The Carthaginians Page 9

  This treaty implies not only busy commerce between the Romans and Carthage’s now extensive areas of dominance (sometimes rather loosely termed her ‘empire’), but also a striking inequality between the signatories. The Carthaginians were not regulated by it in how they should do business in Roman territories or where they could sail, whereas Polybius inferred that the ban on passing the Fair Cape was to prevent Romans from gaining knowledge about the Emporia region (a not very persuasive suggestion). If Cape Farina was the ‘Fair Cape’, the rather more plausible aim would have been to keep Rome’s venturesome merchants from intruding into the far western Mediterranean. No ban was needed, meanwhile, against possible Roman descents on Carthaginian-ruled communities or coasts, for Rome was not a major sea-power even though she may have had, or might acquire, a few warships.

  Just as significant is that the agreement shows Carthage in control of coastal Libya (its interior was not relevant, nor as yet under her power), coastal Sardinia, and at least some of the Sicilian coasts too – though not of the entire island, despite its literal wording. As outlined above, the North African coastline from Lepcis (or from the Altars of the Philaeni) to the straits of Gibraltar had come under her dominance during the 6th Century. The very limited evidence that survives points to a similar inference for both south-western Sardinia and western Sicily.

  PROJECTION OF POWER: SARDINIA

  The Phoenician colonies in Sardinia, lying mostly in its south-western third where the broadest and most productive plains lie – but with another at Olbia on a bay in the far north-east – had grown prosperous in the two centuries since their foundation (Map 3B). The settlers collaborated and intermarried with the locals, as native Sardinian burials and goods at or near towns such as Sulcis, Monte Sirai and Tharros showed. Like Carthage and other Phoenician foundations, they traded with the Etruscans and Greeks, as well as the Phoenician homeland and Africa.

  Around the middle of the 6th Century this began to change. The dominant pottery in excavations becomes black-figure ware from Attica, and the volume of such imports, it seems, is smaller. Some inhabited sites shrank dramatically, like Monte Sirai and Sulcis, or were abandoned; at others, Phoenician, Punic and also Greek styles in items of art and grave-architecture became common. New settlers, now from North Africa, arrived. Nora and Carales grew in importance during the 5th Century. Carales, the dominant city in Sardinia’s most productive region, was perhaps the key base for administration.

  This evidence would fit Carthage’s implied (if exaggerated) claim in her treaty with Rome that she controlled the island, and Justin’s and the late Roman writer Orosius’ accounts of interventions there by the Carthaginian general commonly called ‘Malchus’ – whose real name was more likely Mazeus (or perhaps Mazel) – and his successors. With both authors compressing heavily what they found in earlier works, inconsistencies are no surprise: Justin has ‘Malchus’ victorious in Sicily but then worsted in Sardinia; in Orosius he is beaten both in Sicily and then, still more severely, in Sardinia (even though Orosius implies that Justin is his source). Still, both point to the same period of time for his activities: in Justin’s account they occur about two generations before the Carthaginian defeat at Himera in Sicily in 480, while Orosius dates Mazeus, as he calls him, to the time of Cyrus the Great of Persia who ruled from around 557 to 530.

  Mazeus’ role in Carthage’s domestic history will be looked at later (Chapter VIII). But if there is anything to these claims of 6th-Century wars in Sardinia, they may include dealings with the Phocaean refugees mentioned above. Herodotus, himself a Greek, reports these Greeks behaving like brigands and pirates over several years – harassing Corsican communities by land, no doubt, and Carthaginian and Etruscan shipping at sea (whether they harassed fellow Greeks too, Herodotus does not say). When finally forced into a sea battle against Carthaginian and Etruscan forces, they were victorious despite being outnumbered 120 ships to their own sixty. Yet the allies’ tactical loss was offset by strategic gain, for the badly damaged Phocaeans left for southern Italy (although some Greeks, perhaps the original colonists of Alalia, did stay on, according to archaeological finds). The Etruscans recovered security in their own waters, and the Carthaginians were free to intervene or continue intervening in Sardinia.

  If Mazeus was a real general, whose political troubles at home resulted from a severe defeat in Sardinia, he probably was not involved in the Alalia naval operation but was active either earlier or, a little more plausibly, afterwards. Alalia rid the region of the Phocaeans, but Sardinia was a harder challenge. Justin tells of the city’s next leaders, Mago and his two sons Hasdrubal and Hamilcar, continuing military operations there one after the other. Carthaginian intervention, as noted just now, was far from uniformly beneficial to the Phoenician cities; so it is possible enough that some had to be subdued by force, along with the neighbouring native Sardinians. It would not be surprising, then, that first Mazeus and later the Magonid generals had long-lasting difficulties – Hasdrubal, in fact, was fatally wounded. But eventually, Justin implies, Hamilcar the Magonid was victorious after many exertions (though later he perished in Sicily).30

  If the treaty with Rome is a guide, Carthage succeeded in imposing lasting control by about 510, although of course intermittent revolts may well have continued. Thus by the last decade of the 6th Century she was mistress of the most fertile regions of Sardinia. Even if she claimed control over all of it, in practice this did not extend over its vast mountainous interior, though of course trade with the peoples there continued and Sardinian warriors could be hired as mercenaries for other Carthaginian wars, such as Hamilcar’s in 480. As in North Africa, the Phoenician towns in the island remained selfgoverning but probably paid some form of tribute, as would the native Sardinian communities under Carthage’s dominance. Part of the island’s grain harvest may have been levied for tribute, for we find Hamilcar sending to Sardinia as well as Libya for grain supplies for his Sicilian expedition.

  PROJECTION OF POWER: SICILY

  Carthaginian hegemony in western Sicily seems to date to the later 6th Century too (Map 3C). The first treaty with Rome, at the century’s end, explicitly states that the Carthaginians ‘rule’ Sicily: a selfserving exaggeration, but in practice the clause covered the parts under Carthaginian hegemony. Unfortunately if unsurprisingly, the evidence for how it happened is literary and fragmented.

  Sicily’s native peoples, called Elymi, Sicani and Sicels by Greeks, had been joined in recent centuries by Phoenician and Greek settlers who effectively took over most of the coastlands. Greek settlers were particularly enterprising, founding colonies as far west as Selinus on the south-west coast and Himera less than 50 kilometres east of Panormus. According to Diodorus and the later travel author Pausanias, around 580 a Greek adventurer, Pentathlus of Cnidus, tried to found a colony still further west, only to be slain by ‘the Phoenicians and Segestans’ – Segesta was a vigorous Elymian city in the region, already much influenced by Greek culture – or else by the Segestans alone when he supported Selinus against them. ‘Phoenicians’ in this context would include the cities of Panormus, Solous and Motya; but not necessarily Carthage.

  The next reports, Justin’s and Orosius’, bring in Mazeus and his successors, with Mazeus fighting in Sicily – successfully or otherwise – before heading for Sardinia and defeat. Mago and then his two sons seem to have operated in Sicily too, though Justin does not say against whom. Sardinia may offer a clue: as mentioned above, the Phoenician colonies there, or some of them, seem to have suffered – not benefited – from Carthage’s intervention and may not have welcomed it. Her Sicilian wars, too, may have begun against her Phoenician sister cities to bring them under her hegemony. The wars were probably intermittent, with changing opponents and, it seems, varying fortunes, but Justin does present Mago and his second son Hamilcar – though not Hasdrubal, the elder one – as enjoying notable successes.

  Another episode complicates the picture. Around 510, Carthage’s old nuisance Dor
ieus put in another appearance, this time seeking to found a colony in western Sicily. His luck proved still worse than before – he was defeated and slain, with most of his followers, by ‘the Phoenicians and Segestans’ or simply the Segestans (Herodotus states both versions), or by the Carthaginians (thus Diodorus), or the Segestans again (in Pausanias’ brief account). Justin does not mention the episode but, when he writes of Carthage’s wars against the Sicilian Greeks in the early 480s, a confused half-memory of Dorieus may help explain why he names Leonidas of Sparta as the Greeks’ commander.

  With Carthage a power in western Sicily by 509 and fresh from the contretemps with Dorieus, it would be surprising if – this time – Herodotus’ ‘Phoenicians’ did not include the Carthaginians. According to Pausanias, indeed, the Spartan did found a colony named after his ancestor Hercules before he, his expedition and then the fledgling town met their end; but the mere prospect of such a foundation would have prompted the Carthaginians to act. More than one explanation is possible for the variations among our sources. Herodotus may in fact mean the Carthaginians, just as he later describes the expeditionary army of 480 as consisting of ‘Phoenicians’ (surely not literally), Libyans, Sardinians and others. Rather more likely, the word on both these occasions embraces both Carthaginians and Sicilian Phoenicians. A third and subtler possibility could be that the Carthaginians commissioned their vassals the local Phoenicians and the Segestans to confront Dorieus; to this might be added the extra possibility that it was Segestan soldiers who actually slew him in battle or claimed to have done so.31

  The next known period of war in Sicily, between 490 and 480, pitted Carthage against the two powerful Greek cities Acragas and Syracuse, under their rulers Theron and Gelon. It would lead on to the great expedition of 480, the republic’s first major military confrontation with Greek states. Even so these struggles seem to have followed on a more or less peaceful period, perhaps as long as two decades, after the defeat of Dorieus. It will have been a period when the Carthaginians confirmed and consolidated their hegemony over the west of Sicily, under Mago’s second son Hamilcar. His lengthy career as summed up by Justin – eleven ‘dictatorships’ (terms as sufete and general combined?), four ‘triumphs’ (the Roman term for a formal celebration of victory), his eventual death giving Carthage’s foes new heart – suggests a momentous leadership at home and abroad, and it need not have been exercised purely in warfare.

  Carthaginian Sicily was sometimes called the epikrateia, a Greek term for governed territory. It varied at times in extent and was to be challenged repeatedly by enemies in the 4th and 3rd Centuries; but it endured until the later years of the First Punic War with Rome, to end formally only in 241. Again there was no direct control from Carthage over Sicilian lands, except perhaps in dire emergencies like a Greek or Roman invasion. The Phoenician and native cities remained self-governing, but had to contribute forces and supplies for war if Carthage demanded them. These forces were probably not very large. Whenever Carthage launched major operations in the island, she sent over contingents from Africa and other territories – even as early as 480, as just noted. Whether the local communities paid tribute too, how much, and whether in money (which by 500 had been invented) or agricultural and other produce, is not known.

  CARTHAGE, SPAIN AND THE ATLANTIC

  Pottery remains from Spain may be the earliest of all those at Carthage, for they date to the first half of the 8th Century, even earlier (it seems) than those from Pithecusae and Euboea. Phoenician trade with southern Spain had begun centuries before, notably with the south-western realm along and inland from the Río Tinto on the Atlantic coast, and known to the Greeks as Tartessus, famous for its silver ore. Gades, founded about the same time as Carthage, came to be the main entrepôt for commerce between southern Spain and the rest of the Mediterranean, though the smaller Phoenician trading posts like Malaca and Abdera also took part (Map 3A). The Spanish communities under their princes traded silver, copper, lead, salt, grain and hides for wine, oil, textiles, jewellery and utensils from abroad. These increasingly included items made at Carthage or shipped by Carthaginians from other places, such as oil from Attica. Excavated finds of transport jars (amphorae) show that the wine and oil business was very large, while grandees’ tombs in the Río Tinto and river Guadalquivir regions were provided with luxury import items like jewellery, lamps, carved ivory, and devotional amulets to accompany the deceased.

  Perhaps from the beginning, Carthaginian merchants voyaged into the Atlantic not only to Gades (and perhaps Tartessus) but down the African coast at least as far as the old Phoenician settlements of Lixus and, further south, on the isle of Mogador. They perhaps ventured northwards, too, in search of the fabled tin of the Cassiterides islands, though this may not have happened until later, in the late 6th or the 5th Centuries, as we shall see.

  In contrast to Sardinia, Sicily and even Ebusus, Carthage did not intervene militarily in Spain. The only claim that she did is a sentence of Justin’s, in a very short account of pre-Roman Spain (mostly legendary) at the very end of his history. He reports that the Gaditanes, soon after their city’s foundation, sought help from Carthage against attacks by the native Spaniards, only for the Carthaginians to annex that region to their empire. That one recently-founded Phoenician colony could help – and annex – another, two thousand kilometres away across the seas, is of course a mere fancy, and there is no evidence, archaeological or literary, for any such venture even in the period when Carthage was establishing a hegemony over Sardinia and Sicily. The first treaty with Rome, at the end of the 6th Century, says nothing of Spain (unlike the second, a century and a half later). If the republic did send some help to Gades, it must have been much later and it still did not result in a Spanish epikrateia. Trade was naturally a different matter: they followed in the wake of their Phoenician forebears, and contacts with Phoenician Spain were constant and close. Gades, we shall see, may have been the assembly point for the famous Atlantic expedition recorded in the Periplus of Hanno, sometime around the year 500.32

  Carthage traded too with centres like Tingi and Lixus on Africa’s Atlantic coast, which have left some remains from Carthaginian times and would prosper down to the Roman era. Trading visits to other parts of Atlantic Morocco were regular, if in places a little bizarre from a Greek viewpoint. With some peoples, according to Herodotus’ Carthaginian informers, traders carried out successful deals in a paradoxical silence. Following time-honoured custom they would set their goods out on a deserted beach, return to their ships, and raise a smoke-signal. The local people would come and inspect the wares, leave a quantity of gold on the beach, and depart. The merchants in turn inspected the gold and, if they thought it fair value, took it and sailed away – but if not, would leave everything on the beach and return to shipboard to wait for the locals to add more gold. Traders and natives never met, but ‘neither wronged the other’ in these dealings. We may surmise that if the locals did not like the goods offered, they would not begin the bartering at all; but experienced merchants would seldom make such a mistake.33

  HANNO’S PERIPLUS

  Carthaginian seafaring on a large scale is vividly illustrated in what may be the most remarkable written document that we have by a Carthaginian. Surviving in a single medieval manuscript, a short but circumstantial Greek text called ‘The Periplus [coastal voyage] of Hanno basileus of the Carthaginians’ narrates a naval expedition down the Atlantic coast of North Africa. The work is generally (though not universally) agreed to be a translation, made sometime around 400 bc, of an authentic original. For all that we know, the translator too was a Carthaginian.

  The date of the expedition is not known, but is generally taken to be the later 6th or earlier 5th Century. The Greek title basileus, ‘king’, probably translates Punic ‘sufete’ as shown earlier. This Hanno cannot be more closely identified, but there is one possible clue to his date. Justin mentions a mid-5th-Century war between Carthage and the Mauri (of Mauretania, roughly today’s Morocco
). He gives no details, but if it did happen it may have been connected in some way with the expedition – for instance, the settlements founded by Hanno perhaps provoked hostility from the locals and had to be sent further help (via Gades?). Or conversely, old Phoenician settlements in Atlantic Mauretania, notably Lixus but also trading-posts like the one at Tangier, first had to be helped against the Mauri and then a decision followed to strengthen Carthaginian interests in the region, by sending Hanno out with new settlers. This might also account for why all his colonies seem to have lain along Mauretania’s Atlantic coast. Whether Hanno himself was a member of the then-dominant family of the Magonids – whose leaders in the mid-5th Century included a Hanno, son of Hamilcar the defeated general at Himera in Sicily in 480 – is not known but is a reasonable guess.

  Hanno, says the Periplus, was sent with ‘sixty penteconters, and men and women to the number of thirty thousand’ to found colonies beyond the straits of Gibraltar. Sixty penteconters would not have had room for anything like so many people, so it is reasonable to infer that their number is a literary conceit, or the translator misread the Punic figure, or else the penteconters were armed craft escorting transport ships. All the same the number of settlers must have been much smaller, conceivably just a tenth of the supposed total. The narrative records a colony being placed at ‘Thymiaterion’ and others further down the coast as far as a place called Cerne. ‘Thymiaterion’ was apparently the town later called Tingi, today Tangier, on the straits, where early tombs dating from around 700 already show Phoenician cultural influences. There is much argument over where the other colonies were placed, but they all seem to have lain along the Moroccan coast.