by Dexter Hoyos
even bathrooms with bathtub and washbasin. Hamilcar engaged a Greek tutor
for his heir and cannot have been the only Carthaginian to do so. Again, from
early in the fourth century the Carthaginian state began to issue coins: only in
Sicily at first, to pay the mercenary troops, then later in North Africa as well.
From the start they were based on Greek models and well produced.8
All this did not turn the Carthaginians into a Hellenized community. They
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had other sources of inspiration, Egypt for instance, and they kept close links
with their mother-city Tyre. Above all, language and religion, both descended
from Phoenicia, sustained cultural independence. Supreme among Punic
deities were Ba’al Hammon the god and his consort Tanit, whom the
Carthaginians often entitled pene Ba’al, ‘Face of Ba’al’. Other divinities
included Ba’al Shamim, Melqart whose name means ‘lord of the city’, Esh-
moun with his temple on Byrsa hill, Reshep, and others unsatisfyingly
shadowy.
The Carthaginians were strongly religious, not always along lines that
appeal to moderns. Notoriously they sacrificed small children to the gods to
avert catastrophes: not children of slaves, Libyans or foreigners, but their
own. Plentiful archaeological evidence from the tophet suggests that the rite,
called molk, increased over the centuries and that rich Carthaginians were spe-
cially assiduous. It may be that only stillborn babies, or those who died very
young, were offered, but no ancient writer suggests it. The most striking molk
on record took place in 310 when the city was menaced by Agathocles’ expe-
dition from Sicily—reportedly 500 victims all told, and all from aristocratic
families. Melqart must have been appeased: Agathocles’ expedition went
down to disaster.
Carthage was under threat again half a century later, from the invading
proconsul Regulus, but no mass molk is reported. Individual child-offerings
were certainly made down to Hannibal’s own lifetime (so the finds show).
Maybe the community had outgrown the need for mass immolations, or was
embarrassed by them under the eyes of the Hellenistic world.9
III
Carthage was now one of the greatest cities of the Mediterranean. Her state
revenues at the outbreak of the war with Rome may be estimated at some
2,000 talents a year—12 million Greek drachmas—sparse though the evi-
dence is. According to the historian Livy, by 193 the wealthy and tributary city
of Lepcis was paying one talent a day in tax: our one explicit revenue-figure.
Lepcis, later Lepcis Magna famous for its Roman remains, stands east of
Tripoli on the Greater Syrtes shore, today’s gulf of Sirte: but as Livy sites it
by the Lesser Syrtes, today’s gulf of Gabès, in the fertile Emporia region, he
may have confused it with Leptis Minor, between Hadrumetum and Thap-
sus, and at any rate not too far north of the gulf of Gabès. Whether Lepcis
or Leptis, the tribute may in fact represent what the whole region paid, with
one of those cities as the collection-centre (the Emporia coast did stretch as
far as Lepcis Magna). At a guess, all the rest of Punic North Africa—
Carthage’s own customs and harbour-dues, the tribute paid by the Libyans,
any dues or levies extracted from allies like Utica and Hippou Acra, and
whatever taxes were exacted from Carthaginians themselves—should have
added up to maybe three times as much again.10
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C A RT H AG E
This rough-and-ready calculation gives Hannibal’s city an annual revenue
of 1,400–1,500 talents in 193: between 8,400,000 and 9 million Greek drach-
mas or recently established Roman denarii. Uncertain though it is, this
estimate is plausible. In the early decades of the same century, the Roman
republic’s income, including indemnities and war-booty, has been reckoned
as averaging 13–14 million denarii a year, in other words well over 2,000 tal-
ents. To Rhodes, a rich trading-city but hardly comparable even with
second-century Carthage in size or possessions, her mainland territories in
Asia Minor were paying 120 talents a year in the same period and her own
customs-duties bringing in a million drachmas or about 167 talents—thus a
total of just under 300 till Roman ill-will after the Third Macedonian War
took away the former and slashed the latter.
In 264 Carthage’s empire had included western Sicily and southern Sar-
dinia, and her trade and agriculture were flourishing, so revenue of well over
2,000 talents in that era seems a reasonable though speculative estimate. This
was a sizeable income, larger than the 1,000 talents estimated for Athens at
the peak of her power and empire around 431. It would have fallen after 241,
but in the 230s and 220s the new Punic empire in Spain as well as the annexa-
tions in Numidia must have added sizeably to revenues again, conceivably
raising them over 3,000.
The indemnities that the Carthaginians later had to shoulder are compati-
ble with this. After 241—or more probably 237—they had to pay the
Romans 220 talents a year for ten years, after an opening payment of 1,000
and with a further 1,200 to be squeezed from them in 237. The indemnity
after Hannibal’s war, 200 a year, was equivalent to 12 million Roman asses or
1,200,000 denarii— less than after 241, but the Carthaginians had now lost
Spain. By contrast Syracuse in Sicily was required to pay only 100 talents over
15 years when it made peace with the Romans in 263.11
In 241 there were probably close to 200,000 Carthaginian male citizens.
There are no contemporary statistics but the geographer Strabo reports that
at the start of the Third Punic War, a century later, the city was home to
700,000 people. Probably he means free persons, since ancient population
statistics (and ancient guesses) rarely include slaves, but whether non-
Carthaginian residents are also counted in we cannot say. Strabo must have
got his figure from a writer on that war: it could have been Polybius, who was
at Carthage in 146 as it died.
The total is impossible for the city alone, whose built-up area was too small
on any calculation. Nor can the people living in the spread-out garden suburb
of Megara have been very numerous. Modern estimates for the city itself
vary widely, from as few as 125,000 residents to more than double that. But if
Strabo’s statistic means residents and their families living both in Carthage
and in its own surrounding territory—distinct from the territories of sister
cities like Utica and of the subject Libyans—it may be accepted as a round
figure.
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C A RT H AG E
As Carthage was formidably prosperous in the last half-century of its exis-
tence, between 10 and 20 per cent of residents would be non-citizens
(assuming that Strabo includes them, knowingly or not). On a conservative
estimate, citizens and their families in Carthage and its surrounding territory
would then total around 575,000 in 149, with adult males numbering between
160,000 and 175,000. Ninety-two years earlier, when they were a great power<
br />
but at the end of a harrowing war with the Romans, the total would hardly be
lower. Also to be reckoned in would be a number of citizens living else-
where—traders, farmers, administrators—in North Africa, Sardinia and
Spain, even if Sicily was now closed off. Aristotle in fact twice stresses the
Punic state’s habit of relieving social strains at home by sending out ordinary
citizens to neighbouring towns to ‘make them prosperous’. At a very conser-
vative guess, the Carthaginian citizens living elsewhere might total 10,000 to
15,000, plus their families.
Punic human resources naturally included the other peoples under Punic
control: the allied Phoenician cities and, above all, the subject Libyans. The
wealth of the state also allowed it to hire mercenary troops (something never
done by the Romans). Slaves were a further human resource. Little enough is
known about them, but at least tens of thousands existed in Punic lands, and
probably hundreds of thousands. The Punic state and its empire must have
included some millions of people in 241, even after the loss of western Sicily.
For comparison, 241,700 Roman citizens—adult males again—were regis-
tered in the census of 247, growing to 273,000 twenty-two years later.
Polybius perhaps exaggeratedly reckons the Italian allies of military age in
225 at another half-million. In numbers at least, though not in militarized or
geographic cohesion, the Carthaginians were still a match for the Romans.12
IV
To the contemporary Greek world the Carthaginians were barbarians just like
the Romans. Neither people spoke Greek (a fatal flaw) and, even by the mid-
third century, neither had anything that could be called a literature. None the
less Greeks put the Carthaginians in a special category long before they did
the same for the Romans. In the late fourth century Aristotle, analysing and
classifying states’ constitutions, included the political system of Carthage for
discussion—the only non-Greek state to qualify. It had stable institutions
with many Greek-like features: elected magistrates, a council or senate, a citi-
zen assembly—all these could be found at Rome too, though Aristotle was
uninterested—and even a few social features reminiscent of one Greek city
or another. Men’s meals in communal clubs recalled those at Sparta, for exam-
ple. To Aristotle the Carthaginians’ political system, in spite of its partiality to
money, was ‘aristocratic’, meaning government by the best men: it had ‘a
threefold aim, wealth, virtue and the good of the people’. He approves of it.
Details, of course, and emphases differed. Originally the city had had kings
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like its mother Tyre, but monarchy had eventually given place to aristocratic
rule. In Hamilcar’s time the republic was presided over by two annually
elected sptm or shouphetim, ‘sufetes’ in the Latin form (a kin-word to Hebrew
shophet, judge). Whether these had replaced the king, or whether a nominal
king still existed, is one of the many Punic unknowns. Greek and Roman
writers often use the term ‘king’ without making clear whether they mean it
literally or as a misnomer for sufete. (A complication is added by various
lesser officials also, it seems, called sufetes.) Military commands were
entrusted to generals elected by the citizens for particular theatres of cam-
paigning, as Hamilcar was for Sicily. It looks unlikely that someone could be
both sufete and general at the same time—no one is known who did—but
Aristotle does emphasize that a Carthaginian could hold more than one
office at the same time.
The precise powers and range of Punic executive offices, military and civil,
are obscure too. Punic generals, according to Greek observers, had ‘kingly’—
no doubt meaning absolute—authority on campaign. The record shows that
they could make pacts with foreign states, though these may then have had to
be ratified at Carthage. Their power was matched by the risk they ran if they
failed. Unusually in a republic, a defeated general was liable to be recalled and
put to death: the fate of Hanno who lost the battle of the Aegates in 241.13
The collective political wisdom of the Carthaginians reposed in a council
or senate of several hundred, many of them no doubt former sufetes and
generals. The senate’s formal collective name was ‘The Mighty Ones’ ( h’drm
or hadirim)—a noteworthy forerunner of de Hoogmogendheden, ‘the High
Mightinesses’, the formal epithet of the Dutch States-General three cen-
turies ago. How were senators recruited? We are not told. Tenure of one of
the various official posts, for instance as a rab (a title much attested on Punic
inscriptions though its functions are not clear), public scribe, or market
inspector, or membership of what Aristotle calls the ‘pentarchies’, adminis-
trative Boards of Five, may have been the regular way in.
The senate, the Mighty Ones, dealt with questions of peace and war, and
the overall direction of policy. Apparently it could interest itself in any aspect
of internal affairs—once even forbidding citizens to learn Greek (a Roman
writer claims), a ban not likely to have lasted long. The senate had an inner
‘sacred council’ by the third century, apparently 30 strong, whose authority
Livy stresses. Just what it did is unknown: it may have organized the agenda
of the Mighty Ones, and acted too as an executive committee.14
This inner council was an institution peculiar to the Carthaginians. So were
some others, above all the tribunal of One Hundred, or One Hundred and
Four. This was set up 150 years (or more) before Hamilcar’s time to supervise
and where necessary to discipline generals. According to Aristotle, members
were chosen not by the senate, but by the Boards of Five from among
the senators, and purely on merit (process unknown, as usual). He calls the
Hundred and Four ‘the highest authority’ at Carthage—arguably an over-
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C A RT H AG E
statement since he applies the same term to the chief magistrates. Perhaps by
his day the tribunal had extended its jurisdiction, though we can only surmise
in what directions: for instance scrutinizing the work of civil magistrates,
sufetes included.
Though not mentioned in events of the century and a quarter after Aristo-
tle, it was probably enough the same tribunal which convicted the hapless
generals put to death at various times for failure, and likely enough it was the
one whose judgement Hamilcar risked facing in 241. Livy’s ‘order of judges’
appointed for life, reportedly the most powerful institution in the state soon
after the Second Punic War, was very likely though not definitely the same
body. Its powers may have fluctuated over that length of time too, as we shall
see.15
The ordinary Carthaginian male citizen had a voice in government too.
The citizen body was fairly limited: women had no vote, nor of course did
slaves. Perhaps too Punic men of low economic status, like poor artisans,
were excluded, but the evidence is too indirect to be reliable. Citizens them-
selves no doubt had to reach legal manhood, whatever age that was, before
they qualified as voters. The men of Phoenician towns like Utica and Hippou
Acra—not to mention the millions of subject Libyans—were not Carthagini-
ans, though each may have had suffrage in his own community. But nobody
expected that even the existing 180,000 Punic citizens would or could all take
part in voting, any more than all citizens could at Rome. The central square
below the Byrsa hill, however big, would not have held more than a fraction
of them. Plainly only limited numbers took part.
The citizen assembly, meeting in the square, elected sufetes and generals,
and passed laws. What procedures were followed and what determined a can-
didate’s eligibility for office are predictably unknown, but the lavish spending
which our informants insist was taken for granted meant that only rich men
could compete. This in turn is a clue, both to sharply marked patron–client
relationships between the powerful few in public life and many if not most
ordinary voters, and at the same time to constantly fluctuating political
cliques and followings—the great men manoeuvring for allies and against
opponents; friendships, enmities (and clientships) very changeable; and
voters on the lookout for the biggest or most ingratiating offers.
The assembly’s powers were oddly qualified. If the sufetes—Aristotle calls
them the ‘kings’—and the senate agreed on referring a matter to the people,
this was done. Likewise if sufetes and senate disagreed over referral; and
(presumably) so again if one sufete and the bulk of the senate were at odds
with the other sufete. When consulted, the citizens had more freedom to dis-
cuss and decide than for instance Romans did in their assemblies. But
Aristotle equally implies that sufetes and senate, if they saw eye to eye, could
take decisions without consulting the citizens at all. How often this happened
we do not know, but happen it did: memorably in 218 when the Romans’ dec-
laration of war was vociferously and fatally accepted in the senate.16
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V
This fairly tidy, and to Greek theorists impressive, political setup must not
obscure one important reality. For much of their known history, the
Carthaginians had in practice been governed by dominant individuals and
