Decadence and Historical Understanding in Flaubert's Salammbo

This article considers the issue of decadence and historical understanding through a reading of Flaubert's Salammbô. To understand any period as "decadent" is to raise fundamental questions about the possibility and worth of historical understanding itself. Flaubert's novel, I argue, constitutes a radical attempt to free the decadent from a history of progress and to allow it to work not only on that history of progress but on the idea of history itself. Debates by both ancient and modern historians about the importance of the Carthaginian Mercenary War are reconfigured in the novel through the representation of characters who fail to understand the history that they enact.