New set of travels, was like a different man. Although only 37 years old, he was plagued by sickness and prone to fits of depression, and the novel he had been working on for the last year was threatening to drive him mad. The publication of his most famous work
Two years before, the novel Madame Bovary, had brought him fame and wealth. But now he was attempting to write a piece of fiction quite unlike anything he had ever attempted. It would be a story from classical history that took place in an empire that had once flourished in the north of
Africa, had become the most powerful society in the ancient world, and then had vanished in its entirety more than 2,000 years ago, an empire that had been largely forgotten beside the more well-studied societies of Classical Greece and Rome. This was the empire of Carthage. He had spent the last months locked up
In his study like a hermit, surrounded by the work of ancient historians, trying to bring the lost city of Carthage back to life. But the writing just wouldn’t come, as he wrote to his friend, Ernest Feydeau. I’m done for, my friend, done for! The past month, I found it impossible to
Write. I can’t find a single word. Just think of what I’ve let myself in for, to resuscitate an entire civilization with nothing whatsoever to go on. Flaubert made the decision that something would have to change. He wrote of his intentions to his friend, Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie.
I absolutely must take a trip to Africa; so, toward the end of March, I’ll return to the land of dates. Once again, Iíll live on horseback and sleep under a tent. I need only to go to El Kef and explore the environs of Carthage in order to acquaint myself thoroughly with the
Landscapes I’ll be describing. When he arrived in the French colony of Tunisia, Flaubert jotted down hurried impressions in his notebooks as he explored the ruins of the ancient cities of Utica and Carthage, now all but buried beneath the modern Tunisian capital of Tunis. In the green wheat full of flowering
Poppies, the road climbs a little, sloping to the left, and arrives at a valley; flat plains in the middle, at a league’s distance, ruins like palm trees, and here and there, blocks of masonry. We are walking on the remains of a Roman road. As he walked among the ruined walls of
This ancient city, Flaubert felt himself connected to the ancient people he had been trying to write about, and saw ways of life that must have remained almost unchanged since the days of Carthage. In the South; the village of Sidi-bou-Said, the sea behind like a great block of indigo.
All Carthage now stretches out before me. A camel on a terrace, turning a well; flies are buzzing, weeds hang from the halls like chandeliers. A bird takes flight with the sound of a wing; another sings; very fine dust, silence, green marks on the walls, livid and thick water in some basins.
By the time he had finished his wanderings among the Carthaginian ruins of Tunisia, Flaubert had decided to completely rewrite the draft of his book, as he writes to Mademoiselle de Chantepie. Everything I had done on my novel has to be done over. I was on the wrong track entirely.
So, it turns out that a little over a year since I first had the idea for the book, and after working hard on it most of that time, I am still only at the beginning. Armed with his Tunisian notebooks, Flaubert finished his book four years later,
And it was published under the title of Salammbo. The book was an enormous success. It inspired plays and later even silent films, and it is credited with renewing public interest in a city and a culture that had once been considered a side note of history. As Flaubert walked those ruined walls
And sunken harbors, as he kicked his way through the dust and scree of the crumbling city ruins, he must have asked himself again and again; what did it feel like to walk the streets of that ancient city? What was it like to see Carthage at the height of its golden age,
And what would it have felt like to see this entire city, its streets and houses, its temples and theaters, its harbors and its homes, utterly destroyed and buried in dust and ash? My name’s Paul Cooper, and you’re listening to the Fall of Civilizations Podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of
The past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common? What led to their fall, and what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world?
In this episode, I want to tell one of the most dramatic stories to come down to us from the ancient world, the rise and fall of the empire of Carthage. I want to show how this city rose out of the Phoenician states of the Eastern Mediterranean, and set out on voyages of
Discovery and settlement that put them at the center of the ancient world. I want to describe the unique culture that flourished on the shores of North Africa, and I want to tell the story of how the city of Carthage was destroyed and its memory nearly wiped from the Earth.
The Mediterranean Sea is a vast body of salt water that lies between the continents of Europe and Africa. It’s by far the largest inland sea on the planet, stretching around 4,000 kilometers from end to end, and in the West, it’s connected to the Atlantic Ocean by a thin opening of the Straits
Of Gibraltar. The coastline of this sea is more than 46,000 kilometers long, or enough to wrap around the entire circumference of the planet, and this coastline has provided a home to countless cultures and civilizations over history. One of these cultures emerged on the easternmost corner of the Mediterranean
Coast, on a stony stretch of shore in what is today Lebanon, overlooked by towering mountains covered in cedar forest. Here, a series of city-states rose up more than 4,000 years ago that would give rise to a culture that would one day be called the Phoenicians. The largest of these cities were named
Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos. Pinched as they were between the waves to the west and the forested mountains to the east, the territories they ruled over were never large, but this relatively isolated geography also meant that they were somewhat protected from invaders. The people we now think of as Phoenician
Wouldn’t have ever used that word. Phoenician is a term invented later by their great rivals, the Greeks, and it’s unclear if these cities ever thought of themselves as a unified people. They had a common Phoenician language and were united by the worship of certain gods, among them, Baal Hammon,
A heroic god named Melqart, and his wife Astarte, but there’s very little in the historical record to suggest a common identity, architecture, or literature. Even the Greek word Phoenician has a somewhat mysterious origin. In the earliest texts such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the word Phoinike is used to
Describe a particular color of purple or crimson, and it is also used to describe a date palm, possibly due to the reddish color of its fruit when ripe. So, it’s possible that the word came to be used as a result of one of the Phoenicianís earliest and most successful industries.
The Phoenicians of Tyre and other cities were the first people to color their clothes with a particular kind of dye derived from the bodies of predatory sea snails known as the Murex, or rock snail. These snails produce their dye as a defense mechanism against predators, and depending on the species, can produce a
Vivid red or purple color quite unlike anything else available in the ancient world. From the moment these dyes were first used by Phoenicians around the 16th century BC, their colors became immediately sought after. But the process of producing these dyes was difficult and costly. It could take more than 50 kilograms of
These snails to make a single gram of dye, and so, these fabrics were extremely expensive. The color purple would soon become associated with enormous wealth, and as a consequence, with royalty. This color would be known as Tyrian Purple, after the Phoenician city of Tyre, and later, Imperial Purple. It would dye
The robes of the emperors of Assyria, Rome, and later, Byzantium. The first-century Roman writer, Pliny the Elder, writes about the effect this color had on anyone who saw it. For purple, the rods and axes of Rome clear a path, and it likewise marks the dignity of boyhood. It distinguishes
Senator from noble, and it is summoned to secure the favor of the gods. It illuminates every garment, and on the triumphal robe, it is blended with gold. But why the price? It’s possible then that the term Phoinike came to be used by the Greeks to describe these traders from the rocky
Coast of Lebanon as the makers of purple, or the purple people. The name of the mythical creature, the phoenix, an immortal bird with red feathers, also seems to derive from the same word. With their dye industry booming, the Phoenicians began to set out on ever longer voyages out into the
Mediterranean Sea, all in search of ever more of these priceless snails, and these longer voyages would require new developments in shipbuilding. Since as early as the third millennium BC, Phoenician sailors from the city of Byblos had developed ships with curved hulls perfectly suited for traveling on the waves, and they had developed
Techniques for waterproofing the hulls of their ships using bitumen or pitch. In the Hebrew Bible, the 6th century BC Book of Ezekiel contains one poetic description of a Phoenician ship. They made all your timbers of juniper from Senir. They took a cedar from Lebanon to make a mast for you.
Of oaks from Bashan they made your oars; of cypress wood from the coasts of Cyprus they made your deck, adorned with ivory. Fine embroidered linen from Egypt was your sail and served as your banner; your awnings were of blue and purple from the coasts of Elishah. The Phoenicians were also some of the
Earliest people to notice the pole star, or Polaris, a star that happens to align more or less perfectly with the rotational axis of the Earth. This means that while all other stars appear to rotate in the sky throughout the night as the Earth turns, the pole
Star remains more or less fixed in place. This made it exceptionally useful as a navigation tool, a fixed reference point in the sky. In Greek, this star would even come to be known as Phoinike, or the Phoenician Star. The Phoenicianís early voyages around the Mediterranean led to them encountering
Many other peoples, and among these, they began to cultivate a reputation as uncompromising traders and shrewd businessmen, something that seems to have gained them some degree of unpopularity. Homer’s Odyssey, probably written down in the 7th or 8th Century BC from even more ancient oral traditions, describes the Phoenicians as cunning and untrustworthy
In contrast to the supposedly noble Greeks. Thither came Phoenicians, men famed for their ships, greedy knaves, bringing countless trinkets in their black ship. It seems the Phoenicians had become adept at metalworking, too. The following passage in Homer’s Odyssey describes an ornate bowl brought by traders from the Phoenician city of Sidon.
Then the son of Peleus set forth other prizes; a mixing bowl of silver, richly wrought; in beauty, far the goodliest in all the Earth, Sidonians, well skilled in deft handiwork, had watered cunningly, and men of the Phoenicians brought it over the murky deep, and landed it in harbor.
As a seafaring people, the Phoenicians had a clear preference for building their cities on narrow, easily-defended peninsulas, and where possible, on islands set just offshore. Their most influential city of Tyre was a perfect example, located on a small island just off the rocky coast. In the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Ezekiel
Gives us a sense of the trade that the people of Tyre drove with their surrounding neighbors. Tarshish did business with you because of your great wealth of goods. They exchanged silver, iron, tin, and lead for your merchandise. Greece, Tubal, and Meshek did business with you. They traded human beings and
Articles of bronze for your wares. Men of Beth Togarmah exchanged chariot horses, cavalry horses, and mules. Aram exchanged turquoise, purple fabric, embroidered work, fine linen, coral, and rubies. Judah and Israel traded with you; they exchanged wheat from Minnith, honey, olive oil, and balm. While the natural defenses of their
Geography had kept cities like Tyre independent for much of their history, this wasn’t to last forever. The first millennium BC was an age of iron and an age of empires, and soon the Phoenicians found themselves in a world of increasingly violent and aggressive neighbors. Perhaps the most terrifying of these was
The power of the Assyrian Empire. From its heartlands in what is today Iraq, the Assyrian war machine would periodically stretch its power right to the coast of the Mediterranean, and threatened to engulf the Phoenicians. One inscription from the palace of an Assyrian king gives just one example of
The typical fate of a city conquered by the Assyrians. That city I destroyed — I flung my soldiers like lightning upon them. I piled up heaps of heads in front of his great gate. Bands of captive soldiers I impaled on stakes on every side of his city.
His palm trees I cut down, and from the city of Amidi, I departed. The Phoenicians had every reason to be nervous. At the start of the 8th century BC, the Assyrian king Adad-Nirari III conquered the territory of Northern Syria, as he boasts in his royal palace inscriptions. Conquering from the Siluna mountain of
The Rising Sun and from the banks of the Euphrates, the country of Hatti, Amurra in its full extent, the land of Tyre, the land of Sidon, the land of Israel, the land of Edom, the land of Philistia; I made them submit to my feet, imposing upon them tribute.
The Assyrians were now breathing directly down the necks of the Phoenician cities of the coast, but as time went on, the Phoenicians were able to carve out a niche for themselves that ensured they were quite simply too useful for the Assyrians to destroy. The Mediterranean Sea had long been an
Insurmountable challenge to many of the region’s great powers. The Assyrians referred to it as Id-marrati, or the Bitter River, which they believed to flow around the whole Earth, while the Egyptians referred to it as Wadj-Wer, or the Great Green. These Empires were freshwater river cultures and navigated the waters of
Their rivers in flat-bottomed barges. For this reason, they had always remained wary of the rougher waters of the sea. Assyria relied heavily on many of the commodities brought into the region by Phoenician traders; incense, silver, and purple dye for their palaces, bronze and iron for their armies. So, Assyria offered the cities of
Tyre and Sidon something of a deal. They would be allowed a degree of independence so long as they ensured a constant flow of metals and other resources into Assyria, and so long as they acted as a kind of navy for hire, providing their ships and sailors to Assyria in times of war.
The Phoenicians had little choice but to accept, but there was one problem; the Assyrian demands for metal were truly staggering, and if they were going to be met, it would require a drastic expansion of the Phoenician trade network. At first, the Phoenicians set up simple trading posts anywhere they could find
Good supplies of metal. Archeology shows they set up trading communities in Cyprus to take advantage of its rich stores of copper, and in Sardinia, the Mediterranean’s second- -largest island, rich in copper, iron, silver, and lead. At these sites, local people usually did all the actual mining, while the
Phoenicians simply turned up to buy the goods and take them away by ship. From Cyprus and Sardinia, Phoenician sailors pushed on into the west of the Mediterranean and set up a small colony of Utica in North Africa, and even reached southern Spain, where they found that the mines practically overflowed with silver, iron,
And other metals. Archaeologists have found huge Phoenician furnaces in this region, designed for smelting metal ingots for transportation on an industrial scale, all to satisfy the demands of the fearsome Assyrian kings. Before long, the Phoenicians were sailing out through the Straits of Gibraltar, then known as the Pillars of Hercules,
And out into the Atlantic Ocean. They set up a colony at Lixus, on the western coast of Morocco, and pushed further down the coast to settle what is now the Moroccan port town of Essaouira, more than 4,000 kilometers from their homeland. To finance these expeditions, the Phoenicians developed innovative
Monetary systems that in some ways represented a form of ancient capitalism. Phoenician society was dominated by powerful trading firms usually run by a certain family, and they pioneered the use of interest-bearing loans for voyages, even developing Maritime insurance policies, which paid out if your ships were destroyed in a storm or
Plundered by pirates. But perhaps the greatest of their innovations was something that we use every day, and that is the alphabet. Up until that point, writing had been a cumbersome and difficult task. The cuneiform writing systems that had been developed by the Sumerians thousands of years before, and the
Hieroglyphics of the Egyptians, were both difficult to learn and relied on the services of a learned class of scribes who spent years of their lives learning them. But the Phoenician alphabet was a master class in simplicity. It had only 22 letters, and could be used to spell out words phonetically, leaving out any
Vowels. Quite ingeniously, the shapes of the letters also gave a clue as to how they were pronounced. Their letter B, for instance, was named Bet, which was the Phoenician word for house, and its symbol was drawn with a pointed roof. This simplicity drastically reduced the amount of time it took to learn, and
Meant that common traders and merchants may have had some ability to read and write, and to keep records essential for the complex business of buying and selling across the sea. The Phoenician alphabet was such a good idea that it was adopted almost wholesale by the Greeks, as the Greek historian Herodotus recounts.
These Phoenicians who came with Cadmus brought with them to Greece, among many other kinds of learning, the alphabet. As time went on, the sound and form of the letters were changed, and after being taught the letters by the Phoenicians, the Greeks, who were settled around them,
Used them with a few changes of form. With the addition of some letters for vowels, what resulted was the Greek alphabet, which means that the Phoenician writing system is the foundation of all Western alphabets used today. The earliest piece of Phoenician writing was found on an inscribed tablet known
As the Nora Stone, unearthed in Sardinia, apparently commemorating a Phoenician captain who may have died in conflict with the local people. He fought with the Sardinians at Tarshish, and he drove them out. Among the Sardinians, he is now at peace, and his army is at peace; Milkaton,
Son of Shubna, general of King Pummay. But for the most part, the Phoenicians seemed to have interacted with the people they met relatively peacefully, and most of all, profitably. Before long, the cities of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos found themselves at the far east of a sprawling trade network.
Keeping such a loose and disparate collection of colonies together was no easy task, but it seems that here, the Phoenician religion played a key role. The people of Tyre worshiped a heroic god known as Melqart, a warrior hero who the Greeks would later associate with Hercules. Temples to Melqart were set up at
Multiple Phoenician trading posts, and most had an olive tree, a symbol of the city of Tyre, growing in their central courtyard. The grandest of these temples was built at the furthest Phoenician colony from Tyre, then known as Gades, what is narrow the Spanish city of Cadiz. This colony sat on the Atlantic coast
Just outside the Straits of Gibraltar, but it made up for its extreme distance from Tyre with its immense opulence. At the center of the temple stood an olive tree, with its branches and leaves wrought out of solid gold, holding emerald fruits in its branches. Women were forbidden entry to the temple,
As were pigs, and the priests of Melqart went barefoot, wearing a band of Egyptian flax over their bare heads. The Greek geographer Strabo recounts the following description of the settlement of Gades. Now, these islands are this side of what are called the Pillars of Heracles. Gades, however, is outside the pillars. Here live
The men who fit out the most and largest merchant vessels, both for our sea and the outer sea. They say the Tyrians believe that the two capes which form the strait were the ends of the inhabited world. A great ceremony, known as the Egersis or Awakening, was conducted each year in
The temple of Gades. During this time, all foreigners were asked to leave the city, and a great effigy of the god Melqart was set afloat on the sea and burned. Even this temple was a crucial part of the Phoenician trading system. The institution worked to guarantee the quality of metal ingots produced in
Gades by giving them a special stamp, and acted as a guarantor between merchants entering into contracts, with punishments promised from Melqart himself if any dared to go back on their word. With Phoenician trade increasingly drifting westward, the center of their power would soon also shift in that
Direction to a place where they would finally be free of the overbearing empires constantly breathing down their necks. They would soon found a city on the shore of North Africa, right at the center of the Mediterranean world, a city that would become one of the largest and wealthiest on Earth.
That city would one day be known as Carthage. Like so many aspects of our modern understanding of the Phoenicians, the name Carthage is itself a distortion, filtered through the accounts of others. In Latin, the city was known as Carthago, while the Greeks called it Karkedon. But to its inhabitants, it was known as
Qart-Hadasht, or in Phoenician, the New City. Like many great cities of its time, Carthage soon developed its own founding myth. It begins with a princess of Tyre named Elissa or Elishaya. In the legend, the king of Tyre promises that upon his death, his kingdom would be split between
His two children, his daughter Elishaya, and his son Pygmalion. But when the old king dies, the treacherous brother Pygmalion refuses to accept the splitting of the kingdom and moves to seize everything for himself, even killing Elishaya’s husband to remove any potential rivals. Stricken with grief, Elishaya flees down
To the docks, along with a ragtag band of her royal guards and temple women, and there they set sail westwards and make for Africa. The Roman writer Justinus, drawing on an earlier Greek text, writes his rendition of this story, along with a cunning deception to slow down any greedy pursuers.
Elissa put the attendants, who was sent by the king to assist in her removal, on board some vessels in the early part of the evening, and sailing out into the deep, made them throw some loads of sand put up in sacks, as if it was money, into the sea.
This group of refugees sail along the coast of North Africa until eventually they set ashore near the Phoenician colony of Utica. They camp on a nearby hill known as Byrsa, and the king who rules there, a man named Iarbus, takes pity on them, but not too much pity.
He offers to sell them a plot of land on the hill no bigger than an ox hide. But Elishaya is cunning; she cuts the ox hide into thin strips, lining them up to enclose the entire hill, a much larger area of land than the miserly king had intended.
Bound by his word, Iarbus has no choice but to give them the land he promised, and so, the city of Carthage is born. Justinus recounts the city’s early flourishing. Carthage was founded, an annual tribute being fixed for the ground which it was to occupy. At the commencement of digging
The foundations, an ox’s head was found, which was an omen that the city would be wealthy, indeed, but laborious and always enslaved. It was therefore removed to another place, where the head of a horse was found, which, indicating that the people would be warlike and powerful, portended an auspicious sight.
In a short time, as the surrounding people came together at the report, the inhabitants became numerous, and the city itself extensive. From the hilltop of Byrsa, the city grows and grows, soon eclipsing King Iarbus’ town of Utica, which makes him understandably jealous. He demands that Elishaya marry him so that he can
Absorb her flourishing town and everything she owns into his kingdom. If she refuses, he will burn Carthage to the ground. Faced with the choice of this capitulation or the destruction of her new city, Elishaya builds a great pyre and climbs onto it, saying that she must indeed go to her husband, meaning not
Iarbus, but the man her brother had killed on the other side of the sea, waiting for her in the afterlife. This tragic but noble self-sacrifice has proven irresistible to generations of poets, and the Roman poet Virgil gives one rendition of this scene. When the pyre of cut pine and oak was raised high
In an innermost court open to the sky, the queen hung the place with garlands, and wreathed it with funeral foliage. She laid his sword and clothes and picture on the bed. She lingered a while, in tears and thought, then cast herself on the bed and spoke her last words; ìAccept this soul,
And loose me from my sorrows.î In honor of Elishaya’s sacrifice, her people gave her the title of Dido, meaning female warrior or heroine, and this is the name by which she would be known to later Roman writers. This Baroque tale of love and tragedy has all the hallmarks of ancient
Literature, and we can’t assume that it bears any relationship to what actually happened. Some details of the tale do accord with what archeology tells us, that the Carthaginian Phoenicians drew their origins back to the city of Tyre, and that the city was founded close to the older settlement of Utica, which it soon
Eclipsed in size. But perhaps more important than any of this is the sense that this founding myth might give us of the way the Carthaginians thought of themselves and their city’s place in the world, as a city of survivors who had found refuge here on the North African coast, a city
Of sailors and adventurers. They were resourceful and drove a hard bargain. They were clever, fond of outwitting their enemies, always finding a way to make a little go a long way, and also, perhaps that they would die before they gave up their freedom. Regardless of the truth of its origins,
It’s clear from archeology that after its founding in the 8th century BC, the new colony of Carthage did grow exceptionally quickly. In many ways, it was the perfect Phoenician settlement. Carthage was built in a small bay that itself belonged to a vast natural harbor, known today as the Bay of Tunis.
The city sat on top of a series of sheer red cliffs that looked down over the glittering blue waters of the Mediterranean in the north, and it was also easily defended on its landward side, where a range of rocky hills and a number of lakes and saltwater lagoons
Break the land into a series of narrow approaches, protecting the city from any would-be attackers. The Roman writer Appian writes one description of the city’s location. The city lay in a recess of a great gulf, and was in the form of a peninsula. It was separated from the mainland by an
Isthmus about five kilometers in width. From this isthmus, a narrow and longish tongue of land, about a kilometer wide, extended towards the west between a lake and the sea. Near to the site of Carthage flows a river known today as the Mejerda, which originates in the high Atlas Mountains
Of North Africa. This river flows for 460 kilometers to the sea and brings crucial fresh water into the bay, turning the otherwise arid landscape green, and providing water for drinking and for irrigation. As a result, the land here was abundant with wheat, grapes, olives, and dates.
In the distance over the bay to the south rises the blue outline of the mountain Djebel Ressas, literally the Mountain of Lead, a rugged outcrop of Jurassic limestone climbing nearly 800 meters above the plain. The hot desert winds, known as the Sirocco, would blow in from the Sahara
During the summer season, rattling the shutters on the windows and the leaves of the date palms, and at the end of summer, thunderstorms would roll in from the sea. As well as its ideal geography, the city’s location in the Mediterranean world was also perfect. Carthage sat at a crucial halfway point
Between the city of Tyre and the wealthy mines of Spain, but it was also only about 200 kilometers by boat from the island of Sicily and about 300 kilometers from Sardinia, two crucial sites of Phoenician industry that were only growing in importance. Pottery found in even the earliest
Layers of Carthage shows a huge range of styles coming from Greece, Italy, Spain, and all the Phoenician colonies. The Phoenician world was now a web, with Carthage sitting right at its center. The city in these early days must have been a humble sight. Archeology paints a picture of a simple
Collection of mud brick buildings lining the seashore, but within a century, this had exploded. One graveyard soon had to be moved in order to make space for a quarter filled with metal-working workshops, and the settlers built a wall about three meters in height to protect their burgeoning town. Soon, more monumental buildings would
Be constructed. The Roman poet Virgil imagines the activity that must have accompanied the growth of this town, from tiny settlement to booming city. Aeneas found where lately huts had been, marvelous buildings, gateways, cobbled ways, and din of wagons. There, the Tyrians were hard at work, laying courses for
Walls, rolling up stones to build the citadel, while others picked out building sites and plowed a boundary furrow. Laws were being enacted, magistrates and a sacred senate chosen. Here, men were dredging harbors. There, they laid the deep foundations of a theater and quarried massive pillars. Other than what we can glean from
Archeology, we know very little about the early history of Carthage apart from a few short inscriptions. No Carthaginian texts have survived into the modern day, and so, in terms of written history, we have virtually complete silence from that part of the Mediterranean for the first 200 years or so of its existence,
And beyond that, we have to rely on the writings of others. From the work of Greek writers, we learned that Carthage was a republic. It was ruled under a kind of oligarchic system, governed by a council of its wealthiest citizens. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, writing in the 4th century, spoke approvingly of
The Carthaginian system of government and compares it to that of the Greek city-state of Sparta. Carthage also appears to have a good constitution, with many outstanding features as compared with those of other nations, but most nearly resembling the Spartan at some points. Many regulations at Carthage are good, and a proof of a
Well-regulated constitution is that the populace willingly remain faithful to the constitutional system, and that neither civil strife has arisen in any degree worth mentioning, nor yet a tyrant. But Aristotle also warns that the Carthaginian system put too much emphasis on the wealth of its rulers rather than their competence, and
Expresses concerns that this could lead to corruption. They think that the rulers should be chosen not only for their merit but also for their wealth, as it is not possible for a poor man to govern well or to have leisure for his duties. It is a bad thing
That the greatest officers of state, the kingship, and the general ship should be for sale, for this law makes wealth more honored than worth and renders the whole state avaricious, and it is probable that those who purchase their office will learn by degrees to make a profit out of it.
The highest echelons of Carthaginian society were divided between the civil leaders, the shofetim, or judges, and the rabbim, or generals, who took care of military matters. These highest positions, senators and the heads of committees, drew no salary for their work, and so, they could realistically only be held by those who
Could support themselves on private incomes, usually successful merchants or wealthy landowners, but there was a certain fairness to this. There seems to have been no barrier other than wealth, and people from common backgrounds who became wealthy could quickly rise to the highest parts of government. Certain powerful families were
Constantly vying for the most powerful positions, but there was no hereditary royalty in Carthage. It’s possible that the myth of Elishaya or Dido may have played a role in maintaining this situation. Since according to the legend, the city was founded by a woman who had no
Children, no one could ever claim to be her true descendants or have any kind of ancestral right to rule. Instead, the city was governed by a number of different semi-democratic bodies made up of wealthy citizens. One of these was called the Tribunal of the 104, and another, the Council of
Elders, a kind of senate. The highest executive position was held by two elected officers who ruled simultaneously and who were elected each year. The arrangement was complex and likely prone to corruption, but for the most part, it seems to have worked. While Carthage flourished, the Phoenician
Cities that had given birth to it began to flounder. Tyre and Sidon were still under the boot of Assyria, and around 670 BC, the Assyrian king Esarhaddon began to place harsh restrictions on who they could trade with. When Assyria went to war with Egypt, Esarhaddon forced the Phoenicians of Tyre
To place a trade embargo on the pharaohs. Without access to their once most lucrative market, these cities went into decline. Soon, the king of Tyre was not even allowed to open messages without an Assyrian official present, as the following surviving fragment of one treaty shows.
Nor must you open a letter which I send you without the presence of the royal deputy. If the royal deputy is absent, wait for him and then open it. If a ship of the people of Tyre is shipwrecked off the coast of the land of the Philistines or
Anywhere on the borders of a Syrian territory, everything that is on the ship belongs to Esarhaddon, king of Assyria. As a result of the decline of cities like Tyre and Sidon, it’s likely that large numbers of Phoenicians would have fled to what was now the undisputed capital of the Phoenician world, the
Booming port town of Carthage. They brought with them their language, their knowledge, their gods, and their gold. By the 6th century BC, Carthage was one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the Mediterranean, and its sailors, the finest in the world, would soon embark on voyages of exploration that would not be matched
For another 2,000 years. By this time, the Phoenicians had already sailed right to the end of their world, through the Pillars of Hercules, and out into the Atlantic Ocean. But their exploration didn’t stop there. In fact, if ancient sources are to be believed, they may have been the first
Navigators to successfully sail around the entire coast of Africa. Herodotus recounts one expedition that supposedly took place around 600 BC, sponsored by a pharaoh of Egypt named Nechos, although he is frustratingly vague and short on detail. The expedition apparently set sail from Egypt’s Red Sea coast, voyaged around the
Horn of Africa and the South African Cape, before sailing north through the Gulf of Guinea and back into the Mediterranean through the Pillars of Hercules. Nechos of Egypt sent Phoenicians and ships, instructing them to sail on their return voyage past the Pillars of Heracles until they came into the
Northern sea, and so, to Egypt. So, the Phoenicians set out from the Red Sea and sailed to the southern sea. Whenever autumn came, they would put in and plant the land in whatever part of Libya they had reached, and there await the harvest. Then, having gathered the crop, they
Sailed on, so that after two years had passed, it was in the third that they rounded the Pillars of Heracles and came to Egypt. There they said what some may believe, though I do not, that in sailing around Libya, they had the sun on their right hand. Interestingly, it is this detail that
Herodotus personally finds unbelievable that has caused modern scholars to take the claim more seriously. The change in the position of the sun relative to the ship suggests that the voyage did indeed cross the Tropic of Cancer, and perhaps even the equator, causing the summer sun to appear in the north.
Modern estimates consider a journey time of three years to be a reasonable duration for a circumnavigation of Africa that would have been about 20,000 kilometers long, or half the way around the world. If this story is true, then it means the Phoenicians may have rounded the Cape of
Africa more than 2,000 years before the Portuguese explorer, Bortolemeu Dias, would do the same thing in 1488, opening up the passage to India and the age of European colonialism. More solidly attested voyages of Phoenician discovery would see an explorer named Hanno the Navigator sail out into the Atlantic Ocean through the
Pillars of Hercules, and sail perhaps as far south as Cameroon or Gabon in West Africa. His voyage is recounted in a Greek translation entitled The Periplus, or Travel Account of Hanno, supposedly an accurate copy of an inscription that actually hung in the temple of Baal Hammon in Carthage.
It was decreed by the Carthaginians that Hanno should undertake a voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules and found Phoenician cities. He sailed accordingly, with 60 ships or 50 oars each, and the body of men and women to the number of 30,000, and provisions and other necessaries.
Preceding a day’s sail, we came to the extremity of the lake that was overhung by large mountains, inhabited by savage men clothed in the skins of wild beasts, who drove us away by throwing stones, and hindered us from landing. Sailing thence, we came to another river
That was large and broad, and full of crocodiles and hippopotamuses. Hanno writes down vivid descriptions of seeing active volcanoes spewing lava into the ocean, possibly the active volcano Mount Cameroon. Then quickly sailing forth, we passed by a burning country full of fragrance, from which great torrents of fire flowed
Down to the sea, and we sailed along with all speed, being stricken by fear. After a journey of four days, we saw the land at night covered with flames, and in the midst there was one lofty fire greater than the rest, which seemed to touch the stars.
Hanno even seems to have been the first to write down an encounter with what may have been Earth’s largest living primates, with unfortunate results. We arrived at a bay called the Southern Horn, at the bottom of which lay an island full of savage people, the greater part of whom were women whose bodies
Were hairy, and whom our interpreters called Gorillae. Though we pursued the men, we could not seize any of them; but all fled from us, escaping over the precipices and defending themselves with stones. Three women were, however, taken, but they attacked their conductors with their teeth and hands, and could not be
Prevailed upon to accompany us. Having killed them, we flayed them, and brought their skins with us to Carthage. We did not sail farther on, our provisions failing us. These hairy creatures may have been chimpanzees, monkeys, or what we today would call gorillas, all of which can be encountered in the region of Cameroon.
On Hanno’s return, the hairy skins he brought home were kept in the temple to the god Tanit in Carthage, and according to Pliny the Elder, would remain in the city for as long as it existed. In the 19th century, when the American physician and missionary Thomas Staughton Savage and the naturalist Jeffries Wyman
Wrote the first scientific description of a gorilla, they gave them the name Troglodytes gorilla after the mysterious description in Hanno’s writing, and the name has stuck ever since. Another explorer named Himilco sailed out into the Atlantic and went in the opposite direction, sailing north up the
Coast of Spain and France, and even on to the British Isles. Here, he saw Celtic tribespeople sailing in coracles made of deerskin, a sight he found remarkable. They cleave the tempestuous sea and the current of the ocean abounding in monsters, with woven boats. Indeed, these people do not know how to fashion keels
With pine and maple, but in a miraculous thing, they always fit out vessels from hides stretched together, and often travel through the immense sea in a skin. Himilco also brought back stories of the vast expanse of the Atlantic to the West, a frightening sight to the sailors brought
Up in the enclosed inland sea of the Mediterranean. Beyond, towards the area to the West, there is a sea without end. The ocean lies open across a wide area, and the sea stretches out. No man has entered upon these seas, because the sea lacks winds that would
Drive the ships along, and no breeze from the sky favors a ship. It also seems that he may have seen whales swimming out there in the ocean, which were then nearly four times more numerous than they are today. Here and there, sea monsters swim amid the slow ships sluggishly crawling along.
Himilco reported that he had once seen these creatures in the ocean and proved their existence. These we have related to you, revealed a long time ago deep in the annals of the Carthaginians. In 2019, a team of twenty modern sailors successfully piloted a replica of a single-mastered Carthaginian merchant
Vessel across the Atlantic Ocean, departing from the site of Carthage and landing in the Caribbean five months later, demonstrating that Phoenician ships had the ability to reach the Americas 2,000 years before Columbus. As the city of Carthage grew, its population boomed. While some ancient writers record it as
Having a population of more than 700,000 people, this is thought to be unlikely. But estimates based on the size of the city and the size of civilian armies drawn up in times of crisis have suggested that the population may have reached 400,000. By the year 400 BC, the city walls had
Been rebuilt to now stand a towering 15 meters high, with a triple line of ditches and defenses on the landward side. The hill of Byrsa, where legend has it that Elishaya played her trick with the ox hide, was now itself ringed with an inner defensive wall and loomed over
The rest of the city as a fortified citadel. The Roman writer Appian writes the following description of the city. On the seaside, the city was protected by a single wall. Toward the south and the mainland, where the citadel of Byrsa stood on the isthmus, there was a triple wall. The height of
Each wall was 15 meter without counting parapets and towers, which was separated from each other by a space of 60 meters. One of the most remarkable features of ancient Carthage was the innovative design of its harbor, known as the cothon. Likely built sometime in the third or
Second century BC, this comprised a large, rectangular commercial harbor for civilian ships that led into a unique, circular docking bay for the military ships of Carthage’s war fleet. The harbor was so large that today the shape of its outline can still be seen in the coast of the city of Tunis.
Appian describes the unique design of this harbor. The harbors have communication with each other and a common entrance from the sea 20 meters wide, which could be closed with iron chains. The first port was for merchant vessels, and here were collected all kinds of shipsí tackle. Within the second port was an island
Which, together with the port itself, was enclosed by high embankments. These embankments were full of shipyards, which had capacity for 220 vessels. Above, there were magazines for their tackle and furniture. Two ionic columns stood in front of each dock. On the island was built the admiral’s house, from which the trumpeter gave
Signals, the herald delivered orders, and the admiral himself overlooked everything. At this time, Carthage had the largest and most powerful fleet in the Mediterranean, and the military port was built to conceal the ships docked within and ensure that no spies could glean any of their secrets or keep tabs on their movements.
The island lay near the entrance to the harbor and rose to a considerable height so that the admiral could observe what was going on at sea while those who were approaching by water could not get any clear view of what took place within. Not even the incoming merchants could
See the docks, for a double wall enclosed them, and there were gates by which merchant ships could pass from the first port of the city without traversing the dockyards. Such was the appearance of Carthage at the time. Between the harbor and the citadel of Byrsa on the hill stood the Agora, the
Large open marketplace of the city, where all manner of goods and foods could be bought. Archaeological studies of plant matter found in Carthage show that the ancient Carthaginians enjoyed a varied diet. Walking through the markets of the city, you would be able to buy wheat, barley, and other grains, numerous vegetables like
Artichokes and cabbages, pulses and lentils, and fruits including pomegranates, grapes, figs, olives, peaches, plums, and melons, as well as nuts like pistachios and almonds. Olives were pressed into oil, and its people ate fish like grey mullet, sea perch, eels, and dolphins, as well as the meat of sheep, pigs, goats, chickens, and
Occasionally even dogs. The Carthaginians, like most people in the ancient world, were obsessed with a pungent salty source known as garum, which was brewed from the fermenting of fish entrails, and which was probably similar to the fish sauce used today in East Asian cuisine. In the wreck of one Carthaginian ship
Found off the coast of Sicily in Masala, archaeologists have also uncovered the remains of cannabis stalks which may have been chewed by the ship’s rowers, and could also have been enjoyed on land, either chewed or brewed into a tea. Wine was particularly beloved, too, and especially a particular kind of sweet
Dessert wine made from sun-dried grapes. One agricultural handbook, written by a Carthaginian named Mago, has survived in fragments of Greek and Latin translation, and it describes the process of making this wine. Pick some well-ripened, early grapes. Discard any that are mildewed or damaged. Lay down reeds and spread the grapes out
In the sun on top. Cover them at night so that the dew will not moisten them. When they are dried, pick the grapes off stems and put them in a jar or pitcher. Add some un-fermented wine, the best you have, until the grapes are just covered. After six days, when the grapes have
Absorbed it all and are swollen, put them in a basket, put them through the press, and collect the resulting liquid. Bottle the liquid in stopper jars, and after 20 or 30 days, when the fermentation is over, coat the lids with plaster and cover them with leather. As a typical Phoenician city, Carthage
Initially had a small footprint in North Africa and in its early days, it was reliant on its overseas territories in Sardinia and Sicily for more than half of its food, brought across the sea on grain ships. But in the 6th century, it began to expand its territory around the city.
The Carthaginians either expelled local people or came to agreements with them, and built a network of towns and forts to the south, east, and west, and began to farm the land themselves. A later writer, Diodorus of Sicily, would pan the following description of the abundant hinterland that would soon stretch beyond the city.
All the lands were set with gardens and orchards, watered by numerous springs and canals. There were well-constructed country houses built with lime along the route, announcing widespread wealth. The land was cultivated with vines, olive trees, and a whole host of fruit trees. On both sides, there were herds of oxen and
Sheep grazing on the plain, and near the main pastures and the marshes, there were studs of horses. In its outposts in Sardinia, Spain, and Sicily, Carthage began a similar process, turning what had once been small trading posts into more solid and fortified territories with their own agricultural land.
Soon, the city of Carthage would be more or less self-sufficient, as the Roman writer Appian describes. Gradually acquiring strength, they mastered Africa and the greater part of the Mediterranean, carried war into Sicily and Sardinia and the other islands of that scene, and also into Spain. They sent out numerous colonies.
They became a match for the Greeks in power and next to the Persians in wealth. The typical Carthaginian house was built around a central courtyard, and the wealthier dwellings had an upstairs and a terrace. Finer houses had cupboards and shelves built into the walls, and often a clay bread oven.
We can imagine the smells of this baking bread wafting through the city streets, along with the pungent aromas from the tanneries and wineries, the smells of animals and incense, cooked fish, and salty garum sauce. Wealthy houses also contained elaborate bathrooms with separate changing facilities, and baths plastered with water-resistant stucco. Before bathing,
Oil would be applied to the body, and a bronze tool known as a strigil was used to scrape dirt from the skin. While in Greek houses these bathrooms were usually built off the kitchen, the Carthaginians built their bathrooms next to the entrance to the house, suggesting that there was some sort of ritual
Purpose to the bathing, separating the dusty, unclean world of outside from the clean inner space of the home. A variety of animals would have been visible on the crowded city streets. These would have included beasts of burden like donkeys, oxen, and horses, stray dogs and cats, and noisy caravans of camels
Coming in from the desert. But they also seem to have drawn animals as curiosities from all parts of Africa. A species of huge lion known as the Barbary lion could be found all across this region and would later be captured for spectacles, including in the Roman arenas,
And a species of monkey known as the Barbary macaque is also native to this area. Diodorus of Sicily records one account of Carthaginians keeping these monkeys as apparently much-beloved pets. In these cities, many of the customs were very different from those current among us. For the apes lived in the same houses as
The men, being regarded among them as gods, just as the dogs are among the Egyptians, and from the provisions laid up in the storerooms, the beasts took their food without hindrance whenever they wished. For any who killed this animal, as if he had committed the greatest sacrilege, death was established as the penalty.
Around this time, monkeys began appearing as a motif in the art of regions of Italy, Sardinia, and elsewhere, suggesting that the Carthaginians were even exporting this animal to other regions. Some Barbary macaques were mummified in Egyptian tombs alongside pharaohs, and the skull of a Barbary macaque dated to
Around this time has even been unearthed as far away as Northern Ireland. Of course, in vast stables to the south of the city, were kept the animals that in most people’s minds are most inseparably associated with the city of Carthage; that is the elephant. The North African elephant is an extinct
Subspecies of the African elephant that lived north of the Sahara Desert. Carthaginian paintings on walls, coins, and mosaics show that these elephants had the swooping backs and large ears typical of the African elephant that roams the Savannah, but it was considerably smaller and was likely similar in size to another
Surviving subspecies, the African forest elephant. These reach a shoulder height of about two and a half meters, only a little taller than the largest Shire horses, but of course, their thick and heavy frames mean they weigh more than 15 times the average horse. For this reason, these elephants were
Used by the Carthaginians as fearsome weapons of war. Some historians have speculated that Carthage may also have imported some much larger Indian elephants, which were at that time being used by the Seleucid dynasty in Syria. One elephant that was the pride of the later Carthaginian army was known by the
Name Surus, which some have translated to mean the Syrian. If true, this Syrian elephant would have towered as much as a meter over the smaller Carthaginian elephants, and would have been a truly terrifying sight on the battlefield. In India and Southeast Asia, it has always been common to use elephants as
Work animals to transport heavy loads for construction, but it’s not clear whether the Carthaginians used their elephants in this manner or whether these precious animals were only reserved for their power and prestige, to be used as living tanks on the battlefield, as the writer Pliny the Elder prescribes.
Elephants, when tamed, are employed in war and carry into the ranks of the enemy towers filled with armed men, and on them, in a very great measure, depends the ultimate result of the battles that are fought in the East. They tread underfoot whole companies and crush the men in their armor.
But I think it’s not hard to imagine that as in India, elephants may also have been used ceremonially in festivals and parades to carry kings and generals, a living embodiment of the might of this new empire. While Carthage didn’t hesitate to go to war to defend its interests and protect
Its trade, it was not at heart a warrior culture, and it never suffered a conflict to continue any longer than it absolutely had to. The Carthaginians often relied on diplomatic solutions and agreements to avoid fighting with their various neighbors in the Mediterranean. One such agreement was settled in the
Year 509 BC with a minor city-state in central Italy, in the region of Latium, whose people spoke a small Italic dialect called Latin. This city’s people had just that year thrown off the rule of their Etruscan king and abolished kingship in the city for good. In place of a king, they had
Brought in the rule of a pair of elected consuls drawn from the aristocracy, a system strikingly similar to and perhaps even inspired by the Carthaginians. This city’s name was Rome. The Romans at that time were among several powers in central Italy facing rivals in the Etruscans to the north, and
Powerful tribal confederacies like the Samnites all fighting for dominance in the plains of central Italy. The Carthaginians seem to have taken note of this regional development and proceeded to sign a treaty with this new Roman republic, the contents of which the Greek historian Polybius records. There shall be friendship between the Romans
And their allies, and the Carthaginians and their allies, on these conditions; neither the Romans nor their allies are to sail beyond the fair peninsula unless driven by stress of weather or the fear of enemies. If any one of them be driven ashore, he shall not buy or take anything
For himself, save what is needed for the repair of his ship and the service of the gods, and he shall depart within five days. Carthage shall build no fort in Latium, and if they enter the district in arms, they shall not stay a night therein. The theme of this treaty was simple; you
Leave us alone and we will leave you alone. While Rome was at this point very much on the Carthaginian’s radar, it seems that they considered this Italian city republic to be little cause of concern. Around the year 410 BC, Carthage began minting its own silver coins, and each
Coin would be stamped with the symbol of a palm tree in Greek, known as Phoenike, now becoming a symbol of Phoenician identity. Carthage was now presenting itself as the new champion of the Phoenician people, the capital of the Phoenician world. It was now beginning to look a lot Like
An empire, and like all empires, it soon found an increasing need to defend and expand its territory. It’s often said that Carthage relied on mercenaries to fight its wars, but this is something of an oversimplification. While these kinds of armies-for-hire did make up one part of their forces, in fact,
There were all kinds of reasons that people came to fight for the empire of Carthage. Many of their soldiers were sent to fight for them as part of treaties, just as the Phoenicians had once promised to send their ships to fight for Assyria. As Carthage expanded to conquer new
Peoples all along the North African coast and across the Mediterranean, ever more power and variety was added to its forces. When war came, each ally and province would send fighters of a particular kind based on what they specialized in. The North African power of Numidia to the west of Carthage sent powerful and
Experienced cavalry and javelin-throwers, while colonies in the island of Majorca would send slingers, and peasant spearmen with large, round shields were conscripted from the fields of Libya in the East. Celts from Spain made up some part of their forces, and sometimes even Greeks and Italians ended up fighting in these armies.
There was only one group of people who hardly ever fought for Carthage, and that was the citizens of Carthage themselves. The Carthaginian system relied largely on making life as comfortable as possible for the people of the capital. Few Carthaginian politicians ever risked the unpopular move of conscripting its
Citizens into the army, and so, they amassed their forces out of units brought from all the four corners of the empire. Each army of Carthage was its own unique patchwork and would have spoken dozens of different languages, as the Greek historian Polybius writes. It was therefore impossible to assemble
Them and address them as a body or to do so by any other means, for how could any general be expected to know all their languages? And again to address them through several interpreters, repeating the same thing four or five times, was, if anything, more impractical.
It was a system that had many weaknesses, but it allowed the empire to raise large armies at short notice, and it meant that since they could never be accused of sending good Carthaginian men to die, the politicians of the city were largely insulated from the consequences of going to war.
But soon these armies would find themselves embroiled in a bitter struggle that would test this system to its breaking point and threaten to bring the whole empire to the brink of destruction. These wars would erupt over what would soon become the most fought-over piece of land in the Mediterranean;
That is the island of Sicily. Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. It sits off the southern end of Italy, separated by the narrow waters of the Straits of Messina, only three kilometers wide at its narrowest point. Sicily’s most prominent landmark is the volcano Mount Etna, towering
3,000 meters over its eastern coast, and due to the islandís particularly violent geology, this is one of the most active volcanoes in the world. Although we think of it today as part of Europe, Sicily is actually on the northern edge of the African continental plate, right at the impact point where
The European plate is grinding it downwards into the Earth’s mantle. The collision of these titanic forces means that Mount Etna erupts an average 200 times every year. The volcanic ash spewed by this volcano gives the soil of Sicily an incredible fertility, meaning that its farmlands have always been rich.
At first, Carthage enjoyed an unrivaled position on the island, trading with the Sicilian locals in the west just a short hop away from their capital in Africa, but soon they would come into conflict with another group of people that for much of this history would be their
Greatest rivals on the sea and the land, a people who were at the same time also busy establishing colonies across the Mediterranean. These were the Greeks. The Greeks, like the Phoenicians, were expert sailors and had built a number of thriving colonies in southern Italy, in
What is now Turkey and in the Black Sea. Beginning in the 8th century BC, Greek explorers and traders began expanding their interests onto the island of Sicily. Like the Phoenicians, the Greeks at this time weren’t a unified people. They spoke four different dialects of Greek and countless sub-dialects, and
Came from dozens of independent city-states and island kingdoms that often fought with each other more bitterly than with any foreigners. But despite these internal divisions, the Greeks would expand across the southern portion of Italy and Sicily, and joined up this series of colonies into an area that they would call Megale Hellas, or
Greater Greece. Wherever they went, Greek settlers were in part inspired by the myth of their hero Heracles, who the Romans would call Hercules. He was a half-divine warrior who traveled the length and breadth of Europe, performing his famous twelve labors, and meanwhile performing great deeds wherever he passed through.
Wherever a new Greek colony sprung up around the Mediterranean, a new installment of the Hercules myth would quickly be added, to show that this had also been one of his stops. In some places, he was celebrated for slaying giants and mythical beasts, while in others his feats were more mundane.
In the Greek colonies of southern Italy, he was remembered for banishing a plague of flies that was harming the livestock. In Crete, he had rid the island of wild beasts, and in Sicily, he had caught an errant bull and bested the king in a wrestling match. In Spain, Diodorus of Sicily recounts that
Depending on who you asked, Hercules was credited with either creating the Straits of Gibraltar by tearing the land apart or with narrowing it to keep out sea monsters. Whereas before that time a great space had stood between Africa and Europe, he now narrowed the passage, in order that
By making it shallow and narrow he might prevent the great sea monsters from passing out of the ocean and into the inner sea. Some authorities, however, say just the opposite, namely that the two continents were originally joined and that he cut a passage between them, that the ocean was mingled with the sea.
On this question, however, it would be possible for every man to think as he may please. In one of the most dramatic episodes of these tales, during his tenth labor, Hercules is tasked with stealing the red cattle of the ogre Geryon, who lived in Erythia in southern Spain, close to the
Phoenician colony of Gades. Since Geryon lived so far in the west, it was said, the hides of his cattle had been stained red by their close proximity to the setting sun. After killing Geryon, Hercules takes his cattle and herds them all the way back home to Greece in a meandering route
That took him from Spain, through southern France, and over the soaring snowy mountains of the Alps, and on into Italy, as Diodorus recounts. Hercules then made his way to Italy, and as he traversed the mountain pass through the Alps, he made a highway out of the route, which was rough and almost
Impassible. The barbarians who had inhabited this mountain region had been accustomed to butcher and to plunder such armies as pass through when they came to the difficult portions of the way, but he subdued them all. The story of Hercules bringing these cattle from Spain over these mountains
Was the dramatic pinnacle of a series of myths that would become known as the Heraclean way. It was a series of stories that would be told to countless generations of Greek settlers and then to the children of the Romans who followed them. As the Phoenician hero god Melqart became
Increasingly associated with Hercules in later years, these stories would also be told to the children of Carthage. With stories of this wandering hero on their lips, the Greek settlements in eastern Sicily grew. For several centuries, they maintained an uneasy peace with the Carthaginian colonies in the west of the island,
But as both powers began to require greater amounts of land, they would soon find themselves on a collision course. The exact dating and details of these wars is still fiercely contested, but it’s clear that by the late 5th century BC, Sicily had erupted in warfare between Carthage and the Greeks.
Soon, it would resemble a piece of meat being torn apart by two hungry dogs. The economy of the island suffered. Warlords established themselves as the tyrant rulers of its cities, and banditry and lawlessness spread. For much of these centuries of fighting, the Carthaginians were happy to let the
Wars with the Greeks simmer on. The citizens of its capital never went to war, and so long as the peace and comfort of their city was never disturbed, it must have felt to them that these wars were a very long way from home. But the final episode of these conflicts,
Known as the Seventh Sicilian War, would puncture this sense of invulnerability. That’s because Carthage would find itself in a life or death struggle with a man who would bring the war home to their shores in dramatic fashion. He was a king of Syracuse, a Greek city-state on
The southeastern coast of Sicily, and his name was Agathocles. Agathocles began life as a commoner in the Sicilian colonies, the son of a potter in the port city of Syracuse. At first he learned his father’s trade, but soon entered the army and rose through its ranks until he was able to
Enact a military coup and seize the throne of the city, in the year 317 BC. Agathocles had a high opinion of himself, and as the tyrant of Syracuse, he minted silver coins that portrayed himself as the heir to Alexander the Great, the greatest of all the Greeks, and like Alexander, Agathocles had
Dreams of conquest. He soon set about subjugating cities all around him, as the historian Diodorus of Sicily recalls. Agathocles began unhampered to subject the cities and strongholds to himself. Mastering many of them quickly, he made his power secure. In fact, he built up for himself a host of allies, ample revenues, and a
Considerable army. He had picked a mercenary force comprising 10,000 foot soldiers and 3,500 horse. Moreover, he prepared a store of weapons and of missiles of all kinds, since he knew that the Carthaginians would shortly wage war against him. As predicted, it wasn’t long before the Carthaginians began to see Agathocles as
A serious threat. Carthage amassed a huge army in its usual way, gathering mercenaries and levees from all of its territories and allies; slingers, spearmen, cavalry, elephants, likely speaking a dozen different languages, and sailed all of them to Sicily. On the way, many of their ships were
Wrecked in a storm, but the force that arrived was still easily enough to overpower the tyrant Agathocles, as Diodorus recounts. As Agathocles saw the forces of the Carthaginians were superior to his own, he surmised that not a few of the strongholds could go over to the Phoenicians, and also those of the cities
That were offended with him. After a stinging defeat on the Himera River in central Sicily, Agathocles retreated east to his port capital of Syracuse, where the Carthaginians surrounded the city and laid siege. For Agathocles, it looked like all hope was lost, but it’s here in this desperate moment
That he decided on a truly daring course of action. He hatched a plan to break free of the siege by ship, set sail for Africa, and make a desperate strike at the heart of his enemy, the city of Carthage itself. When he saw that all his allies had
Changed sides and that barbarians were masters of almost all Sicily except Syracuse and were far superior in both land and sea forces, he carried out an undertaking that was unexpected and most reckless. He determined to leave an adequate garrison for the city, to select those of
The soldiers who were fit, and with these to cross over into Libya, for he hoped that if he did this, those in Carthage who had been living luxuriously in long- -continued peace and were therefore without experience in the dangers of battle, would easily be defeated. When the Carthaginians saw the Greek
Fleet leaving Syracuse, they believed Agathocles to be fleeing, and they pursued him. They chased the Greeks, harrying them across the sea for hundreds of kilometers, pelting them with arrows and slingstones. But luck was on the side of the Greeks, and Agathocles and his soldiers were able to land on the beaches of Africa.
Agathocles must have feared that his soldiers would lose courage and attempt to flee, and so, he ordered their ships to be burned in an offering to the gods, as Diodorus recounts. Standing by the stern, he bade the others also to follow his example. Then, as all the captains threw in the
Fire and the flames quickly blazed high, the trumpeter sounded the signal for battle and the army raised the war cry, while altogether prayed for a safe return home. This Agathocles did, for it was clear that if the retreat to the ships was cut off, in victory alone would they have
Hope for safety. Nevertheless, when all the ships were aflame and the fire was spreading widely, terror laid hold upon the Sicilians as they considered the vastness of the sea that separated them from home. From the city walls of Carthage, the fires of the burning ships would have
Been visible on the horizon, and now fear was beginning to spread among its citizens. For them, war was something that happened in other places. The city had never been significantly threatened before, and there were virtually no forces there to defend it. Panic and great confusion seized upon the city.
The crowds rushed to the marketplace, and the Council of Elders consulted what should be done. In fact, there was no army at hand that could take the field against the enemy. The mass of the citizens, who had no experience in warfare, were already in despair, and the enemy was thought to be
Near the walls. For the first time, the citizens of Carthage would actually have to fight. They were conscripted en masse, given long spears and shields, perhaps given some rudimentary training, and along with the small complement of city guards, marched out to meet the Greeks in battle. The Carthaginians hoped to make up for
The poor quality of their citizen troops with sheer numbers, and, vastly outnumbering Agathocles, they were confident of victory, but that was not to be the case. When they met, the experienced and now desperate Greeks smashed the citizen soldiers of Carthage, ran them off the battlefield, and flooded into their camp.
Here, Diodorus writes that they made a telling discovery. In the camp of the Carthaginians were found, along with other goods, many wagons in which were being transported more than 20,000 pairs of manacles. For the Carthaginians, having expected to master the Greeks easily, had passed the word along among themselves to take alive as
Many as possible, and, after shackling, to throw them into slave pens. With this army defeated, the city of Carthage was now completely surrounded by hostile forces, and Diodorus can’t help but comment on the ridiculous nature of the situation. In Sicily, the Carthaginians, who had defeated Agathocles in a great battle,
Were besieging Syracuse, but in Libya, Agathocles had brought the Carthaginians under siege. It’s here that the Carthaginians, in their desperation, seem to have turned to an ancient ritual that forms one of the darkest and most controversial aspects of their history; that is, the rite of child sacrifice.
Human sacrifice was, at certain times, a feature of various societies in the ancient world. Rituals of this kind have been attested in several indigenous American societies and in the early histories of Israel and Judah, as well as the cities of Phoenicia, like Tyre and Sidon. The Book of Kings records one king of
The Levantine kingdom of Moab sacrificing his firstborn child when a war isn’t going his way. In Ireland, Britain, and Northern Germany, during the Iron Age, sacrificial victims were ritually strangled and cast into bogs, where the acidic waters mummified them in a state of perfect preservation. This idea of a deadly exchange with the
Gods seems to be one that recurs in human psychology, and has independently arisen in multiple cultures. The idea that if we want to ask the gods for a great favor, we have to give them something truly precious in exchange, and what could be more precious than a human life?
With the writing down of the Hebrew Bible and the law codes of Moses, this practice was condemned and outlawed in much of the Levant, and from then on, animals were sacrificed in the place of human victims. In Tyre and other Phoenician cities, the practice also seems to have died out in
The first millennium, but there is one place it seems to have continued well into the second century BC, and that is Carthage. These were violent times, when human life was cheap, but even so, these rituals were mentioned with some revulsion by several ancient writers, among them the Greek philosopher Plato.
With us, for instance, human sacrifice is not legal but unholy, whereas the Carthaginians perform it as a thing they account holy and legal, and that too when some of them even sacrifice their own sons. At first, these rituals seem to have been an authentic sacrifice, giving up the
Life of one of your own children in the hope of receiving favor from the gods, but before long, wealthy Carthaginians found a way around this. In fact, they seem to have developed a macabre industry, a trade in other people’s children for sacrifice. The writer Plutarch describes this
System and gives a sense for the atmosphere of these grisly rituals. Those who had no children would buy little ones from poor people, and cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds. Meanwhile, the mother stood by without a tear or moan,
But should she utter a single moan or let fall a single tear, she had to forfeit the money, and her child was sacrificed nevertheless. The whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums so that the cries of wailing should not reach the ears of the people.
For a long time, it was assumed that these stories were exaggerations, pieces of Greek propaganda designed to demonize their enemies in Carthage, but more modern archaeological discoveries have more or less confirmed that child sacrifice did take place at least at some times, and at least by some people in the city.
Large collections of buried urns containing the cremated remains of children have been found in large temple sites known as tophets. Some of these temples are exceedingly large, with collections of cremation urns exceeding 2,000 in number. Archeology has uncovered masks and symbols at these sites, incense burners, and other paraphernalia of ritual,
Suggesting that the ceremonies were highly structured. It is worth being cautious with these findings. At most of the sites, analysis has shown that the vast majority of these children’s remains are of stillborn babies or babies that had died of natural causes. At a time when child mortality has been
Estimated at around 30 to 40 percent, the Carthaginians may have considered the tragedy of infant death to be a kind of sacred sign, a human life being taken back by the gods, and the bodies of these children were burned in the tophets as a result. The relative lack of children’s remains
In the regular graveyards of the city seem to show that these tophets were at least in part cremation sites for the remains of children who had died of other causes, but analysis of the ages of other remains at other times don’t seem to fit with patterns of child mortality.
However the ritual had begun, at least in the later years of the city, it had evolved into something much darker and crueler. The inscriptions at these later sites of sacrifice left over the cremation urns don’t seem to leave much room for interpretation, as this typical example shows.
To Lady Tinnit, face of Baal and Lord Baal Hammon; the thing that Arish, son of Bodashtart, son of Baalshillem, maker of strigils, vowed, because the Lord heard his voice. There are countless of these inscriptions, and they all follow this pattern. The child was not offered up
Front, but was promised in advance if the gods came through on their request. The Greek historian Cleitarchus seems to confirm this order of events. The Phoenicians, and above all, the Carthaginians, whenever they were eager for a great thing to succeed, made a vow by one of their children.
If they would receive the desired things, they would sacrifice to the gods. A bronze Kronos, having been erected by them, stretched out upward hands over a bronze oven to burn the child. The flame of the burning child reached its body until, the limbs having shriveled up and smiling mouth appeared to be almost
Laughing, it would slip into the oven. We can’t imagine the kinds of things people might have asked for in exchange for these sacrifices. Perhaps in some instances, we can imagine the ritual was performed out of desperation, an extreme measure. Other times, perhaps the wishes were trivial; good weather on a journey, maybe,
Good fortune and wealth in the year to come, or the downfall of a business rival. Whatever their wish was, it seems that if it went on to come true, the child’s fate would be sealed. With only fragmentary secondhand accounts and the little that can be gleaned from archaeological sites, we’re
Left guessing about the questions that desperately need answers; how widespread this practice was in society, why and when people engaged in it, and how the majority of Carthaginian citizens felt about it. With the army of Agathocles drawing near and the last citizen defenders defeated in the field, the Carthaginians began to
Believe that their gods must be angry with them, and at least some people in the city believed that it was this practice of sacrificing the children of the poor instead of their own that was to blame, as Diodorus of Sicily recounts. They also alleged that Kronos had turned
Against them, as in former times they had been accustomed to sacrifice to this god the noblest of their sons, but more recently, secretly buying and nurturing children, they had sent these to the sacrifice. When they had given thought to these things and saw their enemy encamped before their walls, they were filled with
Superstitious dread, for they believed that they had neglected the honors of the gods that had been established by their fathers. In their zeal to make amends for their omission, they selected 200 of the noblest children and sacrificed them publicly, and others who were under suspicion sacrificed themselves voluntarily, in number not
Less than 300. In this time of peril, the citizens of Carthage reverted to a kind of suicidal religious fundamentalism, but this would not be the end of the city. Agathocles rampaged around the countryside of Carthage for years, but the city’s formidable triple wall defenses would keep him at bay, and soon
The Greek king ran out of steam. In his absence, some of his Sicilian vassals were taking the opportunity to declare independence. He hurried back home, leaving his inexperienced son in charge of his army, who was easily outmaneuvered by Carthaginian generals. By the time Agathocles returned to Africa, he saw that the situation had
Become untenable, and he fled back home to Sicily. But his achievements had been significant; he had left a lasting impression on the people of Carthage, laid waste to their countryside, terrified them so deeply that they had slaughtered their own children, and likely left them on the brink of bankruptcy.
A peace treaty in 307 BC essentially returned the situation to exactly how it had been before the war started. The example of Agathocles, of a daring strike at the heart of your enemy right at the moment they least expect it, was an example that later Carthaginian generals would remember and learn from.
But it was also an episode that other powers in the region paid particular attention to. Carthage had once been considered the region’s major power, but a small Greek army had come within a hair’s breadth of bringing it to its knees. The historian Plutarch puts it bluntly in
The mouth of one of his characters. For who could keep his hands off Libya or Carthage, when that city got within his reach, a city which Agathocles, slipping stealthily out of Syracuse and crossing the sea with only a few ships, narrowly missed taking? The first who would seek to take
Advantage of this perceived weakness was a Greek king named Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus was the king of the Greek kingdom of Epiros, around what is today Southern Albania. His name meant fiery or red-haired, coming from the same root as the English word pyre, and Plutarch recalls that he seems to
Have suffered from some kind of developmental disorder that fused together the teeth of his upper jaw, giving him an unsettling look. In the aspect of his countenance, Pyrrhus had more of the terror than of the majesty of kingly power. He had not many teeth, but his upper jaw
Was one continuous bone on which the usual intervals between the teeth were indicated by slight depressions. But just like Agathocles, Pyrrhus had an immensely high opinion of himself and fancied himself as the inheritor of the legacy of Alexander. In his later life, he styled himself as a
Hero of the Hellenic world, the defender of everything Greek, and right at that moment, the Greeks who needed the most defending were the beleaguered colonies in southern Italy, the region known as Megale Hellas or Greater Greece. These city-states were suddenly being menaced by a powerful new force in the
Region, a people from the river plains of central Italy that the Greeks considered to be barbarians, and that had recently emerged as something of a regional superpower. This was the once small and insignificant city-state republic of Rome. Throughout the 4th century BC, this bizarre republic had begun expanding
Into the hinterlands of its region of Latium, and brought a number of other cities under its control. From there, they had managed to upset the power balance of central Italy, and toppled a number of well-established rivals, absorbing all of Latium and the region of Campania. Wherever they went, the Romans took a
Remarkably clever and pragmatic approach to absorbing other peoples into their society. While empires like Carthage kept full citizenship only for the people living in their home city, Rome was far more generous with citizenship. Unlike the armies of Carthage, Rome’s legions were made up of citizen soldiers,
And with every free man now a citizen, they were able to draw on vast reserves of manpower. As Rome grew in size and influence, Carthage took notice. About 160 years after the first treaty they had signed, they penned a new expanded agreement with Rome. This new treaty added the condition that
Rome would not try to found any cities in Carthaginian territory, suggesting that Roman expansion had become at least a small concern for the region’s major power. But for the most part, relations between Rome and Carthage were friendly, if suspicious. Carthage welcomed the rise of Rome as a potential ally against their mutual
Enemies, the Greeks, and one district of the city of Rome was known as the Vicus Africus, or African quarter, suggesting that a population of Carthaginian merchants already lived and traded in the city. It seems Carthage viewed Rome not as an unwelcome rival, but as a new potential source of customers.
But for the Greek colonies of southern Italy, Rome was a voracious new predator. As Roman power expanded, the Greeks found themselves surrounded, and many of them began sending out letters of distress to the fiery Greek king Pyrrhus. One of these colonies was the city of Tarentum, as Plutarch recalls.
The Romans were at war with the people of Tarentum, who, being able neither to carry on the war nor put an end to it, wish to make Pyrrhus their leader and summon him to the war, believing him to be a most formidable general. Pyrrhus couldn’t resist this opportunity
To position himself as the valiant defender of Greek civilization against these Latin barbarians. He gathered an armada and a large army complete with 20 war elephants, and in the year 280 BC, he sailed to southern Italy in full force. Himself a sophisticated Greek, Pyrrhus expected to meet an unruly barbarian
Horde on the battlefield, but Roman troops were by now toughened from their long wars of expansion in Italy, and they were already exhibiting the kind of organization that would one day make them famous. When he learned that the Romans were near and lay encamped on the further
Side of the river Siris, he rode up to the river to get a view of them; and when he observed their discipline, the appointment of their watches, their order, and the general arrangement of their camp, he was amazed, and said to the friend that was nearest him, ëThe discipline of these barbarians is
Not barbarous.í But these early Roman legions were still no match for Greek phalanxes, and the site of Pyrrhus’ elephants terrified the Roman horses. Pyrrhus defeated the Romans in two battles, at Heraclea and at Ausculum, in the year 279 BC, and he believed that Rome must soon concede the war and agree to the
Terms of his demands. But slightly to the bemusement of Pyrrhus, Rome simply refused to admit defeat. This refusal to ever sue for peace would become something of a Roman hallmark. Some have argued that Rome’s very nature as a citizen democracy actually contributed to their immense doggedness in warfare. Their leaders were politicians and
Existed in a state of constant competition with each other for the support of the voting public. Any politician who signed a damaging peace treaty could be eviscerated in the senate as a coward, a fool, or even a traitor. This meant that Roman senators would often overwhelmingly vote to
Continue a war rather than admit defeat. This will to continue, along with their large reserves of citizen manpower, meant that Rome could often absorb terrific defeats, losing whole armies, and simply keep going. This often had the effect of simply grinding down their enemiesí will to fight. According to Plutarch, who was fond of
Inventing dialogue for his historical characters, Pyrrhus made the following quip after his third victory with Rome. We are told that Pyrrhus said to one who was congratulating him on his victory, ëIf we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly
Ruined!í For he had lost great part of the forces with which he came, and all his friends and generals except a few; he had no others who we could summon from home, and he saw that his allies in Italy were becoming indifferent, while the army of the Romans, as if from a
Fountain gushing forth indoors, was easily and speedily filled up again. After this series of Pyrrhic victories, Pyrrhus soon realized the conquest of Italy would elude him. He came within miles of Rome, but the tall Servian walls of the city meant that his beleaguered force had no hope of capturing it.
Still, he couldn’t bear the thought of returning home empty-handed. Pyrrhus decided that he would head to Sicily and see if he could have any more success helping the Greek colonies there fight against the Carthaginians. He arrived in the Greek town of Syracuse to a hero’s welcome. Every Greek colony
On the island sent troops to fill his army, and Pyrrhus would find the Carthaginian forces on Sicily to be a much softer target than the legions of Rome. The Carthaginian response to Pyrrhus couldn’t have been more different to the Romans. With little desire to be dragged back
Into another war in Sicily, they offered to pay him off generously to leave them alone, but Pyrrhus refused, as Plutarch describes. When the Carthaginians were inclined to come to terms and were willing to pay him money and send him ships, he replied to them — his heart being set on greater
Things — that there could be no settlement or friendship between himself and them unless they abandoned all Sicily. But Sicily, too, eventually defeated him. After years of war, his men were tired. The Carthaginians and Romans were now working together, so he faced the powerful armies of Rome
On land and the vast navy of Carthage by sea. After finally meeting with defeat in southern Italy, he cut his losses and sailed for home with little to show for his years of war. As he sailed away, Plutarch imagines Pyrrhus reflecting on the situation he has left behind.
He could not master Sicily, which was like a storm-tossed ship, but desired to leave her, and it is said that at the time of his departure, Pyrrhus looked back at the island and said to those about him, ëMy friend, what a wrestling ground for Carthaginians and Romans we are leaving behind us.í
Pyrrhus’ campaign had ended in failure. With him gone, Rome quickly swept over the remaining Greek city-states of Italy, and solidified its hold on the south of their peninsula. The Romans built roads connecting these wealthy Greek cities to the Roman network, and used the treasure they seized to build a grand series of new
Temples in the capital, as well as an enormous second aqueduct for Rome, the Aqua Anio Vetus. Meanwhile, Carthage reclaimed many of the cities that Pyrrhus had taken in Sicily, but without a common enemy, the twin powers of Carthage and Rome were now butting up against each other.
By the year 270 BC, Rome had captured the city of Rhegium, right across the Straits of Messina. They could now look over the water and gazed directly at the coast of Sicily. The wrestling ground that Pyrrhus had left behind in Sicily would set the stage for the next dramatic period of Mediterranean history.
It was a stage that would see a conflict unfold that would dwarf the Sicilian wars for intensity and scale, that would last for a hundred years, that would bring both powers to the brink of bankruptcy, and cost more than a million lives. This was the beginning of the Punic Wars.
The word Punic comes from Latin and is a mutation of the Greek word Phoenike or Phoenician, and at this time, the Romans had come to use it to describe the Phoenician superpower of Carthage that sat facing them only three daysí voyage away on the other side of the sea.
The historian Cassius Dio summarizes the situation, as both the powers of Rome and Carthage slid towards war. The Carthaginians, who had long been powerful, and the Romans, who are now growing more rapidly stronger, kept viewing each other with jealousy. They were led into war partly by the desire of continually acquiring more, and
Partly also by fear. It was a chance incident that broke their truce and plunged them into war. The main source for almost every aspect of the First Punic War is the historian Polybius, a Greek who was sent to Rome in 167 BC as a hostage. Polybius was writing about the events of
The First Punic War a century after they took place, but he was meticulous in his research and traveled widely, gathering as much first-hand knowledge and archival material as he could, and as a Greek, he was something of an outsider in Rome, meaning that his portrayal of the war is considered to be relatively
Even-handed. The story that Polybius tells begins in the volcanic island of Sicily, where, around the beginning of the 3rd century BC, trouble was once again threatening to erupt. At this time, Sicily had something of the Wild West about it. Large parts of it were lawless and fell between the influences of Carthage and
The Greeks. Both sides often used mercenaries to fight for them, but when a particular war was finished, it wasn’t always so easy to get rid of these bands of rough and violent men. One such band were a group of mostly southern Italians who called themselves the Mamertines, or the Sons of Mars, the
Roman god of war. In the past, they had been hired by Agathocles to fight Carthage in Sicily, but when the tyrant of Syracuse had died, they found themselves out of work. The Mamertines wandered the island for some time, likely engaging in theft and petty banditry to survive, until they
Reached the walled Greek town of Messina. Messina was a small settlement on the northeastern tip of Sicily, with the shadow of Mount Etna looming over the horizon, and its location was of great strategic importance. That’s because Messina was one side of the narrowest crossing point between Sicily and Italy.
Standing on the shore there, you can see the Italian mainland just over the water, and a ship could make the crossing in under thirty minutes. Anyone who controlled Messina would also control this crossing, and this meant that both Carthage and Rome were anxious about the city’s future.
When the band of Mamertines arrived in Messina, they must have made quite a sorry sight, and the people of the city originally took pity on them. They took them in and even gave them shelter in their own homes, but soon these hired swords became restless and jealous of the people’s comfortable lives.
In fact, they began to plot to seize the city for themselves. Polybius recounts what happened next. Certain Campanians serving under Agathocles had long cast covetous eyes on the beauty and prosperity of Messina, and they availed themselves of the first opportunity to capture it by treachery. After being admitted as friends and
Occupying the city, they first expelled or massacred the citizens, and then took possession of the wives and families of the dispossessed victims. They next divided among themselves the land and all other property. For the next twenty years or so, the Mamertines would run Messina as a kind of pirate fortress.
They would use it as a base to conduct raids on nearby towns and villages, and to rob ships that sailed through the narrow straits. But soon, the last remaining Greek king in Sicily, a king of Syracuse named Hiero, had had enough. In the year 265 BC, he moved to attack
The city of Messina to stamp out these troublesome pirates. Fearing execution for their crimes, the Mamertines played the only card left to them; trading on the strategic importance of the city. They sent out requests for help to both of the big players in the region, to Rome and to Carthage.
The Carthaginians, being closer, came to their help first, delighted as always to kick sand in the face of the Greeks. They moved a small army into Messina and helped the Mamertines to defend it. This was just the latest move in the nearly two-century chess game between
Carthage and the Greeks of Sicily, but to the Romans, it was a worrying move. With control of the crossing over to Italy, the Romans began to fear that Carthage was plotting an invasion of the mainland, as Polybius recalls. The Romans saw all this and felt that it was absolutely necessary not to let
Messina slip or allow the Carthaginians to secure what would be like a bridge to enable them to cross into Italy. The Roman senate was bitterly divided on what to do, with many expressing disgust at coming to the aid of what amounted to a band of pirates, but eventually their fears won out.
They voted to send a force to Messina to secure the crossing led by a consul named Appius Claudius. Rome was an inland city situated on the river Tiber, and so, the Romans were not a naturally seagoing people. With few ships of their own, they borrowed as many as they could from the
Coastal cities of southern Italy. When they first took in hand to send troops across to Messina, they not only had no decked vessels, but no warships at all, not so much as a single galley, but they borrowed quinqueremes and triremes from Tarentum and Locri, and even from Elea and Neapolis.
The Romans, under the command of Appius, successfully made the short crossing in 264 BC, catching the powerful Carthaginian navy off guard. When they arrived in Messina, the Italian Mamertines ousted the Carthaginians who had come to their aid, and welcomed the Roman army into the town in their place.
The Roman capture of Messina immediately shifted the balance of power in Sicily. The Greeks of Syracuse formed a hasty alliance with their ancient enemies in Carthage, overturning two centuries of war to repel this new invader, but it was no good. The Roman commander Appius descended on Syracuse with lightning speed, as Polybius writes.
Having succeeded in engaging the enemy, thenceforth he scoured the territory of Syracuse and her allies with impunity, and laid it waste without finding anyone to dispute the possession of the open country with him, and finally he sat down before Syracuse itself and laid siege to it. King Hiero saw no other way out.
He surrendered, switched sides, and swore allegiance to the Romans. This was the end of the last independent Greek states in Italy and Sicily, and the future of the Mediterranean would now be decided by either Carthage or Rome. Both sides now marched to war. In this First Punic War, the Carthaginians were clearly concerned.
They drew up a large army of Celts, Iberians, and other peoples, and dispatched it to Sicily, but they were also confident in their overall strategy, which had served them well in previous Sicilian wars. While the warships of Carthage commanded the waves, their trading empire would continue to fill their treasury with
Gold, and that meant there would always be soldiers ready to fight for them. At first, it seemed the Romans had no hope of changing this situation; they had virtually no navy, and their own shipbuilding technology lagged behind, perhaps by centuries, as the historian Polybius writes. Yet, so long as the Carthaginians were an
Undisturbed command of the sea, the balance of success could not incline decisively in their favor, so they took upon themselves there and then to meet the Carthaginians at sea, on which they had for generations held undisputed supremacy. The Carthaginian navy benefited from a thousand years of Phoenician shipbuilding and sailing tradition, but
Their centuries of relatively unchallenged dominance of the sea had also made them somewhat complacent. Their method of fighting on the water was based mostly on the use of heavy bronze rams fixed to the front of their ships. The Phoenician sailors relied on outmaneuvering their enemies on the waves with their superior sailing,
Drawing close with their oars, and crashing into the sides of enemy ships with these rams, striking them in the hulls below the water line. It was a method of warfare that had remained unchanged for the last 500 years, and the Carthaginians were among the best in the world at this tricky way
Of fighting. But soon, the Romans would come across a stroke of good luck. After one skirmish on the sea, a Carthaginian galley had run aground on the shores of Italy. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn what made the Carthaginian navy so effective. The Romans rushed to secure the vessel,
To haul it away and study its secrets, as Polybius records. The Carthaginians, having put to sea in the strait to attack, a decked vessel of theirs charged so furiously that it ran aground, and, falling into the hands of the Romans, served them as a model on which they constructed their whole fleet.
If this had not happened, it is clear that they would have been completely hindered from carrying out their design. What the Romans found on this vessel would have intrigued and excited them. At that time, the Carthaginians were legendary not just for their sailing and the size of their fleet, but also how
Quickly they could build ships. The writer Pliny the Elder recounts what was possible in those days. Piso relates that 220 ships were wholly constructed in 45 days; in the Second Punic War, too, the fleet was at sea the fortieth day after the axe had been put to the tree.
This was long considered to be an exaggeration by ancient writers, but the discovery of the Phoenician shipwreck, known as the Marsala ship, has thrown light on how this kind of mass- -manufacture could actually have been possible. When the wreck was discovered, archaeologists found that the ship had
Each section of its hull marked with certain Phoenician letters. It’s thought that these sections would have been built separately, mass-produced in separate factories, and then brought together in their final location, with a level of coordination that would not be seen again before the Industrial Revolution. These ships were a kind of ancient
Flatpack furniture. Armed with this new knowledge, the Romans began the process of copying the Carthaginian ship exactly, but they didn’t do very well. In their first engagement with Carthage, the inferior mobility of these Roman ships and the inexperience of their sailors meant that a squadron of 17 Roman vessels was destroyed, easily
Outmaneuvered by the Phoenicians, and dealt death blows by their rams. Following this, the Romans began to change their tactics. Getting the hang of the complicated business of outmaneuvering and ramming enemy ships would take too long, and so, they tried to bring the battles at sea into more familiar territory.
To do this, they developed an ingenious new technology. It was a kind of boarding bridge that they called a corvus, the Latin word for crow. These were raised like a drawbridge at the front of the ship, and when they drew near to an enemy vessel, these gangplanks
Would have dropped down onto the enemy deck, where a metal spike on the underside would drive its way into the wood. These bridges would now hold the two ships together, neutralizing the speed and agility of the Carthaginian vessels, preventing them from ramming, and allowing the Roman legionaries to flood on board.
It was a crude but surprisingly effective tactic. The Romans kept their new inventions hidden, and now with a secret naval weapon of their own, they risked a large-scale confrontation on the sea. The Carthaginian fleet was busy plundering at a place called Mylae, on the coast of northern Sicily, when they
Saw the Roman sails on the horizon. They were delighted that their enemies had finally risked a battle, and were supremely confident of sending the whole fleet of this troublesome Italian power straight to the bottom of the ocean. Polybius recounts what happened next. No sooner did the Carthaginians sight him
Than with joy they put to sea with 130 sail, feeling supreme contempt for the Roman ignorance of seamanship. Accordingly, they all sailed with their prows directed straight at their enemy; they did not think the engagement worth even the trouble of ranging their ships in any order. When they neared the enemy,
They saw the crows raised aloft on the prows of several ships. The Carthaginians were, for a time, in a state of perplexity, for they were quite strangers to such contrivances as these engines. Feeling, however, a complete contempt for their opponent, they charged without flinching, but as soon as they
Came to close quarters, their ships were invariably tightly grappled by these machines. The enemy boarded by means of the crows and engaged them on their decks, and in the end, some of the Carthaginians were cut down, while others surrendered in bewildered terror at the battle in which they found themselves
Engaged, which eventually became exactly like a land fight. Eventually, the Carthaginians turned and fled, bewildered at the novelty of the occurrence, and with a loss of fifty ships. For Carthage, this was an utter disaster. Flying high from their successes, the Romans soon organized invasions of the islands of Sardinia and Corsica,
Carthaginian possessions for centuries that had never been seriously threatened. They even organized an invasion of North Africa itself, hoping to follow in the footsteps of Agathocles and march on the capital of Carthage. For the Carthaginians, things were starting to get out of hand. As the Roman invasion force descended
Upon the coast, Carthage sent out the entirety of its fleet to meet them on the open sea. Polybius recounts that as they sighted the Roman sails on the horizon, the commanders of Carthage spoke to their sailors and soldiers, and vocalized a fear that must have been on the lips of
Every man and woman in the Phoenician territories, that this war was now in danger of coming home. Meanwhile, the Carthaginian commanders had briefly addressed their men. They pointed out to them that victory in this battle would ensure that the war in the future was confined to the question
Of the possession of Sicily, while if they were beaten, they would have hereafter to fight for their native land and for all that they held dear. Polybius records that more than 600 ships came together in the battle that ensued. By the time he was writing his
History of the Punic Wars more than a hundred years later, the size of warships had dramatically increased, and so, he likely wildly overestimates the number of men involved, putting it at well over 300,000. Nevertheless, the battle was enormous and probably involved at least 120,000 sailors, soldiers, rowers, and marines.
The vast battlefield would have devolved into a chaos of clashing oars and rams, shouting men, and the thud of the corvus bridges crushing down onto the decks, the clashing of shields and swords, the crashing of waves, and the shrieking of gulls overhead. By the end of the day, the result of the
Battle was a decisive defeat for the Carthaginians. With the fleet of Carthage scattered, the Romans successfully made the crossing into Africa and landed on the peninsula of Cape Bon, on the other side of the bay from the city. The citizens of Carthage would now have been able to see the campfires of the
Roman army in the distance at night. Some of the city’s oldest residents would still have remembered when the army of Agathocles had menaced the city only half a century before, when they had watched those ships burning on the shoreline. The Carthaginians had had enough. They asked the Romans for a peace treaty
To sign, but the Roman demands were so punishing that the Carthaginians, even in their desperate state, could not accept it, and so, the war dragged on. But the Romans, like Agathocles, found themselves unable to take the city of Carthage. The Roman expeditionary force sent to capture the city was beaten disastrously
By a smaller Carthaginian army at the battle of Tunis, and the Roman consul leading it was captured and killed. In this way, the fortunes of each side ticked back and forth like a pendulum. Another naval battle at Cape Hermaeum saw another Roman victory and another hundred Carthaginian ships sunk, but the
Romans had no time to celebrate. On its return voyage home, the victorious Roman fleet was hit by a devastating storm, as Polybius records. The disaster was indeed extreme, for out of their 364 vessels, 80 only remained. The rest were either swamped or driven by the surf upon the rocks and headlands,
Where they went to pieces and filled all the seaboard with corpses and wreckage. No greater catastrophe is to be found in all history as befalling a fleet at one time. 284 ships were lost, with an estimated 60,000 sailors sinking to the bottom of the sea. It was among the worst naval disasters
In history. Some historians have speculated that the Romansí secret weapon, the corvus boarding bridges, may have actually made their ships top-heavy and prone to capsizing in stormy conditions. After this disaster, there are no mentions of the corvus ever being used again on Roman ships. The war would drag on for another 14
Years, with most of the fighting taking place in Sicily and the surrounding seas, but by the year 241 BC, Carthage was spent. The Carthaginian senate ordered their general in Sicily to sign whatever peace treaty the Romans demanded, no matter how punishing. This general was a man named Hamilcar
Barca. He was proud, a competent general, and he had been winning some of his battles in Sicily. He believed that signing such a punishing treaty was madness, and so, he refused the order to negotiate. In his place, the senate sent a more junior commander to capitulate to Rome.
The First Punic War ended in the year 241 BC, 23 years after it had begun, with the signing of the Treaty of Lutatius. It was one of the longest continuous wars to ever take place in the ancient world. It had exhausted both Rome and Carthage, and driven them both to the brink of
Bankruptcy. But Rome, as the victor, had at least gained something from all the years of carnage. Under the terms of the treaty, Carthage was forced to give up all its remaining territory in Sicily to Rome, and possibly the island of Corsica, too. Carthage was forced to release all Roman
Prisoners without ransom, while hefty ransoms were charged for any Carthaginian held by Rome, and they were forced to pay a staggering 82 tons of silver in reparations to Rome over the next ten years. All of this meant that Carthage could no longer afford to pay its armies. Many of these were foreign mercenaries
That it was already in debt to, and in the same year as the treaty was signed, a large band of these mercenaries, around 20,000 men or so, camped outside the city itself and refused to budge until they got paid. But the state was all but bankrupt. When the Carthaginian senate delayed in
Paying them, they mutinied and began looting and burning the countryside. While the two decades of war had been tough on the citizens of Carthage, it had been even tougher on the rural regions of Africa it ruled over. Carthaginian provinces like Libya had sent huge numbers of men to fight for
Carthage, and they were subjected to punishing taxes to pay for it all. Their resentment had been slowly building, and now it boiled over. When news of this army of rioting mercenaries reached some of these discontented cities, they saw their chance to free themselves of the rule of Carthage entirely.
Many of them rebelled, and soon Carthage was engulfed in a civil war. It looked for the first time like the entire empire might come apart at the seams, as Polybius writes. For three years and about four months did the Mercenaries maintain a war against the Carthaginians, which far
Surpassed any that I have heard of for cruelty and inhumanity. The many battles in which they have been engaged at sea have naturally left them ill-supplied with arms, sailors, and vessels. They had no store of provisions ready and no expectation whatever of external assistance from friends or allies.
They were indeed now thoroughly taught the difference between a foreign war carried on beyond the seas and the domestic insurrection. The civil war that followed, which would become known as the Mercenary War, would unfold with unparalleled brutality. The bodies of crucified rebels would have become a regular sight along the
Roads. The instability caused a famine, and Carthage was forced to raise an army from its citizens, forcing ordinary people in the capital to fight. The man tasked by the Carthaginian senate with carrying out this civil war was the proud general Hamilcar Barca, the man who had refused to sign the treaty with Rome.
Throughout these years of violence, he would have seen his homeland burning, his people starving and dying, and all this time, he nursed his hatred for his Roman enemies. At enormous cost, Hamilcar Barca would eventually crush the rebels, and he sometimes did this quite literally. Many insurgents captured in the later
Years of the war were executed beneath the feet of Carthage’s elephants, the ultimate living symbol of the empire’s power. After four years of civil war, some measure of order returned to the scorched countryside. The empire of Carthage had survived, but they were now in an even worse state than before.
Meanwhile, the Romans had spent four years recovering and drawing wealth from their new lands in Sicily and Corsica. At Carthage’s time of weakness, Rome moved to capture the island of Sardinia, too, which had escaped its grasp during the war and was now rebelling against Carthage’s weakened rule. The Carthaginians could do nothing to
Stop them, as Polybius recalls. When the Carthaginians expressed indignation of this on the ground that the lordship over Sardinia more properly belonged to them, the Romans voted to declare war against them. The Carthaginians, however, having just had an almost miraculous escape from annihilation in the recent civil war,
Yielded to the necessities of the hour and not only abandoned Sardinia, but they paid the Romans 1,200 talents into the bargain that they might not be obliged to undertake the war for the present. The new balance of power in the Mediterranean was clear. Carthage was now a hollowed-out husk.
If they were to reclaim any of the power that they had once held, the next generation of Carthaginian military leaders would need to produce a general of such genius that he could turn around the hopes and fortunes of this floundering empire, a general that would conduct a campaign
So daring that it is still studied in military academies to this day. That man would bear a name that in Phoenician meant ëby the grace of Baalí. His name was Hannibal. Hannibal was the son of the general Hamilcar Barca. When the First Punic War ended, he was a
Boy of only six years old, and he would have watched with the formative mind of a child as the world he knew was torn apart by violence, and his father struggled to end the rebellions. When Rome had snatched away the island of Sardinia, Carthage lost the last of its profitable central Mediterranean
Islands, and with the empire so weakened, its economy was in freefall. If it was to right itself, Carthage would need to find vast resources of minerals, metals, and people, and Hannibal’s father knew that the only way these could be found was by expanding Carthage’s last remaining overseas territories.
These were in southern Spain, as Polybius writes. Hamilcar, with the anger felt by all his compatriots at this last outrage, as soon as he had finally crushed the mutiny of mercenaries and secured the safety of his country, at once threw all his efforts into the conquest of Spain.
Hamilcar gathered an army and set out for the Spanish colonies. Rome now ruled the seas, and Carthage’s navy was so weakened that he was unable to travel the whole way to Spain by ship. Instead, he had to march all the way across North Africa and ferry his army
Across the sea at the narrow Straits of Gibraltar. When he left, he took his own young son Hannibal with him to teach the boy the art of war and to ensure that he passed on his burning hatred for Rome. At the time, when his father was about to
Start with his army on his expedition to Spain, Hannibal, then nine years of age, were standing by the altar while Hamilcar was sacrificing to Zeus. His father took him by the hand, led him up to the altar, and bade him lay his hand on the victim and swear never to be
The friend of the Romans. He made his own son Hannibal such an enemy of Rome that none could be more bitter. Despite the weakened state of Carthage, Hamilcar succeeded in conquering the Celtic tribes of Spain. He built a new city there that became known as New Carthage, now the southern Spanish city
Of Cartagena. While the young boy Hannibal grew up in Spain, he would have likely visited the Temple of Melqart or Hercules in Gades, that temple with the golden olive tree at its center. He would have heard stories about Hercules and his legendary journey over the Alps, herding the cattle of Geryon, the giant.
Perhaps he would have even learned the history of the Greek, Agathocles, and his daring strike right at the heart of his stronger enemy. All this while, he would have dreamed of one day making his own mark on history. When his father Hamilcar died and his successor was assassinated, it would soon
Fall to the young Hannibal to lead the Carthaginian armies in Spain. He continued his father’s work of expanding their territories, pushing back the local Celtic tribes who opposed him, and it’s clear he developed a flare for warfare. By the time he was 27, Hannibal controlled more than half of the Iberian
Peninsula, a vast and wealthy territory of nearly a quarter-million square kilometers. From his father, he had inherited an army of 60,000 battle-hardened troops, the best in the empire, and a stable of 200 war elephants. He had also forged alliances with a number of Celtic tribes in Spain that he
Knew would come to his aid if needed. He was now at the head of the wealthiest and most powerful province of the empire. Hannibal and his father’s success in Spain restored the lifeblood of Carthage, and silver once again flowed through the empire. It’s said that just one Spanish mine in
The region of Baebelo, with its shafts running more than two kilometers into the mountainside, was producing nearly a thousand kilograms of silver each week for Hannibal’s treasury. Analysis shows that the coins being minted in Spain at this time were of an exceptionally high content of silver, while those being minted back in
Carthage were still watered down with cheaper metals. All of this meant that Hannibal was beginning to feel increasingly confident about testing the bounds of what he could get away with, both with the Senate back in Carthage and with his sworn enemy of Rome. The Roman poet Silius Italicus gives one
Description of his character. He was one, by nature, eager for action, yet an oath-breaker, cunning beyond all, though of questionable fairness. Armed, he was no respecter of the gods; bold to do wrong, scorning the virtues of peace, and with a thirst for human blood alive in his deepest marrow. Above all, in the
Flower of his youth, he longed to erase that defeat, a generation’s shame, and drown their peace treaty deep in the Sicilian Sea. The location for the flashpoint that would spark the Second Punic War was the town of Saguntum, just north of what is today Valencia in southern Spain.
Saguntum was a Roman ally, and Rome had been watching with concern as Carthage’s Spanish borders edged ever closer. Rome had made it very clear that they would not tolerate a Carthaginian attack on the city of Saguntum, but Hannibal was willing to call their bluff.
In the year 219 BC, at the age of 28, he led his army against the city and put it under siege. The fighting didn’t go smoothly; the people of Saguntum put up a fierce defense from their walls, and Hannibal was even wounded in the thigh by a
Javelin, but his move to take the city was a clear spit in the eye of the Romans. When they heard about what was happening, Rome dispatched some envoys who turned up at Hannibal’s siege camp at Saguntum and demanded to speak with him. He had his man send them away, telling
Them that he was too busy to talk to them. The Romans must have left seething with rage. Back in Carthage, news of Hannibal’s actions were likely met with excitement by his supporters and with a frenzy of dismay by others. One of his great opponents, a man named
Hanno, is supposed to have delivered a blistering speech against him in the Carthaginian senate, the words of which the later Roman historian Livy imagines. As long as any single representative of the blood and name of Barca survives, our treaty with Rome will never remain unimperilled. You have sent to the army, as
Though supplying fuel to fire, a young man who is consumed with a passion for sovereign power, and who recognizes that the only way to it lies in passing his life surrounded by armed legions and perpetually stirring up fresh wars. It is against Carthage that Hannibal is now
Bringing up his towers. It is Carthage whose walls he is shaking with his battering rams. The ruins of Saguntum will fall on our heads, and the war which has begun with Saguntum will have to be carried on with Rome. But Hannibal also had plenty of supporters, and even his strongest
Opponents in the senate found themselves in something of a bind. Many would have likely preferred to have Hannibal arrested and his armies given to some more predictable general, but in truth, they had no idea how to do this. Hannibalís soldiers were loyal to him, and any move against him would cause a civil
War that could lose Carthage all of the wealthy Spanish provinces on which their entire economy now rested. But the Romans, too, were paralyzed by indecision. For the eight months of the siege of Saguntum, Rome did nothing but complain. When Hannibal finally took the city, the Romans sent a delegation of ambassadors
To Africa to demand an explanation. The clouds of war were once again gathering over the sea. When these men arrived, they spoke before the Carthaginian senate and demanded to know whether Hannibal’s capture of Saguntum was the official policy of Carthage or just the work of one rogue general.
If he had acted alone, they demanded that Hannibal be arrested and handed over for punishment. If Carthage failed to do that, Rome would declare war. The historian Appian described this moment as the Carthaginian senate made its choice. The Romans now sent ambassadors to Carthage to demand that Hannibal should
Be delivered up to them as a violator of the treaty. If they would not give him up, war was to be declared forthwith. The chief of the embassy pointed to the fold of his toga and, smiling, said, ëHere, Carthaginians, I bring you peace or war. You may take whichever you choose.í The
Latter replied, ëYou may give us whichever you like.í When the Romans offered war, they all cried out, ëWe accept it.í The poet Silius Italicus, writing some centuries after the conflict, gives an even more florid rendition. He gestured to them that he carried war and peace in his hands, demanding they
Choose, and when the senators refused to accept either, he replied, shaking his robes as if pouring out battle and ruin from his arms; ëTake war, unhappy Libya, with an outcome like the first.í The Roman historian Livy describes the conflict that ensued in the following terms. The most memorable of all wars ever
Waged, the war that is, which, under the leadership of Hannibal, the Carthaginians waged with the Roman people, for neither have states or nations met in arms possessed of ample resources, nor was their own might and power ever so great. Growing up among the fires of civil war,
Hannibal had learned never to let your homeland become a battlefield. He knew that if he waited in Spain, his lands would soon become host to a Roman invasion force. His fields would burn. His silver mines would dry up, and his people would suffer. So, he decided to take his war to Rome.
He withdrew to his capital of New Carthage for the winter, to prepare and plan, and here, Livy describes him giving the following speech to his soldiers. You are on the eve of an expedition that will carry you far afield, and it is uncertain when you will see again your
Homes. With the first signs of spring, with Heavenís good help, we may begin a war that shall bring us vast renown and treasure. The journey from New Carthage to Italy was one of about 1,500 kilometers, so Hannibal knew that a long and dangerous march awaited him once the spring arrived,
And at the end of this journey, a monumental problem loomed ahead of him. That’s because the geography of the Italian Peninsula made it something of a natural fortress. Beginning in the Cretaceous Period around 100 million years ago, the steady northward movement of the African continental plate crushing beneath the
Eurasian plate in the region of Sicily had caused the Earth’s crust to bend and pleat, driving up a dramatic series of mountains that form a sheer wall between the Italian Peninsula and Celtic Western Europe, which the Romans called Gaul. These mountains, known as the Alps, can tower up to five kilometers from sea
Level, with permanent snow-capped peaks choked with icy glaciers, and with only a few narrow crossing points. The Roman writer Ammianus Marcellinus describes the appearance of the Alps at this time. This country of Gaul, because of its lofty chains of mountains always covered with formidable snows, was formerly all
But unknown to the inhabitants of the rest of the globe, except where it borders on the coast; and mountain bulwarks enclose it on every side, surrounding it naturally, as if by the art of man. The most commonly-used roads were the ones that went around this natural wall, the narrow corridor that follows the
Coastline past what is now the French port town of Nice. But as the only way into and out of Italy, these roads were heavily defended and lined with forts stacked with Roman legionaries. Here, the Romans could have staged a fearsome defense. Faced with this problem, Hannibal would need a daring solution,
And it’s here that those stories may have come back to him, stories he must have heard as a child of the great hero Hercules leading his herd of cattle directly over the Alps. The Romans believed that it was impossible to cross the Alps with an army weighed down with supplies, with
Horses, oxen, and with a herd of 37 elephants. It would be madness to even attempt it, and for that reason, it was the last thing they would ever have expected. When spring came and the Romans heard of the Carthaginian army beginning its march, they sent ambassadors along the
Coastal roads and into what they called Transalpine Gaul. There were Celtic tribes of Gauls living on both the Italian and the northern side of the Alps, and so, the Romans used the Latin word cis, meaning ëon this sideí and trans, meaning ëon the other sideí, to differentiate between them. The Roman
Ambassadors approached the leaders of these Transalpine Gauls, and informed them of the Carthaginian army then making its way towards them. They asked these Gauls to bar the way to Hannibal and his troops, but they didn’t get the reception they’d hoped for, as Livy describes. When the envoys, boasting of the renown
And valor of the Roman people and the extent of their dominion, requested the Gauls to deny the Phoenician a passage through their lands and cities, if he should attempt to carry the war into Italy, it is said that they burst out into such peals of laughter that the magistrates and elders could scarce
Reduce the younger men to order. So stupid and impudent a thing, it seemed, to propose that the Gauls should bring down the war on their own heads and offer their own fields to be pillaged in place of other men’s. This was perhaps the first sign that
Things weren’t going to go as the Romans might have wished. But on his march south, Hannibal did encounter significant resistance from local peoples who didn’t welcome the presence of his army, and in France, it was only through the excessive distribution of gifts that the Gauls allowed him and his men to pass.
The first true obstacle was the river Rhone, one of France’s largest rivers. Here, Hannibal’s army crossed with difficulty, building rafts to ferry his men and equipment across, but the elephants here posed a significant challenge. These animals were terrified of water, and so, to get them across, the Carthaginians built enormous rafts built
From whole tree trunks and covered them with earth and turf so that the elephants would believe they were still standing on dry land. In that way, they were able to coax two of the females onto the rafts and across the river, and from there, the rest of the herd were ferried across.
Hannibal then followed the river road north and found a tribe of Gauls who agreed to help him achieve his impossible plan; to cross the vast natural barrier of the Alps. These Gauls gave Hannibal and his men supplies and warm clothing for the mountain crossing, but the task ahead was still staggering.
By this time, it was October. Winter was closing in, and the passes of the Alps were choked with ice and snow. The later Roman writer Ammianus Marcellinus writes one account of these treacherous alpine passes. In these Alps, there rises a lofty ridge which scarcely anyone can cross without danger,
For as one comes from Gaul, it falls off with sheer incline, terrible to look upon because of overhanging cliffs on either side; then over precipitous ravines on either side and chasms rendered treacherous through the accumulation of ice, men and animals descending with hesitating steps slide forward, and wagons as well.
In winter, the ground, caked with ice, and as if it were polished and therefore slippery, drives men headlong in their gait, and the spreading valleys, made treacherous by ice, sometimes swallow up the traveler. The march to the top of the pass took nine days, and we can only imagine the
Hardship that these men, their horses and oxen, and elephants all endured during those days, but on the ninth day, they reached the top, and now gazed down through the Alpine pass into the green lowlands of Italy stretching out below them. But the descent from the mountains would
Prove to be even more treacherous than the climb. On their way down, they found that a recent landslide had turned what was already a difficult road into an unpassable precipice. The historian Livy describes the obstacle that faced them. The result was a horrible struggle, the ice affording no foothold in any case, at
Least of all on a steep slope. When a man tried by hands or knees to get on his feet again, even those useless supports slipped from under him and let him down. There were no stumps or roots anywhere to afford a purchase to either hand or
Foot; in short, there was nothing for it but to roll and slither on the smooth ice and melting snow. The decision was made to cut a stepped path into this sheer wall, and the episode has become one of the most famous in the mythical retelling of these events that
Would take place over the next centuries. The story goes that Hannibal ordered his men to gather large amounts of wood and build a great fire against the rock of the precipice. As the fire blazed and the flames licked at the icy stone, the rock heated up, then the soldiers would pour their
Rations of sour wine against the heated rock, causing its temperature to rapidly drop and the rock to crack. With iron tools, they then worked away at these fissures until after four days of labor, steps were cut into the rock, as Livy recounts. After thus heating the crag with fire,
They opened a way in it with iron tools and relieved the steepness of the slope with zigzags of an easy gradient, so that not only the baggage animals but even the elephants could be led down. Four days were consumed at the cliff, and the animals nearly perished of starvation,
For the mountaintops are all practically bare, and such grass as does grow is buried under snow. Whether this episode unfolded quite in this manner or not, from the perspective of Hannibal’s followers, the purpose of telling this story was clear; here was a new Hercules, it said, a man who has
Crossed the Alps with his herd of elephants, a man who achieves great labors wherever he goes, a man for whom the very rock of the mountain presents no obstacle. Climbing down into the foothills, the men must have felt the lowland warmth wash over their skin for the first time with
A sense of enormous relief, as Livy recounts. Lower down one comes to valleys and sunny slopes and rivulets, and near them woods and places that begin to be fitted for man’s habitation. There the beasts were turned out to graze, and the men, exhausted with toiling at the road, were allowed to rest.
But the audacity of Hannibal’s plan had come at a cost, as Polybius writes. When Hannibal crossed the Rhone, he had 38,000 infantry and more than 8,000 cavalry. He lost nearly half in the pass; while the survivors had, by these long continued sufferings, become almost savage in look and general appearance.
Nevertheless, Hannibal and his men now stood and looked out over the lands of Italy below. They had caught the Romans completely by surprise. At the outbreak of war with Carthage, Rome knew that Hannibal’s army was on the move. They sent out messengers to find out any word about the location of his forces,
But recently they had been coming back empty-handed. After crossing the river Rhone, the Carthaginian general had disappeared. He wasn’t in Gaul. He wasn’t in Spain. For the Romans, the situation must have been puzzling and a little concerning. When news came to them of what Hannibal had done, the first note of panic began
To set in. Polybius recounted the reaction of one Roman general. Publius had not expected that Hannibal would even attempt the passage of the Alps, or if he did attempt it, that he could escape utter destruction. He was immensely astonished at his courage and adventurous daring when he heard that he
Had not only got safe across, but was actually besieging certain towns in Italy. The Roman government was typically slow- -moving, and the speed of Hannibal’s attack had stunned them. Scarcely had the last rumor about the taking of Saguntum by the Carthaginians ceased to attract attention, then news came
That Hannibal had arrived in Italy with his army. What made matters worse was that Hannibal was now recruiting allies from the Cisalpine Gauls in the foothills of the Alps, Celtic tribes on the Italian side of the mountains who had fought with the Romans before. The Roman senate went into a panic. They
Brought up reinforcements from Sicily, from an army that at that moment had been preparing to invade Africa. The general Sempronius Longus led this army of more than 40,000 to intercept Hannibal’s forces in northern Italy. They met at the battle of Trebia in December of the year 218 BC. Here, Hannibal’s powerful and
Determined forces utterly smashed the Roman army, killing at least 20,000 soldiers. When news of this defeat reached Rome, the mood in the senate must have been bleak. Hannibal marched south and crossed the Apennine mountains that run down the center of Italy, and crushed another Roman army on the shore of Lake
Trasimene, killing another 15,000 Romans and capturing 10,000 prisoners. From there, his march seemed to be unstoppable. Hannibal would rampage across Italy for a total of fifteen years. Chastened by their defeats, the Romans now avoided any battles with him, trying instead to suffocate his army and cut off his supplies.
They even resorted to a scorched-earth campaign in which they burned their own countryside in a desperate attempt to starve Hannibal’s troops. Hannibal’s strategy was to march south, hoping that the conquered Greek cities of southern Italy would greet him as a liberator and throw off the rule of
Their Roman masters, but the journey was hard. On his way, all but the largest of his elephants would die as a result of the harsh Italian winter, and while riding through the marshes of central Italy, Hannibal himself caught an infection that caused the loss of one of his eyes.
When he reached southern Italy, he seized a vast supply depot at the town of Cannae, and the Roman senate realized their strategy of suffocating him wouldn’t work. They ordered a vast army to be drawn up, 86,000 soldiers, the largest that had ever been raised in Roman history, and
With this force, they sent the best and brightest of Roman society to march south to meet Hannibal at Cannae. Hannibal, now frustrated with these months without a battle, was all too eager to accept. Once again, the Roman army was utterly smashed, and the defeat was so total that
Even high members of Roman society were slaughtered on the battlefield. Livy describes the aftermath. It is said that 45,500 foot and 2,700 horse was slain, in an almost equal proportion of citizens and allies. In the number were the quaestors of both consuls and 29 military tribunes, some
Of consular rank, some of praetorian; and besides these, 80 senators, all men who had held offices which would have given them the right to be elected to the senate, but had volunteered to serve as soldiers in the legions. The prisoners taken in this battle are said to have numbered 3,000 foot soldiers
And 1,500 horsemen. When news of this staggering defeat reached Rome, the city went into a panic. The people of Rome began seeing evil omens and portents everywhere. One senator was dispatched to Greece to consult the oracle at Delphi, and as the Carthaginians had once done under threat by Agathocles, the Romans
Resorted to rituals of human sacrifice to appease their angry gods, as Livy describes. By the direction of the Books of Fate, some unusual sacrifices were offered; amongst others, a Gaulish man and woman and a Greek man and woman were buried alive in the cattle market, in a place
Walled in with stone, which even before this time had been defiled with human victims, a sacrifice wholly alien to the Roman spirit. To raise a new army, the Romans reduced the age of boys that were allowed to serve in the military to 17, and began enlisting criminals, those with crushing
Debts, and even slaves. But their situation looked bleak. After the battle of Cannae, many of the old Greek cities of southern Italy began to join Hannibal and rebel against Rome. Sicily looked like it could break free, too, and for the next 11 years, war would rage all over southern Italy.
In the year 211 BC, Hannibal even marched against Rome itself, causing great panic in the city, but like the Greek king Pyrrhus before him, Hannibal saw no hope of breaching the city’s imposing Servian walls. The Carthaginian senate made several attempts to open up a new front in this war and capitalize on Hannibal’s
Stunning success. They sent armies into northern Italy and Sicily, hoping to regain some of their former territories, but none of their other generals had the same ability, and these attempts all ended in defeat. Rome now realized that trying to stop Hannibal was useless, and the only way they could turn the
Tide of this war was to attack Carthage in return. They sent one army into Spain, led by a general named Publius Cornelius Scipio, who had been among the few survivors of the battle of Cannae, and he was remarkably successful. In the year 209 BC, in a devastating blow,
Scipio managed to capture the Spanish capital of New Carthage. Three years later, he defeated the last remaining Carthaginian army in Spain, essentially seizing the entire province and its abundant silver mines for Rome. Despite everything Hannibal had achieved, the war was starting to turn in Rome’s favor.
Four years later in 205 BC, with Hannibal still rampaging in Italy, the Romans gave Scipio command of the armies of Sicily and ordered him to set sail for Africa, to bring this war to the gates of Carthage itself. After a year of preparation, Scipio set sail in 204 BC.
Faced with this invasion that could behead his entire society, Hannibal was forced to take his army and leave Italy, to hurry back to Carthage and defend the city, as the Roman poet Silius Italicus renders it. Carthage, with all her limbs severed, now depended upon a single man; only the
Name of Hannibal prevented her great realm from sliding into utter ruin. Envoys promptly set sail, crossing the sea to recall him, with a plea from his country warning that should he choose to linger, the city of Carthage might exist no more. Hannibal marshaled all the forces of
Carthage and met Publius Scipio in North Africa in October of the year 202 BC, at a place called Zama. Here, on the eve of battle, Scipio and Hannibal finally met for the first time, and Hannibal seems to have presented a dejected, weary face, as Polybius writes. The next day, both commanders advanced
From their camps, attended by a few horsemen. Presently, they left these escorts and met in the intervening space by themselves, each accompanied by an interpreter. Hannibal was the first to speak. After the usual salutation, he said that he wished that the Romans had never coveted any possession outside Italy, nor
The Carthaginians outside Libya. To this battle, Hannibal brought 80 elephants from the stables of Carthage. But recently, one of Carthage’s most important allies, the kingdom of Numidia to their west, had seen the writing on the wall and had switched sides, declaring for Rome. For centuries, Numidia had provided
Carthage with its crucial cavalry, and now Carthage found itself facing these same Numidian horsemen on the battlefield. On top of this, the Romans had developed new tactics to neutralize Carthage’s great strength, the fearsome war elephants. When the battle began, the elephants of Carthage charged, but the Roman lines
Opened up to swallow them, containing them with spears and pelting them with javelins. These animals panicked and stampeded back through the Carthaginian lines. In the chaos, the Numidian cavalry, now fighting with the Romans, swung into the rear of the Carthaginian ranks, and Hannibal’s army was driven from the field. He
Only narrowly escaped with his life. after 17 long years of war, Carthage was once again decisively defeated. After the years of the destruction that Hannibal had wrought in Italy, Rome was in no mood to be lenient. They forced Carthage to sign an even more crushing peace treaty than the first.
All of its overseas territories in Spain and elsewhere were stripped away from it, and many of its lands in North Africa were handed over to the Numidians, and Carthage was ordered to pay more than 370 tons of silver, nearly five times the amount they had paid after the First Punic War.
The treaty also aimed to destroy Carthage’s ability to wage war in the future. It banned them from keeping any war elephants, all of which were handed over to the Romans, and restricted the size of their fleet to only ten ships, barely enough to even protect them from pirates.
The rest of the Carthaginian navy was burned in its port. The Roman poet Silius Italicus describes the scene. Then Carthage witnessed a dreadful sight, her fleet being set ablaze, the waves aglow with the sudden conflagration, while Nereus, lord of the ocean, trembled at the glare. The Carthaginians were restricted from
Declaring war anywhere outside of Africa, and only in Africa if they got the permission of Rome first. The new political situation was clear; Carthage was now entirely subservient to Rome. Hannibal would live for another 20 years after the battle of Zama, although he would go into exile in the East, retiring
To Tyre, the mother city of Carthage, and then to the Selucid Empire and Armenia. The writer Pausanius claims that he died when he cut his finger on his drawn sword and developed septicemia from the wound. Other more dramatic stories describe him taking poison when he finds his dwelling
Place surrounded by soldiers loyal to the Romans, come to capture him and take him back to Rome in chains. The Second Punic War was over, and once more, peace returned to that part of the Mediterranean that would last for another 50 years. During this time, despite its diminished situation, Carthage continued to flourish.
Ironically, it seemed to do them good to be freed from the responsibilities of defending far-flung colonies and territories that for centuries had drained their treasury. Nothing about the war had changed the city’s central role in the network of Mediterranean trade. Money still flowed into it from all
Corners of the sea, so much so that the Carthaginians offered to pay off the entirety of the reparations they owed to Rome just ten years after the end of the war, when the treaty had given them fifty years to pay it. Some of the largest and grandest buildings in Carthage were constructed
During these decades after the Second Punic War. For the people of the city, it must have been a time of renewed hope, as the wounds of the long conflict began to heal. But their diminished political situation did have its downsides. Banned from declaring war without Roman permission, Carthage repeatedly found
Itself defenseless against ambitious rivals in North Africa, and one of these was the new Roman ally and King of Numidia, named Massinissa. Massinissa was the king who had betrayed the Carthaginians before the battle of Zama, sending his powerful Numidian cavalry to fight for the Romans, and possibly
Tipping the entire battle in their favor. As a result, he had lived a long and prosperous life. He was now at the age of 86, and his long reign had seen Numidia break free of Carthage and become a North African power in its own right, and a loyal ally of Rome.
But Massinissa wasn’t content with this, and he always coveted more land for his growing kingdom. With the power of Rome now backing him and Carthage’s hands tied behind its back, he repeatedly moved to seize wealthy pieces of land from the weakened former empire. The Carthaginians, bound by their treaty,
Had to appeal to the Romans to allow them to defend themselves, but Rome considered Massinissa a crucial ally, and they always ruled in his favor. Carthage was like a great stricken whale slowly being eaten alive by sharks. In the year 152 BC, half a century after
The end of the Second Punic War, the Numidian King Massinissa seized a particularly rich tract of farmland that had belonged to Carthage for centuries, and the Carthaginians were understandably upset, as the Roman historian Appian writes. Not long afterward, Massinissa raised a dispute about the land known as the ëbig
Fieldsí and the country belonging to 50 towns, which is called Tysca. Again, the Carthaginians had recourse to the Romans. Again, the latter promised to send envoys to arbitrate the matter, but they delayed until it seemed probable that the Carthaginian interests would be utterly ruined. Rome finally agreed to send a delegation
To Carthage to mediate this dispute. One of the men sent as part of this delegation was an irascible Roman senator by the name of Cato the Elder. Cato at this time was 81 years old, and had spent much of his time in the senate railing against what he perceived
As the increasingly loose morals of Roman society. As a young man, he had fought against the armies of Hannibal in Italy, and as a result, he had grown to utterly detest the Carthaginians and everything they stood for. When he arrived in Carthage, Cato expected to find the city a barbarian
Backwater, impoverished by its two subsequent defeats at the hands of Rome, but what he found horrified him. Carthage was a booming city that seemed to be doing better than ever, and to his shock, the visible wealth of the city seemed to outdo that of Rome itself. In Plutarch’s biography of Cato, he
Describes the old senator’s reaction. The city was by no means in a poor or lowly state as the Romans supposed, but rather teeming with vigorous fighting men, overflowing with enormous wealth, filled with arms of every sort and with military supplies, and more than a little emboldened by all this.
The writer Appian records another version of this moment, as the senators rode through the wealthy landscape outside the city. They carefully observed the country; they saw how diligently it was cultivated and what great estates it possessed. They entered the city and saw how greatly it had increased in wealth and population
Since its overthrow by Scipio not long before. When they returned to Rome, they declared that Carthage was to them an object of apprehension rather than of jealousy, the city being so ill-affected, so near to them, and growing so rapidly. The old senator Cato was shaken by his experience.
From then, he would dedicate the final years of his life to a single cause. Now at every debate in the senate, Cato would end every one of his statements, whether on the price of grain or the wars in Gaul, whether on the appointment of new consuls or the response to a
Flood in the south, with a single phrase; ceterum, censeo Carthago delenda est. Furthermore, I believe Carthage must be destroyed. Many in the Roman senate were starting to agree with him. Finally, a year after Cato’s visit to Carthage, the Carthaginians had had enough of the Numidian king Massinissa taking advantage of their situation.
They sent an army of 50,000 men to seize back some of the farmland that he had taken. But their army was decisively defeated by the Numidians. Carthage’s last attempt to defend itself had been a failure, but to the Romans, it was also a breach of their treaty, and it
Was enough of a pretext to go to war one final time to destroy their old rival for good. In the year 149 BC, the old Phoenician city of Utica seems to have felt the change in the winds. They also changed allegiances, declaring their loyalty to Rome, and in the same
Year, a large Roman army used the port of Utica to land in North Africa, and prepared to march on the city of Carthage. At news of this army landing, the Carthaginians were distraught. They sent envoys to meet the Romans, and when they arrived, the Romans demanded that the city be completely
Demilitarized and hand over all of their military equipment. The Carthaginians complied. They came back with every piece of armor and weaponry they could find, offering their total surrender, and with the Roman general sitting over them on his high seat, they pleaded with the Romans not to go to war.
Carthage was now completely disarmed, and in response, the Romans offered them peace on one condition, but it was a condition so absurd that even they must have known it would be rejected. They demanded that the Carthaginians abandoned their city so that it could be demolished in its entirety and moved 16
Kilometers or so inland and away from the sea. Appian recounts these Roman demands. Censorinus rose, and with a stern countenance, spoke; ëYield Carthage to us, and betake yourselves where you like within your own territory, at a distance of at least ten miles from the sea, for we
Are resolved to raze your city to the ground.í Such a task would be virtually impossible, and of course for the sea-going Phoenicians of Carthage, would have essentially ended their livelihoods for good. Moving the city would have meant abandoning their temples, the cemeteries where their ancestors were buried, every
Street and corner that they knew. Appian records the outpouring of grief as the Carthaginians were informed of the Roman plans. While he was yet speaking, the Carthaginians lifted their hands toward heaven with loud cries and called on the gods. They flung themselves on the ground and
Beat it with their hands and heads. Some of them even tore their clothes and lacerated their flesh, as though they were absolutely bereft of their senses. After the first frenzy was past, there was great silence and prostration, as of men lying dead. So pitiable was this mingling together
Of public and private grief that it drew tears from the Romans themselves. The Carthaginians withdrew to their city, and the entire civilian population prepared to withstand their attackers. The historian Appian summarizes the dire situation that the citizens of Carthage faced. They reflected that their city was without arms, that it was empty of
Defenders, that it had not a ship, not a catapult, not a javelin, not a sword, nor a sufficient number of fighting men. They had neither mercenaries, nor friends, nor allies, nor time to procure any. Their enemies were in possession of their children, their arms, and their territory.
Their city was besieged by foes provided with ships, infantry, cavalry, and engines, while Massinissa, their other enemy, was on their flank. But the city was still a formidable fortress. Its triple line of defensive walls could withstand any assault, and it had complex systems for gathering rainwater and storing it in vast
Cisterns, allowing it to maintain a continuous supply of fresh drinking water. The Romans settled in for a siege, but soon found it to be much more difficult than they had expected. They controlled the seas, but swift Carthaginian sailors were still able to smuggle food into the city’s harbor at night.
The Romans tried again and again to storm the city walls, but each time, they were fought back by the citizens, now fighting tooth and nail for their survival with every tool and improvised weapon they could find, as Appian recounts. All the sacred places, the temples and every other unoccupied space, were turned
Into workshops where men and women worked together day and night without pause, taking their food by turns on a fixed schedule. Each day, they made a hundred shields, 300 swords, a thousand missiles for catapults, 500 darts and javelins, and as many catapults as they could. For strings to bend them, the women
Cut off their hair for want of other fibers. The siege of Carthage went on for three years. In the year 147, command of the besieging army was given to a new consul, in fact, the 36-year-old adopted grandson of the great Publius Scipio, who had beat Hannibal at the battle of Zama some 50
Years earlier, a man named Scipio Aemilianus. With him came his personal friend and official documenter of the expedition, the Greek historian Polybius, who writes this part of his history as an eyewitness. Infuriated at the smugglers still supplying the besieged city, the Roman general Scipio ordered a vast stone
Barrier to be built in the mouth of Carthage’s harbor, blocking any further attempts to resupply it. Food became scarce in the city, but still the defenders struggled on. But in the spring of the year 146 BC, the spirit of the Carthaginians was exhausted. Scipio launched a full-scale
Assault of the city from the area of the harbor, and the great walls of Carthage were finally breached. The Roman legions poured into the city and began to massacre every person they could find. Appian described the scenes that followed. Then came new scenes of horror as the fire spread and carried everything down.
The soldiers did not wait to destroy the buildings little by little, but all in a heap. So, the crashing grew louder and many corpses fell with the stones into the midst. Others were seen still living, especially old men, women, and young children, who had hidden in the inmost
Nooks of the houses, some of them wounded, some more or less burned, and uttering piteous cries. Still others, thrust out and falling from such a height with the stones, timbers, and fire, were torn asunder in all shapes of horror, crushed and mangled. Trenches were filled with men. The tug of war, the
Glory of approaching victory, the rush of the soldiery, the orders of the officers, the blast of the trumpets, tribunes and centurions marching their cohorts hither and thither — all together made everybody frantic and heedless of the spectacles under their eyes. The slaughter of Carthage’s citizens went on for six days, during which it’s
Thought that an estimated 60,000 people were put to the sword. The Roman general Scipio set his soldiers to work in shifts so that they would not become tired of the killing, and on the seventh day, Scipio ordered his soldiers to begin taking prisoners. From this point, a further 50,000
Carthaginians were rounded up and sold into slavery. From there, they would be sold and dispersed to all corners of the Roman republic. Carthage was burned to the ground and demolished brick by brick. Some Carthaginians held out for some time in the citadel of Byrsa, the fortified hill on which legend has it
That Elishaya once cut apart her ox hide at the city’s founding. According to Appian, when the Carthaginian general Hasdrubal finally surrendered, his wife set fire to the main temple and climbed upon its roof. Just like the mythical figure of Elishaya, she then cast herself and her children into the flames.
It is said that as the fire was lighted, the wife of Hasdrubal, in full view of Scipio, arrayed in the best attire possible under such circumstances, and with her children by her side, said in Scipio’s hearing; ëFor you, Roman, the gods have no cause of indignation, since you exercise the right of war.
Upon this, Hasdrubal, betrayer of his country and her temples, of me and his children, may the gods of Carthage take vengeance, and you be their instrument.í Having reproached him thus, she slew her children, flung them into the fire, and plunged in after them. Such they say was the death
Of the wife of Hasdrubal. The historian Polybius, who accompanied Scipio throughout the entire siege, writes with little detail about what unfolded, but he does note that in the moment of his victory, the Roman general turned to him and said something strange. In the burning ruins of Carthage, Scipio
Ammianus seems to have felt a spark of apprehension, a sudden fear or realization that one day the same fate might befall his own great city of Rome. Turning around to me at once and grasping my hand, Scipio said, ëA glorious moment, Polybius, but I have a dread foreboding that
Someday the same doom will be pronounced on my own country.í It would be difficult to mention an assurance more statesmanlike and more profound. At the moment of our greatest triumph and of disaster to our enemies — to bear in mind at the season of success the mutability of fortune.
Appian records that Scipio is said to have wept at the sight of Carthage burning, and that he recited a line from Homer’s great epic The Iliad, in which Andromache, the wife of Hector, laments the coming destruction of Troy. Scipio, beholding this city, which had flourished 700 years from its foundation
And had ruled over so many lands, islands, and seas, rich with arms and fleets, elephants and money, equal to the mightiest monarchies but far surpassing them in bravery and high spirit, now come to its end in total destruction. Scipio, beholding this spectacle, is said to have shed tears and publicly lamented
The fortune of the enemy. After meditating by himself a long time and reflecting on the rise and fall of cities, nations, and empires, as well as of individuals upon the fate of Troy, that once proud city, upon that of the Assyrians, the Medes, and the Persians, greatest of all, and later the splendid
Macedonian Empire, either voluntarily or otherwise, the words of the poet escaped his lips; ëThe day shall come in which our sacred Troy and Priam, and the people over whom spear- -bearing Priam rules, shall perish all.í But back in Rome, there was no such sense of foreboding. The city exploded in
Celebration at the news. When the people of Rome heard of the victory early in the evening, they poured into the streets and spent the whole night congratulating and embracing each other like people just now delivered from some great fear, just now confirmed in their worldwide supremacy, just now assured of the
Permanence of their own city, and winners of such a victory as never before. They talked about the height of the walls and the size of the stones. They pictured to each other the whole war as though it were just taking place under their own eyes. In the days that followed, ash would have
Settled over the charred ruins of Carthage. From its final victory in the Punic Wars, Rome would emerge as the only superpower left in the Mediterranean. The scattered Greek kingdoms that remained were one by one absorbed by it, and in the coming centuries, it would grow to encompass the entire shore of
That sea, cover all but the farthest stretches of Western Europe, and shape the entire course of European history. But Carthage would become just a name, a coin that had lost its value, an emblem of an age that had passed into nothing. After the carnage of the siege, the
Blackened ruins of the city were emptied of all life. But for the Romans, this still wasn’t enough. In the years that followed, they sent further delegations to the city to systematically take it apart piece by piece to ensure that no population crept back to repopulate its ruins, that never
Again would their great rival resurface in North Africa. Some of the libraries and archives of Carthage survived the burning of the city. In these were kept the books of Carthaginian history, perhaps poetry and mythology, science and medicine, documents of the Phoenician voyages of discovery to the edges of the world,
But all of these were taken by the Romans. Some were simply burned, while others were distributed among the Romanís African allies. As a result, not a single one of these works has survived. Today, scarcely a few documents written by a Carthaginian can be read, and no works of literature or history have come
Down to us. So, for the next two thousand years, their story would be told by others. Their voices and their memory, just like their city, were completely erased. The territory of Carthage was absorbed into the new Roman province of Africa, and for the next hundred years, what
Remained of the ruins of Carthage were left to crumble into the sands, home to wild dogs, overgrown with scrub and weeds and marram grass, washed with salt from the sea air, the roost of gulls and crows. More than a century later, Rome would send a party of
3,000 colonists to the ruins of the shattered city, and they founded a Roman colony on the rubble. As they settled the area, the ruins of Carthage were themselves buried beneath a new Roman town that shared almost nothing of the city that had once stood there except its name, and even the ruins
Of the city as it had once been would soon be forgotten. Around the year 1835, the British statesman Sir Grenville Temple visited the ruins of Carthage, and wrote the following description of his disappointment upon finding how little remained of that once great city. Early on the morning following, I walked
To the site of the great Carthage, of that town at the sound of whose name mighty Rome herself had so often trembled. I was prepared to see but few vestiges of its former grandeur, but my heart sunk within me when ascending one of its hills, for I beheld
Nothing more than a few scattered and shapeless masses of masonry. Its very name is now unknown to the present inhabitants. Buried in the silence of the grave, no living soul appearing, except occasionally a soldier going or returning from the fort, or the solitary and motionless figure of an Arab,
Watching his flocks from the summit of the fragment of some former palace or temple. Solitude and silence hold sway over the whole scene, a scene which impresses on the mind a feeling of melancholy, which I found difficult to shake off. Another person who visited these ruins was the English poet Letitia Elizabeth
Landon, and I’d like to end the episode with her poem, entitled Carthage. As you listen, imagine what it would feel like to watch the streets and temples of that city crumble and burn, as 800 years of history is buried beneath ash and soot. Imagine every book that has ever been
Written in your native language destroyed, and your people enslaved and scattered about the face of the Earth. Imagine what it would feel like to see your own hometown disappear, emptied of all life and demolished brick by brick, then left empty, until only a scattering of ruins remains.
Low it lieth — earth to earth — all to which that earth gave birth — palace, market street, and fane; dust that never asks in vain, hath reclaimíd its own again. Dust, the wide worldís king. Where are now the glorious hours of a nationís gatheríd powers?
Like the setting of a star in the fathomless afar, timeís eternal wing hath around those ruins cast the dark presence of the past. Thou dost build thy home on sand, and the palace-girdled strand fadeth like a dream. Thy great victories only show all is nothingness below. Thank you once again for listening to
The Fall of Civilizations Podcast. I’d like to thank my voice actors for this episode; Michael Hajiantonis, Lachlan Lucas, Alexandra Boulton, Simon Jackson, Tom Marshall-Lee, Chris Harvey, Nick Denton, and Paul Casselle. Sound engineering was by Alexei Sibikin. I’d like to thank my historical advisor for this episode, Dr. Michael J. Taylor
From the University of Albany. Original music was composed and produced by Pavlos Kapralos, featuring Sass Hoory on percussion, Anastasia Papadopoulou on vocals, June Filetti on oboe, and on the oud and flute, Pavlos Kapralos. All original tracks composed for this episode will be available to download for all Patreon subscribers.
A public list of all sources and recommended reading for this episode will also be available on Patreon. I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so please come and tell me what you thought. You can follow me @PaulMMCooper. If you’d like updates about the podcast, announcements
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