Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage

by David Gibbins

  Fabius remembered the words of the Sibyl, words that she had told him when he had seen her alone, words that he had never uttered to Scipio: she had told him that both Scipio and Metellus would stand over fallen cities, as Achilles had done at Troy. It was their destiny, and the destiny of Rome. But then Fabius remembered what else she had said, to him alone, when she had beckoned him back into the cave and touched him with her wizened finger, her breath caressing his ear like an exhalation from all of history.

  He mouthed the words to himself now.

  One of them will rule, and one will fall.

  Polybius had been watching him, but they both looked down as Hippolyta came bounding back up the steps. Halfway to the top she stopped. ‘I have horses waiting below, Scipio,’ she shouted. ‘We must ride.’

  She turned to go back down. Polybius gestured for Scipio to move, pointing to the fire rushing towards the temple platform from the north, and then began to clatter down the steps after Hippolyta. Fabius lingered for a moment with Scipio, staring one last time. He took a deep breath, tasting the dust from the desert again, the acrid reek of burning, the smell of blood.

  He felt exhilarated.

  Carthage was not the end. It was the beginning.

  He knew what was to come.

  Total War.

  Author’s Note

  My fascination with Scipio Aemilianus and the siege of Carthage began when I was an undergraduate at the University of Bristol and was fortunate to be taught Roman Republican history by Brian Warmington, author of one of the seminal scholarly books on the subject (Carthage, Penguin, 1964); it was then greatly spurred when I was a PhD student and postdoctoral research fellow at Cambridge University and took part in the UNESCO ‘Save Carthage’ project, an international effort to excavate and record as much of ancient Carthage as possible in the face of modern development.

  The main focus of the British mission was the ancient harbours, where the most astonishing discovery was the Punic shipsheds surrounding the circular harbour – sheds that proved to date not to the heyday of Carthage in the third century BC but to the years leading up to 146 BC, showing that she was rebuilding her navy and proof that Cato had been right all along to warn Rome of the threat. Teams of underwater archaeologists, including an expedition under my direction, revealed much about the outer harbour, so that my description of the wharf where Scipio and Fabius secretly dock in the Diana is based on my own extensive study of the submerged foundations. One of the most exciting discoveries made during my time at Carthage was the channel that linked the landlocked harbours to the sea. While our digger was excavating many metres down into the black anoxic layer at the bottom of the ancient harbour, showing that we had found the gap between the outer quays that marked the entrance, I stood at the very spot where I have imagined Fabius seeing the lembos making its breakout during the siege.

  Close by the harbours, at the ‘Tophet’, excavations revealed numerous child cremation burials, some of them very probably the victims of child sacrifice as recounted by the Roman sources. The first-century BC historian Diodorus Siculus (20.14) describes a great bronze god in which children were rolled down while still alive to a roasting place beneath. Further up, on the Byrsa hill, in the ‘Punic quarter’ that I describe in the novel, I have been literally arm-deep in destruction debris from the siege, excavating through charred building material, smashed pottery, human bone and Roman ballista balls dating from those catastrophic final days in 146 BC. It is rare in archaeology to make discoveries that can be linked so clearly to historic events, even ones as momentous as the siege of 146 BC, and my experiences at Carthage led me to many years of thinking about the relationship between historical and archaeological evidence as well as giving me a vivid personal backdrop to the story in this novel.

  The Nature of Roman Historical Evidence

  No eyewitness accounts survive of any of the historical events described in this novel. The Battle of Pydna in 168 BC and the triumph that followed are chiefly known from an account written some two hundred and fifty years later, Plutarch’s life of Lucius Aemilius Paullus, father of Scipio Aemilianus; yet those few hundred lines make Pydna one of the best-documented battles of the second century BC (Aemilius Paullus, 16–23). Although Plutarch was writing so long after the event, similar details, such as the account of the riderless horse galloping between the lines, are found in the surviving references to the battle by the first-century BC historian Livy (44.40–42), who probably had access to a contemporary account by Polybius.

  The siege of Intercatia in Spain and Scipio Aemilianus’ role in it are known from a few lines by Appian, who is also our main source for the siege of Carthage; he was writing almost three hundred years after the events he describes. Plutarch and Appian relied on contemporary accounts that are now lost – notably the volumes of Polybius’ Histories for this period – but there can be no certainty of how reliably or impartially those earlier sources were used, at a time when historical scholarship as we know it did not yet exist. Moreover, the works of Plutarch, Appian and the other ancient historians survive only through medieval copies, adding a further layer of uncertainty to their use as source material. The manuscripts often contained errors of transcription, as well as omissions, ‘interpretations’ and embellishments that reflect the agenda of the monks who carried out the copying.

  In studying ancient military history at the level of battle plans and tactics, these limitations of the source material cannot be stressed too strongly. The siege and destruction of Carthage, the culmination of the Punic Wars, was one of the pivotal events of history, as important as the Napoleonic Wars and the Battle of Waterloo in our times. Having to rely almost exclusively on Appian is as if Waterloo were known solely from one account, about ten pages long, with no footnotes, no source references and no illustrations, written by one amateur historian two hundred years after the event (in fact, of course, Appian was writing even longer than that after the siege of Carthage).

  The comparison is even more stark in the case of our knowledge of Roman military commanders. Any biography of Napoleon or Wellington represents the distillation of a small library’s worth of source material, including autobiographical writings and personal correspondence, eyewitness accounts, military records, maps and plans. Even so, uncertainties remain about their characters, their motivations and the backdrop to their strategic and tactical thinking. In the case of Scipio Aemilianus, a figure of similar historical significance, the sum total of ‘facts’ about him would fill little more than one page, and a modern biography is therefore not a distillation but rather an analysis of those few pieces of information, including expert translation of the original Greek and Latin texts, an evaluation of the reliability of that source material and an attempt to put it into a wider historical context.

  These limitations show just how much scope there is for historical fiction, and how the credibility of any reconstruction – whether historical or fictional – is less about replicating the apparent ‘facts’ than about understanding the uncertainties of that information and the necessity of a critical approach to it. The line between historical speculation and historical fiction is easily crossed, with archaeology increasingly allowing a fresh evaluation of the written sources as well as an independent basis for new pictures of the past.

  The Ancient Historical Sources

  The great historian of the second century BC was Polybius, friend and mentor of Scipio Aemilianus and an important character in this novel. His work provided a unique eyewitness account of many of the events of this period, and his treatise on the army was the first detailed account of the Roman military at a time when it was not yet professional. Unfortunately, only about half of his Histories survive, none for the main events of this novel and all of them as medieval copies of ancient texts, although some later Greek and Latin historians cited passages of Polybius or wrote accounts that were probably heavily reliant on works of his that are now lost. As well as Livy, writing in the first century BC, the mo
st important of these ‘secondary’ sources is the second-century AD Greek historian Appian, whose Libyca contains a detailed description of the siege of Carthage that is probably a reliable paraphrasing of Polybius’ original account. Without Appian, the mute stones of Carthage might tell a very different story, and an account of the final assault such as the one in this novel could no longer be based on a framework of probable historical reality.

  Most ancient historians if pressed would have subscribed to what has been called the ‘big man’ view of history, in which powerful individuals, rather than sweeping tides of change, were primarily responsible for altering the course of events and the world that the historian saw around him, for better or for worse. Admired individuals such as Scipio Aemilianus were not only extolled for their place in history – in his case, for what he achieved, but equally importantly for what he chose not to do – but were also held up as moral exemplars, sometimes even fictionally. An example of the latter is the first-century BC author Cicero’s eulogy of Scipio in his fictional dialogue De Oratore and also in the Somnium Scipionis, the ‘Dream of Scipio’, a work that may have been a piece of moralizing fiction on Cicero’s part but could also have been based on a lost account of a real dream experience, perhaps recounted by Polybius. Another moralizer – but more of a historian than Cicero – was the late first to early second-century AD Greek writer Plutarch, whose life of Scipio’s father Aemilius Paullus provides snippets of information about Scipio’s early life and his first battle experience at Pydna in 168 BC, as well as a vivid picture of the triumph celebrated after Aemilius Paullus returned to Rome the following year.

  In addition to these sources, epigraphical research – the study of inscriptions on tombs and other monuments – helps us to reconstruct the genealogy of the great patrician families of this period, often meaning that we know their names and something of their interrelationships but very little else about them. The lives of common soldiers such as the fictional Fabius are hardly known at all, except from rare tomb inscriptions and occasional mentions by the ancient authors when they had performed a particular feat of valour, or some other notable act.

  Where there is enough material to build up the outlines of a biography, we have to be careful not always to take what is written at face value. For Cicero, an avid republican, Scipio Aemilianus was admirable for his restraint, for not leading a coup in Rome after his victory at Carthage and not going for world domination; for Polybius, Scipio was a friend but also an exemplar of the Roman virtues that Polybius so admired, leading him perhaps to emphasize some character traits over others. As with Victorian accounts of top generals of the day – men such as Lord Kitchener – we have to be wary of eulogy and hagiography. By far the best modern collation and critical analysis of the source material on Scipio Aemilianus is by the late Professor Alan Astin, of Queen’s University, Belfast, who memorably described Scipio as ‘a quasi-autocrat who, but for his own reluctance, could have been a Princeps a century before Augustus’ (Scipio Aemilianus, Oxford University Press, 1967, p. vii).

  It is worth stressing how little we know with certainty from written evidence for this period. Almost all of our ‘facts’ come from authors living several centuries after the events they describe, and much of that in anecdotes, sayings and phrases of a few sentences or less. There are yawning gaps in our knowledge; for example, the years between Aemilius Paullus’ triumph in 167 BC and the start of the second Celtiberian war in 154 BC are hardly documented at all, and almost a complete blank in the life of Scipio Aemilianus. This does not necessarily mean that nothing of much interest happened in those years, but instead represents the vagaries of documentary survival. Even an author as important as Polybius, who maintained a high reputation throughout antiquity and was still being read in the Byzantine court of Constantinople, only survives in partial manuscripts that represent less than half of his known works. Other historians could come in and out of fashion and be lost in obscurity, their works discarded and only known through anecdote and quotes by later authors, often of dubious reliability. Since every book in antiquity had to be painstakingly copied by hand, even popular authors might be represented by only a few dozen extant copies of their books, stored in the private libraries of their patrons or in the public libraries of the main cities; most of those were destroyed in time, most notoriously through the burning of the great library at Alexandria in late antiquity.

  A huge future excitement may be the discovery of lost original writings from this period, perhaps in fragments of papyrus reused as mummy wrapping in Egypt or in the remains of ancient libraries themselves. One of the most remarkable discoveries in Roman archaeology has been the ‘Villa of the Papyri’ at Herculaneum in Italy, containing a room full of scrolls that were carbonized after Vesuvius erupted and buried the town in pyroclastic flow in AD 79. The scrolls mainly contained the writings of an obscure Greek philosopher, but they suggest what may lie undiscovered in one of the other wealthy patrician houses still buried beneath the slopes of the volcano. Such a find could revolutionize our knowledge of ancient history and flesh out the reality of those lost years in the second century BC, but meanwhile we have enough surviving material to allow well-informed speculation consistent with everything else we know about this period, including the increasing body of archaeological evidence.

  Scipio Aemilianus Africanus

  The sum total of knowledge about Scipio prior to his appointment to the Senate in 152 BC would fill perhaps half a page, yet even so provides more detail about his early life than is available for most other Romans of this period. We know something of Scipio’s education and character from the few surviving fragments about him by his teacher and friend Polybius, and from references in later authors who relied on Polybius and other contemporary accounts now lost. Plutarch, for example, tells us how Aemilius Paullus sought to educate his sons ‘not only in the native and ancestral discipline in which he himself had been trained, but also, and in greater ardour, in that of the Greeks. For not only the grammarians and philosophers and rhetoricians, but also the modellers and painters, the overseers of horses and dogs, and the teachers of the art of hunting, by whom the young men were surrounded, were Greeks’ (Aemilius Paullus, 6.8). After the Battle of Pydna, Scipio was allowed to take what he liked from the Macedonian Royal Library, and Cicero tells us that Scipio ‘always had in his hands’ Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, an account of the life of Cyrus the Great of Persia and his rise to power. Cicero also tells us how as a young man Scipio was eager to hear the discourses of several Athenian philosophers who had come to Rome (De Oratore, 2.154).

  Scipio’s absorption of Greek culture was undoubtedly shaped and restrained by Polybius – himself, of course, a Greek but by no means an uncritical philhellene. Polybius’ admiration for the Roman character is revealed in his account of Scipio’s reputation for temperance, at that time something that marked him out in Rome, owing to ‘the moral deterioration of most of the youths. For some had abandoned themselves to amours with boys, others to prostitutes and musical pleasures and drinking bouts … Scipio, however, setting himself to pursue the opposite course of conduct … established a universal reputation for self-discipline and temperance’ (Polybius, 31.25). Polybius’ attitude towards history was of a practical bent, seeing how it could be used to further present-day campaigns and strategies, and Scipio’s passion for the Cyropaedia suggests that his interest in Greek literature was driven by the same imperative. It is possible, therefore, to see a young man strongly schooled in the mos maiorum, the Roman ways of the ancestors, and open to new influences from Greece, yet with those influences mediated by Polybius in such a way that they reinforced the Roman virtues of honour and fidelity that Polybius himself so admired.

  The image of a serious and somewhat austere young man is offset by his passion for hunting, something that Scipio shared with Polybius, and by his exceptional prowess as a warrior. Following the Battle of Pydna, he spent time hunting in the Macedonian Royal Forest, given to him by his fath
er as a victory present. At Pydna he had distinguished himself in battle, fighting deep into the Macedonian phalanx and then returning from the pursuit ‘with two or three companions, covered with the blood of the enemies he had slain, having been, like a young hound of noble breed, carried away by the uncontrollable pleasure of the victory’ (Plutarch, Aemilius Paullus, 22.7–8). When he is next heard of in battle, some seventeen years later in Spain, we are told that he killed an enemy chieftain who had challenged him to single combat, and earned the corona muralis for being the first on the wall in the assault on the fortress of Intercatia; some two years later in Africa, still only a military tribune, he earned the even more coveted corona obsidionalis for rescuing some Roman troops from near-certain annihilation by a Carthaginian force (Appian, Iberica 53 and Libyca 102–104; Livy, Periocha 48-9 31.28.12–29).

  It seems likely that Scipio and his contemporaries would have learned basic fighting skills together while they were still boys in Rome, under the guidance of veterans entrusted with their training in weapons. Whether or not such an ‘academy’ would have provided instruction in the higher arts of war – in strategy and tactics – is unknown, but the concerns of some of the older generation about the military preparedness of future officers, as well as the availability of Greek professors who could teach military history – some of them, like Polybius, former soldiers with combat experience – suggests the possibility. Polybius would certainly have been well suited to the task, not only because of his background but also because of his fascination with all things military, including the ‘Polybius square’ and telescope for battlefield signalling (Polybius, 10.45–6). Others in the Senate, possibly the majority, would probably have opposed such training, fearing the professionalization of an officer corps, so I have imagined the academy operating discreetly behind the walls of the Gladiator School, a place where weapons training and practice on live victims could have been conducted. In Rome today, the visible ruins of the Gladiator School beside the Colosseum date to a later period, but the archaeological evidence suggests that there may have been an earlier training ground on this site to the south of the Forum in the second century BC.