i disagree with the assertion that it never had much going on, given that it was rome's breadbasket and rich as hell for quite a while after the time you discussed - i think if you're gonna point to the romans fucking up the coast you should point to deforestation and not to the whole "salting the earth" thing - sure, they fucked up the city for a while, but it rebounded into a bigass metropolis and only really lost relevance after getting bounced back and forth between rebels, vandals, eastern romans, and arabs for like 400 years

libya wasn't just cyrene: there was a lot of shit in roman africa and i think it's not correct to characterize north africa-west-of-egypt as "the greeks' sloppy seconds" and punic ruins. a bunch of important stuff happened in between "rome moves in" and "everything is islam" and if things turned out a bit differently it sure as hell could have "had a chance", or at least could have declined a lot slower

also north africa was like. extremely important in the spread of christianity and popped out more bishops and heresies than anybody knew what to do with so it's like even culturally speaking it's not like it was a backwater given that saint mutherfuckin augustine was the bishop of HIPPO

i dunno man. i don't disagree with the first half of your post (old historians are lying bastards at the best of times and it's a dangerous game living in the desert), but i deeply disagree with your conclusion and i think it's an unhelpful oversimplification

silphium is neat as hell, i agree with that - i would watch the hell out of that movie too