The Carthaginians Read online

  The earliest possible mention of the ‘m as a political body is in Justin’s story of ‘Malchus’, thus after 550. Returning from abroad with his army to punish his ungrateful enemies, that general summoned ‘the people’ to explain his grievances, complain that his fellow-citizens had tolerated his enemies’ behaviour, but then grant them – the citizens – his magnanimous forgiveness. He then ‘restored the city to its laws’, meaning lawful government. If correct, this is a picture of a citizenry which at least was treated with a degree of respect. Whether restoring lawful government implied, among other things, restoring political functions to the ‘m is only a guess, but at some date the assembly gained the power to elect magistrates and – probably as a later development – to vote on policy decisions.

  Its normal share in affairs by Aristotle’s time involved voting on decisions passed by the senate, resolving a deadlock between the senate and one or both sufetes, and electing sufetes, generals, and other officials like the rab. As already noted, Aristotle shows that even some decisions agreed on by senate and sufetes were still put to the assembly. On such occasions the sufetes ‘do not merely let the people sit and listen to the decisions that have been taken by their rulers’ but allow free discussion (a concession unique to Carthage, he notes), and even then ‘the people have the sovereign decision’. This must mean that the assembly could reject the proposals, just as it decided the issue when there was a deadlock. Later on the philosopher remarks that Carthage was a ‘democratically ruled’ state; rather an exaggeration, but a passing acknowledgement that the assembly’s role was both important and, at times, decisive.

  These functions seem reasonably robust for a citizen assembly in the ancient world. It is therefore puzzling to read Polybius’ disapproving claim that in Hannibal’s day ‘the people’ (meaning the citizen body) had the greatest say. After all we still find the adirim making the major decisions then – even in his own account of events, such as going to war with Rome in 218 and discussing peace in 203. No doubt these would in turn be put before the ham for ratification, but that was not new. The best surmise must be that by 218 every decision of sufetes and senate, not just some as previously, was formally presented to the assembly, even if merely to be ratified. The dominance of the Barcid generals down to 201, based as much on popular support as on alliance with other leading men, probably gave greater visibility to the assembly, without thereby adding to its real power. This would hardly be a huge democratic advance, but Polybius is really seeking to stress how superior Rome’s ‘aristocratic’ political system was in those days, and he may well be pushing an over-artificial contrast.

  No definite information exists about how the assembly functioned. One hypothesis comes from a Latin inscription of ad 48 commemorating a local magnate at the Libyan country town of Thugga, who received an honorary sufeteship from the town’s senate and people ‘by the votes [or the assent] of all the gates (portae)’. These ‘gates’ at Thugga must have been a voting arrangement, perhaps denoting local clans or the residents of different sectors of the town. That the citizens at Carthage likewise voted in separate groups, each called a ‘gate’ (š‘r), is speculation all the same. Gates of the usual kind are mentioned on stelae or other documents – the New Gate inscription, for example – but never in connection with political or social life.23

  The citizen assembly perhaps gained its greater prominence under the trauma of the great revolt of 241–237 in Africa. Citizens had to enlist and fight in battle for Carthage’s survival, and they settled on Hamilcar Barca as their military and political leader during the revolt and after it. He was followed as general – in effect chief general, whether or not so titled – by his son-in-law Hasdrubal and then his eldest son Hannibal, each elected in turn by the citizen body. The Barcid faction’s dominance of affairs clearly included the adirim, the magistrates and even the One Hundred and Four, but it always faced some opposition, and the support of the assembly may well have been the Barcids’ ultimate strength.

  After the peace of 201, the Barcids lost their control and the republic came under the effective (though not official) sway of the court of One Hundred and Four. Their corrupt rule, as we shall see, then brought Hannibal back as sufete a few years later to end the scandals and help set the state back on its feet. For the remaining decades of Carthage’s life, politics and government were more vigorous than they had been in a century or more: a vitality which by a tragic irony contributed to the ultimately lethal hostility of her old enemy in Italy.

  IV

  THE CARTHAGINIAN ‘SEA EMPIRE’

  CARTHAGE AND NORTH AFRICA

  Carthage’s trade and influence developed vigorously in her first two or three centuries, although only their outlines are visible. She did continue to pay a tribute to her Libyan neighbours, as mentioned earlier on Justin’s evidence, and on trying to end this in the late 6th Century she was forced to back down (Chapter VIII). Along the coasts and across the western seas, on the other hand, her trade and influence made remarkable progress, especially after 600 (Map 3A).

  To begin with, it was natural for the city to plant or support settlements along the neighbouring North African coasts, as ports of call for trade and centres for Carthaginian citizens needing fresh opportunities. Some of the many other Phoenician foundations in the region may have had Carthaginian support – colonies like Hadrumetum, Acholla and perhaps Neapolis on the coasts south of the city in the region called Byzacium, Kerkouane near the tip of Cape Bon (which may in fact have been a purely Carthaginian foundation) and Hippacra to the north of Utica.

  Carthage likewise came to dominate the coasts far to the east of Byzacium. Oea and Sabratha were other notable Phoenician, or perhaps joint Phoenician and Carthaginian, colonies on the Gulf of Sirte, and beyond them in turn stood Lepcis. Lepcis, whose oldest archaeological remains are 7th-Century, was a Phoenician colony founded by political refugees, according to Sallust, the Roman historian of Julius Caesar’s time, who claims to have consulted Punic records. As noted above, the Carthaginians – with wide-ranging commercial interests by then – may have helped the project or at any rate supplied protection, because the area, named Emporia by the Greeks, was very fertile although bordered closely by the African desert. With their Phoenician and perhaps partly Carthaginian origins, Emporia’s cities unsurprisingly felt a common interest with their powerful older sister.

  By the late 6th Century, if not earlier, Carthage was asserting her dominance over these coasts. Thus around 515 she reacted against Greek colonists trying to settle a day’s journey east of Lepcis at a river called the Cinyps, under the leadership of Dorieus, brother of the king of Sparta. With Lepcis still relatively young and undeveloped, the danger of a vigorous stream of Greek migrants taking over the region was real. Significantly, Dorieus had men from the island of Thera as guides, and Thera had been the founder of Cyrene farther east around 630. The new settlement lasted only two to three years before the Carthaginians formed an alliance with the local Libyans, a people called the Macae, to expel its occupants. The Macae were evidently prepared to put up with Lepcis, but not with a Greek colony as well. A show of force may have been all that was needed, for no actual fighting apparently occurred before the Greeks left. All the same, Carthage would meet the indefatigable Dorieus again.

  It was perhaps not long after this that Carthage fixed a boundary with Cyrene. Founded in another rich coastland near Pharaonic Egypt, Cyrene quickly prospered, extending its control over its neighbourhood to the west. Given the distance between the two and the desolate nature of the terrain along the southerly reaches of the vast Gulf of Sirte, there would seem little point in territorial clashes, but Sallust had read of a long and inconclusive war over who owned what. His claim of such a war is as implausible, though, as his dramatic tale of how the two cities eventually agreed on a frontier much closer to Cyrenaean territory than Carthaginian, at a site named for two Carthaginian brothers both supposedly called Philaenus (a Greek name, not a Punic one). Supposedly the
y gave their lives to ensure that this became the border as the ‘Altars of the Philaeni’, on the coast, almost 700 kilometres east of Lepcis near the modern oil centre of Ra’s Lanuf. Polybius, the first writer to mention the place, gives the name as the ‘Altars of Philaenus’ (singular not plural) – it looks as though the original Carthaginian story of the border-fixing was touched up further by the time Sallust found it. The ‘altars’ perhaps were on sand dunes, for they had disappeared by the time of Strabo, but the site was remembered.24

  A similar expansion of influence took place in the western Mediterranean. A number of North African ports west of Hippacra came under Carthaginian control or were founded by her in the course of the 6th and 5th Centuries. Apparently none developed as towns until a later age, but places like Hippo Regius, Icosium, Chullu, Tipasa, Iol and Siga marked out the broadening scope of Carthage’s commerce and, inevitably, political influence. Further afield, according to the Greek historian Diodorus she planted a colony on the isle of Ebusus, near the eastern coast of Spain, in 654. Now Phoenician settlement certainly began there around then but, as noted earlier, pottery evidence shows that these settlers arrived from southern Spain. Diodorus’ claim probably goes back to Carthaginian tradition, recalling and distorting the fact (again shown by pottery remnants) that some generations later, around 525, the city did establish its authority over the small but prosperous island, perhaps with a fresh body of settlers. Ebusus became the first territory outside Africa to pass under Carthaginian dominance: a milestone in the city’s development into a Mediterranean great power.

  The Periplus of ‘Pseudo-Scylax’, a Greek sailing guide to the Mediterranean – 4th-Century bc in date but drawing on sources a hundred years older or more – remarks that the entire North African seaboard from the region of Lepcis to the straits of Gibraltar ‘all belongs to the Carthaginians’. It was not directly ruled by Carthage. The cities controlled their own territories, had their own laws and institutions (mostly similar to hers, at any rate as time passed), and supplied military and naval personnel, equipment and munitions when called on. They shared some legal rights with Carthaginians, for example of intermarriage. They also had to pay a regular tribute to Carthage, to judge from a report that one talent a day (equivalent to 6000 Greek drachmas or Roman denarii) came in from Lepcis early in the 2nd Century. This very large sum more likely represented the tribute from the whole of Emporia in that period – unless it is just a rash over-estimate.25

  The tribute system was probably in force at least as early as the 4th Century and could well go back still earlier. Like the tribute from subjects of the Athenian empire in the 5th Century, it may originally have been justified as contributions to Carthage’s protective military and naval costs, though it was kept going even when she was in no position to protect the tributaries (as after 201, when there was no longer a navy). How the payments were calculated, how comparable Lepcis’ or Emporia’s was to other regions’ dues, and whether these were always paid in money or could be given partly in kind (grain and other produce, for instance), is not known. We may suppose that the ‘accountants’ (the ) saw to all these matters, supervised by the rab. So too the tribute exacted from the Libyans of Carthage’s own hinterland, after they came under her rule.

  As mentioned earlier, it was not till after 480, according to Justin’s account, that the Carthaginians succeeded in cancelling rental payments to their native neighbours. But from the 5th Century on, they imposed control over much of their immediate hinterland – and in a no doubt satisfying reversal of fortunes, went on to exact tribute from the Libyans (Chapter VIII). How the process unfolded is not known, but Carthage’s restraint over expansion overseas, after the failure of Hamilcar’s ambitious expedition into Sicily in 480, 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. The 4th-Century Greek author Xenophon, in his reminiscences of Socrates, has his friend describe the Carthaginians as the rulers and the Libyans as the ruled in North Africa, no doubt the view that prevailed in Greece by the year 400. By bringing them under Carthaginian hegemony and taxing them, she must have added significantly to her financial and economic strength. By the year 396, as we shall see, this exploitative hegemony had been in place long enough to exasperate the Libyans into rebellion, unsuccessfully.

  Over time, trading relations developed with the African interior too, although we have only glimpses. Trade with the peoples of the Sahara cannot have been as continuous as along the coasts, given the huge distances and sparse populations, but it was valuable: ivory, precious stones like tourmalines and garnets, animals like lions and ostriches (for public shows and sometimes even as pets), and later on elephants for war. Carthaginian merchants may have made journeys into these regions to trade, but the only story recorded is a one-sentence item in the later Greek author Athenaeus, supposedly from a lost essay of Aristotle’s – how a Carthaginian named Mago crossed the desert three times living on dried meat and no liquids. Whether he was a merchant we are not told. Equally or more often, the peoples of the south probably brought their goods up to Numidia, Libya or Emporia to do business with locals and Carthaginians. Strabo mentions a south Mauretanian horseriding tribe, the Pharusii, sometimes travelling as far as Cirta, the capital of Numidia: this can only have been to exchange items of trade. Sabratha on the Emporia coast was, it seems, a Mediterranean destination for other traders coming from and going to the vast expanses of the African interior.26

  CARTHAGE AND THE ETRUSCANS

  Carthaginian trade with the outside world grew busily. Greek pottery finds that are datable to the second quarter of the 8th Century, both Pithecusan and Euboean types, illuminate her dealings with Greek producers: the potteryware will have brought wine, oil and other imports to the city. After around 700 the Etruscans too entered trading relations. At some date a harbour on the Etruscan coast, close to the city of Caere, became the landfall for visiting Carthaginian merchants. In Roman times it still had the name Punicum, the Latin term for ‘Phoenician’. A fragment of a late 6th-Century ivory tablet, found in a Ste Monique grave at Carthage, bears a statement in Etruscan, ‘I am a Punic man (puinel) from Carthage’: its owner had probably been a merchant accustomed to travelling to Etruria on business, and proud of his achievements.27

  Mutually beneficial commerce was not the only tie between Carthaginians and Etruscans. During the mid-6th Century they cooperated against some troublesome newcomers to north-western waters – Greek refugees from Phocaea in Asia Minor, fleeing from Persian conquest, who around 540 joined earlier settlers at Alalia on the east coast of Corsica. Phocaeans were well known in the west, for they had also founded Massilia in southern Gaul around 600 and had additionally developed a regular trade with south-west Spain beyond the straits of Gibraltar. The refugees, on the other hand, raided and plundered their neighbours by land and sea until Carthage joined forces with Caere and other Etruscan cities to confront them at sea, sometime around 535. Though the allies were defeated, the Phocaeans were so badly damaged that they – the refugee newcomers at any rate – thought it better to migrate to southern Italy.

  Otherwise Carthaginians and Etruscans got on well with Greeks. Quite apart from trading with the Greek world and responding favourably to Greek cultural forms from early on, Carthage and the Etruscans had no problem around 600 with the Phocaeans who founded Massilia in southern Gaul, a settlement which quickly prospered. Contacts initiated by the mariner Colaeus of Samos with the fabled kingdom of Tartessus in south-western Spain, around 640, were exploited by Phocaean merchants without interference, though equally without encouragement, from the Carthaginians. The Syracusan mother of ‘king’ Hamilcar, defeated at Himera in 480, has already been mentioned too. Greeks were happily settling in Etruscan cities and marrying locals: like the famou
s if (perhaps) legendary Demaratus the Corinthian at Tarquinii, whose half-Etruscan son Tarquinius later became king of Rome.

  The links between Carthage and Etruria are further and vividly illustrated by a trio of gold sheets found at Pyrgi, Caere’s chief port, from around the year 500. Inscribed in both Etruscan and Punic, they commemorate a shrine to Astarte – identified with the Etruscan goddess Uni, Rome’s Juno – which was piously dedicated by Thefarie Velianas or Veliiunas, king of Carthage’s old ally Caere. Two centuries later, Aristotle noted the trade and trading agreements between Carthaginians and Etruscans as a self-evident example of how such ties did not turn states into a single political entity even when ‘they have agreements about imports and covenants as to abstaining from dishonesty and treaties of alliance for mutual defence’. This well fits the treaty made with the newborn Roman Republic, also around 500.28

  FIRST TREATY WITH ROME

  Naturally the Etruscans were not the Carthaginians’ only contacts in Italy. Ceramic jars for transport and storage (amphorae) of early central Italian types have also been found at Carthage. But her most famous Italian connection is represented not so much by finds as by texts quoted in Greek translation by the historian Polybius. These are two treaties with Rome, the first negotiated – according to him – in the first year of the new Roman Republic (509), and the second generally dated to the mid-4th Century.

  Whether he is right about the first date is much debated – some scholars, instead, think it very close to the second – but his reference to the treaty’s archaic Latin, the discovery of the Pyrgi gold sheets, and improved knowledge of the economic importance of 6th-Century Rome strengthen the case for an early date. It declares friendship between Rome, Carthage and their allies under specific conditions. Romans or their allies were forbidden to sail beyond the ‘Fair Cape’, probably Cape Farina (though Cape Bon is another suggestion), unless driven by weather or enemies, and if so could not do business or stay longer than five days. Their merchants coming to ‘Libya or Sardinia’ were to trade only under supervision by an official, but payment for sales was guaranteed by the state; while a Roman coming to Sicily ‘which the Carthaginians govern’ would have equal rights with other comers. The Carthaginians promised not to harm various named communities in Latium (the Romans’ home region) subject to Rome; to hand over to her any other Latin city which they might capture; and not to establish themselves militarily in Latium. So far as we know, none of these events ever happened.29