The Carthaginians Read online

  The range of functions of the adirim was at least as broad as the Roman senate’s. They decided on war and peace, though the decision probably needed ratification by the assembly of citizens, as Diodorus mentions happening in 397. They handled foreign relations to the point of deciding on war and peace: for example rejecting the victorious invader Regulus’ harsh peace terms in 256, receiving Roman envoys in 218 and accepting their declaration of a Second Punic War, and conversely in 149 themselves declaring war in defiance of the Roman forces surrounding the city. In military affairs, we find the senate in 310 reprimanding (and putting in fear of their lives) the generals who had failed to prevent Agathocles’ Syracusan expedition from landing. After Hannibal’s victory at Cannae in 216, it authorised fresh forces to go to Sardinia and Spain, and reinforcements with sizeable funds for Hannibal. In 147 it issued (fruitless) criticisms of the savage treatment of Roman prisoners by Hasdrubal, the commanding general in the besieged city.

  Some domestic decisions are recorded too. In the mid-4th Century, in a fit of anti-Greek feeling, the adirim issued a decree (ultimately repealed) forbidding the study of that language. In 195 after Hannibal left Carthage to avoid victimisation, they were forced to promise to take whatever steps against him might be demanded by envoys just arrived from Rome. No doubt it was a senate decree (even if ratified by the assembly) that proceeded to confiscate his property, raze his house, and formally banish him.18

  Measures like these would be decreed on the sufetes’ proposal, as Aristotle indicates. There must have been sharp debates at times: for example, leading up to the decision in 256 to fight on – for the Carthaginians themselves had earlier asked for terms. Certainly there was some opposition to peace in 202, even after Hannibal lost the battle of Zama, forcing Hannibal himself to exert pressure on his fellow senators and on the citizen assembly too to accept Scipio’s terms. Nonetheless, when a powerful faction dominated the state, the sufetes’ proposals and the senate’s decisions naturally obeyed factional wishes, whatever arguments opponents might put. Livy’s and Appian’s pictures of the senate’s small anti-Barcid group speaking against the Barcids’ policies to no avail may be imaginative in detail, but illustrate fairly well what the situation must have been like.

  Livy once mentions a smaller senatorial body too. The peace embassy sent to Scipio Africanus in 203 consisted, he says, of thirty senators called ‘the more sacred council’, termed the dominant element in the senate. No such body appears under this name elsewhere, but now and again other delegations of thirty leading senators do: conceivably this ‘more sacred council’ again. One delegation persuaded the feuding generals Hamilcar and Hanno to cooperate against the Libyan rebels in 238; one in 202 – surely the same body as the year before, though Livy does not comment – was sent out to ask peace from Scipio after his victory over Hannibal; a third, according to Diodorus, was delegated to learn the invading Romans’ demands in 149. All the same, these seem rather demeaning, even if necessary, missions for the supposedly most powerful body in the republic’s most powerful institution. Greek writers, including Polybius and Diodorus, do not help clarity by mentioning at various times a Carthaginian gerousia (‘body of elders’), synkletos (‘summoned body’) and synedrion (‘sitting body’), without explaining the distinctions. All three terms are applied by Greeks to the Roman senate, which had no inner council. Efforts to treat synkletos or else gerousia in Carthaginian contexts as indicating the ‘more sacred council’, and the other two terms as referring to the adirim, have no firm evidence to rest on. No Punic inscription describes anyone as member of such an inner body, either.

  If the ‘more sacred council’ did exist, at least in the 3rd and 2nd Centuries, we could see it (given the absence of any specific details) as a largely honorific body of eminent senators – probably ex-sufetes – whose experience and high repute could be called on in difficult situations. They could also have exerted real though unofficial influence in normal affairs. If Livy’s term ‘more sacred’ has any specific validity, it may be that the members also held high-ranking priesthoods, conferring added solemnity on the council.

  THE MYSTERIOUS ‘PENTARCHIES’

  Another arm of government is mentioned, all too succinctly again, by Aristotle and no one else: the ‘pentarchies’ or five-man commissions. New members were co-opted by existing ones, members served without pay, and the commissions controlled ‘many important matters’, including judging cases at law. None of these features is described in any fuller detail. Nor is the philosopher very clear in explaining how (or why) commissioners had lengthier tenures of position than other officials: ‘they are in power after they have gone out of office and before they have actually entered upon it’. As it stands, this seems to make it pointless for them to have a stated term of office at all, and to imply that there might often be more than five members of a commission in practice.

  Carthaginian inscriptions make no mention of anyone belonging to a five-man commission, but do attest a board or commission of ten for sacred places and one of thirty supervising taxes. Were the pentarchies, or some of them, subdivisions of these? Also attested are officials called ‘treasurers’ or ‘accountants’ ( sounded as mehashbim), whose powers included penalising persons who failed to pay customs dues. If Aristotle is correct that the pentarchies handled many important matters and could try cases, either their tasks clashed with the work of these officials or – much likelier – the formed one or more of the pentarchies. Carthage’s institutions are so opaquely known that these interpretations are a reasonable possibility. Standard public tasks like taxes, sacred places and judicial affairs perhaps seemed to call for lengthier terms of administrative office (three to five years?) for greater continuity. Even so, Aristotle’s dictum about pentarchy members holding their positions both before and after they were pentarchy members remains a puzzle.19

  One official at Carthage is known almost entirely from Punic inscriptions: the rb or rab, meaning ‘chief’ or ‘head’. A hundred or so men are termed rab in the documents without accompanying description, implying an office different from the rb khnm (rab kohanim, chief of priests) and rb (rab mahanet, ‘head of the army’ or general). This rab seems to have been in charge of state finances, equivalent then to a treasurer. If so, this was the official whom Livy terms ‘quaestor’, using a Roman title again, who in 196 defied the newly-elected reforming sufete Hannibal until taught a sharp lesson. (At Gades in 206 we read of a quaestor, too, presumably that city’s rab.) He presumably had the as his subordinates, although the inscriptions mentioning these do not refer to him. An inscription mentioning one person, it seems, as rab ‘for the third time’ (rb šlš, approximately rab shelosi) suggests – along with the large number of rabim known – that it was a position with a time-limit. So does Livy’s report that the ‘quaestor’ defied Hannibal because he knew that, after holding office, he would automatically join the powerful and virtually impregnable ‘order of judges’ (on which more below). The office was probably annual, like a sufete’s.

  It must have given plenty of opportunities for holders to enrich themselves. Both Aristotle and Polybius tell us that Carthaginians in their day viewed giving bribes as normal in public life, including bribes for election votes. The philosopher comments, in a different context, that it was perfectly normal for Carthaginian officials to practise money-making activities (adding tartly ‘and no revolution has yet occurred’). Profiting from public revenues, which he also notices, was a natural extension (rather optimistically, he thinks that wealthy men like Carthaginian officials would be less tempted). In one known period at least, it had become so severe that it was affecting the republic’s ability to pay its way: Hannibal was elected sufete partly to deal with it – and his first confrontation was with the chief of finances.

  One more feature noted by Aristotle, disapprovingly, is that the same man could hold more than one office at the same time. A votive stele interestingly commemorates one Hanno, sufete and chief of priests (rb khnm, or rab
kohanim), son of Abdmilqart (Hamilcar) who again had been sufete and chief of priests. Of course the sufeteship was a one-year office, while the priesthood was permanent. Aristotle no doubt was thinking more of non-religious combinations, like being sufete and rab together, or even sufete and general. Though no clear evidence for sufete-rab combinations exists, it is possible that occasionally a sufete might indeed become a general too.20

  THE GENERALS

  At some moment in the city’s history a further position was created, that of general (rb , approximately pronounced rab mahanet; in Greek, strategos). Officially this innovation separated military duties from civil, a contrast with Rome where the consuls regularly and praetors sometimes had to carry out both. The Carthaginians perhaps initiated their generalship in the middle or later 6th Century, when they began sending military forces over to Sicily and Sardinia. Even if they did, it looks as though the office down to the early 4th Century could still, as suggested above, be taken on by a sufete should the situation demand it. That would explain examples mentioned earlier, such as Hamilcar in 480, Himilco in 396, and Mago as late as 383 – ‘kings’ appointed to commands in Sicily. As mentioned above too, Isocrates in an effusive paean to authoritarian rule matches Carthage and Sparta as two states ‘ruled oligarchically at home and monarchically at war’. This is not a sign that Carthage still had real kings active in affairs, for he also praises his contemporary the ruthless tyrant (in modern terms, dictator) of Syracuse, Dionysius I. But it may be a sign that her ‘kings’ – that is, sufetes – still led armies at least on important campaigns in his time.

  All the same, over these centuries there were probably plenty of military tasks not important or enticing enough for a sufete. These could be handled by men who held the generalship alone, whether or not they had been sufetes or later became sufetes. By Aristotle’s day (it is clear) a general was not normally a sufete at the same time. But generals too were elected, and the office was enough of a political prize for men to pay perfectly good bribes to obtain it. A century later, effective control of affairs rested with the elected generals of the Barcid family (Hannibal’s father and brother-in-law, and Hannibal himself), none of whom is recorded as being sufete along with being general. Instead they were able, it seems, to get kinsmen and supporters elected to sufeteships year after year, not to mention to other generalships as needed.

  A general did not serve for a fixed term, for obvious reasons. The appointment seems to have been for the length of a war, or at any rate until another general was chosen to take over command. Then again, more than one rab mahanet could be chosen for military operations: most obviously if land operations (in Sicily for instance) needed one commander and naval operations another, or for commitments in different regions. In North Africa itself, during the great revolt by Carthage’s mercenary troops and Libyan subjects from 241 to 237, two generals – Hamilcar Barca and his one-time friend, then rival, Hanno ‘the Great’ – held equal-ranking generalships, which caused friction. In an effort to improve collaboration, Hanno was replaced for a time by a more cooperative commander who, in practice if not in law, acted as Hamilcar’s subordinate.

  This is not the only evidence that, at times, one general might be appointed as deputy to another. Two Punic inscriptions have the term rb šny (vocalised approximately rab sheni), or an abbreviated hšn’, each of which seems to mean ‘second general’. They imply subordinate commanders and, although details are entirely lacking (save that the hšn’ was a Hasdrubal), such an arrangement is often reported in narratives of Carthage’s later wars. Thus in 397 Himilco, the general in Sicily, had an ‘admiral’ (nauarchos in Diodorus) named Mago leading his fleet, while a century and a half later, in 250, Adherbal in command there had a naval deputy, one Hannibal, whom Polybius terms a ‘trierarch’. Hamilcar Barca later appointed his son-in-law Hasdrubal ‘trierarch’ when operating in Spain in the 230s, even though Hasdrubal’s naval tasks were minor by all accounts: the equivalent term in Punic had perhaps become the normal one for a general’s immediate deputy, whatever his duties.21

  Certainly the practice of a supreme general with subordinates became the norm over the nearly four decades of Barcid dominance after 237. Polybius emphasises Hannibal’s direction of all military affairs during the Second Punic War, which at its height involved up to seven generals in different theatres. Hannibal commanded in Italy with another officer acting semi-independently under him; three generals – two of them his brothers Hasdrubal and Mago – operated in Spain against the invading Romans; a sixth commanded an expeditionary army in Sicily; and a seventh (apparently another Barcid kinsman, Bomilcar) led out the navy on several rather fruitless sorties. After peace with Rome in 201, with all warfare now effectively banned, what was done with the generals is unknown. Either they became civil (or ornamental) officials, or they lapsed altogether until the Carthaginians unwisely decided to fight Numidia half a century later. In their final war with Rome, they seem to have had two separate and equal generals again: one operating in the countryside, the other defending the besieged city (Chapter XII).

  NEMESIS OF GENERALS: THE COURT OF ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR

  The state was notoriously draconian in dealing with its defeated generals. In later times at least, the penalty for failure was crucifixion, as happened for instance to Hanno, the admiral beaten by the Romans in 241. We are told that fear of punishment was always in the mind of Carthaginian commanders, and we read of one or two who killed themselves to avoid it (the corpse of one such, Mago in 344 or 343, was itself crucified instead). The process of judging unsatisfactory military performance must originally have been carried out by the senate and sufetes (or possibly one of the pentarchies, but a five-man court for such serious indictments seems unlikely). A change, though, came in the 5th Century or early in the 4th, when a special tribunal was created for the purpose (Chapter VIII).

  This was the body which Aristotle calls the One Hundred and Four. He also calls it ‘the greatest authority’ at Carthage, with members chosen solely on merit: but does not say what it actually did apart from likening it to the five ephors at Sparta. The comparison looks excessive, for Sparta’s ephors not only supervised (and could prosecute) the Spartan kings but dealt, too, with large areas of administration both civil and military – areas which at Carthage were handled by the pentarchies, on Aristotle’s own evidence, or officials like the rab and the generals (on evidence from other sources, inscriptions included). But Justin reports a hundred-strong senatorial court being set up during Magonid times to scrutinise generals’ actions. This must be the same body. Thus the court of One Hundred and Four was the authority that convicted and executed delinquent generals. After a time its supervision may have widened to generals’ subordinates too. An officer was crucified in 264 for giving up the occupied city of Messana in Sicily without a fight, the same punishment that the court inflicted on unsatisfactory generals, and so perhaps a case of its now judging other military miscreants. What body had previously dealt with such officers we do not know – maybe one of the pentarchies. Aristotle’s comparison with the ephors would certainly be more understandable if, even in his day, the One Hundred and Four was beginning to encroach on other bodies’ functions.

  Why there were one hundred and four judges is not known; the figure has been doubted because Aristotle also writes simply of one hundred, as does Justin. One suggestion, if one hundred and four is correct (and ‘one hundred’ just a rounding-down), is that the two sufetes and two other officials (the rab and the rab kohanim?) could have been members ex officio. The ordinary judges were senators selected by the pentarchies, on unknown criteria save for the merit stated by Aristotle, and they served on the court for life.22

  Supposedly then it was the One Hundred and Four who kept the republic’s generals on the straight and narrow in wars, and for the same reason caused them too often to be over-cautious. Yet how impartial its judgements were may be wondered, especially when feelings ran high after a defeat or – worse – a lost war.
Generals, and often if not always their lieutenants, were senators themselves: this meant having friends and enemies among the adirim and participating in Carthage’s vigorous, at times embittered, politics. Such connections could be pivotal to the outcome of a prosecution whatever the merits of the case itself. Punishments or threats of punishment are rarely recorded. Crucifixion did await Hanno, the admiral whose defeat at the Aegates Islands in 241 forced Carthage to sue for peace, yet twenty years earlier a defeated general, another Hanno, not only survived (though heavily fined) but five years later was commanding a section of the navy. Hamilcar Barca, who had to negotiate the invidious peace terms with Rome in 241, was threatened with trial when he returned home, but nothing came of it. Nor was Hannibal prosecuted after the disaster of Zama.

  THE ASSEMBLY OF CITIZENS

  The citizen assembly was called simply ‘m (ham), ‘the people’. It most probably met in the city’s great marketplace, called the agora by Greeks. In later centuries this lay south-east of Byrsa and near the sea; earlier, before the city expanded in that direction, the original agora may have been on the low ground between Byrsa and the shore to its east.