The Carthaginians Page 10

  From Cerne the expedition sailed further south – we are not told why – though it founded no more settlements. The Carthaginians now had some intriguing, not to mention mysterious, encounters that have formed the Periplus’ main fascination for modern readers. Inland from one anchorage, they heard and were terrified by drumbeats, flutes and cries at night. Over much of the trip they saw fires that lit up the night skies and sometimes came down to the shores, including at one point a blaze ‘larger than the rest, which seemed to reach the stars’. On one island just before turning back, they were assailed with stones by the natives but managed to capture three very hairy women ‘whom the interpreters [from Lixus] called “Gorillas”’. These fought back so fiercely that their captors killed them, flaying the bodies to take the skins to Carthage. Hanno now turned back because supplies were running short.

  Apart from the ‘Lixitae’ interpreters (the people of Lixus or their Berber neighbours), most of the Periplus’ names are not easily identifiable, not even those of the colonies. How far south the fleet sailed is regularly debated, and the vivid descriptions of sites and events beyond Cerne have been matched with quite a variety of African places and features. As the Periplus, like a ship’s log, records the number of sailing-days from one place to the next, identifications depend very much on estimating the fleet’s sailing speed, with estimates ranging from a cautious 40 kilometres a day to an optimistic 100 and above. As a result, some interpretations have Hanno sailing around all of west Africa as far as the Cameroon coast; others, in sharp contrast, only as far as the gulf of Agadir in southern Morocco and over to the nearby Canary Islands.

  The story of the voyage was placed in the temple of ‘Cronus’, probably Baal Hammon’s. In the 1st Century ad both Mela the Roman geographer and Pliny the Elder knew it, no doubt in its Greek version. Pliny mentions details which he must have found in another source conversant with Hanno’s Periplus: that the expedition started from Gades, and two skins of the women ‘Gorillas’ could be seen at Carthage in the temple of ‘Juno’ – meaning Tanit or (some think) Astarte – until the destruction of the city. He could be right about both, for the Periplus’ itinerary starts at the straits of Gibraltar, while conceivably the third skin may have been lost or destroyed before the time of his other source.

  The Periplus’ term ‘Gorillas’ (in Greek, Gorivlla~) has had a strange later life. Some readers supposed that Hanno captured hairy apes, not hairy humans: so a 19th-Century clergyman-scientist, Thomas Savage, applied the word to African apes (and in time it was used of the film hero King Kong). Its real form and sense is another disputed Periplus question. Is it a copyist’s error for ‘Gorgades’, the word that Pliny gives to the captive women’s tribe (an easy mistake using Greek letters), or for some other term; or a transcription into Greek of a supposed Punic term of disdain, ‘oril or horil, ‘the uncircumcised ones’? If so, Hanno’s interpreters must have meant the whole tribe, as Pliny assumes. Whatever the solution to this ancient puzzle, ‘gorilla’ is the most lasting, if misapplied, legacy of Hanno’s expedition.34

  In practice, what this famous voyage achieved seems limited. The colonies do not seem to have lasted into Roman times or to have left much trace on the ground. If the stated aim was to plant them, it is not obvious why the fleet sailed on for at least another twenty-seven days after the final one at Cerne. A marked feature in the later half of Periplus is the almost constant fright of the travellers at the strange sights and sounds they met, and this second half is sometimes suspected as being mere myth-inspired fiction – or cunning Carthaginian disinformation. If it is genuine, the aim of the further voyage may have been to seek out new places for trading, though plainly none was found.

  Even so, Hanno’s Periplus brings to life the seafaring skills and the (cautious) long-distance enterprise of Carthage in her heyday. His colonising expedition was at least equivalent in size to the Phocaeans’ migration to the west after 546. It dates probably to the century of Carthage’s widening control over North Africa’s coasts, her takeover of Ebusus, the known pacts with Etruria and Rome, and the interventions in Sardinia and Sicily. Nor is it the only travel episode that illustrates her maritime vigour.

  HIMILCO’S VOYAGE

  Another notable Atlantic expedition, reported by ancient writers though its own record does not survive, was led by one Himilco, who sailed to the north. Avienus, a 4th-Century ad writer whose partly-preserved poem Ora Maritima (‘the Sea Coast’) describes the shores of western lands, claims to summarise items from Himilco’s report, which he uses along with other long-past travel accounts. With sources so distant from his own time, and with an unreliable grasp of geography in any case, Avienus is a debatable witness to Himilco’s voyage, but at least it is also mentioned by Pliny, who writes that both Himilco and Hanno were sent forth from Carthage at the same time. Himilco’s voyage will then date between 500 and 450.

  Sailing north from the straits of Gibraltar, he visited the ‘Oestrymnides islands’ on a voyage that lasted four months from start to end. These islands are another well-debated geographical issue, thanks to Avienus’ poetically coloured and often vague language: the Oestrymnians had traded with the Tartessians, he avers, then with ‘the colonists of Carthage’ and other folk around the straits, and were two days’ sail from ‘Ierne’, which seems to be Ireland. The names ‘Oestrymnides’ and ‘Oestrymnis’ (the main island) are not found outside Avienus, but they are generally identified with the famous, if again much-debated, Cassiterides islands whose important trade in tin with southern Spain – cassiteros being the Greek for tin – is often mentioned by ancient writers.

  Herodotus in the later 5th Century was the earliest to mention the Cassiterides and their reputation as Greece’s source of tin, but was dubious about their existence. Later ages acquired fuller though sometimes fanciful details: Strabo describes the islanders in their black cloaks, ankle-length robes and belts circling their chests as ‘looking like the vengeance-goddesses in tragedies’; they lived a pastoral life and exchanged tin and lead from their mines for salt and manufactured goods from visiting merchants. The Cassiterides have been variously identified: as the Scilly Islands off Cornwall (or Cornwall itself, supposing that Himilco mistook it for an island), as Brittany or some of the islands off the western Breton coast, or – much more conservatively – as the extensively indented coast of Galicia in north-western Spain.

  The tin trade, as noted earlier, was a prized and vital part of Mediterranean commerce. Pliny, while mentioning Himilco, in a brief remark elsewhere calls the first traveller to the tin islands Midacritus, a man otherwise unknown but with a Greek name. Himilco may have been the first Carthaginian official – a sufete like Hanno, perhaps – to explore the route and write an account of his journey, though this is only a surmise. Once they gained a dominant position in western waters, the Carthaginians worked hard at keeping competitors at bay. Strabo tells a story of one later ship-captain who ran his vessel into shoals with the loss of all his crew, rather than let a Roman ship behind him find the route to the tin islands (the authorities at Carthage rewarded him handsomely).35

  But ancient seas were hard to patrol, and nothing suggests that Carthaginian screening in western waters was foolproof. Colaeus’ and the Phocaeans’ dealings with Tartessus have been mentioned above. Herodotus, though doubtful whether the Cassiterides – or even an ocean beyond Europe – really existed, does accept that tin, like amber, came ‘from the furthest region’ of the world but makes no mention of Carthaginian intermediaries. In this as in many other of their dealings with the rest of the Mediterranean world, the Carthaginians had a constant problem over matching their preferences with the realities.

  AN EXPANSIONIST POLICY?

  Carthage under Mazeus, Mago and their successors looks surprisingly active, indeed assertive. Her size, population and wealth were growing, thanks to busy trade and industry. The area of the city, by the end of the 6th Century or earlier, was over 50 hectares. The 6th-Century troubles of her mother
city perhaps brought her some extra advantages: Tyre suffered a thirteen-year siege from 585 to 572 by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, and then had to accept first Babylonian and, forty years later, Persian domination, events that did Tyrian prosperity little good. The silver trade from Tartessus seems to have contracted badly or even collapsed. The Carthaginians continued to honour Tyre as their mother city, sending yearly tithes to Melqart’s temple there, but at the same time they may have gained some of Tyre’s western customers. They may also have received Tyrian and Phoenician migrants seeking a less threatened life.

  Establishing her dominant influence over the North African coasts, and over Ebusus, overlapped in time with a similar development in the regions of Sardinia and Sicily that were commercially, agriculturally and culturally aligned with her interests. These activities stretched over many decades, from the middle or later 6th Century (the wars of Mazeus) to the early 5th. Justin’s account of them, selective though it is in places – highlighting the clash between Mazeus and his priestly son, ignoring local place-names, studiously vague about chronology – nonetheless transmits what seems a plausible outline, not just a triumphally fictitious one. In fact the wars as he tells them were far from uniform successes, for they included the failed attempt to jettison paying the Libyan tribute, the defeats in Sardinia suffered by Mazeus and Mago’s son Hasdrubal, and the practical stalemate against Acragas and Syracuse early in the 480s.

  This wide range of military and naval ventures should be seen in perspective, all the same. The armed forces employed were surely much smaller than those in Carthage’s later wars. Herodotus gives the Carthaginian and Etruscan fleets 60 penteconters each when fighting the Phocaeans: a penteconter had twenty-five oars on each side, each rowed by one oarsman, who it seems did any necessary hand-to-hand fighting as well. Carthage’s expeditionary force would therefore have totalled 3000 men or so, the majority of them oarsmen. It need not have been her entire naval capacity at the time, but clearly was a major effort. The days of hundreds of heavily-manned quinqueremes were far in the future.

  The armies campaigning in 6th-Century Sardinia or Sicily probably numbered a few thousand at most, even when supported by allied contingents and mercenaries. They may not always (or even often) have outnumbered their opponents – one reason why operations seem to have been episodic and sometimes adverse. It could also help explain the consternation aroused by the incursion of Dorieus and his followers, who cannot have been much more numerous. Allegedly Hamilcar’s great army in Sicily, only thirty years later, did comprise an enormous number of soldiers – three hundred thousand – not to mention 200 warships and 3000 transports, but these figures cannot be taken any more seriously than Herodotus’ colossal totals for the Persian forces invading Greece in the same year.

  It does not seem likely that these wide-ranging, overlapping and persistent ventures simply happened to coincide, or that their various stages each developed because of separate and ad hoc factors. Rather, a conscious plan looks likely: to capitalise on Carthage’s growing riches and resources by bringing important nearby territories under firmer influence and exploitation. The republic’s concern to clarify and regulate trade relationships is plain from the treaties with the Etruscans and Romans. Trade naturally figured in the dealings by Carthage and her Sicilian Phoenician allies, like Motya, with the island’s Greek cities, though whether economic tensions contributed to the wars of the 480s is not certain. According to Herodotus, Gelon of Syracuse in 480 did tell envoys from Greece how he had previously offered – in vain – to cooperate with Athens and other Greek states in ‘liberating the trading posts (emporia)’ which brought these states ‘great revenues and benefits’, only for them to refuse both his offer and also his appeal for military help against the Carthaginians. Were these trading posts in Sicily, or in a region of more direct interest to mainland Greece such as southern Italy? Gelon’s language suggests the latter, which would not make the emporia an issue between Carthage and Syracuse, but nothing else is known about them.

  The republic’s overseas drive for hegemony was partly due as well, perhaps, to political pressures among the Carthaginian élite. It was not just the Barcid generals of the 3rd Century who owed their status and effective dominance to military glory (and carefully distributed booty): so did Mago and then his descendants for a century and more, until their peers combined to dislodge them. Mazeus may have been the first grandee to exploit military success like this, perhaps indeed because it was the first time the resources – in men, ships, munitions and money – were available on the necessary scale. His overthrow cleared the way for the more judicious Mago, but military activities were still desirable, to support the continuing dominance of his family and faction. By 480 their supremacy was secure enough to survive the shock of the defeat at Himera.

  By 480, too, Carthage had become the centre of a geopolitical sphere of influence broader than anything previously seen in the western Mediterranean. The tales of Darius of Persia calling for her help in his expedition against Athens in 490, and of his son Xerxes coordinating with Carthage a grand strategy ten years later to attack the Greeks in both the east and the west simultaneously, may be legend but do recognise that now the republic had a status – and potential – which would not have been dreamt of at the end of the 7th Century. It put her on a level, economically, politically and militarily, with just a very few other contemporary powers in the Mediterranean.

  V

  TRADERS AND LANDOWNERS: CARTHAGINIAN SOCIETY

  TRADE AND TRADERS

  The Carthaginians are often visualised as a nation of seafaring traders, interested only in the bottom line. This supposed obsession is more a feature of modern stereotyping than ancient. True, ancient writers from Herodotus on often mention their trading behaviour, techniques and markets, as already shown. Greeks and Romans often and admiringly stressed Carthage’s wealth: the Syracusan leader Hermocrates in 415 described her (according to Thucydides) as richer than all other cities, and two hundred and sixty-five years later, in Polybius’ time, the universal view remained that she was the wealthiest city in the world. Cicero makes the entirely specious claim that it was Carthage’s passion for trade, and by implication money-making, that eventually brought her down. Nonetheless, ancient sources focus more often on other prime features of the city’s life – warfare and politics especially.36

  A great deal of Carthage’s wealth did come from the sea. As noted earlier, the lengthy expeditions of Hanno and Himilco seem basically intent on fostering contacts along Europe’s and Africa’s Atlantic coasts. The takeover of Ebusus and interventions in Sardinia and Sicily had added to her trade advantages, so there is no surprise in her resolve, obvious in the first treaty with Rome (of 509 or thereabouts) and again in the second (generally dated to 348: Chapter X), to regulate Roman trading contacts with her territories in both islands as well as in North Africa. It would be hard to imagine that her agreements with other commercial states were very different, except perhaps ones made with sister Phoenician colonies that may possibly have given those places easier terms.

  From early times on, the usual Carthaginian merchant ships, like others in the Mediterranean, were of two types: a small craft known as a gaulos (thought to be a Phoenician word for ship), low in the water with a wide and rounded hull and pointed bow; and the hippos (Greek for horse, because of its horsehead prow), narrower and tapering at both bow and stern. In various forms and sizes, such ships and their descendants were the mainstay of the Carthaginian merchant marine down the centuries. It may have been in large merchantmen that Hanno’s expeditionary colonists sailed, with his 60 penteconters as escorts. The penteconter itself – the name means fifty-oared ship – was descended from fifty-oared war galleys of more ancient times, and remained the standard ship of Mediterranean warfare until around 500. It could also be used for transport, as for example the Phocaeans did on their migrations; though, as noted earlier, Hanno’s expedition would have needed many more than sixty if his coloni
sts went in penteconters too.

  Archaeological finds reveal imports to Carthage from all over the Mediterranean, even in early times as was shown above, and also installations for making the famous scarlet dye from the murex shellfish. Commerce in tin, iron, lead, silver and other metals continued, although these goods have left fewer physical traces. The remains of amphorae, pottery jars used for carrying wine, oil and grain, show continuing imports from Greece, notably Athens and especially prominent during the 5th and 4th Centuries, as well as increasing quantities from southern Italy and Campania, the Iberian peninsula, and later too from Rhodes. Diodorus records a thriving export of olives from Acragas in Sicily to Carthage in the later 5th Century: though he implies that, once olive cultivation became widespread in Libya, the exports fell off.

  The Carthaginians in turn exported North African fish, grain, oil (this in later times at least), murex dye and other products. In the city’s final centuries, after 300, Libyan wine too became an important export, or so suggest the wide-mouthed Punic amphorae (suitable for easy pouring) found in many places around the western Mediterranean – Massilia, Corsica and Rome among them – and even further east at Athens.