Destroy Carthage Page 5

  It is yet another hundred years before Carthage begins to appear in written history. By then, the colony was already prosperous. Herodotus, harking back to 650, offered the tradi­tion of a then mature Carthage, rich and envied. Before the close of the 6th century, her fame was such that the Persian emperor Cambyses, having conquered Egypt, dispatched an army from that country to seize the jewel of the coast for his diadem. Heading optimistically west, the Persian troops marched into the Libyan desert and vanished - as the early years of Carthage were to vanish from record - without trace.

  While the 'New Town' grew, the old Phoenicia declined. Tyre, repeatedly menaced by the warlords of Assyria and Babylon, had weakened long before Carthage was strong enough to bring relief. Instead, she succoured refugees from the motherland and prepared to defend herself, not from the distant land-powers of Asia, or even primarily from local tribes, but from an insidious seaborne peril which, from about 750, threatened to overwhelm Semitic settlement in the west.

  Benefiting from the misfortunes of metropolitan Phoenicia, Greece had edged steadily to the fore in westering colonization. Generation by generation, fleets of hardy, resourceful Greek migrants, impelled by overcrowding in mainland Hellas, by Persian encroachment on Ionia, by their own questing spirits, descended on the shores of Italy, Sicily, Provence. Some even settled in Spain and Cyrenaica.

  Everywhere, Phoenician colonization was endangered. The Greeks were as adroit at sea as the Semites, readier to turn to piracy and war where commercial competition failed. One by one, the Phoenician settlements gave way until Tunisia, en­circled, at last produced a challenger. Alone against the ubi­quitous enemy, Carthage was to come of age violently.

  8: The Siceliots

  Of the incentives urging Carthage to militant leadership of the western Phoenicians, the most immediate was Greek encroach­ment in Sicily. Phoenician control of the Sicilian ports, hence guardianship of the narrows between the island and Carthage, had long held the eastern approach to a select, if somewhat unscrupulous, sailing club.

  Greek geographers looked back on the western Mediter­ranean as a Phoenician lake, a vast preserve on which foreigners trespassed at their peril. To be caught there, declared Strabo, recalling Eratosthenes, was to suffer instant death by drowning. The Odyssey gave the early Phoenicians a bad name. They were, in the eyes of the western Greeks, 'famous for their ships,' but 'greedy men,' robbing stealthily, ingloriously.

  To the admirers of Heroic Greece, piracy and plunder in themselves assigned no stigma. Hellas was born a sea-brigand. What aroused the 'anti-semitic' indignation of many Greeks, especially the nobility, was the despised commercial instinct of the Phoenicians and their profitable operations west of Greece - a march stolen on a race with a geographic head-start.

  Eastern Sicily, fertile and close to Greece, was a natural bridgehead in the westering movement from Hellas. Among the first Greek settlements there were Naxos (734), at the foot of Mount Etna, and Syracuse (733), further south.

  At about the same time, Messana and Rhegium were founded either side of the straits of Messina, giving access by sea to western Italy. The Phocaeans of Ionia, reputedly the best long­distance sailors among the Greeks, pushed on to found Massilia (Marseilles) and several posts on the Spanish coast. Of these, the most southerly competed at Tarshish. In Sicily, new Greek colonies followed, in the north at Himera, in the south at Selinus. The latter, less than a hundred miles from Carthaginian Africa, raised a serious possibility that the Phoenicians could lose their western hold on the island. In such a situation, the Carthaginians were convinced, the Greeks would dominate the western sea, cut the lanes to Sardinia and menace Carthage herself.

  A concerted attempt to drive the Phoenicians from Sicily was soon to come. The third decade of the 6th century saw the Siceliots, as the Sicilian Greeks were known, reinforced by bands of new Greek settlers from Rhodes and the Dorian port of Cnidos, in Asia Minor. Under a leader named Pentathlos, the Rhodians and Cnidians established themselves at Lily- baeum, in the extreme west of the island, contiguous to the ultimate Phoenician stronghold of Motya.

  At last, having submitted tamely to repeated intrusions, the Phoenicians resisted. In conjunction with a native tribe of Sicily, the Elymians, they defied Pentathlos and destroyed Lilybaeum.

  Carthage now adopted a policy of intervention to the north. Historical sources are still scant, but it seems that some time following the repulse of Pentathlos a Carthaginian chief called Malchus (the Greeks may have mistaken the Semitic word melek, or king, for a proper name) led a force to Sicily to strengthen Phoenician positions there. Motya, the seagirt fortress of the west, was reinforced.

  Malchus sailed on to Sardinia. There, Carthage helped to sustain the Phoenician settlements through a stormy period. The natives were hostile and Greek pirates prowled the coast. In 560, the Phocaean Greeks established a strong colony in Corsica, their fifty-oared warships plundering adjacent Sardinia and her sea trade.

  To beat the pirates, Carthage joined forces with Etruria, the Italian land facing Corsica, whose ships had also been set upon. The Etruscans, an assertive, advanced people, were redoubtable warriors but lacked a large fleet. As a check to Greek expan­sion, the alliance with maritime Carthage was potent.

  Sweeping the northern islands, a combined Carthaginian- Etruscan armada engaged the pirate navy. The Phocaeans, out­numbered, put up a savage fight, their big warships driving the allies before them. But their losses were crucial. Reduced to 20 vessels, a third of their original number, the Greeks abandoned Corsica to the Etruscans and soon withdrew from southern Spain.

  Carthage was well served. Direct threat to Sardinia was averted; Carthaginian monopoly of Tarshish restored. The wealth from the region was vital to her new role. Leadership of the western Phoenicians had brought not only economic and political dominance but a military burden disproportionate to her population.

  Malchus had led a citizen levy, the characteristic army of ancient states. For defensive purposes, and short campaigns, the system was adequate, but the demands of overseas com­mitments put it under heavy strain. Economically, it made better sense to devote revenue in part to hiring troops beyond the city rather than waste the lives and energies of a special­ized community whose talents were better used creating wealth.

  Military reform is traditionally ascribed to a luminary named Mago, whose reign or magistracy (it is uncertain when the early kings of Carthage were replaced by suffetes, or magistrates) embraced the enlistment of forces from dependent states and the use of foreign mercenaries.

  Carthaginians still held command, while an elite corps of citizens - known by the Greeks as the Sacred Band - was re­tained to stiffen and inspire the new armies. Equipped and trained as heavy infantry, in the manner of Greek hoplites, the Sacred Band complemented the early hired troops, Libyans and Spaniards, who fought lightly-armed, sometimes as cav­alry.

  The system was effective. By Mago's death, Sardinia had been thoroughly consolidated while the Siceliots accepted Carth­aginian interest in western Sicily. Many Greeks, misrepresented by a bellicose minority, were content to trade with the Phoenicians, some even to conduct their businesses in Phoenic­ian colonies. The obverse was also true.

  Indeed, when a Spartan prince named Dorieus threatened to upset the status quo by settling in the far west of Sicily at the end of the 6th century, he received no encouragement from the Greek colonies. Shunned by the Siceliots, his followers were overwhelmed by the Phoenicians, Dorieus killed.

  In these circumstances it was not impossible that the western Mediterranean could have witnessed a gradual merger of cultures, encouraged by commerce, in which Carthage (in­creasingly exposed to Greek manners, drawn north by the Etruscan pact) might in time have shed her eastern heritage. That she became, as it happened, isolationist, a uniquely indi­vidual force, owed much to two early developments. Each was rooted in the fortunes of eastern Greece.

  Here, on the shores of the Aegean, radical changes had come about in politi
cs. With increasing commercial prosperity, the old Greek states had acquired a strong middle or trading class which, independent of the soil, was also independent of aristo­cratic landlords. Enviously, the poorer classes had stirred them­selves to question the yoke of the nobility. Finally, popular movements had tumbled aristocracies and kingdoms.

  In ultimate form, such movements had already produced the democracies of Athens and some other states. Elsewhere, rev­olution had resulted in a form of government where more or less popular leaders held power as new autocrats. Terminologically distinguished from the old kings as tyrants - the new form of rule being a turannos, or tyranny - many of these rulers were enlightened men. Others, prevailing at length, brought tyranny to disrepute.

  Meanwhile, the Siceliots, clinging to customs brought with them from former times, lagged in development. Until the be­ginning of the 5th century, most Siceliot states were controlled by the nobility. Then, as a fresh wave of Asiatic Greeks fled west from the Persians, the situation abruptly changed.

  New ideas, introduced by the migrants, who included pas­sionate revolutionaries, threw the Greek cities of Sicily into a turmoil of instability and violence. From the ferment emerged a breed of tyrants of the worst kind: egotistic, ruthless, de­structive in their conquests. Among the first, both controlling cities on the south coast, were Gelon of Gela and Theron of Acragas.

  Gelon, to dominate this baneful partnership, had served his apprenticeship as lieutenant to another tyrant, Hippocrates. The training was a thorough one. In alliance with Theron, he first seized Syracuse, the finest port in eastern Sicily and the key to communications with the east. Making this his new capital, and the base for a growing fleet, he then turned his gaze west.

  His ambition frightened not only the Sicilian Phoenicians but a good many Siceliots. Among the latter was the ruler of northern Himera, Terillos, a friend of the Carthaginian family of Mago, the influential Magonids. When Terillos, driven from his city by Gelon's ally Theron, appealed to Carthage, a major confrontation seemed probable.

  A second eastern development heightened the crisis. The new century had opened with a situation of cold war between Athens, a supporter of the Ionian rebels, and Persia's western bureau at Sardis. In the summer of 490, a year after Gelon came to power in Sicily, the Persian emperor Darius assembled one of the largest armadas then seen to impress his might on Athens and eastern Greece.

  Marathon, an Athenian victory against the odds, won time for Hellas but made a greater invasion inevitable. Xerxes, son of Darius, prepared to conquer Greece. In 481, enslavement to Persia seeming imminent, the threatened Greek states asked Gelon to rally to the motherland. He did not respond. Terillos had barely been exiled from Himera. Gelon expected trouble of his own, from Carthage.But if the tyrant was ill-placed to reinforce mainland Greece, more significant was the knowledge that Greece could not assist Gelon. How far Carthage was swayed by this is debateable. The later Greek writer Diodorus Siculus claimed an ar­rangement between Persia and Carthage to synchronize their attacks. Others disputed it. One thing seems certain: the east­ern Phoenicians, who assisted Xerxes's preparations, were un­likely to have kept Carthage in ignorance of his plans. If she meant to tackle Gelon, now was the moment.

  The Carthaginian force entrusted with restoring Terillos was the strongest yet fielded by the city, and the first whose com­position is detailed. Apart from Libyans and Iberians, it con­tained Sardinians, Corsicans and 'Helisyki,' the last obscure in origin. A member of the Magonids, Hamilcar, commanded the expedition.

  Greek historians, gross in exaggerating the strength of their enemies, numbered his force at 300,000. Divided by ten, a more realistic figure may be obtained. Even then, part of the army, seemingly its cavalry, was lost when a storm struck the trans­port ships. Rounding the western end of Sicily without inter­ception, the rest of the fleet put in at Panormus (Palermo), roughly equidistant from pro-Carthaginian Selinus, southwest, and hostile Himera, some fifty miles east.

  Gelon, warned by Theron of Hamilcar's approach, was ready with his army. The opposing forces marched on Himera from Panormus and Syracuse, encamping beyond the walls, the in­vasion fleet beached in the vicinity. Marginally outnumbered, the tyrant compensated with a cunning stroke.

  Hamilcar called on Selinus to replace the cavalry lost at sea. Learning of this, Gelon dispatched a body of his own horse to keep the rendezvous. Deceiving the guard on the Carthag­inian fleet, the Syracusian cavalry gained their camp and burnt the beached ships. It was a demoralizing blow for Hamilcar's mercenaries. They fought stubbornly but never regained the initiative.

  The fate of their general is hazy. According to Carthaginian report, recalled by Herodotus, on perceiving the battle lost Hamilcar threw himself into a sacrificial fire lit to appease the Phoenician gods, thus emulating Dido. Alternatively, he was said to have been cut down by the impostors who fired the ships. Few of his men escaped death or capture.

  Carthage was stunned by the bad news. Her most ambitious intervention to date in Greek affairs, Himera would have been costly enough as a victory. As a defeat, it was exorbitant. Gelon had now to be bought off with silver. His price was more than fifty tons of it.

  To the north, the Etruscans were losing ground to the Italian Greeks. In the east, Salamis had proved a Persian debacle. It was a time for licking burnt fingers. Prudently, the Carthaginians fell back in Sicily on Motye and the far west, leaving the Siceliots to resolve their own arguments. Revenge would come later. At the moment, Africa, for all its wild wastes, seemed the safest place.

  9: The Africa Enterprise

  Naval losses inflicted by Gelon; the diminution of northern trade, especially the import of corn and oil; the need to ac­cumulate reserves against the prospect of renewed war - a variety of factors stimulated Carthaginian interest in the hitherto neglected hinterland. Poetically, the change of strate­gic emphasis was described by one writer (Chrysostom of Antioch) as 'transforming the Carthaginians into Africans.'

  Apart from its northern fringe, Africa mystified the ancient world. Egypt had encountered the Nubians of the Upper Nile, fought the Ethiopians - the 'dark-faced people'-, probed the Libyan wilderness. Beyond, in an imagined domain of monsters and sorcerers, the gods held nocturnal revels and the sun retired: so thought Homer.

  While the coasts of Andalusia, Italy and the intervening islands presented obvious attractions to Carthaginian travel­lers, the aspect inland of their adopted shore was forbidding. To the west, the Tellian Atlas formed an almost unbroken barrier between the sea and the interior as far as the straits of Gibraltar. To the east, the coastal plains, themselves less daunt­ing, were bounded by swamps and the wastes of the Hamada. Predatory beasts roamed a jungle of wild olives and mastic trees.

  The people encountered in North Africa were known by the Greeks as Libyans, later as Berbers from the Latin Barbarus. A group of tribes sharing a basically common tongue, they were scattered widely between Egypt and the Atlantic coast. South of the Atlas, they bordered on black preserves. To the north, through the early history of settlement, they held sway to the outskirts of the coastal towns.

  Little is known of the race other than that it was white and nomadic, subsisting by stockbreeding, hunting and exploit­ing the black tribes. Inured to a harsh existence, its people were fierce and austere, not dissimilar, it seems, to the Tuareg of modern times. Until the epoch of Himera, they had been sufficiently strong in Tunisia to exact ground-rent from Carth­age.

  Thereafter, the city set about subduing its neighbours with urgency. The chronology of her African expansion is impre­cise. Some acquisitions may have occurred in the 6th century; some not until the 4th. Nevertheless, by far the greatest surge of activity attached to that part of the 5th century following Himera.

  It was led by the family most anxious to efface the humility, namely the Magonids, in particular by a son of Hamilcar named Hanno. Hanno lost no time. In the space of a few decades, Carthage had dominated the easterly peninsula of Cape Bon, conque
red an area of the hinterland (including the Medjerda and Siliana plains) approximating to the most fertile part of modern Tunisia, raised villas and farmsteads in the wilderness.

  The annexed regions were of two kinds: those immediate to Carthage, including the isthmus and Cape Bon peninsula, counted as city land; the more distant as subject territories. Their inhabitants seem not to have been enslaved as a general rule. Adopting, at least in part, the culture of their masters, they became, again in Greek parlance, Libyphoenicians.

  By the end of the century, visitors would express amaze­ment at the fecundity of a countryside transformed by fruit trees, vines, almond, pomegranate and cereals. Land experts had supervised the reclamation. One of them, an official with the favoured name of Mago, was celebrated for a treatise on agriculture which, translated, became a standard Roman source. 'Above all writers,' declared the agriculturist Columel­la, 'we honour Mago the Carthaginian, father of husbandry.' Varro cited the work as the highest authority in its field.