The Mandelbear's Reading

Posted by Bret Devereaux

https://acoup.blog/2026/04/17/fireside-friday-april-17-2026/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fireside-friday-april-17-2026

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Hey folks! Fireside this week; next week we’ll be back to seperating out the components of Carthaginian armies, looking at the real backbone of those armies, which are Carthage’s North African subjects.

But for this week’s musing, I wanted to talk a bit about how different historians approach our craft when the evidence is both limited and hostile and Carthage provides a good opportunity to do so. As we noted last week, the evidence for Carthage – its armies, politics, society, all of it – is quite difficult. The literary evidence that we have for Carthage is both very limited (relatively few ancient authors say much about them) and also quite hostile: Carthage’s history was written by its enemies. We know that pro-Carthaginian histories (notably that of Philinus of Agrigentum) existed, but their work does not survive to us. So for any given event or institution, we often only have one source (or at least one real source in cases where we have Polybius and several other authors whose source is also Polybius) and so not only is that source is almost invariably hostile to Carthage, we have no reliable other source against which to compare.

Now in other situations where this is the case – for instance in Greek treatments of the Achaemenids – we have a backup option, which is that we may have archaeology or shorter, more fragmented sources (epigraphy, papyri, temple records) against which to ‘check’ our literary tradition. But here, Carthage gives us very little as well. We have some inscriptions from Carthage, but they’re very few and quite short and limited. Likewise, archaeology has certainly confirmed the presence of Carthage and its Punic material culture, but it struggles to answer a lot of the questions we have.

So we have sources, which are to some degree unreliable, but which we are generally unable to ‘check’ with other kinds of evidence, but those sources are all we have. What is a historian to do?

In practice, there tend to be two responses and Carthage is also convenient as a demonstration here because those approaches can be neatly summed up in the English-language scholars who exemplify them: Dexter Hoyos and Nathan Pilkington.

The first approach – employed by Dexter Hoyos, I’d argue – is to assume that the sources are basically accurate unless you have reason to suppose otherwise. So assuming what Diodorus is saying is not absurd, we assume it happened and often even when what Herodotus or Diodorus is saying seems a bit ‘out there’ (like the size of the armies at the Battle of Himera (480)), we assume the event probably occurred, if perhaps in a more reasonable way (the armies being smaller, for instance). Implausible things (the Carthaginians attacking Syracuse in 480 in coordination with the Achaemenid invasion of Greece) can be discarded, but if there isn’t a good reason to doubt something, then we do not doubt it.

This approach is often married to a ‘positivist’ historical approach, which aims to establish objective facts in so far as they can be nailed down (and less interested what it views as interpretation). At its worst, it can be ‘under-theorized’ – that is, failing to think critically or analytically enough about sources or cause-and-effect and just presenting facts – though I would hardly level that accusation at Hoyos, who is well aware his sources are not always to be trusted.

The alternative, of course is the reverse: rather than assuming the sources are trustworthy, unless proven otherwise, the sources are assumed to be untrustworthy unless confirmed by some other sort of evidence or reasoning. This is, I think, fairly close to Nathan Pilkington’s approach in The Carthaginian Empire (2019). To return to the question of the Battle of Himera (480), Nathan Pilkington, well, questions the existence of the Battle of Himera and indeed contends that there may not have been a meaningful Carthaginian presence on Sicily at all in the early fifth century, because our only evidence that there was are these motivated, untrustworthy Greek writers.

There is a risk, in this kind of approach, for the resulting history to be, in a way, over-theorized. After all, if the sources are untrustworthy, they must be replaced by something. Ideally, they might be replaced by archaeology (this is Pilkington’s preference) and that can be valuable, but as we’ve discussed time and again, archaeology often cannot answer our most important questions. The first danger is that over-theorizing: the ‘blank spaces’ created by discounting the sources are in turn filled with theoretical frameworks, how it ‘must have been,’ which risk ending up as houses of cards: it is one thing to build a theory which fits the available evidence, but another thing to build a theory into the absence of such evidence (Pilkington, I should note, largely avoids this pitfall). But the alternative danger is the ‘council of despair’ – that despite having sources which comment on a period, the historian essentially throws up their hands and declares that nothing can really be known (or at least very little) – whole chunks of history consigned to dark ages created entirely by critique. Naturally, the positivist-inclined historians will rebel against this determination to declare that nothing can be known when there is evidence right there.

For my part, I think readers can guess that I am closer to the Hoyos end of this spectrum than the Pilkington. My tolerance for yawning uncertainty is fairly low, which is why I steadfastly refuse to work on basically anything in the Roman world before 264 when Polybius at last lets me put at least one foot firmly on the ground. But once there, my tendency is to assume the sources are broadly right unless I have a good reason to suppose they’re not. That isn’t to say Pilkington’s book is bad – I don’t think it is, even though I often disagree with it – I think it is valuable precisely because it overturns a bunch of apple carts. It is good and useful to send historians holding the consensus view scrambling to defend it – more often than not they succeed, but the result is a stronger, more clearly reasoned position.

But I think there is a real risk in attempting to read ‘against the current’ of one’s sources, which can become a sort of motivated reasoning. To take another example, I find N.L. Overtoom’s effort in Reign of Arrows (2020) to reframe Antiochus III’s victory over the Parthians as something closer to defeat or at least a clever feint and retreat by the Parthians, when the sources – admittedly, fragmentary and difficult – seem quite clear that they understand Antiochus III to have won a great victory and also we see Parthia brought back under Seleucid control (albeit not for very long) after the campaign. It’s an effort to take a theoretical construct (Parthian feigned flight as both a tactical and operational principle) and apply it against the sources. This, I think, we cannot do unless we have some really good reason to do so (like some clear evidence that Parthia’s position remained strong afterwards; they were vassalized, so evidently it didn’t).

But sometimes some suspicion about the sources is warranted. As I noted in last week’s post, there is an odd pattern in our sources where – up until Polybius kicks in and we have more reliable sources – Carthage seems to only ever lose battles and yet somehow Carthaginian power seems to keep expanding. One is left wondering not if the Greek victories over Carthaginian armies are fake (I don’t think they are) but rather if some Carthaginian victories have perhaps been forgotten or de-emphasized in the retelling.

In either case, there is no sure solution here. Momentum has been building for a while for scholars to be more skeptical – in some cases, extremely skeptical – of our Greek language sources when they discuss non-Greek cultures, especially ones (Persians, Parthians, Phoenicians) they view largely as enemies, an approach which has value if just to act as a ‘check’ on the rest of us (and often more than that). On the other hand, there is a strong pressure towards positivism in publication: no one wants an introductory textbook that just says, “we don’t know” on every page and folks buying books also want to be told what was, rather than what could not be known. I suspect as a result the skeptical approach will remain a strong undercurrent in the scholarship, while major publications continue to be dominated by works of a somewhat more loosely positivist bent.

On to recommendations:

Starting on a bit of a pop-culture note, I really enjoyed Peter Raleigh’s take over at The Long Library on Martin Scorsese’s criminal characters particularly in the context of Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). Peter’s essays on film are always a treat – even though he often picks movies rather more obscure than what I tend to watch – but this is a particularly incisive look at the way Scorsese paints his criminal characters (both protagonists and villains) and how his entire body of work really explores the kind of person and the kind of thinking that leads to that sort of criminality. A particularly good read for reminding you that however charismatic some of these characters (in movies other than Killers of the Flower Moon) are, the point of these movies is almost invariably that their behavior is both socially destructive and also self-destructive.

Meanwhile, on the historical side, I’ve recommended Partial Historians before, but let me do so again, as they have just now gotten to the Gallic sack of Rome (390) and so are starting to move into a period where our sources start to be on slightly firmer ground (though hardly very firm ground even at this point). For those who missed previous recommendations, Partial Historians is a podcast with two historians (Dr. Fiona Radford and Dr. Peta Greenfield) who are moving through the history of Rome on a year-by-year basis, comparing and contrasting the sources we have for each year as they go. It’s a great way to get a sense, especially for these early years (though they are now beginning to move into what we’d call the Middle Republic – historians differ somewhat on the exact start-date for that) how tricky the sources can be. Give it a listen!

And over at Astroclassical Musings, Oliver Clarke, curatorial assistant at the Ashmolean Museum, had as his ‘coin of the week’ a fascinating Punic coin with a pegasus design on its obverse. It’s a wonderful coin and Clarke uses it as a jumping off point for a fascinating discussion of the size of the coin, where the images come from and even the modern history of how the Ashmolean ended up with this particular coin. In particular, he argues that the coin may reflect an effort by Carthage to communicate its claim to control of Sicily, having a coin with Tanit on one side – the chief goddess of Carthage – and the Sicilian Pegasus on the other.

For this week’s book review, I’ll be a bit late to the party and recommend P. Wyman, The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World, 1490-1530 (2021). We’ve touched on the topic of the ‘Great Divergence’ – or as I tend to frame it, the ‘Why Europe?’ question – and The Verge serves as a remarkably readable introduction to the answers to that question. The book is organized not as a dry discussion of these factors, but as a series of nine biographical sketches – a mix of powerful leaders and ‘smaller’ people living within those changes – which serve to illustrate the key factors which Wyman sees as responsible for setting Europe on the path to reshaping the world. The result is a narrative that is engaging to read and strongly grounded, complete with the literary flourish of short passages at the beginnings and ends of the chapters that adopt an almost historical-fiction vividness, attempting to describe the feeling that a figure has of being in a given moment.

The four major shifts that Wyman sees as responsible for the Great Divergence are the specific strain of capitalism that Europe developed, the (re)emergence of states in Europe (albeit very much not yet the powerful modern administrative states of later centuries), the military revolution and finally the printing press, leading to the more rapid dissemination of ideas outside of a narrow elite. This multi-factor approach is well suited for the structure – each chapter focused on a specific person can feature a focus on different elements or blends of these four factors. It also does a good job of reflecting current scholarly consensus in a way that I think is helpful for someone looking to start understanding early modern Europe, providing a platform from which to look at more focused scholarly treatments of specific elements of these factors.

I am, of course, not without my quibbles. While the military revolution is very clearly part of Wyman’s narrative, it is somewhat less prominent than I’d have it. For instance early statements that there wasn’t a clear reason why European ships led exploration and economic predation (piracy and raiding) – Wyman prefers to focus on the economic culture that created the raiding-trading-exploring naval entrepreneurs, which is absolutely a major factor here – struck me as a bit off. The European shipbuilding tradition really did have an edge by the 1500s in producing ocean-going multipurpose vessels that could fight effectively with cannon; there’s a reason that even at vast logistical distance, local fleets of dhows, junks, atakebune and so on found they couldn’t ever quite prohibit European warships from plying their waters, even when they wanted to (a factor that is especially strong in the Indian Ocean, where local shipbuilding traditions were not well set up to exploit gunpowder artillery). From a military perspective, my advice for someone finishing The Verge would be to make T. Andrade, The Gunpowder Age (2016) their next stop, not because they disagree (they don’t), but because the emphasis is different.

That said, Wyman also succeeds in bringing home the cost of this massive change and how disorienting and distressing it was in the moment. What we look back on as the ‘rise of Europe’ at the time felt like conditions in Europe spiraling violently out of control, culminating (outside of the chronology of Wyman’s book, but frequently mentioned) in the 16th and 17th century Wars of Religion (which were as much about politics and economics as religion). And of course the ‘rise of Europe’ in much of the rest of the world took the form of sudden exposure to a rapacious, often cruel and callous system of exploitation, a process that is really only starting as Wyman’s book ends, but which he discusses very clearly. In short then, this is a great book for someone looking to initially get their feet on the ground in addressing the ‘Why Europe?’ question – and an excellent jumping off point (with notes! and bibliography!) for further study of the question.

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