The Carthaginians

by B D Hoyos

  THE ASCENDANCY OF HANNO ‘THE GREAT’

  Himilco’s successor Mago in Sicily had been his fleet commander (presumably his ‘second’ or subordinate general, rb šny: cf. Chapter III), who is not described as a relative. Vigorous and resourceful, Mago quelled the great Libyan rebellion of 396, then returned to Sicily in 393 to carry on the war with Dionysius and reach a peace the following year which left Carthage dominant over the western half of the island. When a new war was provoked by Dionysius in 383, Mago was killed in battle – the date is uncertain, but most likely in 382 or 381 – to be replaced as general by his son. (A story told by Polyaenus about a ‘Himilco’ may, but more likely does not, involve this son whose name is not known.) The new general defeated the Syracusans and made a favourable peace with Dionysius, only to disappear from the record afterwards. By mid-century the leading men at Carthage were certainly not of the old dominant family. Carthaginian politics had entered a new and more fluid state.

  These new leaders were Hanno – already mentioned as the man eventually accused of plotting a coup – and his enemy ‘Suniatus’, a Latin form of ’Šmnytn, Eshmuniaton. This was not the first time that political rivalries had erupted at Carthage (Mazeus and his opponents being the most obvious predecessors), but for the first time both men were virtual equals in status and influence. Hanno was appointed ‘war leader’, which must mean general, against the ageing Dionysius in 368, which indicates a high military reputation. But Eshmuniaton, according to Justin at any rate, was ‘the most powerful of the Carthaginians at that time’. In due course, having got rid of his rival, Hanno is called by Justin ‘the foremost (princeps) of the Carthaginians’.

  He had first proved his military capacities in the late 370s, when the Libyans took advantage of a severe epidemic afflicting their Carthaginian overlords to rebel again: Hanno repressed them. This looks, too, like what the contents list of Trogus’ history sums up as ‘the campaigns of Hanno the Great in Africa’, in the context of Dionysius’ last years – campaigns which Justin leaves out. Their date must be earlier than 368 when Hanno was given military command against the tyrant of Syracuse. In this short-lived Sicilian war he showed dash and resourcefulness enough to impel Dionysius to accept an armistice. That effectively ended matters, as the tyrant then died, although a formal peace took longer to arrange.

  The contents list of Trogus’ history calls this Hanno magnus, ‘the great’. No other source does, but as it happens two other Hannos – in the later 3rd and mid-2nd Centuries – have the same term applied to them in Greek (megas) by Appian and by Zonaras (a Byzantine whose work abbreviates the Roman historian Cassius Dio). It is usually interpreted as a translation of rab, the ‘chief’ of an official body or an army. Yet so many Carthaginians are styled rab on inscriptions down the centuries that it would be strange to find it applied by foreign writers to just these three, and by only a few writers at that. Moreover the father of Himilco the Magonid, another Hanno, is officially termed ‘the rab’ on the Punic inscription recording Himilco’s and Hannibal’s sack of Acragas, yet no ancient author calls him megas or magnus.

  Besides this, the term is ignored by, or is not known to, most Greek and Roman sources: not only Justin but also Aristotle, Polybius, Diodorus, Livy and Polyaenus (who mentions quite a few Hannos). It looks, then, as though the writers who bestow the epithet on the three Hannos drew it indirectly from a separate historical tradition. Quite possibly this was a biographical record, for as mentioned earlier, Carthaginian aristocrats paid attention to family ties and genealogies. This could suggest too that all three belonged to the same family. Whether megas and magnus do translate rab, or an inherited family sobriquet of some sort, can hardly be decided.

  This first Hanno ‘the Great’ had a brilliant yet ultimately disastrous career. After his success in Africa and his appointment as general in Sicily, he destroyed his powerful rival Eshmuniaton by having him convicted of treasonable contacts with Dionysius. Eshmuniaton was no doubt put to death, as Hanno himself would later be. Justin claims that because ‘Suniatus’ had written to Dionysius in Greek, the senate decreed a ban on studying or speaking Greek. This is exaggerated at best, and a fiction at worst, for Carthage’s dealings with the Greek world went on as normal. There is no report of her Greek residents being expelled, for instance; and Dion of Syracuse kept up his friendships with various Carthaginians – at one point being criticised for writing privately to the city authorities there (no doubt to the sufetes, and probably in Greek). If there is anything behind the story, it may be that by 368 some Carthaginians did feel bitter towards Sicilian Greeks and their ways after forty years of repeated wars. This one, the fifth since 409, was an unprovoked aggression by Syracuse. So at any rate Diodorus states, and so it must have looked from Carthage. The sense of outrage, even if short-lived, might be strong enough for Hanno to manipulate it to his political advantage.

  Eshmuniaton’s ruin may have been achieved through the senate or, more likely, by arraignment before a sufete (the adirim had no judicial authority that we know of, and his case does not look like one which the court of One Hundred and Four would judge). With him gone, Hanno and his supporters now had the upper hand. Their opponents continued to be strong, all the same, while Hanno’s grandiosely showy way of life probably turned other Carthaginians against him. Two stories told about an arrogant Hanno seem to mean him: first, Pliny the Elder writes that a Hanno, ‘one of the most distinguished Carthaginians’, so skilfully tamed a lion as a pet that his persuasive powers were judged a threat to the city’s freedom and he was put to death for treason. A later Greek author, Aelian, offers a still more imaginative story of a Hanno training birds to chant ‘Hanno is a god’, only to find that, when set free to spread this message, they went back to their usual cries instead. Both stories look made up, but the import of both is that this Hanno was rich and arrogant and his fellow citizens thought him dangerously ambitious.

  Hanno ‘the Great’ certainly was brought down by them when convicted of plotting a coup d’état. The account in Justin is detailed though not wholly satisfactory (Trogus’ original probably did better). Some time around 350, Hanno allegedly plotted to seize power by murdering all the adirim at his daughter’s wedding banquet. The scheme was discovered but, too powerful to be prosecuted, he was foiled instead by a decree banning all such public feasts. Undeterred, he tried to bring on a slave revolt; he was foiled again. Now he retired with twenty thousand slave supporters to a ‘fort’ – it was shown earlier that Justin probably means his country estate – but failed to attract help from the Libyans and a Numidian king (Justin writes a king of the ‘Mauri’, but they were impossibly distant). He was captured, mutilated gruesomely, and crucified, while Justin claims that his entire family was executed too. This is exaggerated, for at least one son, Gisco, was simply exiled.69

  As usual with a résumé, especially one by Justin, much is left unexplained: what prompted Hanno to try a coup if he was already so powerful, why he seems in the story to have no citizen supporters outside his own family, how he organised the slave revolt – which, despite being foiled, still raised thousands of followers for his last stand – and how the successful resistance against him was organised. The account is obviously a version coloured to absolve the rest of Carthage’s élite from any association with the miscreant. An attempted coup by a Hanno did occur before the 330s, for Aristotle mentions it. He implies, too, that there was indeed a faction backing it. He does not date the event, but his Hanno must be Hanno ‘the Great’, for otherwise we would have to suppose two separate Hannos in two different periods, both of them powerful men, who each tried and failed to make himself master of the city.

  It looks as though Hanno and his supporters overreached themselves – perhaps through trying to monopolise the sufeteship and other offices while prosecuting opponents like Eshmuniaton, and courting popularity with lavish displays and gifts – and as a consequence the resulting tensions finally broke out into conflict. Whether or not Hanno did plot
a mass murder of his senatorial enemies, he could readily be accused of it (just as more than one alleged enemy of Rome would be accused of scheming to slaughter the entire Roman senate). In turn he perhaps did flee to his country estate with a body of supporters, not necessarily just slaves, while Justin’s twenty thousand should be estimated downwards to a couple of thousand at most. By force or intimidation, he was captured and the movement collapsed. Whichever faction won this round – Eshmuniaton’s or another – the upheaval unveils further the levels of competitive tension in Carthaginian public life as the century advanced. Nor would it be the last such drama.

  The competition and tensions must have been connected, partly at least, to the city’s increasing power and wealth, together with the stresses of repeated, large-scale and costly wars with Syracuse (now a major power too) and from the restive Libyans. In the 370s Carthage even intervened briefly in southern Italy, while in 348 she made a second, updated treaty with the Roman republic, also increasingly powerful in the central Mediterranean (Chapter X). In 344 the internal wars convulsing the Sicilian Greeks encouraged her to make a vigorous new effort to extend her dominance over the island (Chapter IX). The rewards, risks and enticements of political success would sharpen the conflicts among ambitious aristocrats, occasionally even to the point of violence as in Hanno’s case. Not that violence was inevitable: when military setbacks in Sicily led to the exiled Gisco being recalled in 341 and elected general, reportedly he celebrated his victory over his family’s foes only in the symbolic way mentioned earlier, by placing his foot on their prostrate necks in public.

  The renewed warfare launched in 344 looks like the work of Hanno the Great’s victorious opponents. They would certainly have a need for military success to bolster their position. Defeats undid them instead. One general, Mago, killed himself to avoid being prosecuted (his resentful fellow citizens crucified his corpse). His successors were completely beaten at the river Crimisus in 341, a disaster where no fewer than 3000 citizen soldiers were lost – all of them, we are told, from aristocratic families. It was this debacle that brought Gisco back, and the necks which he symbolically trod on may have included those of the disgraced generals. Whether so or not, his recall marked a triumph over the opposing faction or factions.

  POLITICS AND WAR IN THE LATE 4TH CENTURY: BOMILCAR’S PUTSCH

  Gisco was able to make a fairly good peace with the Sicilians, which will have confirmed his effective supremacy in the republic. As time passed, however, the competition between factions or individuals became more evenly balanced, to judge from Aristotle’s view in the 330s that Carthage’s political system was mostly admirable. Gisco’s conciliatory attitude seems to have lasted, while at the same time his family remained prominent. This pleasing state of affairs lasted some twenty years, encouraged no doubt by concern over the momentous developments in the east: Alexander the Great’s extraordinarily fast conquest of the Persian empire, his sacking of Carthage’s mother city Tyre – an ordeal witnessed by Carthaginian envoys to the sacred rites of Melqart there – and the annexation of Egypt, with whom Carthage shared the centuries-old frontier set by the brothers Philaenus.

  The Carthaginians watched these events carefully, avoiding domestic discord if only because new civil dissensions would make them look an easy further target for Alexander. As Phoenician descendants and off-and-on foes of Greek Sicily they might count as extra prey. Besides, they welcomed Tyrian women and children sent to them for safety. Reportedly they sent an agent named Hamilcar to pose as an exile and win entry to Alexander’s entourage so as to keep Carthage informed on his doings – but it was the king himself who told their envoys at Tyre to take home the warning that he had plans to march in Carthage’s direction eventually. His death in 323 and the disruption of his empire eased their worries. Several generations of in-fighting among the empire’s successor states followed, including Egypt under its new Greek pharaohs, the Ptolemies. (Incidentally, the suspicious Carthaginians put their agent to death on his return, claiming that he had intended to betray the city to Alexander.) By then, Carthage was concerned at developments in Sicily that, in the end, would bring down a near-catastrophe on her in Africa.70

  Ironically the republic played a part in the revived truculence of Syracuse, now the most powerful state in the island, by first opposing and then helping the unscrupulous populist leader Agathocles to become its effective ruler – ironically, because Carthage’s dominant faction more than once showed itself anxious not to fight a new war in Sicily. No fewer than four times – around 325, in 319, 315 and then 314 – she intervened in the Syracusan and Sicilian Greeks’ squabbles to persuade the antagonists to patch up agreements. None was lasting, yet there seems to have been no serious opposition to this sensible approach to Sicilian affairs. Only when Agathocles in 312 went back on the spirit of the third agreement did frustration affect Carthaginian politics. The general commanding in Sicily since at least 319, another Hamilcar, was then accused by both his fellow citizens and also Carthage’s Sicilian allies of betraying his city’s interests – even of seeking Agathocles’ help to make himself master of Carthage. Resentment plainly ran high. Hamilcar was convicted in a secret hearing without his knowledge and only then recalled, but died before he could be punished. Justin claims that the senate found him guilty, but this is probably a mistake for the court of One Hundred and Four (which consisted of senators).

  His replacement was Hamilcar son of Gisco, ‘one of the most distinguished’ Carthaginians according to Diodorus. The two men might seem political rivals, given that the first Hamilcar’s shabby treatment benefited the second. But it is possible instead that the first Hamilcar lost the trust even of his own faction when the policy of restraint in Sicily backfired, for an item in Justin suggests that the two Hamilcars were connected by blood or else had been allies. One of the generals commanding in Libya three years later, the Bomilcar who afterwards attempted a coup but failed, died on the cross denouncing his fellow citizens for repeated injustices towards past leaders – allegedly false charges against Hanno ‘the Great’, Gisco’s exile, and the secret verdict on ‘his uncle Hamilcar’. The second Hamilcar, son of Gisco, had recently been killed at Syracuse and did not form part of this litany. But for Bomilcar to link himself and his uncle with Hanno and Gisco suggests at least a political association between them all, and maybe kinship too, while the second Hamilcar was Gisco’s son and Hanno’s grandson.

  By contrast, the other general appointed with Bomilcar against the Syracusan invasion was a family enemy, Hanno – because, says Diodorus, the Carthaginians saw such rivalry as a guarantee against either man becoming a danger to the state. With the city on the verge of disaster at Agathocles’ hands, this reasoning seems more of a recipe for state suicide than for survival; nor was it ever tested, since Hanno was soon killed in battle. It seems just as likely that Carthage’s two main factions or rival families joined forces to present a united front in the crisis, but that Bomilcar’s failed coup after Hanno’s death prompted a later notion that they had been jointly appointed to prevent precisely such an attempt. But the fact that family reasons made the two men political rivals shows that factional politics had indeed endured down the decades, even if on the whole Hanno the Great’s family and their friends kept the upper hand.

  What tempted Bomilcar to his putsch? Perhaps he feared that his political group was losing its pre-eminence in the city’s affairs, or at least in its military affairs – with his uncle secretly convicted and recalled, the other Hamilcar defeated, captured and shamefully killed at Syracuse, and he himself required to join hands with his long-standing opponent. More personally, he may well have feared being prosecuted over the defeat which had cost Hanno his life, while at the same time being encouraged by the acquisition of power recently won by so many generals overseas: not only Agathocles in Sicily but Alexander the Great’s marshals in the east, including Ptolemy I over in Egypt. Incidentally, both Diodorus and Justin claim (with slightly differing details) that he
had ideas even of joining forces with Agathocles. It may be that Bomilcar, like his uncle, thought that Carthage should try to live at peace, so far as possible, with Syracuse rather than carry on wars which either ended in stalemate or, as at present, threatened disaster; and that he was the best person to bring this about.

  The putsch failed, all the same, because he lacked enough support. Although the military situation gave him the excuse for mustering his forces in Megara, he could rely on a mere 500 citizen soldiers and 1000 mercenaries for the attempt to seize the agora, no doubt along with the senate house and other key buildings. Diodorus says that he ‘proclaimed himself tyrant’, which of course corresponds to no Punic word. It may mean that Bomilcar declared himself sole sufete and general (or chief general), or even perhaps borrowed the Greek term strategos autokrator, ‘supreme general’ – the standard title taken by Sicilian Greek leaders bent on tyranny. If he hoped to overawe his fellow citizens he was badly mistaken. Their reaction proved his lack of wide support. After initial panic, ‘the young men gathered and, forming up in ranks, attacked the tyrant’, who was driven out of the old city back into the new. Then with ‘all the citizens coming together under arms’, the putschists, cornered on a Megara hilltop, capitulated under promise of amnesty. Bomilcar alone was tortured to death in the middle of the agora, no doubt in ways reminiscent of the execution of Hanno ‘the Great’. It was there, in Justin’s telling, that he denounced the Carthaginians for how they had treated Hanno and the others.

  Three generals were next appointed, all it seems of equal rank: Himilco, Adherbal and another Hanno, and during 307 the Greek invasion – which had for a time mastered virtually the entire Libyan interior and even taken Utica and Hippacra – ignominiously collapsed. It is not at all probable that the new generals came from the faction, still less the family, of Hanno the Great and Gisco, unless somehow its survivors managed with amazing speed to shake off any association with Bomilcar and keep out the friends and supporters of Bomilcar’s late colleague and foe Hanno. More likely it was this Hanno’s group that benefited from the abortive coup, while whatever was left of Hanno the Great’s and Gisco’s was badly hurt at least.71