Thermes of Antoninus Pius, CarthageIn
the spring of 146 BC the North African city-state of Carthage finally
fell. After three years of embarrassing setbacks, the Roman army under
its new and relatively inexperienced commander, Scipio Aemilianus, had
managed to break through the Carthaginian defences and establish an
all-important bridgehead at Carthage’s circular war harbour, an
engineering masterpiece with capacity for at least 170 ships and ramps
to drag the craft to and from the water’s edge.
The Roman forces were in a position to launch a final assault on the
Byrsa, the citadel of Carthage and the religious and administrative
heart of the city. The legionaries were, however, forced to fight every
step of the way on the narrow streets that led up the hill as desperate
defenders rained missiles down on them. Despite this stiff resistance,
it was now a question of when rather than if Carthage would fall.
The Carthaginians who had sought refuge in the tall houses that
flanked the city’s streets were flushed out by fire and the sword. The
Greek historian Appian, whose writings are the main surviving source for
this episode, wrote of how Scipio employed squads of soldiers to drag
burnt and mutilated corpses off the streets so that the progress of his
legionaries was impeded no further.
It still took six days and nights to break Carthaginian resolve, with
Scipio deploying his forces in rotation to preserve both their strength
and sanity for the ghastly work in which they were engaged. On the
seventh day a party of Carthaginian elders bearing a peace offering of
olive branches from the sacred Temple of Eshmoun, the Carthaginian god
of healing, which sat on the highest point of the Byrsa citadel, came to
the Roman general begging that their lives and those of their fellow
citizens be spared. Scipio acceded to their request and later that day
50,000 men, women and children left the citadel through a narrow gate in
the wall.
Although the vast majority of its surviving citizenry had
surrendered, a rump consisting of Carthage’s commander-in-chief,
Hasdrubal, his family and 900 Roman deserters – who could expect no
mercy from Scipio – were still holed up in the precinct of the Temple of
Eshmoun. Time, however, was on the side of the Romans and eventually
this small group of diehards was forced up onto the roof of the building
to make a final stand. It was then that Hasdrubal’s nerve finally
broke. Deserting his wife and children, he went in secret to Scipio and
surrendered. It would be left to his wife to deliver a fittingly defiant
epitaph for the dying city by throwing herself and her children into
the flames of the burning temple after venting scorn at her husband’s
cowardice.
Although it is a myth that Scipio had the site of Carthage ploughed
with salt to ensure that nothing would flourish there again, he was
certainly keen to ensure that the city bore the full force of Roman
opprobrium. As the fires burnt on the Byrsa Hill, Scipio ordered his
troops to demolish the city’s walls and ramparts. Following military
custom, the Roman general also allowed the soldiers to loot the city and
rewards were handed out to those legionaries who had displayed
conspicuous bravery during the campaign. Scipio then personally
distributed all gold, silver and religious offerings, while other spoils
were either sent to Rome or sold to raise funds. The surviving arms,
siege engines and warships were burnt as offerings to the gods Mars and
Minerva and the city’s wretched inhabitants sent to the slave markets,
with the exception of a few grandees, including Hasdrubal, who, after
being led through Rome as part of Scipio’s triumph, was allowed to lead a
life of comfortable confinement in various Italian cities.
The brutal destruction of Carthage by the Romans has retained its
power to both shock and provoke. When in the 1950s the poet and
playwright Bertolt Brecht cast around for a historical metaphor to
remind his fellow Germans about the dangers of remilitarisation, he
instinctively turned to an event that had taken place over 2,000 years
before:
Great Carthage drove three wars. After the first one it
was still powerful. After the second one it was still inhabitable. After
the third one it was no longer possible to find her.
In recent years the ongoing crisis in Iraq has also afforded
political commentators many opportunities to equate the situation in
that unfortunate land with what befell Carthage. The following words by
the American sociologist and historian Franz Schurmann are typical of
the kind of emotive comparisons that have been drawn:
Two thousand years ago the Roman statesman Cato the Elder
kept crying out, ‘Delenda est Carthago’ – Carthage must be destroyed!
To Cato it was clear either Rome or Carthage but not both could dominate
the western Mediterranean. Rome won and Carthage was levelled to the
ground.
Iraq is now Washington’s Carthage.
Brecht and Schurmann use the example of Carthage to make seemingly
conflicting points: one sees the fall of the city as the result of a
hubristic desire for military might; the other views it as the supreme
example of destructive bullying by a more powerful and ruthless rival.
In fact, whether you view Carthage as villain or victim, those judgments
are based almost exclusively on the historical testimony of Carthage’s
greatest enemy, Rome.
It was not just the physical fabric of Carthage that Scipio sought to
obliterate. The learned tomes that graced the shelves of the city’s
libraries, with the exception of the famous Carthaginian agricultural
treatise by Mago which was spirited back to Rome, were dispersed among
the local Numidian princes who had aided Rome in their war of
extermination against Carthage. Nothing more starkly reflects the
success of this Roman project than the fact that less than a couple of
thousand words of Punic – the Carthaginian tongue – are known and many
of these are proper names. The spoils of war not only included the
ownership of Carthage’s territory, resources and people but also its
past. Destruction did not mean total oblivion. A far worse fate awaited
Carthage as a mute, misrepresented ghoul in the historical annals of its
enemies.
Both Greek and Latin literature would consistently portray the
Carthaginians as mendacious, greedy, untrustworthy, cruel, arrogant and
irreligious. Particularly shocking to modern sensibilities are the lurid
accounts of hundreds of children being sacrificed by immolation in
order to placate Baal Hammon and Tanit, the bloodthirsty chief deities
of Carthage. Such was the emphasis placed by the Romans on Carthaginian
treachery that the Latin phrase
Fides Punica, literally ‘Punic Faith’, became a popular ironic expression denoting gross faithlessness.
Carthage was, of course, not the only city to suffer destruction at
the hands of Rome. In the very same year that Scipio’s troops were
carrying out their grim work in North Africa, the venerable Greek city
of Corinth was suffering a similarly traumatic fate at the hands of
another Roman army. However, it is Carthage’s fate that history
remembers. It was not the demolishing of the walls, the burning of the
houses or the enslaving and killing of the population that made this
episode so infamous but its completeness and the cold-blooded
determination with which it was carried out.
Many explanations have been put forward as to why Rome invested so
much in the destruction of Carthage. Hatred and vengeance certainly
played their part. After all, the two states had fought two of the
greatest and bloodiest wars – the Punic Wars – that the ancient world
had known. Many Romans considered Carthage to have been their greatest
enemy, the ‘whetstone’ of their greatness. Victory over Carthage in the
First Punic War (264-241 BC) had demanded that the Romans, who had no
previous naval experience, develop their own fleet and defeat the
pre-eminent sea power of the ancient world in a period of a little over
three decades. In that short time the Mediterranean had been transformed
in the Roman mind from a dangerous unknown to
Mare Nostrum,
‘our sea’. For many Romans the final defeat and destruction of Carthage
was the great watershed moment of a glorious and eventful history
because it marked the transformation of Rome from Italian to ‘world’
power.
Moreover, Carthage had taken Rome to the brink of total defeat.
During the Second Punic War (218-201 BC), the great Carthaginian general
Hannibal had blazed a trail of devastation across Italy, humiliating a
series of Roman armies along the way. It had taken every ounce of Roman
resilience and resources to eventually dislodge Hannibal from the
Italian peninsula but not before he had come close to capturing Rome
itself and, in all likelihood, final victory. Even a century later, the
Roman poet Statius was still evoking the ghoulish spectre of ‘Libyan
hordes’ marauding through the Italian countryside.
There was also the question of Rome’s ruthless application of
realpolitik. By the time of the third and final Punic War (149-146 BC)
Carthage, despite having made an impressive economic recovery from the
disastrous depredations of its defeat in the Second Punic War, was a
mere shadow of the power that it had once been. It was really no threat
to Rome, which by that time controlled much of the Mediterranean.
Despite this, a powerful clique within the Roman senate, led by Cato the
Elder of
Delenda est Carthago fame, had pushed hard for
Carthage to be neutralised permanently. With the argument won, Carthage
had been harassed into a foolhardy act of defiance that had at last
given the Roman senate the justification to send its legions back to
North Africa.
Yet, despite the contemporary emphasis on the destruction of Carthage
being the result of the desire for a final settling of accounts, it is
clear that more pragmatic considerations were at the fore of Roman
thinking on this matter. The sacking of what was still one of the
richest port cities in the ancient Mediterranean was unquestionably a
hugely profitable business. The slave auctions and the seizure of a
large swathe of previous Carthaginian territory, which now became public
land owned by the Roman state, contributed to a massive infusion of
wealth into both public and private Roman coffers. At the same time, the
conspicuous destruction of such a famous city sent an unequivocal
message: dissent from Rome would not be tolerated and past glories
counted for nothing in this new world. The destruction of Carthage now
stood as a bloody memorial to the cost of resistance to Rome and a
suitably apocalyptic fanfare for Rome’s coming of age as a new world
power.
In the face of such a litany of destruction and misrepresentation,
both ancient and modern, one might legitimately ask whether it is really
possible to write a history of Carthage that is anything more than just
another extended essay on victimhood and vilification.
There are some intriguing but equally frustrating clues. Within the
burnt-out structure of a temple (thought by its discoverer, the German
archaeologist Friedrich Rakob, to have been the Temple of Apollo
ransacked by Roman soldiers) were the remains of an archive thought to
have contained wills and business contracts, stored there so that their
integrity and safekeeping was guaranteed by the sacred authority of the
god. The papyrus on which the document was written was rolled up and
string wrapped around it before a piece of wet clay was placed on the
string to stop the document from unravelling and a personal seal was
imprinted upon it. However, in this particular case, the same set of
circumstances that ensured the seals were wonderfully preserved because
they were fired by the inferno which engulfed the city also meant that
the precious documents that they enclosed were burnt to ashes.
Faced with such historical lacunae there is always a temptation to
overcompensate when imagining what has actually been lost. However, we
should be wary of assuming that the shelves of Carthage’s famous
libraries groaned under the weight of a vast corpus of Punic and earlier
Near Eastern knowledge now destroyed. Although rumours circulated in
the ancient world of mysterious sacred parchments which had been hidden
away before Carthage fell and there are scattered references in much
later Roman literature of Punic histories, it is difficult to gauge
whether the city was really a great literary centre comparable with
Athens or Alexandria.
At times, researching a history of Carthage is rather like reading a
transcript of a conversation in which one interlocutor’s contribution
has been deleted. However, the responses of the existing protagonists,
in this case Greek and Roman writers, allows one to follow the thread of
the discussion. Indeed, it is the sheer range and scale of these
‘conversations’ that allows the historian of Carthage to recreate some
of what has been expunged. Ideology and egotism dictate that even
historians united in hostility towards their subject still manage
vehemently to disagree with one another and it is within the
contradictions and differences of opinion that existed between these
writers that this heavily biased monologue can be partially overcome.
As regards other material evidence, the ruins of Carthage have always
stirred the imagination of those who visited them. Rumours that the
Carthaginians had managed to bury their riches in the hope of returning
to retrieve them in better times had led the troops of one first-century
BC Roman general to commence an impromptu treasure hunt. For the modern
archaeologist Carthage can resemble a complicated jigsaw of which many
pieces have been intentionally thrown away. Yet history tells us that
such final solutions are rarely as comprehensive as their perpetrators
would have us believe.
Although the religious centre on the Byrsa was completely demolished,
many of the outlying districts and, as we have already seen, some parts
of the hill itself escaped total destruction. In fact, the Romans
inadvertently did much to preserve parts of Punic Carthage by dumping
thousands of cubic metres of rubble and debris on top of it. Even the
ominous two-foot-thick black tidemark found in the stratigraphy of the
western slopes of the Byrsa, the archaeological record of the razing of
the city in 146 BC, is packed full of southern Italian tableware,
telling us what pottery styles were in vogue in Carthage at that time.
Then there are the thousands of monuments recording votive offerings
made to Baal Hammon and Tanit, which, although extremely formulaic, have
furnished invaluable information on Punic religious rites. This is
especially so in the case of child sacrifice, which is revealed in a
different light to the hysterical ritualised savagery found in the
historical accounts. There is also a small number of surviving
inscriptions relating to other aspects of city life, such as the
construction of public monuments and the carrying out of an assortment
of religious rituals. This epigraphic evidence has been helpful in
aiding understanding not only of Carthage’s religious life but also the
social hierarchies that existed within the city. It is from the writing
on these slabs of stone that we learn of the faceless potters, metal
smiths, cloth weavers, fullers, furniture makers, carters, butchers,
stonemasons, jewellers, doctors, scribes, interpreters, cloak
attendants, surveyors, priests, heralds, furnace workers and merchants
that made up the population of the city.
The picture of Carthage that emerges from these very fragmentary
glimpses is a strikingly different one from the barbarous, cruel and
aggressive city-state found in the Greek and Roman historical canon.
Carthage might have been founded by settlers from the Phoenician city of
Tyre in what is now southern Lebanon, but it was older (early eighth
century BC) than any Greek city in the central or western Mediterranean
region; so much for its ill-founded reputation as oriental gatecrasher
into a pristine Hellenic world. Its Phoenician name, Qart-Hadasht, or
‘New City’, suggests that Carthage was set up as a colonial settlement
and not just as a trading post.
Strategically the site could not have been better chosen, for it
stood on the nexus of the two most important trans-Mediterranean trading
routes, the east-west route that brought silver from the mines of
southern Spain to Tyre and its north-south Tyrrhenian counterpart that
linked Greece, Italy, Sicily and North Africa.
It is now thought that Carthage might have actually been established
to act as a larger civic centre for other smaller Phoenician colonies in
the region. It certainly grew quickly. Although archaeologists are yet
to locate any of the important public buildings or harbours from that
early period, current evidence indicates that the littoral plain began
to fill up with a densely packed network of dwellings made of sun-dried
bricks laid out on streets with wells, gardens and squares, all situated
on a fairly regular plan that ran parallel to the shoreline. By the
early seventh century BC the settlement was surrounded by an impressive
three-metre-wide casement wall. So swift was the development that in the
first hundred years of the city’s existence there is evidence of some
demolition and redevelopment within its neighbourhoods, including the
careful re-location of an early cemetery to make way for metal
workshops. Three further large cemeteries ringing the early city
indicate that, within a century or so of its foundation, Carthage was
home to around 30,000 people, a very considerable number for that
period.
Although at first luxury goods were imported from the Levant, Egypt
and other areas of the Near East, by the mid-seventh century BC Carthage
had become a major manufacturer itself through the establishment of an
industrial area just outside the city walls, with potter’s kilns and
workshops for purple dye production and metalworking. Carthage now
became a major manufacturer of terracotta figurines, masks, jewellery,
delicately carved ivories and decorated ostrich eggs, which were then
exported throughout the western Phoenician colonies.
The decline of Tyre as an economic and political force in the first
decades of the sixth century BC led to Carthage assuming the leadership
of the old Phoenician colonies in the central and western Mediterranean.
This was hardly surprising because already Carthage was the most
populous and economically powerful member of that grouping. The real
source of Carthaginian might was and would remain its fleet, the
greatest in the Mediterranean for hundreds of years. A huge mercantile
fleet ensured that Carthage was the nexus of a vast trading network,
transporting foodstuffs, wine, oil, metals and luxury goods, as well as
other cargoes across the Mediterranean. If a couple of much later Greek
and Roman sources are to be believed, then Carthaginian expeditions also
made their way into the Atlantic, travelling as far afield as West
Africa and Britanny.
With the most feared fleet in the Mediterranean, Carthage remained
one of the pacesetters in naval technological innovation. In the fourth
century BC it was the first to develop the quadrieme, which was both
bigger and more powerful than the trireme, the ship that had dominated
naval warfare for the previous 200 years. Marine archaeologists, who
have studied the remains of several Carthaginian ships lying on the sea
bed just off Marsala on the west coast of Sicily, were amazed to
discover that each piece of the boat was carefully marked with a letter
which ensured that the complex design could be easily and swiftly
assembled. The Carthaginians had developed what was, in essence, a
flat-pack warship.
With Carthaginian leadership of the western Phoenician colonies
confirmed, we see the growing influence of recognisably Carthaginian
cultural traits in other western Phoenician colonies. These included the
adoption of Punic, the Levantine dialect spoken in Carthage, as well as
a new taste for the luxury goods and religious practices favoured in
the city.
Yet the headship of the Phoenician community in the west was not the
only source of Carthage’s burgeoning power. For the first centuries of
its existence the Carthaginians had been hampered by the very limited
extent of their hinterland, which meant that they had been forced to
import much of their food. This began to change in the sixth century BC
as Carthage sometimes expanded aggressively into the territory of its
Libyan neighbours. A whole raft of farmsteads and small towns was
developed on this new land with the result that Carthage also became an
agricultural powerhouse, producing food and wine not only for its own
population but also for export. The Carthaginians were also celebrated
for certain technological advances in agriculture, such as the
tribulum plostellum Punicum, or Punic cart, a primitive but highly effective threshing machine.
Interestingly, this economic and political dominance did not
translate into any imperial aspirations until the last decades before
the First Punic War. However, the Carthaginian leadership of a Punic
bloc that took in North Africa, Sardinia, western Sicily, southern
Spain, the Balearics and Malta did become increasingly involved
overseas, politically and militarily. The most significant of these
ventures was on Sicily where heavy economic investment and the presence
of strategically important Phoenician colonies meant that Carthage
quickly became a major player in the highly volatile political landscape
that existed there. Over the following two centuries Carthage was
obliged to send a number of armies to Sicily in order to defend its own
and its allies’ interests there, particularly from encroachments by the
most powerful Greek city-state on the island, Syracuse. Military action
between the two powers and their allies was punctuated by periods of
‘cold war’ in which each side eyed the other warily.
Despite some Sicilian-Greek historians’ claims to the contrary, this
was never a straight conflict between the Punic and Greek blocs.
Carthage, in particular, often co-operated with Sicilian Greek
city-states worried about the growth in Syracusan power. More generally,
Greek, Punic and indigenous communities on the island intermarried and
worshipped each others’ gods and goddesses as well as trading and making
war and political alliances with one another. Indeed, it was often the
deep and long-standing relationships that existed between supposedly
bitter rivals that were the driving force in the creation of a
surprisingly cohesive and interconnected central and western
Mediterranean.
Politically Carthage was certainly influenced by the Hellenic world,
introducing constitutional structures that resembled but did not ape
those found in the Greek city-states. Carthage had long been an
oligarchy, dominated by a cartel of rich and powerful merchant families
represented in a Council of Elders with one dominant clan usually
holding the role of first amongst equals. However, over time this led to
the introduction of more representative bodies and officials. A body
called the Tribunal of One Hundred and Four, made up of members of the
aristocratic elite, now oversaw the conduct of officials and military
commanders as well as acting as a kind of higher constitutional court.
At the head of the Carthaginian state were two annually elected senior
executive officers, the Suffetes, as well as a whole range of more
junior officials and special commissioners who oversaw different aspects
of governmental business such as public works, tax-collecting and the
administration of the state treasury. A popular assembly that included
all members of the citizen body was also introduced. However, much to
the approval of the Athenian political scientist Aristotle, its powers
were strictly limited. In fact, Aristotle thought that the Carthaginian
constitution of the fourth century BC was the best balanced in the
Mediterranean world. Later, however, in line with many Greek states, the
powers of the popular assembly increased markedly, leading to charges
that Carthage was going down the road of demagogy.
One finds the same mixture of emulation and innovation in Carthage’s
interactions with Greek culture. There is good evidence for members of
the Carthaginian elite being educated in Greek, and Greek artistic and
architectural traits were often adopted and adapted for Punic tastes.
This familiarity with Greek art, rather than leading to mere mimicry,
allowed the Punic population of the island to express itself in new and
powerfully original ways. Traditional Phoenician art forms such as
anthropoid sarcophagi, stone coffins whose human heads, arms and feet
protruded out from a piece of smooth stone like human pupae, acquired
Greek dress and hair decoration. And it was not just one-way traffic.
Sicilian Greek art, and architecture in particular, was clearly
influenced by the Punic world.
Perhaps the most striking example of Greco-Punic cultural interaction
was found by archaeologists excavating on the site of the Punic city of
Motya in Sicily in 1979. It was an oversized marble statue of a young
man, standing 1.8 metres tall without his missing feet. Although the
arms had also gone, it was relatively simple to reconstruct the pose of
the left arm, as the hand has been carved resting on the hip. The head
was framed by a fringe of curly hair and had once worn a crown or wreath
kept in place by rivets. All in all, it appeared to conform to the
severe Greek sculptural style of the early fifth century BC and, indeed,
a very similar statue of an
ephebe, a young man of military training age, has been discovered on the site of the Sicilian Greek city of Acragas.
It has been argued that only a Greek sculptor could have created such
a high quality piece and that the Motya ephebe was a looted Greek work.
However, there was a problem. Unlike other statues of ephebes from this
period, who are depicted nude, the Motya young man is clothed in a fine
long tunic with flowing pleats bounded by a high girdle. Many ingenious
solutions have been proposed to explain this anomaly. The strange
girdle and hand positions have led to the suggestion that the young man
was either a Greek charioteer or a sponsor of a chariot race. However,
the Motya figure is very different from other surviving statues of Greek
charioteers. In fact, the closest parallels are found within the Punic
world. First, despite the clearly Greek sculptural form, the statue
follows the Punic convention of not displaying the nude body; second,
the clothes and headgear worn by the young man bear a marked resemblance
to the ritual garments worn by priests of the cult of the Punic god
Melqart, with whom Heracles would enjoy an increasingly close
association in Sicily. Neither Greek nor Punic but Sicilian, the Motya
ephebe stood as a glittering testament to the cultural syncretism that
was such a powerful force in this region.
In such a brief survey it is simply impossible to do justice to all
of the different ways that Carthaginian political, economic and cultural
dynamism helped to create a western Mediterranean world that existed
long before Rome came on the scene. Carthage was, in reality, the
bedrock on which much of Rome’s success as an imperial power was
founded. Rome was not just the destroyer of Carthage but also the
inheritor of a politically, economically and culturally joined-up world
which was Carthage’s greatest achievement. The Romans were always ready,
although sometimes grudgingly so, to recognise their debt to the
Greeks. However, these had tended to be in cultural fields such as
philosophy, art and history that the Romans did not wish, or did not
have the confidence, to claim as their own. In fact the creation of what
we know as the classical world was founded on the recognition of the
complementary nature of Greek and Roman talents. Greek innovation met
Roman dynamism. The existence of Carthage, a dynamic Mediterranean power
which had also enjoyed a similar complementary relationship with the
Greek world, was an inconvenient truth that Rome was simply not willing
to acknowledge. Thus Carthage’s brutal end might have had as much to do
with Roman insecurity about creating its own unique legacy as any desire
for vengeance or plunder.
Richard Miles is a Newton Trust Lecturer in the
Faculty of Classics and Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at
Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He is the author of Carthage Must be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Mediterranean Civilisation (Allen Lane, 2010).
