Maybe Hannibal wasn't so horrible

But how deadly he is! "Pride of Carthage" is soaked with blood - "a choreographed sacrifice of massive proportions." In one spectacular scene after another, Durham throws together tens of thousands of men churning the ground in mile-wide swaths as they kill one another in a sickening variety of ways. Hannibal's attacks on Roman forces twice the size of his own army are awesome and desperate, full of cries and fire; armor and limbs; elephants, horses, and dogs - oh my!

But Durham is also remarkably attentive to individual lives and moments between heaves of battle. Hannibal, "the child of a thunderbolt," is worn by doubts and melancholy, desperate for the company of his wife and baby. He constantly feels the horrible burden of destiny. "At moments," he says, "I look down and realize that I'm seated on a monster fouler than anything I could have conceived."

His brothers adore him, but they labor under a sense of inadequacy that saps their initiative and leads to fatal errors. His wife, mother, and older sister present fascinating pictures of the complicated, compromised position of smart women in an ancient, patriarchal culture.

On the other side, we catch glimpses of Roman leaders who vacillate between arrogance and panic, unable to fathom this barbarian's next move. And at the other end of the social spectrum, we see the beggars, slaves, and prostitutes who follow behind these giant armies, supplying and reaping what they can without a care for who wins or loses.

Durham warns in his acknowledgments that "this book is a work of fiction and should only be read as a novel," but the historical records that survive are hardly models of modern academic objectivity. The Romans never managed to kill Hannibal, but they did write the only surviving history of his life. There are no extant Carthaginian sources.

In fact, there's almost nothing left from Carthage. At the conclusion of the Third Punic War in 146 BC, Rome carried out what may have been the largest systematic execution of noncombatants before World War II, killing all but 50,000 of its 700,000 inhabitants and burning the entire city to the ground. Cato's much-repeated demand, "Carthage must be destroyed," was finally carried out.

Much that was lost is revived here in all its glory and gore, but ultimately what's more stunning is Durham's imagination, his sensitivity to the cost and exhaustion of war. It's a brilliant exploration of the tension between private destiny and historical force, as full of the sweep of geopolitics as the quiet intimacies of a marriage. He so clearly creates the hopes and fears of these people removed from us by time and culture that we can recognize our tragic, common heritage.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send e-mail comments about the book section toRon Charles.

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