Word: bryher
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Coin of Carthage, by Bryher. The Punic Wars, seen not so much on the battlefronts as in the backwaters of living and in the private hopes and problems of small people...
...Subtitles. Bryher's seemingly patchy method is likely to prove a relief to readers tired of overstuffed historical pageantry. But her assumption that anyone reading the book will know in large outline at least who won the Punic Wars and how is often disconcerting. As Trader Zonas leaves from his home in a seaport town and trudges into the hills with the hope of selling leather bridles to the Carthaginians, his small adventures at first seem fragmentary and meaningless-like a provocative foreign film seen without subtitles...
...What Bryher eventually brings into view, however, is the enduring landscape along the fringes of a wasting war of occupation. Hannibal's army lives off the Italian countryside for decades at a stretch, until the danger from the war is as familiar a part of peasant life as drought or plague. The Italian villagers are loyal to Rome when the legions can defend them, comfortably acquiescent when the Carthaginians ride into town and offer better prices. To the fearful peasantry, Hannibal's few armored elephants loom dreadfully, like the roaming German Tiger Tanks of World...
...most likely to survive, his friend Dasius is an idealist most unlikely to do so. The restless son of a Roman freedman and a Greek slave, he yearns for the dark freedom of Carthage's Africa, finds it, and loses everything. In time of war, Bryher suggests, it is advisable to make only the smallest demands upon life...
...Bryher's small, shapely book, like the handful of minor historical classics in which she has previously sought to trap various troubled and far-off times (Roman Wall, Beowulf), is nobody's guidebook to the important events of a historic day or decade. But it offers the details and textures of a particular age so pervasively known and felt by the author that it does not have to be clumsily insisted upon as scholarship. The figures who move in Bryher's historic landscape are neither makers nor victims of history. They are men, seen small, but with...