SOURCE: Rice, Mary. “The Failure of Metaphor as an Historical Paradigm: Flaubert's Salammbô.” Modern Language Studies 20, no. 1 (winter 1990): 95-8.

In the following essay, Rice posits that not only is Flaubert's view of modern life as a reflection of history evident in Salammbô, but the novel contains several internal relationships which mirror one another.

In 1864, two years after the publication of Salammbô, Flaubert wrote in a letter, “… history is nothing but the reflection of the present on the past, and that is why it is always to be remade [à refaire].”¹ Salammbô is Flaubert's own version or remake of the story of the mercenaries' revolt that occurred in Carthage between the first and second Punic wars, and while the novel was just as carefully researched as Madame Bovary before it and The Sentimental Education thereafter, because of its distant time period the novelist's methodology was necessarily different. Flaubert's main source...