For all the brilliance, energy, and charm, a cloud of pointlessness hangs over Pyrrhus’s career. He was an opportunist who failed to make anything of his opportunities. The danger the Molossian king posed to Rome was serious but never life-threatening. One senses that he failed to research his projects sufficiently. He did not understand until it was too late the extent of the Republic’s human reserves. The rapid Hydra-like rebirth of Laevinus’s mangled army came as a severe shock, but by then he was committed to Tarentum and war.
However, the failure of his Italian expedition had one major consequence. The Greeks now recognized that a new player had joined the international table. They were hypnotized by the steely stare of this warlike state that now dominated the Italian peninsula. For their part, having bloodied Pyrrhus’s nose, the Romans hoped they had persuaded the quarrelsome Hellenic world to mind its own business and leave them free to conduct theirs without interruption.
Now that they had won responsibility for the city-states of southern Italy, they wondered whether they might have to keep an eye open for trouble in Sicily, just across the narrow strip of water between Rhegium and Messana (today’s Messina). Instability there would act like an airborne infection capable of blowing across seas to an exhausted peninsula, which more than anything needed a period of peace and quiet.
After all, Pyrrhus had warned them. On his final departure from Tarentum, he discussed with his entourage the consequences of his failure in Sicily: “My friends, what a wrestling ring we are leaving behind for the Carthaginians and the Romans.”
11
All at Sea
ON ITS MISSION OF EXPLORATION, THE FLEET sailed out of the Mediterranean, through the Pillars of Hercules, and into the unnerving swell of the Atlantic Ocean. It turned south and set its course along the generous bulge of western Africa.
The Pillars are on either side of the narrow stretch of water we call the Strait of Gibraltar, and for most well-informed people of the fifth century they marked the western limits of the known world. The name was a reminder that the demigod once passed this way while undertaking his labors. So, too, did Greek explorers and traders, but their heyday was over. Massilia and some settlements in northern Spain were the only Hellenic outposts left. These Occidental waters had become the monopoly of Phoenician merchants, especially those from the great North African city of Carthage.
Sixty galleys with fifty oars apiece were commanded by Hanno, a member of a leading Carthaginian family. His orders, issued sometime about or after the year 500, were to found trading outposts on the African coast. Two days from Gibraltar, the explorers set up their first mini-colony and then arrived at an inland lagoon that was covered with reeds. Elephants and other animals were feeding there. They continued sailing and established some more settlements along the way, which in due course probably became the source of pickled and salted fish that Carthage exported to Greece; perhaps also Tyrian purple dye was extracted from sea snails harvested on this coast.
Carthage was interested in what is called “dumb barter” with African tribes south of the Sahara, as Herodotus, the Greek “father of history,” explained in the fifth century:
They unload their goods, lay them out neatly on the beach and return to their boats, whereupon they send up a smoke signal. As soon as they see the smoke, the natives come down to the beach and place on the ground a certain amount of gold in exchange for the goods. They then withdraw to a distance. The Carthaginians come ashore again and examine the gold. If they believe it represents a fair price for the articles on offer, they pick them up and sail off. If not, they go on board once more and wait. The natives come and add more gold until the Carthaginians are satisfied. There is complete honesty on both sides: The Carthaginians never touch the gold until it equals the value of the goods and the natives never touch the goods until the gold has been removed.
In the dispatch he wrote about his expedition, which was displayed as an inscription in the Temple of Baal Hammon, in Carthage, Hanno made no mention of the gold trade, doubtless to avoid alerting competition.
The basic purpose of the enterprise had now been achieved and, despite the fact that they suffered from a lack of water and blazingly hot weather, the flotilla sailed on, presumably motivated now by curiosity and a taste for excitement. At one point, the ships tried to make landfall, but savages clothed in animal skins made it clear they were unwelcome by throwing stones at the visitors. On another occasion, some black men ran away from them.
A number of days later, they arrived at the Niger Delta, where they encamped on an island. Hanno wrote:
Landing on it we saw nothing but forest and at night many fires being kindled; we heard the noise of pipes, cymbals, and drums, and the shouts of a great crowd. We were seized with fear, and the interpreters advised us to leave the island. We sailed away quickly and coasted along a region with a fragrant smell of burning timber, from which streams of fire plunged into the sea. We could not approach the land because of the heat. We therefore sailed quickly on in some fear, and in four days’ time we saw the land ablaze at night; in the middle of this area one fire towered above the others and appeared to touch the stars; this was the highest mountain which we saw and was called the Chariot of the Gods.
The Carthaginians were not sure how to interpret all this, although we recognize that they had encountered an erupting volcano.
Some time later, as they continued sailing south, they arrived at another island in a lake, where they came across some mysterious beings:
It was full of savages; by far the greater number were women with hairy bodies, called by our interpreters “gorillas.” We gave chase to the men but could not catch any, for they climbed up steep rocks and pelted us with stones. However, we captured three women, who bit and scratched their captors. We killed and flayed them and brought their skins back to Carthage.
Another puzzling encounter, then, this time between homo sapiens and some primate cousins.
Thirty-five days had elapsed since Hanno left Carthage and, running short of provisions, he ordered his ships back to the familiar Mediterranean and safety.
* * *
THE CARTHAGINIANS IN particular and the Phoenicians in general were intrepid explorers and traders. They usually acted for commercial reasons, although as early as the seventh century an Egyptian pharaoh with a penchant for grandiose schemes commissioned some Phoenicians to circumnavigate Africa. Their fate is uncertain, but if they succeeded—and it was claimed that they did, after a journey lasting two years—it was to little purpose, for the continent’s landmass was unexpectedly large and the sea route was too long to be of practical use to denizens of the Mediterranean.
Himilco, a contemporary of Hanno and perhaps his brother, made another daring trading voyage and published a report of his adventures (now lost, although quoted by a fourth-century A.D. Latin author). He, too, sailed to the Pillars of Heracles, but turned northward. His aim was to reconnoiter the Atlantic coast of Spain, Portugal, and France. This time there was no question of searching for gold but for control of the trade in tin for making bronze and in lead, the two newly exploited metals of the age.
He reached Brittany, rich in ore, and perhaps even Heligoland (a source of amber), but seems not to have stopped off at Britain. In his dispatch, he made his journey sound as difficult and unpleasant as he could. He reported marine monsters, dangerous sandbars, and carpets of thick, clogging seaweed. The ocean was terrifyingly vast, if only one could see it through the fog. One senses that Himilco was talking up the dangers to discourage any rivals from following in his wake.
The Carthaginians were ambitious, energetic, and clever. They kept in touch with their mother city, Tyre, but in the sixth century Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to it for thirteen years. According to the Bible, an excited Ezekiel crowed on behalf of his single god, “I will stop the music of your songs. No more will the sound of harps be heard among your people. I will make your island a bare rock, a place for fishermen to spread their nets.” The prophe
t spoke too soon. The city held out, but eventually agreed to recognize Babylonian suzerainty. In later centuries, Egyptian and Persian invaders took their toll, and finally, in 332, Alexander the Great captured Tyre after another bitter siege. Furious at having been held up, he had two thousand citizens crucified on the beach and thirty thousand sold into slavery.
It was evident that an independent future for Phoenicians did not lie in the East. The balance of power shifted toward Carthage, whose location and excellent harbor in the Bay of Tunis suited it well for the development of trade in the Western Mediterranean. With time, its citizens were “transformed from Tyrians into Africans” and became leaders of an informal empire of Phoenician colonies, usually small mercantile outposts, throughout the region. The Atlantic port of Gades, an island stronghold separated from the mainland by a narrow arm of the sea, fell under its control around the year 500.
The Carthaginians were congenital seafarers and had little interest in acquiring land. However, to protect their “pond” and to exclude other traders, they occupied western Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, and southern Spain. They also acquired footholds along the North African coast, although there were no good harbors between the Atlantic and Carthage itself. This was their backyard, and woe betide any wandering Greeks whose ship strayed into their waters. Drowning was the best that could be expected.
IN ORDER TO lower their reliance on food imports, the Carthaginians annexed the fertile hinterland that lay to the south of their capital. They became expert farmers, and were guided by a celebrated writer on agriculture named Mago. He disliked urban living: “If you have bought land, you should sell your town house so that you won’t be tempted to worship the city’s household gods instead of those of the country.”
Although his book is lost, it was often cited by Greek and Latin authors. Mago advised on planting and pruning vines, on the management of olive trees and fruit trees, on growing marsh plants, on beekeeping (including the lost art of “getting bees from the carcass of a bullock or ox,” once known to Samson), and on preserving pomegranates, known to the Romans as malum Punicum, or the Punic apple. One of his recipes was for a sweet raisin wine, or pas-sum (still drunk today in Italy as passito). Carthaginian amphorae have been found all over the Mediterranean, evidence of a thriving export trade.
The city of Carthage itself, which consumed these provisions, stood on a triangular peninsula connected to the mainland by an isthmus about two miles wide at its narrowest point. On one side lay a lagoon and on the other the sea. Any visitor walking in from the countryside was confronted by a massive battlemented wall that ran across the isthmus. It was more than forty feet high and thirty feet wide, with four-story towers every fifty or sixty yards. Inside, stables housed elephants and horses. In front were two ramparts and a wide ditch. The wall was said to have continued for twenty miles, on a less gargantuan scale, around the entire city. (By comparison, Rome’s walls ran for a little more than thirteen miles.) It was a bold general who imagined that he could capture Carthage.
In his historical novel about Carthage, Salammbo, Gustave Flaubert vividly evokes the urban panorama:
Beyond [the wall], the city rose in tiers like an amphitheater. There were tall, flat-roofed houses built of every type of material—stone, wood, reeds, shells, and beaten earth. The trees in the temple gardens made green pools in this mass of multicolored blocks, which was honeycombed with public squares and intersected by countless narrow streets. The walls of some of the old quarters of the city presented huge blank surfaces relieved only by climbing plants and streaked with the sewage thrown over them. Streets passed through yawning openings in the walls like rivers under bridges.
One of these internal walls surrounded the city’s heart, a hill called Byrsa and the two harbors, forming a citadel. Here also was a public square, or forum, and a council chamber outside which justice was administered in the open air. Three narrow winding streets, lined with six-story houses, led up to the top of Byrsa.
The first or outer harbor catered to merchant vessels. It was rectangular, measuring about 1,600 by 1,000 feet, and opened to the sea through a single entrance that could, if necessary, be barred with iron chains. Outside this entrance, a massive quay was built where merchant ships could load and unload goods. At the other end of the rectangle, a narrow channel led into the inner naval harbor. This was a circle of water about 1,000 feet in diameter, with a small island in the middle. Appian writes:
On the island was built the admiral’s house, from which the trumpeter gave signals, the herald delivered orders, and the admiral himself overlooked everything. The island lay near the entrance to the harbor and rose to a considerable height, so that the admiral could observe what was going on at sea, while those who were approaching by water could not get any clear view of what took place inside.
Around both the island and the circumference of the circle were quays and sheds to accommodate two hundred and twenty warships, as well as arsenals and shipbuilding yards. Two Ionic columns stood in front of each shed and gave the impression of continuous porticoes running around the island and the harbor’s edge. All these state-of-the-art facilities, probably completed in the late fourth century, were a state secret. They were surrounded by a high double wall and were invisible even from the mercantile harbor.
This was the city that, legend had it, Dido had built and her treacherous lover, Aeneas, had abandoned. Her dying curse of unceasing enmity between Carthage and Rome was approaching its fulfillment.
THE CARTHAGINIANS RECEIVED a bad press from ancient historians. There was sarcastic talk of Punica fides, “Punic good faith,” meaning sharp dealing and betrayal. Plutarch, writing in the second century A.D. but following some much older source, claims:
[They] are a hard and gloomy people, submissive to their rulers and harsh to their subjects, running to extremes of cowardice in times of fear and of cruelty in times of anger; they keep obstinately to their decisions, are austere, and care little for amusement or the graces of life.
There is hardly any surviving evidence for this harsh judgment—with one colossal exception, their religious practices, to which (like other Semitic peoples) they were fiercely attached. There were many temples, shrines, and sacred enclosures, or tophets, in Carthage. The city’s most popular deities in a numerous pantheon were Baal Hammon, Lord of the Altars of Incense, and his wife, Tanit, Face of Baal. Tanit’s name suggests that she was subordinate to her husband, but in fact she was more than his equal. Once the Carthaginians had acquired their North African lands, they felt the need for a guarantor of life and fertility and looked to Tanit, as their mother goddess, to fill that role.
Various ancient texts report a dark side to Punic worship. The Bible has it that the Phoenicians sacrificed small children. A king of Judah desecrated one of their holy places “so that no one could sacrifice his son or daughter as a burnt offering,” and the prophet Jeremiah quotes the Jewish God as saying, “They have built altars for Baal in order to burn their children in the fire as sacrifices. I never commanded them to do this; it never even entered my mind.”
The Greek Diodorus Siculus, not the most reliable of historians, has left a celebrated description of a Carthaginian attempt to placate an angry Baal. He equated Baal not with the chief Greek god, Zeus, but with his terrifying father, Cronos, who ate up his own progeny:
In their anxiety to make amends for their omission, [the Carthaginians] chose two hundred of the noblest children and sacrificed them publicly…. In the city there was a bronze statue of Cronos, extending its hands, palms up and sloping toward the ground. Each child was placed on it, rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.
According to Plutarch, parents saved their own infants by replacing them with street children, whom they purchased, and loud music was played at the place of sacrifice to drown out the victims’ screams.
Modern scholars were unsure what to make of these exotic holocausts. Were they invented by hostile propagandists? If there w
as any truth in the stories, perhaps animal sacrifices were substituted at some point for human beings (as in the legend of Abraham and Isaac). Then, in the 1920s, a tophet was unearthed containing the burned remains of young children. For a time, it was argued that this was merely a cemetery for dead newborn and stillborn infants, offered postmortem to appease the gods. Further investigation, however, revealed the remains of children up to four years old, and inscriptions made the nature of the sacrifice explicit. Thus, one father wrote: “It was to the lady Tanit and to Baal Hammon that Bomilcar son of Hanno, grandson of Milkiathon, vowed this son of his own flesh. Bless him you!”
A NATION WITH a small territory will necessarily have a small population, and so it proved with Carthage. The geographer Strabo claimed a total number of 700,000 inhabitants, but that is conceivable only if it encompassed the entire countryside and the other townships that made up the Carthaginian estate. There were surely never more than 200,000 people of pure Phoenician descent living outside the city walls. At the time of its greatest prosperity in the early third century, the city probably housed about 400,000 souls, including slaves and resident aliens.
For a nation with international and imperial responsibilities, Carthage did not have enough citizens to stock its armies. To fight its wars, it routinely recruited mercenaries, from among African tribesmen and, farther afield, from Spain and Gaul. This practice brought with it certain dangers, for mercenaries are motivated by pay rather than by patriotism and have been known to turn on their defenseless employers if they have a grievance. Sea, not land, being the Punic element, citizens, perhaps of the poorer sort, apparently helped to man its ships.
The Rise of Rome Page 22
