Texts in Context:
Punic Wars on Purple Seas
By Gabriel Blanchard
The conflict of the Roman orders had ended; the conflict that created the "Roman world" was about to begin.
The New City
It is the mid-third century BC.1 The unrest we discussed last week has not completely vanished, but the plebs enjoy more representation in government than ever, and Rome has begun to be concerned with her international stature. In this capacity, she receives an appeal for aid from the Mamertines, Italians who had conquered a Sicilian city. They are under attack in turn from Syracuse, and the Romans aren’t the only power they’ve appealed to; they also asked the Carthaginians, who rule most of Sicily. But who were these Carthaginians?
At the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, there was a network of coastal city-states, not unlike those of Hellas, of Semitic rather than Indo-European origin. They were magnificent sailors—it is not certain, but they may have circumnavigated Africa in antiquity. What is known is, they founded colonies all over the Mediterranean, one of which became especially prosperous. It was located on the northern coast of Africa (near modern Tunis) and named something like Qart Ch’dashta,2 “New City.” They called themselves Chanani, but the Greeks named them after one of their most celebrated wares: a reddish-purple dye derived from sea-snails, known as φοῖνιξ [phoinix]. The Romans met the Greeks first, so they referred to the people of Qart Ch’dashta as Poeni, or Puni, while their city (which Latin-speakers couldn’t quite get their tongues around) was approximated as Carthāgō.
Besides their talent for seafaring, the Carthaginians had brought something else with them from their homeland in the Levant: a religious custom, mentioned in parts of the Hebrew Bible. It was not popular among the ancient Romans. They usually took a live-and-let-live attitude to what people from Abroad did, especially if it was an ancestral tradition—but this one disgusted the Romans’ sense of piety to any god. The custom in question was that of taking an infant to a shrine set apart for this purpose,3 and sacrificing the infant to one of the city’s gods (its two chief deities being Baal Hammon and his consort Tanit).
The First Punic War
The Romans believed in a version of just war theory, and since the Mamertines had after all simply taken a Sicilian city for themselves, they were inclined to view the request for help with distaste. Yet still less did they want Carthage expanding its influence (and they were not immune to the appeal of war-spoils). On learning that Carthage had already moved to help the Mamertines, the Romans quickly resolved to do the same. One might think two armies that had come to do the same thing for the same side would not be in conflict; but apparently, the Carthaginians and Romans just had to fight about who was going to help more, and whose help was better, and my plutocrat can beat up your plutocrat, etc.
The war dragged on for over twenty years (264-241 BC), and it exhibited a certain ridiculous tenacity in the Roman character that will be important later. Carthage was a naval power; the Roman opinion of the sea, on the other hand, was more along the lines of “Shan’t.” As they had to anyway, the Romans decided they could at least pretend that ships were land. Rather than learn the traditional tactic of ramming, they invented the corvus, a long boarding plank with a beak-like spike in the far end: they kept these vertical, like a mast, and used them by swinging them down to impale the decks of enemy ships and board them. Now, having a many-feet-long metal pole with a spike on the end standing upright in one’s ship is not ideal for sailing, especially during storms, but the Romans had a shrewd solution to this: after the First Punic War, they stopped using them.
Speaking of “after the First Punic War,” the war ended in Roman victory. Carthage ceded Corsica, Sardinia, and their bit of Sicily (so, all of it but Syracuse, now a Roman ally) to the Roman Republic. Peace returned; but it had its discontents.
The Thunderbolts
Hamilcar Barca was a Carthaginian general during the first war, and hated and distrusted the Romans ever afterward; even conquering the southern bit of Spain doesn’t seem to have made him feel better. (“Barca” is not precisely a surname, but what the Romans called a cognōmen, i.e. an epithet or nickname; barqa was a Punic word for “lightning.”) He passed this attitude on to his sons, one of whom was named Hannibal or “Baal hath shown favor.”
In 218, Hannibal embarked upon a Second Punic War. Rather than come at Italy by sea, he approached by land, from the north. He came with not only an army, not only with three dozen war elephants, but with Roman allies that had broken their oaths to side with him instead. And the Latins began to lose battle after battle. At Trebia: twenty thousand dead. At Lake Trasimene (just over a hundred miles north of Rome): between fifteen and twenty-five thousand dead. At the Battle of Cannæ, to which Rome sent a force of eighty-six thousand men: estimates from sixty-seven thousand to eighty thousand.
... and still the unconquerable enemy rolled nearer and nearer to the city; and following their great leader the swelling cosmopolitan army of Carthage passed like a pageant of the whole world; the elephants shaking the earth like marching mountains and the gigantic Gauls with their barbaric panoply and the dark Spaniards girt in gold and the brown Numidians on their unbridled desert horses wheeling and darting like hawks, and whole mobs of deserters and mercenaries ... and the grace of Baal went before them.
In 215 BC, even Syracuse (which had at least stood between Hannibal and convenient supply lines from home) defected to Qart Ch’dashta; it may have been the fact that Archimedes, besides being an abstract mathematician, designed war machines for his native Syracuse around this time, that allegedly drove a Roman soldier to kill him after Syracuse was conquered.
But Hannibal lacked the numerical strength to move against Rome itself; the Romans, despite horrific losses, were still capable of fielding multiple armies to intercept Italian turncoats and keep Hannibal busy, wasting supplies and energy—and Carthaginian patience: the city resupplied and reinforced him just once (also in 215). What was more, the war in Spain was going tolerably well for Rome. Then, strangely, Carthage began losing allies. Bit by bit, the Romans wore Hannibal down, set their old allies in line again, clawed their way out of the very grave.
In 204, the Romans had recovered enough not only to go on the offensive, but to invade Africa. The Carthaginians promptly recalled Hannibal from Italy, and in 202, he led their forces, fortified with no less than eighty war elephants, at the fateful Battle of Zama. Against him was ranged a Roman army headed by a scion of the Cornelii—one of Rome’s most venerable patrician families, descended from time immemorial and famously public-spirited; this Publius Cornelius Scipio would be formally awarded a title after Zama: Āfricānus, i.e. “the conqueror of Africa.”4 The eighty elephants were spooked and driven back among the Carthaginians, trampling many of them. Hannibal urged the New City to accept Roman peace terms (which amounted to making Carthage a protectorate of Rome). The humiliated Carthaginians acquiesced; most of their empire was taken over by the Roman government. A few years later, Hannibal went into voluntary exile in the east, eventually (so legend says) committing suicide in 181.
The New City’s Old Ruins
There was a Third Punic War in 149-146. It was arguably a punitive expedition, as Carthage had violated the terms of the truce; in fairness, the terms were arguably impossible to fulfill (though we have no space for the details). But it was in the lead-up to this war that, allegedly, Cato the Elder—a senator and censor known for being erudite, frugal, fearless, tireless, cruel, conscientious, and thoroughly unlikeable—adopted his famous rhetorical device: concluding every speech he made with the words Cēterum autem cēnseō Carthaginem esse dēlendam,5 or “And my further opinion is that Carthage ought to be destroyed.”
Entertaining though the story is, the Romans almost certainly didn’t sow the earth with salt—if only because, as ludicrous as this may sound, it would be a waste of salt! They did raze Carthage to the ground, sell fifty thousand survivors into slavery, and annexed what remained of the city’s territory, making it into the new Roman province of Africa. Probably they felt that was plenty, salt or no salt.
But the victories of the Punic Wars brought two things with them: a huge influx of wealth (both in land and in precious metals—Spain, for instance, was extremely rich in silver); and a huge number of all those veterans, widows, debtors, and otherwise disadvantaged folk whose plight had produced the old conflict of the orders. Rome is nicknamed “the eternal city,” and may have felt a little déjà vu as it entered the next stage of its history …
1That is, we ask that you imagine it is the third century BC. It’s still the twenty-first AD, really.
2Given its Phoenician roots, Carthage was a literate society; however, for the same reason, its writing system only had consonants. Partly on this account, “Qart Ch’dashta” is a guess at the vowels of the Punic pronunciation, and can be no more. (The “New City” is thought to have been thus named in contrast with their old city, Tyre.)
3In Hebrew, a close linguistic relative of Punic, such a shrine was called a תֹּפֶת [tofeth], but this may have been a local usage, or even the name of a specific shrine. When discussed in Punic at all, these places are referred to by names corresponding to the Hebrew words בֵּית [bêyth], “house” (often used to refer to the “house” of a god, i.e. a temple), or קָדֵשׁ [qâdhêsh], “holy [place].”
4In ancient Roman parlance, “Africa” did not indicate the whole continent we know by that name (the scope and shape of which they did not know about). “Roman Africa” referred roughly to modern Tunisia, coastal Libya, and the northeasternmost parts of Algeria.
5Often shortened, and changed from indirect to direct speech, as Carthagō dēlenda est.
Gabriel Blanchard is CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
If you enjoyed this piece, and would like to learn more about some of the Roman writers from our Author Bank, take a look at these intros to Lucretius, Livy, Seneca, Tacitus, Epictetus, and St. Gregory the Great. Or, if this post prompted your curiosity about ideas more than individuals, you might like our “Great Conversation” posts on history, law, oligarchy, or war and peace.
Published on 3rd September, 2024. Page image of excavated ruins from Carthage, located in modern Tunisia; photo by Wikimedia Commons user Calips, used under a CC BY 2.5 license (source).
