first version of the foundation legend, with Elissa and the immolation to escape a marriage, survives only in a Greek account. If any Carthagenian ever wrote the history of his own people, it has not come down to us. Indeed, no Carthagenian literature of any sort has survived; if any written literature ever existed, it was never so much as mentioned by the Greek and Roman writers on whom we depend for our narrative history of Carthage.
To all intents and purposes, then, Carthage is very nearly a prehistoric civilization, known to history only because it had literate enemies. Even the investigations of modern archeologists are capable of giving us only a limited view of the Carthagenians. A handful of inscriptions survive, but they are in the nature of brief dedications and the like, giving the barest hint of what the incribers were thinking. We have not even the works of art that can bring other lost civilizations to some sort of imaginative life. Little Carthagenian art has survived, and that which has survived is either rudimentary or derived from Greek originals, in neither case revealing very much about its makers.
To give an account of the Second Punic War, or indeed of any episode in Carthagenian history, from the Carthagenian perspective is thus comparable to writing a brief for the defense based almost entirely on the depositions of prosecution witnesses, without possibility of cross-examination, still less of calling any other witnesses, and with only very limited physical evidence from which to reconstruct any other picture of events. None the less, the following study seeks, in so far as far as it is possible to do so, to reconstruct a picture of the Second Punic War, and specifically of Hannibal's campaigns, as these might have been experienced from the Carthagenian perspective.
Any such reconstruction must begin with the background of events, again reconstructed from the Carthagenian perspective....