The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
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There were other, personal factors at work among the Carthaginian elite, for the city was at this time controlled by a group of powerful dynasties that dominated its Senate. A prominent Carthaginian with the common name Hannibal is said to have conceived a passionate hatred for all Greeks after his grandfather Hamilcar was killed in battle against the Syracusan army at Himera in 480 BC. An easy victory in 410, under the redoubtable Hannibal, expelled the Selinuntines from Segestan territory, and was followed by a massive second invasion in 409, with troops drawn from southern Italy, North Africa, Greece and Iberia. Xenophon, in his somewhat lame continuation of Thucydides, claimed that Hannibal brought with him 100,000 men, maybe twice the real figure.2 With the help of sophisticated siege engines modelled on those familiar to the Phoenicians in the Near East, the walls of Selinous were breached after a mere nine days. The inhabitants paid a horrific price for their resistance: 16,000 Selinuntines were put to the sword and 5,000 were taken into slavery. This was followed by the sack of Himera, where 3,000 male prisoners were sacrificed to the shade of Hannibal’s grandfather on the spot where he had been killed in 480.3 The Carthaginians had not simply gone on the rampage. They were now determined to forge a secure dominion over much of Sicily at the expense of Syracuse. This was not, however, an ‘ethnic’ war of Phoenicians against Greeks: the Carthaginians sent an embassy to Athens, and the Athenians, now in the final stages of the war with Sparta, showed themselves well disposed to the Carthaginians, for they were looking for any allies they could find.4 Athens and Carthage could also hope to benefit from mutual trade, once peace was established in the Greek world.
Then in 407 the Carthaginians embarked 120,000 troops on 120 triremes, if Xenophon’s rather incredible figure is to be believed, and invaded western Sicily; even with such a large force it took seven months to starve Akragas into surrender. The city was plundered of its fine works of art, which included a brazen bull inside which a sixth-century tyrant of Akragas was said to have roasted his victims.5 These acquisitions turned the taste of the Carthaginians towards Greek styles; certainly, by the third century Greek art and architecture had gained a hold on Carthage. Western Sicily was now under its direct control, and Carthage began to look eastwards, to Gela on the southern coast, which would open the road to Syracuse. The Gelans fled. Seeing one defeat after another for the Greeks, the Syracusans hurried to make peace, and the Carthaginians, who were expending vast sums on their army and navy, were ready to agree reasonably generous terms. The western and south-eastern Sicilian conquests were to remain under their control, but the Greek population was invited to return, while the eastern flank of Sicily, with its Greek and Sikel population, stayed independent of Carthage, which had achieved its main objectives.
One victim of the conflict was democracy. Syracuse once again fell under the control of a long-lived tyrant, Dionysios I (d. 367), the first of a much-feared dynasty. The story is told of one Sicilian tyrant who knew he was detested and was therefore amazed to find that an old woman regularly offered prayers for his safety in a city temple. He summoned her and asked why she did this. She fearlessly replied that she thought him a terrible despot. But she remembered the tyrant during her distant youth; he had been dreadful, but was succeeded by someone even worse, and after him came someone worse still. So she prayed for the life of this tyrant, knowing that, were he to die, he would be succeeded by someone of unimaginable ghastliness. The tyrant was so impressed by her honest answer that he gave her a bag of gold. These tyrants relied on brute force and made no pretence to act as constitutional monarchs. But they were also men of taste and culture; an earlier generation of Sicilian tyrants had earned the praises of the poet Pindar, and the new generation cultivated philosophers such as Plato, who visited Syracuse in 388 or 387, and is said to have returned several times, in the hope of guiding the successors of Dionysios I towards policies properly informed by Platonic principles.6 Although most of the remarkable correspondence between Plato and the Syracusan rulers is now discounted as later invention, the story of Plato’s ties to the Syracusan court serves as a reminder that not just Greek goods but Greek ideas were travelling across the Mediterranean at this period.
It was Dionysios I who made peace with Carthage; but it was also Dionysios who revived the conflict with Carthage in 398, capturing the prize possession of the Phoenicians in western Sicily, Motya. The inhabitants were massacred, and not even the women and children were spared for the slave markets; those Greek traders who lived there were crucified as traitors.7 That was the end of the history of Motya, but it was the beginning of a bitter conflict that brought a massive Carthaginian fleet to the harbour of Syracuse in 396. Once again the city was threatened with destruction; once again the Syracusans took advantage of the layout of their port to pick off the enemy fleet while also attacking the enemy land forces. Himilco, the Carthaginian commander, staring at defeat, made a secret deal with Dionysios and evacuated as many native Carthaginian soldiers as he could, abandoning his Iberian, Sikel and Libyan allies. The hairy Iberians, professional mercenaries, were absorbed into the Syracusan armed forces. More seriously still, there was uproar in the Carthaginian possessions in North Africa, and for a time it seemed that Carthage itself would be overwhelmed by a mass of slaves and rebels who gathered on the site of Tunis, hard by Carthage itself. The rebels dispersed, but Carthage had experienced a political earthquake. The only solution was to cede the Greek cities won under the earlier treaty to the tyrant of Syracuse, though the humiliation was not complete: the Punic settlements remained under Carthaginian control. Dionysios distracted himself with ambitious raids elsewhere in the Mediterranean – in 384 he raided Pyrgoi, the outport of Etruscan Caere, carrying away a vast treasure valued at 1,500 talents, which would pay for a substantial army. He probably needed the prestige this brought, because his envoys at the Olympic Games that year were mocked as the representatives of a tyrant no better than the Persian king. He did not seek to found a Syracusan empire but ruthlessly to establish his personal power, a point the Athenians tacitly recognized when they addressed him as ‘archon [ruler] of Sicily’.8 He had every intention of renewing the struggle for control of all Sicily, and a series of conflicts between Syracuse and Carthage in 375 culminated in the loss of a Carthaginian army of 15,000 – two-thirds dead, one-third enslaved. Carthage bounced back, defeating Dionysios and taking out 14,000 Syracusan troops. The end result was that Carthage did retain control of the parts of western Sicily it had long ruled, and even recovered title to some of the Greek cities captured by Hannibal.
II
Despite the hostility that had marked Carthaginian relations with Syracuse, the result of these wars was to tie Carthage more closely into the Greek world. The city was now to all intents detached from Phoenicia; it is doubtful how important trade with Tyre and Sidon was to late fourth-century Carthage, compared to the renewed intensity of contact between Carthage and the Greek cities of Hellas, Sicily and Italy. The Carthaginian god Melqart was identified with Herakles. The Carthaginians were convinced that they had offended Demeter by sacking one of her temples in Sicily, so they imported her cult into Carthage, even attempting to conduct the temple rituals according to the Greek liturgy, with the aid of Greek residents.9 Carthaginians learned Greek – at one point when relations were particularly bad they were banned from learning or speaking the language, which is the surest proof that Greek had become the second language of the local elites. These elites actively exploited the fertile coastline of North Africa, often owning prosperous estates some distance away, abundant in grain, fruits and wine. The lesser towns that the Phoenicians had founded along the African coast were now subject cities. There was increased intermarriage with the local population, a trend that included the leading families of Carthage, who sometimes had family ties to local Berber kings, or indeed to prominent Greeks in Sicily. Carthage had become a cosmopolitan city numbering perhaps 200,000 inhabitants, with extensive suburbs and merchant and naval ports.
Throughout the four
th century the Carthaginians kept a close eye on Syracuse. They struggled for control over the seas between Africa and Sicily as well as over the island. The value of the straits became clear in 344–343 when the Corinthian admiral Timoleon became the saviour of Syracuse. His fame rested on the fact that he had conspired to assassinate his brother for making himself tyrant of Corinth. Plutarch reported that Timoleon covered his own face and wept while his two co-conspirators killed his brother.10 Timoleon therefore seemed an ideal ally for disaffected Syracusan nobles who opposed the ruthless policies of the dynasty of Dionysios. Since Corinth had originally founded Syracuse there still persisted a sense that Corinth was the place where aid should be sought, though it was no longer one of the political and economic leaders in the Greek world, and could provide only a small fleet. Carthage sent ships to block the arrival of Timoleon, who managed to find a way through, and Carthage found itself drawn into another destructive war: 3,000 Carthaginians died in battle in western Sicily in 341, and the Carthaginian general, Hasdrubal, was crucified when he returned home, the standard penalty for incompetence on the battlefield. Carthage did not lose its western Sicilian lands, but Timoleon established himself as the leading figure on the island, fostering the creation in nearly every Greek city of a system of aristocratic government. Tyrants went out of fashion for a couple of decades; more importantly, the Sicilian Greeks seemed to understand the need to work together.11
By the time of Plutarch, who died in AD 120, Timoleon was being hailed as the hero and favourite of the gods who had ‘cut the nerves of tyranny’ and had liberated Sicily from the power of the Punic barbarians. In reality, Timoleon was not very different from the tyrants who had preceded him. He had seized power with the help of mercenaries; and in suppressing petty tyrants across the island he was asserting the long-contested supremacy of Syracuse. One redeeming feature was that he had the good sense to resign office in old age, afflicted by cataracts and honoured by the Syracusan people. The other redeeming feature was that he presided over a period of economic recovery throughout much of Sicily. Cities were rebuilt, including several that had been devastated by the Carthaginian wars: Akragas and Gela revived; no less significantly, small centres of Greek settlement grew and prospered. Scornavacche in south-eastern Sicily is the site of a small Greek town that had been destroyed by a Sikel attack in 405; now it became a centre of the ceramics industry.12 This revival was the work of new settlers as well as the old Siculo-Greek population. Timoleon may have brought as many as 60,000 settlers from Greece itself and from the Greek cities of southern Italy. The grain trade between Sicily and Athens became increasingly regular in the late fourth century; to judge from the large number of Corinthian coins of the same period found in Sicily, there were particularly intense commercial contacts across the Ionian Sea to Corinth, through which Sicilian agricultural goods were funnelled into Greece.13 It would be a mistake to attribute this new prosperity entirely to the efforts of Timoleon. The fourth century saw a wider revival of trade in the central Mediterranean. The plague that had erupted during the Peloponnesian War became less virulent and population revived. There were long enough stretches of peace for Carthage as well as the Greek cities of Sicily to rebuild trading contacts to east and west. Carthage enjoyed commercial ties with Athens and made the best use of its links to Spain as well.
The last major conflict between Carthage and Syracuse broke out in 311. Hamilcar, the Carthaginian commander in western Sicily, faced a formidable foe in Agathokles, who had managed to overturn Timoleon’s constitution and to establish himself as tyrant of Syracuse. Agathokles, like his predecessors, aimed to bring all or most of Sicily under Syracusan control. Hamilcar reasoned that the best interest of Carthage would be served by an understanding that Syracuse could dominate eastern and central Sicily; the Carthaginians were worried to see Agathokles taking an unhealthy interest in Akragas, which lay close to their own settlements in western Sicily. In 311 Agathokles marched with a large army towards Akragas, but a Carthaginian fleet of fifty or sixty ships arrived and Agathokles was thwarted. The next year, Hamilcar disembarked 14,000 men (only one in seven was actually a citizen of Carthage). He swept through Sicily, supported by local forces resentful of Agathokles’ ambitions. The tyrant of Syracuse realized that he had over-reached himself, and that he had lost the war in Sicily. His possessions were now confined to Syracuse itself. But what he also possessed was money and troops: 3,000 Greek mercenaries and another 3,000 Etruscan, Samnite and Celtic mercenaries lured from Italy. Adding another 8,000 men recruited locally, he fitted out a fleet of sixty warships and in August 310 the fleet headed through a Carthaginian naval barricade to the coast near Carthage. With outstanding temerity, Agathokles landed his men, burned his ships (because there were not enough men left to guard them) and marched his forces towards Carthage itself, camping nearby on the site of Tunis.14 This meant that Carthage was under siege from the Syracusans while Syracuse was under siege from the Carthaginians.
Carthage, with its easy access to the sea, was impossible to invest without massive naval forces, so even the conquest of swathes of the North African coastline by Agathokles did not secure the surrender of Carthage. Still, the loss of its rich fields and orchards must have hurt the city badly. The moment Agathokles disembarked and launched a land attack on the Carthaginians, his Libyan allies deserted – perhaps 10,000 men – and 3,000 of his Italian and Greek mercenaries were killed in battle. Agathokles, it has been well said, ‘was no Alexander either in genius or resources’.15 He did at least understand that he must now make peace, and, predictably, the map of Sicily returned to its old appearance, with Carthage ruling the western end and the Greeks retaining control of the east and the centre.16 Surprisingly, this defeat did not mark the end of Agathokles. He asserted his power as ‘king of Sicily’, taking this novel title in imitation of the Greek kings who, starting with Philip and Alexander of Macedon, had established themselves as rulers of the eastern Mediterranean. He now directed his imperial ambitions elsewhere, mainly towards the Adriatic, forging one marriage alliance with Pyrrhos of Epeiros, a cousin of Alexander the Great and a general of comparable talents, and another with the Ptolemies in Egypt. He took control of the islands of Kerkyra and Leukas in the Ionian Sea and extended his dominion into southern Italy, which he twice invaded. Yet he left no obvious legacy: he failed to establish a dynasty, as he had hoped, and his maritime empire did not outlive his assassination in 289 BC.17
The real legacy of Agathokles was the continued survival and prosperity of his bitterest enemy, Carthage. The Romans asked for a renewal of their commercial treaty with Carthage, first signed in 509 BC. Whereas in 509 the Carthaginians could see the Romans only as mildly useful neighbours of their Etruscan friends, they were now dealing with a significant power in Italy, which, within a few generations, would attempt to drive Carthage completely out of Sicily. To understand these developments it is necessary to step back in time once again.
III
The prominence, indeed pre-eminence, of Rome in the Italian peninsula by 300 BC was the result of wars fought on land; Rome had no ambition to become a naval power, and the treaties with Carthage, renewed in 348 BC, indicate that those Romans who crossed the seas travelled as merchants, not as men of arms. These treaties ensured that they did not wander into areas that lay within the Carthaginian sphere of influence, notably Sicily, though in times of severe famine, for example in 493, grain was brought all the way from Sicily to Rome.18 The major preoccupation of the early Romans was the defeat of neighbouring peoples such as the Volscians who were percolating down from the Appenines in the hope of settling the broad spaces of Latium, to the south of Rome. The Romans also faced a severe threat in 390 BC from Gallic invaders, from whom they were famously saved at night-time by cackling geese. Relations with the Etruscans, with whose culture they shared a great deal, were much more complex, but the complete destruction of one of the largest Etruscan cities, Veii, in 396 BC, marked the first stage in the submission of the souther
n Etruscan lands.19 After the fall of Veii, which was within walking distance of Rome, the Etruscan cities were not destroyed but instead were drawn into a Roman web; wealthy Caere became a dependent ally following its defeat in 253, and lost control of part of its coastline, which included the port at Pyrgoi where in past times Greek and Carthaginian traders had gathered and settled. It is therefore no coincidence that, within a few decades of their expansion along the coast of southern Etruria, the Romans were able to launch massive fleets and defeat Carthaginian navies in the waters off Sicily. In addition to acquiring coastal stations in Etruria, the Romans began to develop their own outport at Ostia, though its original function was to channel goods from Greek Italy and Etruria into the Tiber and to supply Rome.20
Merchant shipping came and went, but the Roman war fleet almost seems to emerge fully armed out of nothing. The Romans responded passively to threats from the sea: in 338 BC Volscian pirates from Antium (Anzio) on the Latin coast raided the mouth of the Tiber, but they were beaten back, and the Romans took back home as trophies the rostra or ‘beaks’ of the ships they had destroyed. These rostra were displayed on the stage used for speeches in the Roman Forum, which explains the continuing use of the term ‘rostrum’ to mean a speaker’s platform.21 A few years later, around 320 BC, a treaty with the southern Italian city of Taras, founded by Spartan colonists, stipulated that Roman ships should not sail into the Gulf of Taranto, thereby defining a Tarentine sphere of influence and protecting the trading interests of what had become the dominant Greek city in southern Italy and leader of the ‘Italiote League’ of cities.22 Although a treaty might be expected to bespeak amity, the more probable explanation for this agreement is that Roman land campaigns against the Samnites and other enemies were drawing Rome’s armies closer and closer to the Greek cities; lines therefore needed to be drawn on the map. Treaties, contracts and other legal documents often mention possibilities that are not immediate or even real, and there is still no evidence that Rome was seeking to arm large fleets, though in 311 the duumviri navales or ‘two naval men’ were appointed to construct a classis or ‘fleet’ and ensure that it was kept in repair.23 But this fleet was probably tiny.