The Carthaginians Read online

  Carthage in her early centuries is hard to reconstruct in detail, because of developments in later times followed by her re-foundation under the Romans and by modern construction. The first settlement seems to have stretched eastward almost as far as the shore, as the sandy ground there has evidence of sites for the (pungent) preparation of dried murex shellfish to make the famous, expensive and coveted scarlet dye for clothing. On the southern side of the colony, south-east of Byrsa, are traces of archaic potteries, iron foundries and other metallurgical workshops. From the start, Carthage was more than merely a middleman-centre for acquiring goods from other sources and selling them on to buyers elsewhere. At some date, incidentally, her ironmasters developed the technique of adding a quantity of calcium to their furnaces to neutralise the sulphur in iron ore, a process which much improved the quality of their iron products (and was not recovered until the Bessemer process in the mid-19th Century).7

  Some recent discoveries, and excavations at a number of Phoenician settlements in southern Spain, indicate that the earliest city had a typical range of structures: temples and warehouses, shops and private dwellings – with the wealthiest and largest of these, each with its central courtyard, on Byrsa’s slopes – all linked by streets of pounded earth, most of them only a couple of metres wide although the wealthier Byrsa quarter enjoyed at least one about three times wider. Such streets can be seen at the site of Kerkouane, a small city near Cape Bon destroyed in the mid-3rd Century. The layout of the streets varied: on the flat ground, they formed a grid pattern even in early Carthage; on Byrsa’s slopes they radiated outwards down from the top while those crossing them followed the hill’s contours. Stone or brick walls protected Byrsa at least, for traces of them have been found too; stone walls for the entire city-circuit would come later. A town square or space no doubt existed then, just as one did later on a site further south, where people gathered for markets, political functions, ceremonies and announcements. Not until the 5th and 4th Centuries did further expansion change the urban landscape.

  On parts of the slopes and crests of Byrsa and the other hills they buried their dead in increasingly extensive cemeteries or necropoleis. These and other resting-places supply much of the material evidence for Carthaginian culture and commerce, for it was customary to entomb the deceased with offerings and mementoes to help them in the next world – jars or bowls with food and drink, figurines, lamps, rings, amulets and jewellery, some home-made and others imported. South of the settlement, close to some salty shore-lagoons, the colonists by 700 had established a special cemetery for infants’ cremated remains deposited in pottery jars: a place for which excavators have borrowed the Biblical name ‘tophet’ (Map 1A).

  Past the seaside lagoons and a little to the south of the ‘tophet’, the ancient shoreline passed around a sandy tongue of land partly closing the entrance to the lake of Tunis, then made a gentle curve northwards to form a natural roadstead where ships could anchor. It may not have been a wholly convenient anchorage for delivering goods in early times, due to the distance overland to the city and with the lagoons in between, but it was sheltered from the open sea, while barges and other boats could ferry at least some cargoes along the shore to and from the city. There was thus plenty of space for loading and unloading cargoes. It is possible that the low-lying area by this shoreline developed in the 7th and 6th Centuries into a ‘lower city’ – outside Carthage’s own walls – for the artisans and labourers who worked at the harbour, built Carthage’s merchant vessels and warships, and manned the potteries and foundries which have been found below Byrsa on the south.

  This lakeshore was not the only landing point in the city’s early centuries. The indented eastern shoreline, up to the steep slopes of Douimès and Borj-el-Jedid, allowed ships to anchor close to land or even to be beached in places. In the waters just offshore from the northern sector of the city are the broken remnants of a breakwater or mole, called ‘Roquefeuil’s Quadrilateral’ after its French discoverer, which at some stage in Carthage’s history was built to protect such an anchorage. These exposed waters all the same would be less appealing or safe as ships grew in size and so too did Carthage’s mercantile traffic. The bay of Ariana, as it then was, on the northern side of the isthmus could also receive some ships. But it was no nearer to the city, and wagons or pack-animals would have to climb over Byrsa, Junon and the other hills to get down to Carthage. As a result it seems always to have been less important for shipping and cargo.

  At the head of the lake of Tunis, fifteen kilometres from the open sea, stood the town of Tunes (the small ancestor of the modern metropolis), and on the lake’s southern shore the Libyan town of Maxula, supposedly the home of the king whose marriage demand forced Elissa to die. From there the coast trends east and then northeastwards, past more coastal heights, to become the mountainous and fertile peninsula of Cape Bon, imposingly visible from Carthage. The coast beyond this lake stretched north-westwards to Utica, then a seaport like all Phoenician colonies, while Libya’s principal river, the Bagradas – in Greek Macaras, today the Mejerda – met the gulf of Tunis between the two cities. The coastline has receded some distance since then to leave Utica’s site inland, thanks to silting, and the river has also changed its lower course more than once over the centuries. Not far north of Utica, the narrow eastward-pointing promontory of Rususmon (the cape of Eshmun, Apollo’s Promontory or sometimes the Promonturium Pulchri, ‘Fair One’s Cape’, to Greeks and Romans; today Ras Sidi Ali El Mekhi, or Cape Farina) formed the northern limit of the gulf of Tunis, the home waters of Carthage.

  Probably the Carthaginians from the start controlled the rest of the land on their own peninsula, for they needed a security zone and some ground where produce could be grown; and as just mentioned, the land outside the colony later developed into the semi-rural suburb called Megara. As noted earlier too, Justin reports them paying their Libyan neighbours a yearly fee for the site (not always willingly) until after 480. Disappointingly he does not say which Libyans or how large a fee, or whether this paid for territory outside the colony too. The last is likely enough: it would be virtually unknown in the ancient world for any town to possess nothing but the land inside its own walls.

  The Libyans who were their neighbours were part of the ethnic group today called Berbers, who dwelt along the coasts and uplands of North Africa from the region of modern Libya to the Atlantic. The high plateaux and long mountain valleys of this vast area, a virtual subcontinent north of the Sahara desert, supported semi-nomadic communities and small permanent settlements, often and perhaps regularly focused around dominant family groups or clans. The peoples in the far west came to be called Mauri; to those east of the Mauri – that is, occupying roughly the broad uplands of modern Algeria – the Greeks gave the name Nomades, or nomads, while the Romans called them Numidians. The communities in Carthage’s and the other Phoenician colonies’ hinterland were the easternmost of the Numidians, though Greek and Roman writers prefer to call them Libyans.

  The rulers of the countless North African communities are usually termed kings by the same writers (like Iarbas king of Maxula in the Elissa story), though many or most were kinglets at best. Not until much later did some larger kingdoms arise. From the Carthaginian, not to mention Greek and Roman, point of view these peoples were unsophisticated barbarians, but this did not prevent the Phoenician colonists in North Africa from treating them with careful respect. Much of the country inland from Carthage was very productive, as were parts of Numidia; the inhabitants – while themselves wary of the eastern immigrants – were receptive to many aspects of the settlers’ culture and ready, as Justin insists, to do business. One Numidian product came to be particularly valued: their small but tough and agile horses, and the warriors who rode them with superlative skill. Numidians would provide the prized cavalry of Carthaginian armies and make history under the leadership of generals like Hamilcar Barca and his son Hannibal.

  Some relations between the Phoenicians in North Afri
ca, Carthaginians included, and the local peoples grew still closer. Intermarriage was frequent enough for Justin to depict Elissa’s own followers as keen for her to marry her Libyan suitor. He implies, too, that the city soon grew powerful partly because locals came to live there. In turn Aristotle in the 4th Century noted (approvingly) the Carthaginians’ habit of easing population pressures in the city by sending out citizens to settle at inland centres: this no doubt furthered intermarriage. In later times too, the people of the other Phoenician colonies were sometimes called ‘Libyphoenicians’, a name which the Roman historian Livy, and the source he consulted, ascribed to their mixed descent. Diodorus in turn records that the Libyphoenicians had the right of intermarriage with Carthaginians.8

  Naturally there was intermarriage too with people from more distant countries and cities with which Carthage had contacts. The dedicator of a votive stele, of uncertain date, in the ‘tophet’ (the infants’ cemetery) gave his name as Bodmilqart son of Istanis, son of Ekys, son of Paco – Greek ancestors, or possibly Egyptian.9 Hamilcar the general at Himera in Sicily in 480 had a Sicilian mother, although this had no effect on his implacability towards the Sicilian Greeks. A sister of Hannibal’s and then a niece both married Numidian princes; then Sophoniba, daughter of a leading aristocrat, was married some years later to two kings of united Numidia in succession, Syphax and Masinissa. Meanwhile both Hannibal and his brother-in-law in the 220s took Spanish wives. And Hasdrubal, one of the last generals defending the city against Roman attack in 149, was a grandson on his mother’s side of Masinissa (and so a cousin of the famous Jugurtha, the Numidian king who fought the Romans a generation later). The Carthaginians, then, from quite early times were almost if not just as much North African and, more generally, western as they were Phoenician.

  By 750, the New City was doing business with her Phoenician homeland, Egypt and Greece, as well as with her North African neighbours. The steady growth of Phoenician settlements, as further colonies were set up elsewhere in North Africa, in Sicily, Malta, Sardinia, the southern coasts of Spain, and the Atlantic coast of Morocco, further promoted trade. Greek settlements in the central Mediterranean were spreading too, chiefly in Sicily – notably Syracuse, Acragas and Messana – and southern Italy, for instance Cumae just west of Naples, Naples itself, Rhegium and Tarentum. In the 8th and 7th Centuries both migrant movements, Phoenician and Greek, coexisted peaceably. Though the historian Thucydides later wrote that Phoenician traders in eastern Sicily withdrew to its western parts when Greek colonists arrived, no clashes are mentioned in these early centuries. In fact, apart from Sicily the two migrations kept largely to separate lands: there were no Phoenician colonies in south Italy, for instance, and no Greek ones in North Africa west of Cyrene, or in southern Spain west of Cape de la Nao near Cartagena.

  Carthage’s North African territories also expanded, though the early stages can be seen only dimly. The Cape Bon peninsula was an obvious area to reach for, given its closeness to the city and its fertile valleys. Just south of the cape, in the sea-cliffs near today’s village of El-Haouaria, sandstone quarries (now called the ‘Grottes Romaines’) were exploited from the mid-7th Century for building works at Carthage. Then sometime before 500, perhaps as early as the 7th Century again, a small town was founded on the coast nearby, about fifteen kilometres north of Kelibia. As its Punic name is unknown, it is called by its modern one, Kerkouane – the one purely Punic town to be excavated in modern times, since it was abandoned in the Roman invasion of 256–255 and never reoccupied. Carthage may have contributed to establishing the little town, which prospered on farming and fishing, and others nearby: notably Neapolis on the northern edge of the gulf of Hammamet, a place known by its Greek name which in fact means New City – in Punic, therefore, another Qart-hadasht.

  Effective Carthaginian control over the peninsula probably grew in stages as Phoenician and Carthaginian settlers grew in numbers and productivity. By the end of the 6th Century it seems to have been complete: for the text of Carthage’s treaty with the newly-formed Roman Republic, dated by the Greek historian Polybius to 509, bars Roman merchants from sailing down its western coast though allowing them to do business, under strict supervision, ‘in Libya’ and (it follows) at Carthage herself.

  Dominance over the interior of Libya was much slower to develop, but the process is even more obscure. Justin’s potted history of events reports that sometime during the 6th Century, the Carthaginians for some years cancelled their yearly stipend to ‘the Libyans’, only to be coerced eventually, through military action by their landlords, to pay the arrears and, presumably, the regular stipend from then on – this, even though the city was at that time furthering its influence over Sicily and Sardinia. Not till after 480, in his account, did they manage to cease payments. Who these Libyans were can only be surmised: but most likely they were an alliance of several peoples in Carthage’s nearer hinterland, since they were able after many years of conflict (Justin states) to enforce their claim. All this may in turn be relevant to the story of Carthage’s first known, and historically controversial, leader ‘Malchus’, as we shall see.

  Again, land surveys of the city’s immediate hinterland in Libya have found no obvious signs of a Carthaginian presence there until late in that century. As with so much archaeological investigation, the picture is far from complete. Nonetheless, Carthage during her first three to four hundred years may be comparable to medieval Venice, which acquired a maritime empire and Mediterranean-wide power long before it took control in the 15th Century of a large sector of its adjoining mainland.10

  III

  STATE AND GOVERNMENT

  CITIZENS AND ARISTOCRATS

  Carthage in recorded times was a republic: that is, a state with regularly elected officials accountable to their fellow citizens. This was a political structure that developed well after her foundation. As the example of Tyre shows, her Phoenician forebears were ruled by kings, monarchy being the standard governmental format of the Near and Middle East. It would be natural for the colonies of the Phoenician diaspora to begin in the same style, even if changes came later. In turn, throughout her history Carthage was dominated by a wealthy élite who can conveniently be called aristocrats. This was not a fixed or narrow group, all the same – even more than at Rome, membership of the aristocracy was flexible, open to talent and money, and keenly competed for.

  What made a Carthaginian a Carthaginian, socially and legally, is obscure. Presumably anyone who could plausibly trace his (or her) ancestry back to the founders counted. The later Roman poet Silius Italicus, in his lengthy epic on the Second Punic War, claims this pedigree for Hannibal – though in choosing Elissa-Dido’s father and brother as the general’s forebears and naming them Belus and Barca he is probably drawing on nothing more than a fanciful imagination. We shall see, though, that some Carthaginians down the ages did name several ancestors on inscriptions: obviously they took pride in their genealogy. Of course a mere claim to ancestry would hardly be enough. Citizenship gave rights and benefits as well as imposing duties, so that a legal basis was surely essential. While at Rome the citizen lists were maintained by the five-yearly censors, no official with this stated function is known at Carthage; but the republic had quite a range of magistrates and other administrators, to be introduced shortly, some of whom may well have had census-taking duties.

  More debatable is whether there was one Carthaginian citizenship or two. A limited level of citizenship perhaps applied to former slaves of citizen masters, if a number of inscriptions in Punic do refer to such people – for instance one Safot, ’š bd Milkyaton son of Yatonbaal son of Milkyaton, a phrase sometimes interpreted as ‘slave freed thanks to’ Milkyaton (but, on another interpretation, simply ‘slave of’ Milkyaton), and a Hannobaal or Hannibal who records himself as willingly re-entering the employ, or service, of a man named Esmunhalos. There seems a slight hint that both men owed a debt to their patrons – moral, legal, perhaps monetary too – rather as Roman freedmen d
id to their old masters even though they too were now Roman citizens.

  Another hint of a superior rank of citizen might be seen in the Greek text of a treaty between Hannibal (in Italy) and King Philip V of Macedon in 215, which in one clause uses a unique term, ‘the lord [or ruling] Carthaginians’ (kyrious Karchedonious). Since the Carthaginians are repeatedly mentioned elsewhere in the treaty without the epithet, however, it may simply be a diplomatically ceremonious usage; or perhaps, as has also been suggested, a copying mistake for Tyrious with the phrase meaning ‘the Carthaginians of (or from) Tyre’. Carthage’s bonds with her mother city were famously strong, and there were other cities called Qart-hadasht in the western Mediterranean: notably the one on the gulf of Hammamet usually known by the Greek version of its name, Neapolis, and the showpiece capital of Punic Spain (New Carthage to the Romans, and Cartagena today) which had recently been founded by Hannibal’s brother-in-law.

  A third item sometimes used to back the theory of full and lesser citizens comes from New Carthage. When it was captured by the Roman general Scipio in 209, Polybius reports, his ten thousand prisoners included its citizens and two thousand artisans. Scipio set the citizens and their families free, while promising the artisans that they would eventually be freed too, if they worked faithfully for the Roman war effort. They evidently were not citizens of New Carthage (or presumably of Carthage), but it does not follow that they were half-citizens. If not migrants from other Spanish communities who had come to work in the city, they were probably slaves owned by the citizens. Their case, therefore, does not support the idea that Carthage – any more than New Carthage – had a class of lesser or restricted citizens.11