The Carthaginians Read online

  As well as handling such produce, the city’s merchants were also active middlemen, acquiring goods from other producers and selling them on. A sizeable part of the cargoes set out on African beaches for the locals to inspect will have been of this sort, and it is worth noting that (as Herodotus tells it) the Carthaginian traders were paid in gold, not barter items. A 5th-Century shipwreck, just off the islet of Tagomago alongside Ibiza, was carrying a cargo probably of garum fish-sauce, in amphorae of a type made in the region of Gades and Tingi; while the ship was a western Phoenician type, perhaps even from Carthage. A small Carthaginian ship which sank in the harbour of Lilybaeum (modern Marsala) around the year 250 also carried garum along with wine and olives.37

  What a Carthaginian merchant arriving in a foreign town might have for sale is playfully suggested by the Roman playwright Plautus in Poenulus, ‘The Little Carthaginian’ (or more freely ‘Our Carthaginian Friend’), a comedy put on, it seems, not long after the Second Punic War. The ‘little Carthaginian’ is a rich, elderly merchant named Hanno, searching the Mediterranean for his long-lost daughters and just arrived in a small Greek seaport. For his own reasons he pretends at first to speak only Punic, which allows a self-appointed local interpreter named Milphio to mistranslate him as huckstering a variety of mostly cheap goods: ‘African mice’ for display at a festival (a joke for panthers?), soup ladles, water- or music-pipes, nuts, lard, spades and mattocks. This miscellany, which is spread over several lines, is plainly meant for humour since the audience knows that Hanno is on a very different mission: but Romans might well expect much this kind of cargo from Carthaginian ships.

  Hanno’s supposed Punic utterances not only mystified later copyists but modern scholars too until quite recently, the general verdict being that Plautus wrote invented gibberish. Now they are widely treated as genuine – the only specimens of Punic of any length in Greek or Roman literature. Translations of them vary because of the state of the text, but in any version they are unexciting: Hanno prays for help from the local gods, explains that he is seeking the hospitality of an old friend’s son who lives in the town, and identifies the young man’s house; he then answers Milphio’s questions in Punic until the false renditions provoke him into Latin. But his Punic remarks are lengthy enough to suggest that at least some members of his audience could understand him. With Carthaginian–Roman trade going back to the 6th Century or even earlier, this will be no surprise (not to mention that, by Plautus’ time, the first and second Punic wars had brought many Carthaginians to Italy as enslaved captives).38

  It is worth noting that an old street or district on Rome’s Esquiline Hill had the name Vicus Africus, ‘the African quarter’: perhaps it was where merchants from North Africa lodged in numbers sizeable enough to give the place its name. A community, small or substantial, of Carthaginians and other North Africans could be found at Rome and other important foreign centres at any time (save during wars), just as resident Greeks are glimpsed at Carthage in 396 and Italian merchants in 149. Syracuse in 398 had a large body of resident Carthaginians, with plentiful property to plunder when a new war broke out; so did other Sicilian Greek cities, Diodorus tells us (the Carthaginians, by contrast, seem to have left their resident Greeks alone).

  Milphio in Poenulus describes Hanno as a gugga, a joke (it seems) about the merchant’s colourful foreign clothing; a modern suggestion is that gugga was the Punic name for a purple-hued African bird. The widespread view that it was a word, perhaps derisive, for Carthaginian traders in general is less convincing, for it is not found anywhere else with this sense. Interestingly even so, a Punic-language inscription at Cirta in Numidia – today’s Constantine in Algeria – probably from after the destruction of Carthage and thus after Plautus’ lifetime, seems to use hgg‘ (‘the gugga’) for the profession of a man coincidentally called Hanno.

  Given the importance of trade, within and beyond Africa, to the Carthaginians throughout their history, and the general view that their republic was run by a merchant oligarchy, it is paradoxical that the only rich Carthaginian merchant whom we know in any detail is fictitious. One real merchant may be attested on a mid-4th-Century Greek inscription (now lost) from Thebes: he was ‘Nobas son of Axioubos’ – probably one Nubo or Nabal (both are rare but attested Carthaginian names), son of a Hasdrubal or Esibaal – who received honours from the Boeotian League of which Thebes was the dominant city. Possibly the men called Aris and Mago whose names – in Greek letters – are stamped on some wide-mouthed amphorae found at Carthage were merchants too; but just as possibly or more so, they were the amphora-makers or the landowners whose estates produced the wine or oil transported in the jars (as was common practice on Roman-era lamps, amphorae and other pottery items). It is surely safe to suppose that most (if not all) of the city’s leading men down the ages had links with commerce – directly or through kinsmen or merchant protégés – but this does remain a supposition.39

  LAND AND LANDOWNING

  As mentioned earlier, it was not till after 480, in Justin’s account, that the Carthaginians succeeded in cancelling rental payments to their Libyan neighbours. Instead, from then on they imposed control over much of their hinterland – and in a no doubt satisfying reversal of fortunes, went on to exact tribute from it. How the process unfolded is not known, but Carthage’s restraint over expansion overseas after the failure in 480 of Hamilcar’s ambitious expedition into Sicily offers a context. Unwilling or uninterested in further confrontation with the Sicilian Greeks, at any rate for the next seventy years, and maybe deciding that there were still opportunities to exploit in her own continent, she chose – not necessarily right after 480 – to confront the populous but politically disunited Libyans. By bringing them under Carthaginian hegemony and taxing them she must have added significantly to her financial and economic strength. It was probably during the same period that the North African coastlands, including the other old Phoenician colonies, came under a similar dominance, as noted earlier.

  While Carthage’s own city-territory (in Greek, her chora) remained a separate entity from the subject Libyan territories and the lands of her Libyphoenician allies, nothing banned Carthaginians from owning property in all three. The chora consisted of Carthage’s immediate environs, probably including Tunes, as well as the Cape Bon peninsula, but its precise limits are not known. Carthaginian citizens very likely owned most of it, apart from any areas directly owned by the state, but there were probably some other property-owners as well – residents from the sister colonies, some Libyans (from the very beginning, according to Justin), even foreigners like Greeks, Tyrians and Etruscans. As mentioned above, there was a Greek community at Carthage early in the 4th Century and no doubt at other times, while property-owning Carthaginians could be found in many Sicilian cities and maybe at Rome.

  Polybius, writing of the later 3rd Century, states that the chora supplied the Carthaginians’ ‘individual lifestyle needs’ while the tribute from Libya paid the expenses of the state. This should mean that the chora provided citizens with their grain, other food and other private goods in a period when the citizen population – male and female, city and chora – was probably between six and seven hundred thousand. Its produce may have maintained their slaves and ex-slaves too, for Polybius is probably not being pedantically exact in his phrasing.

  Hannibal in 195 owned an estate on the east coast in Byzacium, between Acholla and Thapsus, thus pretty certainly outside the chora and in the territory of one of these two Libyphoenician communities. Again in non-Carthaginian territory would be the land grants that Aristotle reports being given to citizens sent out into the Libyan countryside to ease population pressure in the city. He implies that the grants were generous, for they made the grantees ‘men of means’. In time, then, Libya was dotted with Carthaginian settlers and their farms and orchards – a continuing factor for major cultural, religious and social impacts.

  By Aristotle’s day, and probably from early on, the Carthaginians were distinguis
hed for their agricultural expertise. Diodorus, in his account of the Syracusan leader Agathocles’ invasion of North Africa in 310, writes a famous description of the marvellous countryside that the invaders found as they marched down the Cape Bon peninsula:

  The intervening country through which it was necessary for them to march was divided into gardens and plantations of every kind, since many streams of water were led in small channels and irrigated every part. There were also country houses one after another, constructed in luxurious fashion and covered in stucco, which gave evidence of the wealth of the people who possessed them. The farm buildings were filled with everything that was needful for enjoyment, seeing that the inhabitants in a long period of peace had stored up an abundant variety of products. Part of the land was planted with vines, and part yielded olives and was also planted thickly with other varieties of fruit-bearing trees. On each side herds of cattle and flocks of sheep pastured on the plain, and the neighbouring meadows were filled with grazing horses. In general there was a manifold prosperity in the region, since the leading Carthaginians had laid out there their private estates and with their wealth had beautified them for their enjoyment. (Diodorus 20.8.3–4)

  Diodorus’ narrative of this war in Africa reads as though based on a sound, maybe eyewitness source. It also chimes with Polybius’ statement about the productivity of the chora: for as we have seen, the Cape Bon peninsula had long been an important part of this. When the Romans invaded Punic North Africa in 256, they promptly found quantities of goods to loot in the rich countryside, including no fewer than twenty thousand persons to carry off as slaves. A century later in 153, envoys from Rome – among them the famous, irascible and suspicious Cato the Censor – noted the wealth of the countryside as well as the prosperity of the city. This is echoed by Polybius, who visited North Africa a few years after and stresses both the fertility of the land and how ‘the supply of horses, oxen, sheep, and goats in it is beyond anything to be found in any other part of the world’. Strabo rather exaggeratedly claims that even in 150 Carthage still controlled three hundred Libyan towns. Despite the damage done by invasions and local rebellions, Carthaginian and Libyan skills were always able to make the land flourish once more.40

  As mentioned earlier, archaeological finds suggest that Carthaginians moved out to live in the hinterland not much before the year 400: even within 50 kilometres of the city, recognisably Carthaginian sites are very few down to about the year 300, contrasting with plenty from the next two centuries. Whether this should mean that not many Carthaginians occupied Libyan properties before the final century and a half of the city’s existence still needs to be clarified. If correct, Aristotle’s report of regular allocations of land in Libya to citizens, good land at that, must be wrong, and we must wonder what made him imagine it. It may well be that earlier citizen settlers lived much like their Libyan neighbours, even if these were in practice their subjects or vassals. Carthaginian domination and exploitation of Libyans and Libya’s resources were well under way before 396, to judge by the great rebellion launched – unsuccessfully – by the Libyans in that year.

  The development of the countryside beyond the chora would be especially notable in its most fruitful areas: the lower Bagradas valley, the so-called ‘little Mesopotamia’ between this and the Catadas (modern Mellane) river to its east, and also (by the 4th Century) the uplands around the middle Bagradas and its tributaries the Siliana and the Muthul – regions of populous towns like Thugga, Uchi, Thubursicu and Bulla; not to mention the richest region of all, Byzacium. On the island of Meninx, modern Jerba, off the western coast of Emporia, a prosperous countryside with large and small villas existed by the late 3rd Century, apparently untroubled by Roman seaborne raids during the Second Punic War. Thanks to this agricultural prowess, Carthaginian merchants down the ages – and surely too those of smaller but important centres like Hippacra, Utica and Hadrumetum – had their well-stocked cargoes of grain and oil to take to customers abroad.

  Agriculture again was the theme of two of the few Carthaginian writers known to us, Hamilcar and Mago – both of them retired generals, according to Pliny and the 1st-Century ad agronomist Columella. When they lived is not known, though Hamilcar seems to have preceded Mago and both almost certainly lived after 400, possibly even after 300. Their works have not survived but Roman authors mention them with respect, especially Mago and his twenty-eight books on estate management, in effect a complete encyclopaedia of farming. Both writers seem to have drawn partly on Greek predecessors, but in turn they powerfully impressed their Greek and Roman readers and later agricultural authors: a striking feat indeed. When Carthage was destroyed in 146 and all the city’s libraries were passed on to pro-Roman North African rulers, the Roman senate ordered Mago’s work to be reserved for translation into Latin. Sixty years later, a condensed Greek version was brought out by a translator from Utica with the interestingly Roman-Greek name of Cassius Dionysius.

  Mago, and no doubt Hamilcar too, wrote for affluent landowners. Hamilcar remains only a name, but a number of passages from Mago and a few from Cassius are quoted or paraphrased by Roman authors (notably Pliny and Columella, as well as Cicero’s contemporary Varro). We therefore have welcome glimpses of how wealthy Carthaginians treated their estates.

  The beginning of Mago’s work was much quoted. An estate buyer, he stressed, should sell his house in the city lest he grow fonder of it than of his country property. In turn, someone especially fond of his town home had no need of a rural estate. Most Carthaginian landowners are not likely to have followed this advice literally (we know that Hannibal had a city house as well as the Byzacium estate), but Mago’s real aim was no doubt to emphasise the importance of intelligent and committed farm management. His variegated topics included how to select the best bullocks, site vineyards and prune vines, plant olives, and rear horses and mules. He also supported the less plausible but widespread ancient idea (later taken up poetically by Virgil) that bees could be produced from the carcase and blood of a slaughtered bullock.

  Worth noting, too, are some precepts quoted by Varro from Cassius Dionysius, who translated Mago. He recommended judicious treatment of estate slaves, particularly those chosen as supervisors. Slaves should be at least twenty-two years old and knowledgeable; supervisors and ordinary labourers must be given incentives to work well and feel loyalty to the estate and its owner; they should be chastised verbally rather than with blows; and the more alert and committed among them should be further rewarded, including encouraging them to marry fellow slaves and have sons. Such sound advice very probably came from Mago. Again we cannot say how far Carthaginians followed it in practice but, so far as they go, the precepts illustrate a sensibly enlightened attitude to slaves – one rather less forbidding than the strict and utilitarian slave regimen practised by Cato the Censor in 2nd-Century Rome.41

  WORKERS AND LABOURERS

  The potteries, foundries, dockyards and harbours at Carthage needed a sizeable working population. Some would be slaves and some others immigrants from the Libyan hinterland and from abroad, but many Carthaginian men and at least some women will have been breadwinners for their families. Maintaining, and at times extending, the amenities of a prospering city and catering to the needs and interests of its residents called for the normal broad range of occupations, from unskilled labourers such as dockworkers to goldsmiths, architects, doctors and teachers. Of their daily lives and needs not much is known, but the remains of houses excavated at Carthage and at the little Cape Bon town Kerkouane include small-roomed dwellings, some in multi-storeyed blocks at Carthage (in her later centuries), and shops opening onto the streets.

  Ordinary city people lived close together, as they did in Phoenician, Greek and Italian towns too. Craftsmen in different trades may well have set up their shops, and therefore homes, along one or more streets, just as Rome had the vicus Africus and streets noted for particular trades such as scythemakers, cobblers and booksellers. As noted above, the area south of
the walled city and beside the shore of the lake of Tunis seems to have been where the potters, ironworkers and dock labourers dwelt. There is as yet no archaeological evidence of dwelling-places in the sector, but the ‘New Gate’ inscription mentioned below strengthens the impression. In any case the homes of many of the very poor – Carthaginians and outsiders – must have been flimsy and perishable, leaving no traces.

  Votive stelae and other inscriptions in Punic, from Carthage and elsewhere, commemorate ordinary folk down the ages: for instance Abdeshmun the scribe, ‘Abdmilqart the tax-collector’ (ngš), Aris a maker of strigils (metal scrapers used in the bath), carpenters named Ariso and Baalyaton, Baalhanno the fisherman, Baalsamor and his son Abdosiri who were each ‘chief of the gate-keepers’, an interpreter named Baalyaton son of Mago, wheelmakers named Bomilcar and Himilco, Bostar the innkeeper (Bd‘štrt hlyn), a merchant Halosbaal son of Bostar son of Abdmilkot, a bow-maker named Hanno, and Mago the butcher (Mgn ). Another Mago, ‘son of Himilco son of Himilco’, was a chariot-maker. There were ‘the craftsmen who made the female statues for the temple of Mkl ’ (a little-known deity); goldsmiths – ‘the founders of gold objects’ – with their foundry; and at a higher social level, the seal-keeper Abdeshmun whose son Baaliyaton became a sufete, and Yehawallon or Yehawwielon a road-builder or engineer.

  Yehawallon figures in an inscription that is a rarity: a lengthy document in Punic found in the 1960s, attesting not a religious matter but a civic enterprise and dating from the 4th or 3rd Century. This was the building of an important street ‘leading to the New Gate’. Just where the gate was is not certain, but the inscription may state – experts’ interpretations of the Punic text vary – that it was in the southern wall. If so it would represent further development on that side of Carthage, which fits evidence for her urban growth from the 5th Century on. The inscription, on a block of black limestone, ascribes the project to ‘the people of Carthage in the year of the sufetes Safot and Adonibaal’ and ‘the time of the magistracy of Adonibaal’ and at least one other named magistrate, but the stone is damaged, ‘and their colleagues’. What Adonibaal’s office was is unclear, like so much else; were these men the heads (rbm) of the various pentarchies in that period? More interesting still is the range of workers involved in the project: tradesmen, porters and others ‘from the plain of the town’ (the area south of the city wall?), gold-smelters, furnace workers and, less certainly, ‘the weighers of small change’, the artisans ‘who make vessels’ (or ‘pots’), and ‘the makers of sandals’.