SALAMMBO: SACRED PROSTITUTION - & WHY YOU SHOULD PAY YOUR MERCENARIES

SALAMMBO: SACRED PROSTITUTION - &WHY YOU SHOULD PAY YOUR MERCENARIES

STATUE OF THE MONTH, MAY 2020

‘For this woman, men would commit every sin … every sacrilege!’

              (slogan on advertising poster for The Loves of Salammbo, 1960)

The woman in question, Salammbo, forms the subject of a dramatic and erotic statue in the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight.  William Hesketh Lever, soap manufacturer and art collector, was a keen collector of contemporary sculpture; he purchased Salaambo from the artist, the French sculptor Maurice Ferrary, at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1900 (the event for which the Eiffel Tower was constructed).  It has remained in the Lever collection ever since, forming the centrepiece of a purpose-built circular sculpture hall.  

                          Maurice Ferrary, Leda & The Swan, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight 

Ferrary used different materials in various colours to create a polychromatic effect, a technique that was popular in the closing decades of the nineteenth century – his Leda and the Swan, also in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, employs the same  multi-media technique. 

The white marble figure of Salammbo writhes in ecstasy against the backdrop of a column of polished red granite.  The column is topped by a bizarre bronze figure: a bare-breasted woman holding a crescent moon, riding on four interlocking horses (she also has one of those Sixties hairstyles that involve a lot of backcombing and hairspray).  A bronze snake, draped round the column, coils itself sinuously round Salammbo’s shoulders; her drapery falls from her left arm, leaving her completely naked apart from a pair of thin gold anklets.  

The statue is so striking that it’s easy to see why it fascinates and perplexes visitors to the gallery.  But what does it all mean? What’s the story behind the statue, and how would its original audience have known how to interpret it?  

Most of the visitors to the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1900 would have been familiar with Gustave Flaubert’s novel Salammbô (1862), so popular in the nineteenth century that it inspired several operas and a ‘Carthaginian’ fashion craze, but now largely overshadowed by his earlier work, Madame Bovary.  Although Flaubert invented the character of Salammbo herself (borrowing the name from a Babylonian goddess, the equivalent of Aphrodite, mentioned in an ancient Greek source) he inserted her into a real historical event, the Mercenary War (241-237 BC).  This event, described by the ancient historian Polybius, occurred in the aftermath of the First Punic War between the Romans and the Carthaginians (‘Punic’ meaning ‘Phoenician’, as the Carthaginians were originally Phoenician colonists who established a ‘new city’ - Qart-hadasht, or Carthage - on the North African coast). 

At the end of the First Punic War, the Carthaginians were faced with the task of paying and repatriating 20,000 mercenaries who had fought under Hamilcar Barca (Hannibal’s father) in Sicily.  Polybius says that these soldiers came from a variety of backgrounds: Libya, Spain, Gaul, Sicily, Greece, runaway slaves, deserters from the Roman army.  Instead of following the original plan to ship each group to Carthage, pay them several years’ backpay and let them return home before the next group arrived, the Carthaginian authorities decided to wait until all the mercenaries had arrived back at Carthage, hoping to get away with paying them less money.

Not surprisingly, the mercenaries mutinied, under the leadership of Matho (a Libyan) and Spendius (an escaped slave from Campania), whom Flaubert used as major characters in his novel.  Unfortunately for the Carthaginians, many of the locals in the area controlled by the city resented the heavy taxation and conscription that had been imposed on them during the war against Rome; 70,000 people joined the mercenaries, leading to a full-scale revolt against Carthaginian rule. If you want the full version of events, I recommend Adrian Goldsworthy’s excellent book The Fall of Carthage or the Wikipedia article on the Mercenary War.  For our purposes here, it’s enough to say that Hamilcar Barca eventually defeated both the mutiny and the revolt. 

One reason for Hamilcar’s success was the defection of a Numidian rebel leader, Naravas, to the Carthaginian side, a defection which Hamilcar rewarded by allowing Naravas to marry his daughter.  Polybius didn’t name Hamilcar’s daughter, so Flaubert gave her a name – Salammbo -and used her to spice up the story of the Mercenary War by introducing a subplot based on sexual obsession and a mysterious magical object, the zaïmph.  In the novel, Salammbo is a virgin priestess of the goddess Tanit, who worships Tanit in her role as a moon-goddess. Shielded from knowledge of Tanit’s role as a fertility goddess, she has never seen the statue of the goddess which sits in the inner sanctum of the temple: ‘the old idol in the magnificent mantle, on which depended the destinies of Carthage’.  This ancient statue is covered in a mysterious veil, the zaïmph, which supposedly fell from heaven and which represents the luck of the city. (I haven’t been able to ascertain where Flaubert found the word zaïmph; I suspect he may have made it up. It looks like a Greek word, but isn’t).  When Salammbo pleads to see the veiled statue, the High Priest warns her that to look upon the zaïmph is an act of sacrilege, which will result in death.  (By the way, there’s already a band called Zaimph, in case you were tempted to use the name!). 

The mercenary leaders Spendius and Matho come up with a plan to steal the zaimph, in order to deprive Carthage of its power.  When they break into the temple, they find a cloud-like cloth, embedded with twinkling stars which seems to constantly change colour, ‘appearing at once bluish as the night, yellow as the dawn, purple as the sun, multitudinous, diaphanous, sparkling light.’  When the tide of the fighting goes against the Carthaginians, the High Priest of Tanit persuades Salammbo that she can save the city by venturing to Matho’s camp and recovering the zaimph, sleeping with him if necessary: ‘you will be alone with him in his tent … You will be humble, you understand, and submissive to his desire.’  The implication is that Salaambo is being instructed to act as a sacred prostitute of Tanit, an important concept in Carthaginian religion (see article by Maurice Shroder).

The sex scene in the tent is pretty restrained (so restrained that I had to read it twice to check whether anything had actually happened), although Salammbo, accustomed to the soft hairless bodies of the eunuchs who serve her, is amazed by Matho’s muscular body.  When Matho falls asleep, Salammbo escapes with the zaimph.  Her sacrifice, however, fails to save the city, which descends into famine after the mercenaries destroy the aqueduct which supplies the city’s water. In a last-ditch effort to buy the favour of the gods, many of the city’s children are sacrificed to Baal in the form of ‘Moloch’ (a corruption of the Canaanite word mlk, probably meaning a generic fire-sacrifice), being fed into a furnace within a huge bronze statue of the god.  Flaubert’s description of these sacrifices later formed the basis for a scene in the Italian epic movie Cabiria (1914), in which the chest of Moloch’s statue opens up like a rubbish-chute to receive his victims. 

                                             Moloch statue from Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria (1914)

                                                        National Museum of Cinema, Turin

            Picture Credit: Jean-Pierre Dalbera, Paris

Hamilcar eventually defeats the mercenaries and makes good on his promise to marry Salammbo to the Numidian prince Naravas, but at her wedding she collapses and dies, cursed by the gods for having dared to touch the sacred zaïmph of Tanit.

Flaubert’s novel would have been pretty strong meat even for nineteenth-century readers accustomed to sensational fiction: the closing chapters build into an orgy of cannibalism, child sacrifice, torture, mass crucifixions and soldiers being trampled by war-elephants.  It’s so sumptuous that it borders on the camp in its lavish descriptions of architecture, jewellery, clothes (mostly dyed with expensive purple), spices, and exotic animals (elephants, apes, antelopes, parrots, flamingos). Every surface is made from some precious and exotic material: ebony, ivory, coral, pearls, topaz, amethyst, emerald, mother-of-pearl, alabaster, cedar, onyx, marble, gold, obsidian, lynx-skins. Everything is scented with cinnamon, nard or myrrh. Eunuch priests attired in ostrich feathers lurk round every corner. It’s the ultimate Orientalist novel, representing the ‘Orient’ as a place of luxury, passion, obsession and death.  That said, Flaubert went to considerable efforts to reconstruct the material culture, politics and religion of Carthage in the 3^rd century BC, using the information available at the time.  He corresponded with archaeologists and read all the ancient sources before travelling to Tunisia (then nominally under the control of the Ottoman Empire) in the spring of 1858 to see Carthage for himself.

We’re therefore finally in a position to unravel the meaning of the statue’s various elements.  The snake is Salammbo’s pet, a black python which exists in a strange inverse relationship to her, growing in strength as she becomes weaker.  The fluid drapery which she casts behind her may be the veil she removes when she enters Matho’s tent, although it’s also possible it represents the zaïmph itself (in which case the sculptor clearly baulked at trying to represent something so ethereal in appearance).  Salammbo’s only accessory, the golden anklets, are clearly intended to add an erotic touch by emphasising her otherwise total nudity, but they also echo a passage in the novel: ‘between her ankles she wore a golden chainlet to regulate her step’ – and thus, by implication, to control her freedom of movement and her access to the outside world.  It is only after she has slept with Matho, and is about to escape from his tent with the zaïmph, that Salammbo realises that the chain between her anklets has broken. 

The sinister bronze figure sitting on top of the column represents the goddess Tanit – although a far more sinister version of Tanit than would normally be found in Phoenician art.  This terracotta figure of Tanit from a Phoenician site in Ibiza, for example, looks like your average Greco-Roman goddess – the Romans identified her with Juno, queen of the gods.  

                                 Statue of Tanit from the necropolis of Puig des Molins, Ibiza

                                        Archaeology Museum of Catalonia, Barcelona

                                          Gold stater from Carthage, depicting Tanit & a horse (replica)

Maurice Ferrary, though, clearly wanted to emphasise the contrast between the purity and self-sacrifice of Salammbo and the bloodthirstiness of Tanit – because we now come to the one thing that every Roman schoolboy (and every reader of Flaubert’s novel) knew about the Carthaginians: that they practised child sacrifice to Tanit and her consort, Baal Hammon.  

In the 1860s, when Flaubert wrote his novel, the main evidence for the practice of child sacrifice by the Carthaginians came from the works of Greco-Roman authors, including Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus and Pliny the Elder.  Greek authors usually identified Baal with the Titan Cronos, who ate his own children (his wife eventually tricked him by dressing a stone in a babygro and telling him that it was his son Zeus).  For his blockbuster ‘Moloch’ episode, Flaubert drew on Diodorus Siculus’ claim that children were laid onto the arms of a bronze statue of Cronos, from which they rolled into a flaming pit below.  Plutarch says that childless couples would buy children from the poor; if the birth mother cried out during the sacrifice, she’d forfeit the money.  Flaubert also used Diodorus’ claim that aristocratic Carthaginians bought children to sacrifice, in place of their own offspring; he has Hamilcar substitute a runty slave-boy for his own son, Hannibal, who is saved from the flames.    

The academic debate over whether this was just nasty Roman propaganda appeared to be solved with the excavation of the Tophet of Salammbo, location of the Temple of Tanit (don’t get too excited; it was called after the area of Carthage where it was found, which in turn was presumably named after the book) in 1921 – a tophet being a Biblical word for a site where children are sacrificed.  Further excavations in the 1970s found over 20,000 urns containing the remains either of very young children or of young animals (mainly kids and lambs), apparently sacrificed as ‘substitutes’ for children.  Tophets have also been found at eight other Phoenician sites in Algeria, Sicily and Sardinia.   

The crescent moon was a symbol of Tanit, used on coins and stone stelae in Carthage and other Phoenician colonies.   Some ancient coins also show Tanit with a horse, and it is likely that the horses which Tanit rides in the statue are a reference to the foundation-myth of Carthage.  In the original version of the story, a Phoenician princess called Elissa flees from her home in Tyre (in present-day Lebanon) after discovering that her evil brother Pygmalion has murdered her husband.  Landing on the coast of North Africa, she finds a buried horse, a sign from Tanit that this is where they should found their new city.  When writing the Aeneid, Virgil borrowed this story, used Elissa’s alternative name of Dido (supposedly meaning ‘the wanderer’ in the local tongue in the area round Carthage)  and moved her 370 years back in time so that she could engage in a doomed love-affair with Aeneas, a refugee from the Trojan War.  In the poem, Virgil explains why Dido has chosen a particular spot on which to erect a temple to Juno (aka Tanit):  ‘When first the Phoenicians had been driven there by wind and wave, Juno, the Queen of the Gods, had led them to this spot where they had dug up the head of a spirited stallion (caput acris equi)’ (Virgil, Aeneid Book 1.442-444) – although I have to say that I’ve never been certain whether Virgil meant that Dido had unearthed a horse’s skull or a carving of a horse’s head. 

Ferrary’s statue makes no attempt to represent Salammbo as an ‘authentic’ Phoenician priestess: she’s a white Western European woman from the fin de siècle.  The statue is entirely a product of its time: the sinuous curves of the snake, and the use of metal on marble, give it a very Art Nouveau feel, as does the contrast between Tanit and Salaambo.  Salaambo, with her swept-up hairstyle and dreamy pose, looks like a three-dimensional version of an Alphonse Mucha poster; given that Mucha was living and working in Paris throughout the 1890s, and also participated in the Universal Exposition of 1900, it is likely that Ferrary would have been influenced by his posters, particularly the ones he produced to advertise Sarah Bernhardt’s productions.  The statue adopts the same formula that Mucha used: a beautiful woman in an elegant pose, in front of a ‘culturally relevant’ setting.  The statue even uses the same system of proportions (a 1:3 width:height ratio) that Mucha adopted for his ‘tall’ format posters. Ferrary’s colour-scheme (white, black, the faded-looking red of the granite column) also echo the muted palettes of some of Mucha’s work.  It’s perhaps no surprise that Mucha himself had already produced an image of Salammbo in 1896, although his take on her (wearing a peacock-feather headdress) actually comes far closer to the descriptions in the book than Ferrary’s statue does.

                     

Alphonse Mucha, Salammbo (1896)

Picture credit: Art Renewal Centre Museum, image 4418

References & Further Reading

Maurice Ferrary’s Salaambo and Leda & the Swan are on display in the Lady Lever

Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, on the Wirral (Bebington is the closest Merseyrail station).

The main source for the Mercenary War is Polybius, Histories I.66-88.  The Penguin Classics translation of Polybius does not include the section on the Mercenary War; the full text, translated by Evelyn Shirley Shuckburgh, can be found on Project Gutenberg, Histories of Polybius:  http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44125

Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô, English translation by Gerard Hopkins

Adrian Goldsworthy, The Fall of Carthage: The Punic Wars 265-146 BC

(Phoenix, 2006)

Paul Greenhalgh & Claire Allerton, ‘Verve & Logic: The Lineage of Art Nouveau’  

in: Alphonse Mucha: In Quest of Beauty, ed. Sarah Mucha & Tomoko

Sato. pp 52-59  (Mucha Foundation, 2015)

Glenn E Markoe, Phoenicians (University of California Press, 2000)

Maurice Z Shroder, ‘On Reading Salammbo’, L’esprit créateur, 10:1 (1970) Spring,

24-35 (accessed through JSTOR)

Stanislav Segert, ‘Crossing the Waters: Moses and Hamilcar’, Journal of Near

            Eastern Studies 53, No 3 (1994) pp.195-203 (available on JSTOR) – for origin

of the name Salammbô

Edward W Said, Orientalism (Penguin Modern Classics, 2003)

‘Mercenary War’ Wikipedia page has a very detailed and thorough outline of the

events of the war, as described by Polybius

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercenary_War)

‘Moloch’ Wikipedia page – includes ancient and Biblical sources from which

Flaubert’s depiction of the ‘Moloch sacrifices was drawn, as well as a list of

appearances of Moloch in popular culture

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch)

‘Religion in Carthage’ Wikipedia page has lots of detail on excavations of the

Tophet sites in Carthage, and the various conclusions which have been drawn

from this  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Carthage)

‘Salaambo’ Wikipedia page has a useful list of operas and films based on Flaubert’s

novel  (https://en.wikipedia/wiki/Salammbo)