Salammbô

Gustave Flaubert published Salammbô in 1862, four years after Madame Bovary had brought him both fame and a prosecution for immorality. Looking for a subject that would not put him in court again, he turned to the ancient world instead of to provincial France.

The novel takes place in Carthage immediately before and during the Mercenary War of 241 to 237 BCE, and its principal source is the first book of Polybius's Histories. Flaubert went to Carthage in 1857 to do research on the ground, and he built the book out of the material he found there and in the ancient writers, taking the shape of his story from the war itself.

It was enormously popular when it appeared. Eleanor Marx translated it into English in 1886, which introduced it to readers in Britain and America, where it became a bestseller, and the novel is usually credited with starting a renewed interest in the struggle between Rome and Carthage, and with fixing the picture of the city that later historical novels would work from.