Critical Reviews

The Geopolitical Chess Board

The novel opens brilliantly, with Carthaginian general Hasdrubal Gisco fleeing Spain after the catastrophic defeat at Ilipa, where forty thousand of his troops died in a single afternoon. He spots Roman ships sailing toward the Numidian king Syphax's court and makes the split-second decision to follow. Within three chapters, we have the complete geopolitical situation: Carthage is losing its centuries-long war with Rome, Numidia holds the balance of power, and whoever wins Syphax's cavalry might win the war. Hasdrubal's solution is ancient and brutal: sell his daughter Sophonisba to the fifty-year-old king as his thirteenth wife.

Agency Within Constraint

But Farhat's genius is showing us this transaction from every angle. We see Hasdrubal and Syphax negotiate in a backroom, neither man consulting the woman being discussed—her value calculated in cavalry, her agency negotiated away while both men acknowledge she has too much intelligence to be easily controlled. What makes this compelling is that Farhat never pretends Sophonisba has real choice. She's merchandise in Chapter Six, literally standing beside naked slaves being sold in her vestibule, recognizing herself in their oiled bodies: "In a few days or weeks, she too would be merchandise, displayed and negotiated over. The only difference was that her bill of sale would be called a marriage contract." But the novel's sophistication lies in showing how agency operates within constraint—how she weaponizes the very system that commodifies her.

Democracy as Political Weapon

The political sophistication here is extraordinary. Farhat has done something I've never seen in historical fiction: he shows Carthaginian constitutional democracy actually functioning. When Sophonisba writes a brutal poetic denunciation of Prince Massinissa (who has defected to Rome), she sends it not to the Carthaginian Senate but to the ham—the popular assembly. The Senate is deadlocked, thinking in quarterly profits. The ham thinks in generations and has been warning about Roman expansion for decades. Through constitutional procedure, she forces the issue: the ham votes, the Senate must implement, and suddenly Carthage mobilizes its wealth against Rome.

Poetry as Reality

And then there's the poetry. Substantial verse appears throughout—not as ornament but as plot driver. When Sophonisba responds to Massinissa's elegant challenge with a denunciation that calls him "the walking corpse of honor Rome has made" and "jackal at the feast / Who feeds on scraps from conquerors' tables," her words don't just insult—they catalyze constitutional mobilization across an entire civilization. Farhat clearly understands that in ancient Mediterranean cultures, poetry wasn't literature separate from politics—it was politics, creating reality through language rather than merely describing it.

The Weight of History

More significantly, the novel makes an argument about history itself—about who gets remembered and how. Carthage lost its war with Rome, and Rome wrote the histories. Everything we know about Carthage comes through hostile sources: Roman historians who portrayed them as barbaric child-sacrificers, Greek chroniclers who saw them as mercenary plutocrats. Farhat has gone back to the fragments—constitutional procedures mentioned in passing, coin designs preserved in museums, archaeological evidence of democratic structures—and reconstructed a civilization that offered genuine alternative to Roman imperialism.

When Sophonisba walks through Carthage for the last time (a city that will be literally razed to the ground by Rome in 146 BCE, its population killed or enslaved, its library burned, its very existence erased), we're not just watching a woman say goodbye to her home—we're watching the death of possibility itself. The civilization that thought in centuries, that built democratic institutions, that created space for female power, that preferred alliance to conquest: all gone. Only the victors' propaganda remains.

The Act of Resurrection

Farhat has performed an act of resurrection. Through meticulous research and literary craft, he's given Carthage back its voice—and given it to a woman Rome reduced to a footnote, a tragic queen whose death (choosing poison over being paraded in Scipio's triumph) was the only thing history remembered about her. It turns out she was fighting Rome all along, with weapons Rome didn't recognize as weapons: poetry that changed voting behavior, marriage that shifted geopolitical balances, economic theory that transformed kingdoms. She lost—Carthage lost—but Farhat has ensured the losing side's story survives with complexity and intelligence intact.