Carthage Must Be Destroyed Read online

  Carthage had been under siege for nearly three years when one day during the spring of 146 BC the Roman commander, Scipio Aemilianus, ordered the final assault on the stricken city and its increasingly desperate inhabitants.

  Even now, with its defences and defenders greatly weakened, Carthage still posed a daunting challenge for the Roman attackers. Situated on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Tunisia, the city was built on a peninsula made up of a series of sandstone hills. On its north-eastern and south-eastern peripheries, two narrow strands of land jutted out like wings, with the latter almost cutting off the sea and creating the large lagoon now known as the Lake of Tunis. The northern area of the peninsula was protected by a series of steep sandstone cliffs, whereas to the south lay a large coastal plain protected by a formidable set of walls, ditches and ramparts.

  On the seaward side of the city two magnificent harbours were shielded by a sea wall. A chronic shortage of available living space within the city had meant that security had been somewhat compromised in this area. Whereas previously a gap had been carefully maintained between the wall and the nearest buildings, now houses had been constructed right up to the sea walls, allowing determined attackers the opportunity of setting fire to them with missiles or gaining access by climbing on to their roofs.1 However, the walls themselves still presented an intimidating obstacle, with some of the huge sandstone blocks weighing over 13 tonnes. The blocks were covered in white plaster, which not only protected the stone from the elements, but also gave the walls a famous shimmering marble effect when looked upon from ships sailing into the city’s harbours.2

  The two harbours–one commercial and one military–stood as a reminder of Carthage’s past fame as a maritime superpower. These vast man-made structures, which covered an area of around 13 hectares, had required the manual excavation of some 235,000 cubic metres of soil. The rectangular commercial harbour had extensive quays and warehousing where goods from all over the Mediterranean world and beyond were loaded and unloaded.3 The circular war harbour was an engineering masterpiece, with storeyed ship-sheds which could hold at least 170 vessels, with ramps to drag them from and to the water’s edge.4 Now the harbours lay idle, because the Romans, after many fruitless attempts, had finally managed to secure their blockade by constructing a mole to block their entrance.

  As the Romans had also managed to seal Carthage from its North African hinterland, no further food supplies could be brought into the city–meaning that much of the population was beginning to starve. Physical evidence still exists showing that life for the inhabitants of Carthage had taken a dramatic turn for the worse during the siege. At some point, probably when the siege made them impossible, rubbish collections ceased (a resident’s nightmare, but an archaeologist’s dream).5 During the last difficult years of the city, the only waste that seems to have been regularly removed was the corpses of the many who died as starvation and disease took hold. Now, in the last terrible months of the city’s existence, in contrast to the care that had traditionally been taken of the dead, the corpses of both rich and poor were unceremoniously dumped in a number of mass graves just a short distance away from where they had lived.6

  When the attack finally came, the city’s defenders were caught off guard, because the Carthaginian commander, Hasdrubal, had gambled on an assault being mounted on the commercial port, whereas in fact the Romans attacked the war harbour first. From the harbour, the legionaries quickly moved to seize control of Carthage’s famous agora, or marketplace, where Scipio ordered his men to set up camp for the night. The Roman troops, sensing that final victory was near, began the inevitable plunder by stripping the nearby temple of Apollo of its gold decoration.7

  Carthage was divided into two distinct but integrated parts. While the lower city was laid out orthogonally in a formal grid, the streets on the slopes of the citadel, the Byrsa, were arranged in a radial pattern.8 Now that many of the neighbourhoods on the plain had been secured, Scipio called up fresh troops in preparation for the storming of the Byrsa. The soldiers proceeded with caution, as the nature of the hill made it an excellent terrain from which to stage ambushes. Three narrow streets led up the steep slopes. Each was flanked by six-storey houses from whose roofs their inhabitants mounted a desperate last defence by raining missiles down on to the advancing legionaries. However, Scipio, a seasoned siege tactician, quickly regained the momentum by commanding his troops to storm the houses and make their way to the roofs. From there they used planks to create gangways over to the adjacent houses. While this battle raged above, the slaughter on the streets continued.

  Once the resistance on the roofs had been neutralized, Scipio ordered that the houses be set alight. So that his troops’ progress up the hill should be unimpeded, he also commanded that cleaning parties should keep the streets clear of debris. However, it would not be just stone and burning timber that came crashing down from above, but also the bodies of children and the elderly who had been sheltered in secret hiding places within the buildings. Many, although injured and horribly burnt, were still alive, and their piteous cries would add to the cacophony around them. Some were subsequently crushed to death by the Roman cavalry proceeding up the streets. Others would meet a far more gruesome end as the street cleaners dragged their still breathing bodies out of the way with their iron tools before tossing both the living and the dead into pits.

  For six long days and nights the streets of Carthage were consumed by this hellish turmoil, with Scipio conserving the physical strength and sanity of his men by regularly rotating his killing squads. Then, on the seventh day, a delegation of Carthaginian elders bearing olive branches from the sacred temple of Eshmoun as a sign of peace came to beg the Roman general that their lives and those of their fellow citizens be spared. Scipio acceded to their request, and later that day 50,000 men, women and children left the citadel through a narrow gate in the wall into a life of miserable slavery.

  Although the vast majority of its surviving citizenry had surrendered, Hasdrubal, his family and 900 Roman deserters, who could expect no mercy from Scipio, still held out. They took refuge in the temple of Eshmoun, which, because of its lofty and inaccessible position, they were able to defend for some time. Eventually lack of sleep, physical fatigue, hunger and terror forced them on to the roof of the building, where they made a final stand.

  It was now that Hasdrubal’s nerve broke. Deserting his comrades and family, he secretly made his way down and surrendered to Scipio. The sight of their general grovelling in supplication at the feet of his Roman nemesis merely hardened the resolve of the remaining defenders to die a defiant death. Cursing Hasdrubal, they set fire to the building and died in the flames.

  It would be Hasdrubal’s own wife, with her terrified children cowering at her side, who would deliver the final damning verdict on her disgraced husband: ‘Wretch,’ she exclaimed, ‘traitor, most effeminate of men, this fire will entomb me and my children. Will you, the leader of great Carthage, decorate a Roman triumph? Ah, what punishment will you not receive from him at whose feet you are now sitting.’ She then killed her children and flung their bodies into the fire, before throwing herself in after them. After 700 years of existence, Carthage was no more.9

  Introduction:

  Recovering Carthage

  HANNIBAL’S SHIELD

  In the late first century AD, Silius Italicus, a very rich Roman senator with literary pretensions, wrote the Punica, an epic poem that took as its subject the Second Punic War, between Carthage and Rome. At over 12,000 lines long, the work almost made up in sheer ambition for its author’s lack of poetic talent. One of its more memorable sections centred on a suit of fine bronze armour and weaponry, strengthened with steel and finished in gold, that skilled Galician smiths presented as a gift to the great Carthaginian general Hannibal while he was on military campaign in Spain. In laborious detail, Silius related how it was not just the excellent craftsmanship of the plumed helmet, triple bossed breastplate, sword and spear that delighted
Hannibal, but the intricate scenes from Carthage’s past engraved upon a great shield. This medley of historical highlights included the foundation of the city by the Tyrian queen Dido, the doomed love affair between Dido and the Trojan founder of the Roman people, Aeneas, scenes from the first great war between Carthage and Rome, and episodes from the early career of Hannibal himself. These vignettes were adorned with a little local colour in the form of supposedly ‘African’ bucolic scenes, including animal herding, hunting, and the soothing of wild beasts. Silius went on to describe how, delighted with the gift, Hannibal exclaimed, ‘Ah! What torrents of Roman blood will drench these arms.’1

  Resplendent in his new armour, the Carthaginian general would become a walking, and very deadly, lesson in history. But was it Carthage’s lesson or Rome’s? Certainly most of this prehistory of the most famous war that Rome had ever fought was complete fiction. So what? one might ask. After all, the Punica itself was written not as history, but as a (not particularly good) epic poem. However, by the time that Silius was writing, nearly 250 years after the final destruction of Carthage, the scenes engraved upon Hannibal’s shield were part of a very real canon of historical ‘fact’ that had reduced Carthage to little more than a ghostly handmaid to Roman greatness. Moreover, the ‘historical’ episodes depicted on Hannibal’s shield represented Carthaginians in profoundly negative terms–as impious, bloodthirsty, sly and deceitful. In one scene Hannibal was even represented in the act of breaking the treaty with Rome which led directly to the second Punic War–a reference to the by then established historical orthodoxy that it was Carthage’s own perfidy rather than Roman ambition that had brought about its downfall. Such was the emphasis placed by the Romans on Carthaginian treachery that the Latin idiom fides Punica, literally ‘Carthaginian faith’, became a widely used ironic expression denoting gross faithlessness.2

  The Romans were not the first to develop the powerful negative stereotypes of Carthaginians as mendacious, greedy, untrustworthy, cruel, arrogant and irreligious.3 As with many aspects of Roman culture, the hostile ethnic profiling of the Carthaginians originated with the Greeks: in particular, with those Greeks who had settled on the island of Sicily and had, before the rise of Rome, been Carthage’s main rivals for commercial and political supremacy in the region. However, it had been the Romans who obliterated not only the physical fabric of Carthage but also much of its history, by giving away virtually all the content of Carthage’s libraries to their local allies, the Numidian princes,4 in 146 BC, thereby leaving Rome’s own version of events unchallenged.

  However, the dispersal and destruction of Carthage’s own historical records did not mean that there would be no history of Carthage. The spoils of war included the ownership of not only Carthage’s territory, resources and people, but also its past. Carthage was indispensable to Rome because of the central role that it had played in the development of a series of now well-established Roman myths. It was during their wars against Carthage that Romans had first begun to write their own history, and Carthage’s subsequent destruction ensured not only the authority of this new (Roman) historical orthodoxy, but also the survival of a defeated Carthage in the popular imagination.

  THE LONG SHADOW OF ROME

  The most celebrated of Carthage’s sons and daughters were little more than mere bit players in the early annals of Roman history. The famous Dido–Aeneas romance, with the latter callously deserting the Carthaginian queen in order to go off to Italy, where his descendants eventually founded Rome, was in fact the invention of the great Roman poet Vergil, long after the destruction of the city. Dido herself, although possibly the product of an earlier Phoenician or Sicilian Greek story, was developed as a character only by later Roman writers.5 And even Hannibal, the most famous Carthaginian of all, was in part immortalized for his usefulness as a foil for the genius of that great Roman hero Scipio Africanus.

  Carthage was just too important to Rome simply to disappear into obliterated obscurity. After all, the great victory over Hannibal in the Second Punic War was considered by many influential Romans to have been their finest hour. Some even believed that the final solution visited on Carthage had been a profound mistake, for the city had provided the whetstone on which Rome’s greatness had been sharpened.6

  Carthage may have been destroyed, but it was never forgotten. Even many years later, the memory of the terrible events that had taken place there still hung heavy over the rubble-strewn site where the city had once stood. Paradoxically, Carthage remained a place that most needed to be remembered by the very people who had so thoroughly destroyed it.7 For members of the Roman elite, almost any kind of personal reverse or fall from grace could be placed into its correct context by a stroll –usually of the cerebral rather than physical variety–through the pitiful remains of what had been one of the greatest cities of the ancient world. Some, however, had the opportunity of a more direct form of contemplation. Some fifty years after Carthage’s final destruction, Gaius Marius, a Roman general who had been forced into exile by his political opponents, was said to have lived a life of poverty in a hut among the city’s ruins, prompting one ancient writer, Velleius, to comment, ‘There Marius, as he looked upon Carthage, and Carthage as it gazed upon Marius, might well have offered consolation to one another.’8 However, this regret at Carthage’s passing should not be mistaken for respect for a valiant foe. It sprang from a self-indulgent nostalgia for a fantastical golden age when Romans had been proper Romans.

  The success of the Roman project to rewrite the history of Carthage is visible everywhere–even in the terminology used by modern scholarship to define the city and its people. For the period from the sixth century BC onward, we use the term ‘Punic’ to describe not only the dominant culture of Carthage, but also the diaspora of old Phoenician colonies that stretched across North Africa, Sardinia, western Sicily, Malta and the Balearic Islands, as well as southern and south-eastern Spain. It was not, however, a word that Carthaginians or their western Mediterranean peers of Levantine origin used to define themselves, but an ethnic moniker given to them by the Romans. The Latin noun Poenus, often used by Romans to describe Carthaginians, and from which the adjective Punicus was derived, was hardly a neutral term. As one scholar has pointed out, its use by Roman writers was nearly always ‘defamatory and pejorative’, and it was ‘the term of choice for negative discourse’.9

  The negative associations surrounding the Carthaginians have proved to be extraordinarily pervasive–particularly the idea that, through its aggression, Carthage had brought its own ghastly end upon itself. When the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht cast around for a historical metaphor to remind his fellow Germans about the dangers of remilitarization in the 1950s, he instinctively turned to a series of events that had taken place over two thousand years before: ‘Great Carthage drove three wars. After the first one it was still powerful. After the second one it was still inhabitable. After the third one it was no longer possible to find her.’ 10

  Many of the prejudices first found in Greek and Roman texts were enthusiastically adopted and adapted by the educated elites of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and America, who had grown increasingly interested in classical antiquity. The attitudes that they found in the Greek and Roman literature that they read quickly became their own. Thus the idea that the British–the inhabitants of ‘La perfide Albion’–were in fact the Carthaginians of contemporary Europe firmly took hold in Republican France.11 The sentiment soon spread across Europe and beyond.12 Thomas Jefferson, president of the United States in 1801–9, wrote of Britain, ‘Her good faith! The faith of a nation of merchants! The Punica fides of modern Carthage.’13 A nation of shopkeepers could not be trusted to keep its word.14

  For the great powers of nineteenth-century Europe, the emulation of these ancient prejudices was linked to something far more particular than mere admiration for the classical world. During the colonial land-grab of the second half of the nineteenth century, the Roman Empire understandably
provided an attractive blueprint for these new imperial powers, and Carthage also had a role to play as an ancient paradigm for the barbarity and inferiority of the indigenous populations that they now ruled over. Similarly, when the French had first started writing of perfidious Albion, it had been as much a way of bolstering their own imperialist claims as it was about undermining British pretensions to be the new Rome.15

  For the French, in particular, who from the 1830s onward were pursuing long-term strategic goals in the Maghrib, the stories of Carthaginian cruelty, decadence and deceit that abounded in both ancient Greek and Roman literature were eagerly seized upon and projected on to the Arabs who now lived in the region. In North Africa, France would be the new Rome. The most famous product of these colonial assumptions would be Gustave Flaubert’s novel Salammbô. Published in 1862 and set in ancient Carthage, Salammbô was a roller-coaster ride of sexual sadism, extreme cruelty and repugnant luxury.16 In other words, it played to every western-European stereotype that existed at that time about the decadent Orient. It also served as a sideswipe at the French bourgeoisie, whose religious conservatism, materialism and political bankruptcy Flaubert so despised.17

  The overarching influence of Roman authors on modern perceptions of Carthage was further reinforced by the trenchant criticism that Salammbô received. This had nothing to do with the savagery, sex and licentiousness that appeared on almost every page, but concerned the obscurity of the subject. One critic indignantly wrote, ‘How do you want me to be interested in this lost war, buried in the defiles and sands of Africa . . .? What is this to me, the duel between Tunis and Carthage? Speak to me rather of the duel between Carthage and Rome! I am attentive to it, I am involved in it. Between Rome and Carthage, in their fierce quarrel, all of future civilization is already in play.’18 The point was that any aspect of Carthaginian history that was not associated with Rome was of no real interest or importance for an educated audience.