The Carthaginians Read online

  AD 193–211

  Septimius Severus of Lepcis Magna reigns as first Roman emperor from Africa; honours memory of Hannibal

  SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE

  Archaeological evidence and ancient written works carry the story of the Carthaginians. Both are incomplete in many ways. Archaeological finds are limited because of costs, because the site of Carthage is again inhabited, and because what is found is not always easy to interpret. Inscriptions written in Punic, the Carthaginians’ language, may be only partly legible, and the meaning of the words is often debated. Nonetheless, archaeology has not just added to our knowledge of Carthaginian civilisation but has revolutionised it.

  The surviving written works are by Greeks and Romans, most of them living after the fall of Carthage and all of them interested mainly in her dealings and her cultural contrasts with their societies. Most ancient works do not survive complete either, so that a good deal which the ancient readers had available is now lost to us.

  IMPORTANT ANCIENT WRITERS

  Appian: an Alexandrian Greek and imperial bureaucrat of the later 2nd Century ad; wrote a history of Rome’s wars down to Julius Caesar’s time, treating each region in a separate book (that is, book-roll). His book Libyca narrates Rome’s campaigns in Africa against Carthage; Iberica, all their wars in Spain; Hannibalica, the campaigns of Hannibal in Italy. Some books are only partly preserved. Appian is very dependent on earlier histories; his chosen sources for the Punic Wars were often imaginative. His own composition methods, too, left him open to mistakes (sometimes silly ones). Even so, his histories of these conflicts offer useful information, above all on the Third Punic War where he mainly though not exclusively relies on Polybius.

  Cassius Dio: a Roman senator and consul who lived from about ad 163 to after 220, Bithynian by birth; of his Roman History in eighty books from Rome’s foundation to his own times only some books survive in full, as do Byzantine excerpts from his earlier books and a virtual précis by the Byzantine John Zonaras down to 146 bc, as well as for some later periods. Dio is an intelligent writer, focused on Rome but prepared to be fair to other sides, and important too because he seems to have consulted older Roman sources (of the 2nd–1st Centuries bc) along with Greek authors.

  Diodorus: a Sicilian of the later 1st Century bc; author of a Library of History in forty books, which he describes as a compressed world history taken from respected Greek predecessors. He seems to have compressed one at a time for lengthy stretches, though in places adding items from another source. This method can produce an uneven narrative, but Diodorus is still the main source for Greek Sicily’s history and its dealings with Carthage, as well as an important one for Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. His sources for Carthage’s wars in Sicily included Ephorus (4th Century) and Timaeus (early 3rd Century); on the Punic Wars he used Polybius. Of the original forty books, only 1–5 and 11–20 are now complete; excerpts, some long, others short, survive in Byzantine compilations.

  Justin: a Roman writer of late but unknown date (between the 2nd and 4th Centuries) who made a précis of the forty-four-book world history by Pompeius Trogus, a Roman from Gaul of Augustus’ time. The Philippic Histories avoid a detailed account of Rome and focus on the rest of the world from the Assyrians onwards, with short but notable treatments of Carthage’s foundation-story and history from the 6th to the early 3rd Centuries. Trogus’ sources are unnamed but no doubt included earlier extensive histories, especially Greek ones. Besides Justin’s précis, a set of contents lists (prologi) of Trogus’ books survives; at times these throw light on what Justin chose to include and exclude.

  Livy: Titus Livius of Patavium (59 bc–ad 17) devoted most of his life to a monumental history of Rome in 142 books, bringing it down to the middle of Augustus’ reign and consulting a broad range of older histories and other sources, Greek as well as Roman. Conscientious, relatively humane, and strongly patriotic, Livy found his history expanding almost unstoppably as he proceeded (he comments on this at the start of Book 31), while his own critical abilities stayed limited and his bias for Rome’s side of events often over-coloured his narrative. Books 1–10 survive (down to 293 bc), then 21–45 (from 218 to 167): his history of the Second Punic War (Books 21–30) is the longest, and most famous, full-length account, while in later books he gives much information about Hannibal’s later life. For this half-century he draws greatly on both Polybius and Roman authors – sometimes more or less paraphrasing Polybius while constantly adding details from elsewhere, which can have strange results. Unfortunately he is not that interested in Carthaginian affairs, though what he does narrate is valuable. Useful epitomes (Periochae) of nearly all the 142 books, of 4th-Century ad date, survive; most are brief, while those of Books 48–50 (the period of the Third Punic War) are much lengthier and offer important details.

  Nepos: Cornelius Nepos, a contemporary of Cicero, included short biographies of Hamilcar Barca and his son Hannibal among a set of Lives of Eminent Foreign Generals. They provide useful items along with some foolish errors; his sources probably included Hannibal’s literary Greek friends Silenus and Sosylus.

  Plutarch: Greek philosopher and biographer of Greek and Roman leaders, including several who had dealings with Carthage (Dion, Timoleon, Pyrrhus, Fabius Maximus, Marcellus). Plutarch used a range of sources, mostly sound ones, and is important whenever he touches on Carthaginian matters.

  Polyaenus: Greek writer of the 160s ad, author of eight books on military and naval Stratagems, largely on Greek commanders but with some examples from Carthaginian history. Unfortunately his methods are often careless and some of his anecdotes implausible.

  Polybius: historian (about 200–118 bc) of the Mediterranean world for the period 264 to 146 bc, a leading Greek of Megalopolis in the Peloponnese. During years spent as an increasingly respected political hostage at Rome (167–150), and becoming a close friend of the eminent Scipio Aemilianus and a temperate admirer of Rome’s political system, he composed his Histories in forty sizeable books, analytical and argumentative as well as narrative, to explain how the Romans could make themselves masters of the Mediterranean world in less than fifty-three years (219–167). He opens with a shorter narrative of events from 264, and later extended the work to end in 146 with the destruction of Carthage; he was an eyewitness of this tragedy. His sources, whom he often analyses and criticises, all wrote in Greek but included pro-Carthaginian and early Roman historians. Like others, Polybius is interested in Carthage largely where she interacted with the outside world, especially Rome. His ponderous style and complex treatment of issues caused only Books 1–5 to survive in full, but Byzantine compilers in the 10th Century made lengthy extracts from the rest, while shorter excerpts are quoted by ancient and Byzantine authors.

  Strabo: Greek scholar of Augustan times, whose seventeen-book Geography of the known world deals with places, peoples, cultures and even economics. Book 17 covers Africa, including a rather short section on Carthage.

  I

  THE PHOENICIANS IN THE WEST

  THE PHOENICIANS

  The Canaans (Kn’nm), as the ancient Phoenicians called themselves, had long been settled on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean before they made an impact on the west. The ancient Israelites called them Ponim, a name which in varying forms spread to the Greeks (as ‘Phoenices’) and the Romans (‘Poeni’), and so to modern times.1

  Trade became their forte, under the leadership of wealthy cities like Byblos – the earliest to achieve commercial riches – Arwad, Sidon and Tyre. Phoenicia lay conveniently at the crossroads of Near Eastern trade routes, both east–west and north–south, with tin and copper among their staples: tin originally from central Asia, copper from local mines and also from Cyprus, the ‘copper’ island par excellence. The cedar forests of Lebanon were another much-exploited resource, valued especially by timber-poor Egypt and important too to the peoples to Phoenicia’s north and east, notably the Hittites, Assyrians and Babylonians. Textiles and even glass manufactures for
med other elements in the Phoenicians’ trading versatility.

  With prosperity came outside pressures. New Kingdom Egypt sought to impose and hold control over Phoenicia’s coasts and cities, with varying success; the 14th-Century bc collection of documents from Amarna in Egypt show how the kings of Byblos could communicate with the pharaohs on near-equal terms. But Egypt’s weakness after 1200 BC, in the confusion of attacks by the mysterious ‘Sea Peoples’ and by Libyans overland from the west, along with her internal dissensions, allowed the Phoenicians a little time for complacency – as the long-suffering Egyptian envoy Wenamon, on another quest for timber around 1100, found in his dealings with Zakarbaal, king of Byblos.

  Disruption and change happened elsewhere too. Assyria suffered setbacks in Mesopotamia and beyond, the Hittite kingdom collapsed, and the great Syrian port and entrepôt Ugarit was destroyed. When Assyrian power revived in the 11th Century, the Phoenicians did not escape its attention: they became vassals of the eastern empire. Their dependence was limited and did not hamper their business fortunes, nor did migrations of (it seems) Sea Peoples from the central and western Mediterranean to the coast to Phoenicia’s south. This region, from then on called Philistia, with prosperous cities like Ascalon and Gaza, developed close ties with Phoenicia, while trade with Cyprus, Syria and other eastern lands recovered after a dip and increased in vigour during the 11th Century. Among Phoenician cities Byblos suffered eclipse, while Sidon and then Tyre became pre-eminent.

  SIDON AND TYRE

  Both were very old places already. The Tyrians remembered being first founded around 2750 BC (so they told Herodotus in the mid-5th Century, and archaeological finds support it). Nor had they invariably been friends: around 1340 we find the Sidonians blockading Tyre and her king writing to seek help – not very successfully – from Egypt. Sidonian tradition, represented on coins of the Hellenistic era, gave that city a more benign role as ‘foundress’ of Tyre: a garbled memory at best, but perhaps Sidon helped to repopulate her sister city soon after 1200 after other troubles. Sidon’s power had been based both on prosperous trade from her two harbours, and on broad mainland acres. With a city area of 145 acres (58 hectares) and substantial territory along the coast and stretching inland, she was Phoenicia personified for the writers of Old Testament books like Joshua and 1 Kings; and, as just noted, made life miserable at times for her sister city twenty-two miles to the south. From about 1000 bc on, however, Tyre outdid Sidon in energy and success, thanks at least in part to vigorous and extended commerce.

  Tyre, whose Phoenician name was Sor, stood on an island just off the coast (until Alexander the Great’s siege-mole joined it to the mainland). In its times of prosperity, its 130 acres housed an estimated thirty thousand inhabitants: Strabo, the geographer of Augustus’ era, notes that its multi-storeyed buildings were higher than the skyscrapers in Rome. It too acquired fairly sizeable mainland territory, important for foodstuffs and the city’s water supply, while the coastal waters yielded the shellfish that produced Tyre’s famous ‘purple’, in fact scarlet, dye. The first of its enterprising leaders known to history was the famous Hiram (king c. 971–939), recorded in the Bible as a comradely contemporary of Solomon of Jerusalem, whose great temple he supposedly contributed to building. In the same period, Tyre’s trading links with western lands blossomed.

  Phoenician trading ships had been visiting Greece and lands further west from very early, with the versatile, and sometimes devious, Phoenician merchant finding mention in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Of course they were not unique in these activities: Greek traders too ventured abroad, and are found for instance in Syria at the 9th-Century emporium now called Al Mina, and from the 8th Century on the island of Pithecusae (Ischia) near Naples. At these and other places, trading intercourse with both locals and Phoenicians was busy and mutually beneficial.

  The Phoenicians’ overseas commerce was celebrated and sometimes envied – as Old Testament diatribes against Tyrian wealth and pride vividly show. Merchants offered household goods and luxury items from their homeland and other eastern countries, and in return sought mainly raw materials: iron from the island of Elba, for instance; silver and lead from mainland Etruria and then from southern Spain. Ivory and tin were traded from beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the straits of Gibraltar) – tin coming from the ‘Cassiterides islands’, often but insecurely thought to be Cornwall or the Scillies, and ivory from the west coast of Africa. Trade exchanges necessarily were by barter: even after the Lydian kingdom in western Asia Minor devised coins around 600 as a way to pay for goods, it took some centuries for western states (Carthage included) to make use of them even in limited ways. Traders’ ships would arrive at a harbour or anchorage, interested locals – including local grandees or their agents – would gather, and business would be done. Landing sites, at the mouths of rivers or on small, easily defended peninsulas, became regular trading places and, later on, the sites of colonial settlements from Phoenicia.2

  SETTLEMENTS IN THE WEST

  It was only after some centuries that Phoenicians began to settle overseas. Various ancient traditions accorded very early dates – around 1100 – to Gades (today’s Cádiz), Lixus on the Atlantic coast of Mauretania (Morocco), and Utica on the Tunisian coast just north of Carthage, so that Carthage with her traditional date of 813 was seen as much the youngest of Tyre’s daughters. On the other hand, a century and a half of archaeological effort on the western Mediterranean’s many shores lends no support to tradition. The earliest levels of occupation, identified by finds of relatively datable Greek pottery imports, point to the 8th Century or, at most, late in the 9th. The driving force behind these foundations was Tyre.

  By the middle of the 8th Century Tyre, though under pressure from Assyria, had won hegemony over its old rival Sidon: thus King Ithobaal I (887–856, father of the notorious Jezebel) also styled himself ‘king of the Sidonians’. Tyrian commerce with lands overseas developed as well. The Cyprus copper trade was important enough for the city to establish a settlement-colony there during the 9th Century, apparently though not certainly at the already old town of Citium (Phoenician Kty; modern Larnaca) on the coast facing Phoenicia. An inscription of about 750 commemorates a governor or vice-regent (soken) of the ‘New City’: a name, or a term, used perhaps to denote the colony in contrast to an older community. It was a name with a future – in Phoenician, Qart-hadasht. Also worth noting is that the Phoenician name for Cyprus was Alashiya.

  With the evidence from archaeology indicating foundation-dates for all the western colonies no earlier than Citium’s, and many of them later, we have to infer that the Phoenicians led by Tyre chose to launch ambitious and consistent waves of colonisation during the later 9th and the 8th to 7th Centuries. They planted not tradingposts but urban settlements all across the southern, central and western Mediterranean coasts. Lixus, Gades and Utica were only three of many; in Spain the colonies also included Malaca, Sexi and Abdera on the Costa del Sol; the Sardinian creations included Bitia, Carales, Nora, Olbia, Sulcis and Tharros; in Sicily they founded the island town of Motya, and probably Panormus and Solous; and in North Africa, which they and the Greeks after them called Libya, the cities of Utica and Carthage at least, probably also Hippacra, Hadrumetum and, to the east, Lepcis Magna near today’s Tripoli (others too are possible). The migrations were so prolific that before very long some settlers in southern Spain moved on to establish themselves on the island of Ebusus, as archaeological finds indicate – although the Carthaginians claimed otherwise, as we shall see.

  The Tyrians had their own chronicles, which may have told a different story about the migrations. The later Jewish historian Josephus, citing Menander of Ephesus, a Greek researcher into Phoenician history, reports the chronicles dating Carthage to a hundred and fifty-five years after the accession of Hiram, thus around 816. These ‘annals of Tyre’ may also be the ultimate source for the Roman author Velleius’ date of about 1103 for Gades and Pliny the Elder’s of 1101 for Utica; and acco
rding to Pliny again, Lixus’ temple of ‘Hercules’, in other words the Phoenician god Melqart, was older than the famous one at Gades. If such dates do have a basis, they may record when such shrines were first established at trading-sites; Pliny’s date for Utica is actually that of its hallowed temple of ‘Apollo’, usually identified on Cypriot evidence as the god Reshef.

  Phoenicians were as punctiliously pious as Romans, and merchants arriving to trade in a new region would commonly set up a sacred place for their protecting deity to watch over them. This may then have been recorded. The oldest Phoenician stele, or inscribed stone, in Sardinia apparently commemorates such an honour to the Cypriot god Pumay, at Nora in the south-west; it dates to around 800 or soon after, and Nora indeed had the reputation of being Sardinia’s first Phoenician foundation.3

  The extent of this colonial expansion in about a century and a half indicates that, while the Tyrians led, other Phoenicians took part too. Over-population may have been a factor, as some ancient writers like Sallust and Justin thought. Another may have been a need for new, copious and less contested raw materials, in an era of conflict-driven great powers in Phoenicia’s neighbourhood – notably the resurgent Assyrians, whose kings exacted varied and always expensive tribute from the coastal cities. These stresses may in turn have created a third reason for some migrations overseas: domestic dissensions, blamed or credited by ancient writers as prompting the foundation both of Lepcis and, more famously, of Carthage.

  II

  CARTHAGE: FOUNDATION AND GROWTH

  TALES OF THE FOUNDATION

  When the first colonists from Tyre established themselves on the great headland overlooking the Gulf of Tunis, they named their ‘new city’ appropriately, Qart-hadasht. To the Greeks this was ‘Carchedon’ and to the Romans ‘Carthago’.