The Carthaginians Page 17
Illustration 18 Bronze mirror (back), profile of a goddess
another goddess, figures on well-made terracotta incense burners, each around 30 centimetres high, with coiffured hair topped by the incense bowl, while a beautifully designed head of Medusa in terracotta – her curling hair intertwined with snakes identifies her – with staring eyes and slightly parted lips, again fully Greek in style, was an offering in a shrine near the ‘tophet’ (Illustration 19). Just as elaborate, with mixed Ionic and Doric features, is the stele dedicated by Milkyaton the sufete described earlier, representing Kore or Demeter in her temple and dated to the 2nd Century – not long, therefore, before the fall of the city.
Illustration 19 Terracotta head of Medusa
Works of art (and architecture) in different styles, as well as works combining different traditions, coexisted easily throughout Carthage’s history. A stele set up around 250 in Hadrumetum’s ‘tophet’, and very well preserved, presents a full-frontal winged sphinx standing on a handsome Ionic column, with its dedicator’s inscription above and, over this, a gable-like top (recalling those of grand mausolea like Ataban’s at Thugga) decorated with a series of stylised palm fronds: an impressively executed combination of Egyptian, Greek and Carthaginian elements (Illustration 20). Another stele, probably 3rd-Century, shows the face and shoulders of a young man again entirely Greek in appearance – head turned to one side with a troubled or questioning expression, shoulders covered by a cloak with loose folds and a brooch (Illustration 21).
Illustration 20 Cippus from Hadrumetum
Illustration 21 Stele of a youth, from Hadrumetum
A small stone ossuary or box for a deceased person’s preserved bones, from the necropolis of Ste Monique on Borj-el-Jedid, has a lid sculpted as a full-length and three-dimensional portrait of a priest with curled hair and beard framing a strikingly lifelike face, its features rather like those traditionally given to Zeus (Illustration 22). Wearing a long robe with intricate folds and a long panel of cloth draped down from his left shoulder, he offers a blessing or prayer with his right hand and clasps an incense bowl in his left. Ossuaries, several of which have been found in necropoleis at Carthage, were common in the Near East including Judaea, less so in
Illustration 22 Ossuary of a priest from Ste Monique tomb, 4th–3rd Centuries
Greece or at Rome. Another from the same necropolis and of much the same era (the 4th or 3rd Century) also depicts a priest named Baalshillek, similarly robed and bearded, with raised right hand and vessel in his left, around whose figure the stone has been chiselled away to raise him above the rest of the lid. Although so much like the other sculpture in these details, Baalshillek’s figure is flat, the details incised into the surface and in a far plainer style, recalling Phoenician forms rather than Greek.
Two full-sized sarcophagi, recovered from the Ste Monique necropolis and dating to the later 4th Century, can complete these examples. One corresponds to the unnamed priest’s ossuary: an elderly bearded man with the same robe (including the ceremonial cloth panel draped down from the shoulder) and in the same stance. The other is one of the most remarkable pieces of sculpture found at Carthage. Again it shows a blend of influences: made of Pentelic marble (1.93 metres long and 48 centimetres deep), its gabled lid is carved as a beautiful priestess or goddess, standing upright like the priests (Illustration 12). She wears a veil which falls over the back of her head to her shoulders and is topped by a hawk-shaped crest – a symbol of the Egyptian goddess Isis – while around her neck is a broad Egyptian-style collar hiding the top of her robe. This in turn is a Greek peplos, gathered above the waist to let a fold fall over either hip, then reaching down to just above her sandal-shod toes. Below the waist, the peplos is sheathed in two great folded wings that touch the ground beside her feet: another Egyptian aspect, recalling both Isis and Horus. In her uplifted left hand the girl holds a scentbox or phial but, in contrast to the raised gesture of each priest’s empty right hand, her right hand wears a wrist bracelet and remains at her side clasping a dove.
The statue was brilliantly painted, although only traces survive. While incorporating so many Egyptian hieratic features, its presentation of the girl’s face, figure and robe is altogether Greek of the Hellenistic era, just as similar statues do in Ptolemaic Egypt of the same period. Again there is a sharp contrast in another Isis icon from Carthage (Illustration 23): this one a terracotta statuette of the 4th
Illustration 23 Another Isis effigy: terracotta statuette
or 3rd Century in much more classic Egyptian style, with long plaited hair falling to the shoulders, hands apparently clasped behind the back, and the body below the waist completely clasped by the deity’s feathered but non-naturalistic wings.63
Greek-style works of art, particularly if large, highly decorated and made of costly materials like marble or ivory, would be expensive to commission or even to buy in a market. Nor need they have appealed to every Carthaginian. Religious and even aesthetic traditions would also help to ensure that other long-established forms were continued too. The same range can be seen in the genre of tomb-razors unique to Carthage, Punic North Africa, Sardinia and Ebusus: copper or bronze pieces shaped like a hatchet-head with a projecting spur as the handle. Buried with the dead for ritual use in the afterlife, from about 500 on these were incised with pictures of a god of the next world, sometimes with Egyptian themes like Horus or a pharaoh figure, often with a Carthaginian god (especially Melqart), and from the 4th Century on often with Greek deities – not only Melqart’s equivalent Heracles, but Asclepius (Eshmun) and Hermes (perhaps Sakun) among others.
Carthaginian coins were not meant to be artworks, but often have impressive artistic quality. They were a relatively late development for the city, which like other Mediterranean cultures had normally used barter, exchange and weighed pieces of precious and semi-precious metals in trade. Late in the 5th Century, a time when coinage was in widespread use in Greek lands including Sicily, the Carthaginians and their Sicilian allies started to strike their own in the west of the island – very likely in preparation for the major offensives which they mounted between 409 and 405 and which needed large and expensive mercenary forces. The first issues were in silver and bronze, based on the tetradrachm (four-drachma coin) of Athens and its fractions. Then, during the first half of the next century, they also struck gold coins to the standard of the Greek gold stater (worth 20 drachmas), obviously in much less quantity, and ones of electrum – a blend of gold and silver.
The coins often though not always bear legends, for instance the name of the issuing city ( the Punic name of Panormus, or Qart-hadasht), sometimes also words like (mahanet, the army) or ‘m (ham mahanet, the people of the army), (mehashbim, the accountants, or paymasters), or b’ršt (which seems to mean ‘in the territories’). From the late 4th Century coins were struck at Carthage too, in gold and electrum, again for state payments – most are found in Sicily again – but along with small bronze coins for local use. Not many decades later a new silver standard was adopted, now for convenience called the shekel, which was slightly lighter than the stater. Larger values, two and three shekels, were also issued at times, as well as fractions of the shekel. This gave a considerable flexibility to the city’s monetary system in an age of growing diplomatic and military commitments.
The motifs on the coins were limited. A horse or a horse’s head, a palm tree, and the profile of a goddess or god account for most types, though of course each could have many variations: the horse may be standing still, galloping, or standing with its head turned back, for instance; some coins show only the forepart of the horse; sometimes behind it there is a palm tree, or above it a star or moon. The goddess almost invariably is Tanit – including on coins struck by Hannibal in Italy during the Second Punic War – usually wearing earrings and very often crowned with a cornstalk garland. Occasionally it is Astarte or, in another suggestion, Elissa-Dido in a distinctive Phrygian cap (a soft head-coveri
ng with long flaps at back and sides); or still more occasionally Isis. The god is normally Melqart, adorned with a lionskin helm that typifies his Greek equivalent Heracles. In the later 3rd Century a few other types appeared: occasionally a lion (Illustration 24c, d), and the Barcid generals in Spain struck some fine-quality coins with an elephant or a warship’s prow on the reverse as well as Melqart portraits without the lionskin but with a distinctive Herculean club, and with a war-elephant (Illustration 24i). Both striking and pathetic is a small number of 2nd-Century coins discovered only in 1994 – half-melted or worse, they are survivals of the destructive fires set by the Romans once they took the city in 146.64
In most cases and from the start, the artistic quality of the precious metal issues is good to excellent, the bronzes (cheaper in value and larger in quantity) much less so. The styles are virtually all Greek and largely under the influence of Sicilian Greek issues, especially Syracuse’s, but the deities and the types on the reverse are distinctively Carthaginian. The Carthaginians’ ability to adopt, adapt and develop what they wanted from other cultural worlds is no less evident in their coinage.
Illustration 24 A selection of Carthaginian coins from Sicily and North Africa:
(a) silver tetradrachm: obverse, front body of galloping horse, crowned by winged Victory, and corn-symbol, legend Qart-hadasht; reverse, palm-tree with (‘the army’): Sicily, early 4th Century, 17.1 grams
(b) silver tetradrachm: obv., Tanit or Kore with dolphins; rev., horse’s head with palm-tree, legend ‘m (‘the people of the army’): Sicily, late 4th Century, 16.8 gr.
(c) silver tetradrachm: obv., head of Elissa-Dido(?) with Phrygian cap; rev., lion with palm-tree and s‘m : Sicily, 4th Century, 17.05 gr.
(d) silver tetradrachm: obv., head of Elissa-Dido(?) with Phrygian cap; rev., lion and palm-tree, with legend s (‘of the people of the army’): Sicily, late 4th Century, 16.9 gr.
(e) gold tridrachm: obv., Tanit wearing necklace and earring; rev., standing horse; c. 260 bc, 12.4 gr.
(f) silver trishekel: obv., head of Tanit; rev., horse’s head: Carthage, c. 260 bc, 22.3 gr.
(g) silver six-shekel : obv., head of Tanit; rev., leaping horse: Carthage(?), c. 260 bc, 44.3 gr.
(h) billon: obv., head of Melqart in style of Hercules, with lionskin; rev., lion with Greek legend Libyon (‘of the Libyans’) below, and Punic letter m (mem) above: overstruck on a Carthaginian coin by the rebels in the Truceless War, 241–237 bc, 7.3 gr.
(i) silver 1.5 shekel: obv., head of Melqart in style of Hercules, with war-club; rev., war-elephant: Spain, before 218 bc, 10.8 gr.
(j) bronze: obv., head of Tanit; rev., standing horse: Carthage, early 2nd Century, 95.1 gr.
VIII
CARTHAGE IN AFRICA
POLITICS AND RIVALRIES: MAZEUS-‘MALCHUS’
The rich élite who ran Carthage’s affairs were pretty certainly not just a merchant oligarchy but a more complex blend. Merchants of course bought property, in Carthage and outside, with some of their profits: this was a reliably safe investment. Meanwhile some wealthy Carthaginians no doubt held most of their wealth in land, and their opportunities for acquiring more land would grow as the city’s control over Libya did. Mago the agronomist’s command, to sell your town house if you wished to be a serious estate owner, implies that such people did exist. It need not be doubted, all the same, that they would often invest in trading ventures.
Such families and more strongly mercantile ones surely had close relations (marriage included). Equally they must often have undergone changes in circumstances – some dying out, some deciding to give up the risks of overseas trading in favour of landowning, some the other way round. All the while, newly enriched men would be doing their best to become accepted members of the dominant élite in their turn, which meant above all gaining (and according to Aristotle often buying) public office and joining the adirim (the senate). These factors, competitive and cooperative, were permanent elements in Carthaginian politics and government. It would be unsafe, though, to imagine a sharp difference between ‘merchant’ and ‘landed’ families in society, and still more unsafe to suppose that Carthaginian politics and policies involved tensions between commercial and landed interests.
On the other hand, it can be cautiously inferred that most or all of Carthage’s dominant figures down the ages belonged primarily to landowning families. Quite notably, the affairs of the republic from the mid-5th to at least the early 2nd Century were very often directed by military men: from ‘Malchus’ and then Mago until Hannibal, himself the last in a long series of such rabim mahanet. Perhaps they were all from wealthy merchant families; but wealthy and prominent merchants did not become Carthage’s dominant figures. In spite of Carthage’s maritime reputation, none of her historical leaders was a naval commander, unless Hanno of Periplus fame counts as one (which is uncertain). Nor did her projection of power involve many sea battles: we know only of Alalia, and that was at least tactically a defeat. Much if not most of Carthage’s leadership in historical times consisted, then, of generals.
We have already met the charismatic ‘Malchus’, as moderns usually call him, who was both Carthage’s first recorded leader after Elissa and the first of these military men. His doings are told by Justin and by Orosius, the 5th-Century ad compiler of a Christianised world history, but ‘Malchus’ is not his proper name. The manuscripts have Mazeus, Maceus, or Maleus; in these a 17th-Century editor thought that he could recognise the Phoenician mlk, and so printed ‘Malchus’. But mlk applied to a person means king or ruler (Melqart, Mlqrt, literally means ‘king of the city’), and did not become a name until much later, even in the eastern Mediterranean. In any case it is never advisable to amend textual readings unless all the existing ones are unacceptable, which does not apply here. Just possibly the real name should be Mzl or something similar, for in Punic mzl means ‘good fortune’. For convenience, though, Mazeus – the commonest form in both sources – will do.65
In Justin’s telling, he warred successfully in Africa, then conquered part of Sicily – only to suffer a bloody defeat in Sardinia and be ordered into exile along with his surviving soldiers; Orosius’ much shorter account makes him suffer repeated defeats in Sicily as well as Sardinia. When a petition for pardon from his men to Carthage was rejected, the troops sailed with him to the city and laid siege to it, forcing the authorities to capitulate. Mazeus used his victory to put ten senators, his chief enemies, to death, but it was a brief supremacy: accused soon after of aiming at monarchy and of the crime of executing his own son, he was tried and himself put to death. Both writers are rather more interested in the clash between him and his son. While besieging Carthage, Mazeus was snubbed by his son Carthalo, the priest of ‘Hercules’ (thus Melqart): for, returning from Tyre after delivering there Melqart’s share of Mazeus’ Sicilian booty, Carthalo ignored his father’s summons and went into the city to fulfil his religious duties. On coming forth a few days later in priestly garb, he suffered first a stern lecture on filial duty from Mazeus and then public execution on a cross in his regalia, as a warning to others.
The story of Mazeus is about equally accepted and rejected by moderns. Justin’s rather loosely organised account has problematic features – Mazeus’ entire army sentenced to exile, and his surprisingly harsh treatment of his son for putting religious duties first – not to mention the question of whether Trogus found the episode in any reliable previous historian. The Carthaginians, as already noted, probably did have their own historical traditions. Trogus could have drawn on these, even if indirectly – for instance using a Carthaginian or pro-Carthaginian author writing in Greek – as the detail about the tithe-offering to Melqart of Tyre suggests (such offerings were made yearly). The clash between father and son is obviously rhetorically embroidered, especially Mazeus’ harangue to Carthalo, whereas the rest of the account is quite plain in style. If Carthaginian tradition did include Mazeus’ story, that of course does not prove it did happen, but equally does n
ot prove it to be fiction. Some other points suggest that an element of fact underlies it.
It was noted earlier that the period assigned to Mazeus’ activities – in Justin, two generations before the battle of Himera in 480; the reign of Cyrus the Great, according to Orosius – would be compatible with evidence for Carthage’s initial 6th-Century intervention in both Sicily and Sardinia. This was a time of tense relations, too, with the Libyans, when the city stopped its stipend to them for several years but was then forced to resume paying it, arrears included. As a tentative hypothesis, Mazeus’ successes against ‘the Africans’, as Justin calls them, marked the start of the Carthaginians’ refusal to pay, a stance which lasted some years – perhaps decades. With that feather in his cap he might well be reappointed general to further the city’s interests overseas.
It would be no surprise, in turn, if successes abroad strengthened his position – as his son’s priesthood of Melqart and his army’s devotion both suggest – and at the same time created jealous enemies. The attack on him which led to his armed return may not have been the first (for a comparison, there was more than one against Julius Caesar in Gaul before he staged his own military return in 49 bc), but once he suffered a severe defeat in Sardinia with losses heavy enough to weaken his army, his enemies could act effectively. If he and his rebellious troops then sailed to Carthage, they must have been overseas, most probably in Sardinia. The exile decree could have been, in practice, an order bidding them to stay there indefinitely.
None of this looks impossible to believe, even if Trogus or Justin coloured it up for impact. Nor need it be assumed that the disgraced army consisted solely, or even mostly, of Carthaginians. There would be a cadre of Carthaginian officers and maybe a citizen contingent, but even in the 6th Century the city may have been hiring mercenaries, Libyans among them, just as it was to do for Hamilcar’s expedition to Sicily some decades later. Despite the defeat, the survivors stayed loyal to their general: not just because of his charismatic leadership but because his enemies at Carthage made the mistake of tying the men’s fate to Mazeus’. Their armed return obviously took his opponents by surprise, but the political struggle was between aristocratic cliques manipulating a largely passive citizen body, as their quick capitulation and his ensuing fall confirm. Plainly Mazeus had no soldiers at hand to save him in the end, which again suggests that most of them had been non-citizens and that he, willingly or not, had paid them out and disbanded them.