CARTHAGE

This epistolary novel completes a trilogy about the Punic Wars. A fictional historian has gathered and glossed papers from the Wars' central characters, beginning immediately after Hannibal's suicide and concluding with the destruction of Carthage. We learn, for instance, that Cato's famous antipathy to that nation developed from his boyhood rape by Carthaginian sailors. We also are treated to more gruesomeness and scatology than is comfortable. The British Paul Mathews reads particularly well, if you don't mind some eccentric pronunciation and Cockney centurions. Unfortunately, he sometimes blurs the distinction between the supposed original documents and the historian's footnotes. Y.R. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine [Published: OCT/ NOV 03]