Librería Samer Atenea
Kálamo Books
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
In 239 BCE, a Gallic mercenary captain stood before twenty thousand starving, mutinous soldiers and spoke to them not through an interpreter, but in the paymaster’s own tongue. What he said would plunge Carthage into the most savage war of its history. Autaritus had spent two decades proving his loyalty to Carthage, holding his countrymen to a discipline that spared them the treachery and sacrilege that disgraced Gaulish mercenaries elsewhere in Sicily. Betrayed by chronic unpaid wages and catastrophic Carthaginian diplomacy, that loyalty curdled into rebellion - and Autaritus’s rare command of Punic transformed him from a captain into a kingmaker, capable of uniting Iberians, Libyans, Numidians, and Greeks who shared no language but the one he alone could speak fluently. This is the story of the Mercenary War’s true architect: the massacre that made peace impossible, the rebel coinage that declared a state, the betrayal at a mountain parley, and the crucifixion that broke a rebellion two years in the making. Drawing on Polybius and the surviving numismatic record, this book recovers a man history remembers only in fragments - and asks what loyalty is worth when the powerful never intend to repay it.
