La quarta guerra punica: analogie storiche nei dibattiti europei al termine della Prima guerra mondiale

Abstract

This essay analyses a few references to the Punic Wars in the last months of the First World War and in the aftermath. Starting from a page from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the exploitation of this historical analogy is traced in different types of texts by J.M. Keynes, H. Lloyd Jones, G. Stresemann and, finally, U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. From the analysis of these sources, two lines of re-actualization of the Punic Wars emerge, one ‘liberal’ (Keynes and Lloyd Jones) and one nationalist (Wilamowitz, Hitler and, partially, Stresemann), which saw the Third Punic War as foreshadowing the ‘legend of the stab in the back’.