising-star ancient historian Eve MacDonald restores the story of Carthage and its people to its rightful place in the history of the ancient world, reclaiming a lost culture long overshadowed by Roman mythmaking.

Drawing on brand-new archaeological analysis to uncover the history behind the legend, MacDonald takes readers on a journey from the Phoenician Levant of the early Iron Age to the Atlantic and all along the shores of Africa. She reveals ancient Carthage as a cosmopolitan city not only of extraordinary wealth and brave warriors, but also of staggering beauty and technological sophistication. Home to Hannibal and Dido, to war elephants and vast fleets, at its height Carthage commanded one of the ancient world’s greatest navies and controlled territory spanning the coast of northwestern Africa to modern-day Spain, Sardinia, Sicily, and beyond. In gripping narrative, MacDonald shows how and why the Romans came to so fear Carthage, as one of the few rivals ever to inflict multiple defeats upon them—and what the world lost when it was finally gone.

Reclaimed from the Romans, Carthage is a dramatic tale from the other side of history—revealing that, without Carthage, there would be no Rome, and no modern world as we know it.