Having blessed Carthage as diverse and multicultural, Hannibal's author unconsciously imagines Carthage's great opponent to be as monolithic in race, creed, and outlook as a white-shoe law firm in 1950s New York—and therefore (by an inevitable implicit logic) greedy, perfidious, and belligerent. But the real Romans imagined that their city had been founded from a flotsam of the accursed, exiles, and broken men. And loyal to those origins, Rome energetically split her citizenship into rights and ranks, and granted parts of it to her friends, who could eventually aspire to the whole.
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