The Carthaginians

by B D Hoyos

  Different regions furnished different types of soldier. Libyans, Iberians and Gauls were primarily infantry, the Iberians often armed with a distinctive curved sword, Gauls with long swords for slashing. The Numidians were most famous for their formidable cavalry but could also arm infantry, at any rate for fighting within North Africa. Balearic islanders were limited in number but were light infantry wielding dangerously accurate leather slingshots with stone or iron balls to soften up enemy forces at the start of battle or harass them during and after it. Campanians, from the region of Italy south of Rome, were primarily armoured infantry but also provided some cavalrymen; enterprising and often ruthless, they were used from the late 5th down to the 3rd Century – and by Sicilian Greek states too – though their availability may have lessened as Rome increased her control over their homeland. Ligurians, highlanders from the coastal Italian Appennines, were light-armed warriors of rather loose discipline. The western Mediterranean thus regularly furnished manpower for the republic’s armies till the year 201.

  Greek mercenaries, the most highly valued in the east, were not recruited by Carthage until the mid-4th Century, unless perhaps in small numbers earlier. They are first mentioned in the Carthaginian forces facing the liberator Timoleon of Corinth when he arrived in Sicily in 344. Greek cities’ allied troops were a separate matter: as early as 480 Selinus in south-west Sicily offered cavalry to Hamilcar’s army, and ‘Greek allies’ – unspecified – earn a mention in his grandson’s army in 409. Valued though they were, Greek professionals played a part in Carthage’s armies only on and off, and for only about a century. Their loyalties may have been slightly suspect to generals in wars against Greeks. One story tells how in 344 excessive friendliness between Timoleon’s and the Carthaginian Mago’s Greek mercenaries alarmed Mago into evacuating Sicily altogether. Nor are Greeks mentioned in the next army sent over against Timoleon, or in the war against Agathocles in Libya near the end of the century.

  Fighting the Romans was a different matter, as the timely role of Xanthippus of Sparta in 255 illustrates, but Greek mercenary numbers then seem to have run down again as the long war dragged on and the republic’s finances deteriorated. When the great revolt of the mercenaries broke out in North Africa in 241, the only Greeks in the rebel forces were what Polybius calls Mixellenes, ‘mixed Greeks’ or possibly ‘half-Greeks’ – most of them slaves and deserters, he adds disdainfully – who are not afterwards reported in events. They may have been a composite of Greeks and others from south Italy, rather than mercenaries from the east. The armies of the Barcid generals over the next four decades, Hannibal’s in Italy included, had no Greek mercenaries at all: we do not know why.

  How contingents of a Carthaginian army were organised is not known in detail, but each contingent would consist at least of a number of sub-units like infantry companies and cavalry squadrons. In large formations there may have been other subdivisions, just as a Roman legion of Agathocles’ time was made up of manipuli subdivided into centuriae. The Carthaginian republic paid their mercenaries’ and conscripts’ wages – though sometimes with lengthy gaps between payments – and presumably paid citizen troops too when these were in service, though the fancy armour and other accoutrements of bodies like the Sacred Battalion must have been at a warrior’s own expense (cf. Illustrations 25, 26).

  In every period the highest officers in an army were, it seems, all Carthaginians, though below them the various contingents, both conscript and mercenary, commonly had commanders and officers of their own. Some senior Carthaginian officers are known, most of them from the era of the wars with Rome. We do meet a ‘Synalos’ (probably Eshmunhalos) in 357, military governor of Carthaginiancontrolled Heraclea Minoa in Sicily, who gave much-needed help to his Syracusan friend Dion in the quest to free that city from tyranny.

  Illustration 25 Heavy-armed infantry on the march: jasper scarab from Kerkouane, 4th Century BC

  In the following century, a Hanno was the garrison commander at Messana in 264 whose ineptitude contributed (at least in his compatriots’ eyes) to bringing about the First Punic War; at the war’s end one Gisco was the subordinate left in charge in Sicily by the departing Hamilcar Barca. Hannibal’s cavalry commander Maharbal gave his famously fruitless advice to march directly on Rome, supposedly after Cannae in 216; another trusted subordinate was Hannibal’s best friend Mago, nicknamed ‘the Samnite’ (we do not know why),

  Illustration 26 Front and back parade armour (4th–3rd Centuries BC) found at Ksour Essaf, near Sousse

  who served with him for twenty years; and Hannibal’s own nephew Hanno was still another, and one of the best, of his lieutenants in Italy.

  African and foreign officers are sometimes heard of, again chiefly during the Punic Wars. It was a Spartan mercenary, Xanthippus, who against all tradition at Carthage was granted practical – though not official – command in 255 and destroyed the Roman invaders under Regulus. Just a few years later, the fortress seaport of Lilybaeum was saved for the Carthaginians by Alexon of Achaea, who thwarted a treacherous scheme by other mercenary officers to hand it over to its Roman besiegers. In the great rebellion of 241 in North Africa, one of the most bloodthirsty rebel leaders was the Gaul Autaritus, leader of the Gallic mercenaries in Hamilcar Barca’s old army. On the other side, Hamilcar gained the loyal support of a Numidian prince, Naravas, whose cavalry played a vital part in his campaigns and who may afterwards have married one of Hamilcar’s daughters. Hippocrates and Epicydes, two officers in Hannibal’s army in Italy, were brothers of part-Syracusan ancestry (their grandfather had lived in exile at Carthage): sent to Syracuse in 213 to manoeuvre that city into alliance with Carthage, they succeeded brilliantly, at least in the short term. Then, after the Roman sack of Syracuse, Hannibal sent a vigorous Libyphoenician cavalry officer, Mottones (Mattan) of Hippacra, to rally Carthaginian forces in the island.

  Non-Carthaginians’ services were not always fully appreciated by the republic, in later times anyway. Xanthippus found it discreet to exit North Africa after the victory that saved the city; a few years later, some unpaid and mutinous mercenaries were dumped on a small island (Ustica north of Sicily, perhaps, or Linosa between Malta and Byzacium) by their general. The Gallic chief Autaritus shared and sharpened his men’s widespread discontent at their employers’ shabby efforts to haggle over their overdue pay. The Numidian Masinissa, perhaps Naravas’ nephew, served Carthage well in Spain in Hannibal’s time but was then dropped in favour of his rival Syphax (a slight for which the republic was to pay dearly). Mottones’ prowess so annoyed Hanno, the general in Sicily, that in the end the disgusted Hippacritan went over to the Romans – who in appreciation made him a Roman citizen, Marcus Valerius Mottones, as he shows in his and his sons’ votive inscription at Delphi, set up twenty years later.

  Carthaginian armies, like those of many other Mediterranean states, included a wide range of combatants. Heavily-armed infantry and agile, often Numidian cavalry formed their core, while among other important arms were lightly-armed infantry and distinctive contingents like the Gauls – ferocious though loosely-disciplined warriors, wielding fearsome broadswords – and the small but valued companies of Balearic slingers. A 4th-Century jasper scarab-ornament from Kerkouane depicts a group of heavy infantrymen on the march (Illustration 25): their armament of plumed helmets, shingreaves and spears is fully Greek, and their purposeful stride implies a high level of discipline (the plumes perhaps suggest officers). The sort of parade armour available at least to generals and their immediate subordinates is illustrated by the magnificently wrought bronze armour, for breast and back, found at Ksour Essaf near the coast about 30 kilometres south of Sousse (Illustration 26). It is apparently a south Italian product and 4th- or 3rd-Century in date. Its owner could have served against Agathocles (or indeed with him) or in one of the great wars of the following century, and then took this item of personal treasure with him to the grave.

  War chariots figured in some important 4th-Centu
ry campaigns, for instance against Agathocles, while one or two surviving stelae attest chariot-makers such as the Mago son of Himilco mentioned earlier. All the same the weapon, a survival from old Near Eastern warfare, was about as ineffective in the republic’s conflicts as Persian chariots were against Greek enemies like Alexander. After 300 or so they were given up in favour of elephants.

  Elephants are of course the popular symbol of Carthaginian warfare. In reality, like Greek mercenaries they were used for a much more limited period than often thought. The great powers of the eastern Mediterranean had started to use them in the wars after Alexander the Great’s death. They first appear in 262 in Sicily – though possibly some had been used there in 278–276 against Pyrrhus, who had elephants of his own – and are mentioned for the last time at Zama in 202. Most of their service, then, was against the Romans in the first two Punic Wars. Carthage’s elephants were acquired from the forests of the Atlas mountains; smaller than those from India which the eastern kingdoms used, they could carry only their riders but could inflict serious damage when skilfully used, especially against troops and horses unaccustomed to them. At the same time they needed large amounts of food, were difficult to transport across water, and could be neutralised – or even turned against their own side – by a resourceful enemy, as Scipio did at Ilipa in Spain in 206 and four years later at Zama.

  Elephants were a mixed success for Carthage. In their first major battle against the Romans, at Acragas in 262, they made little impact and nearly all were captured. By contrast, Xanthippus’ use of them seven years later against Regulus contributed to his victory. Hamilcar Barca similarly made good use of elephants in fighting the rebel mercenaries and Libyans from 240 to 237, and thereafter in his campaigns in Spain where the Barcid generals built up a powerful elephant corps supposedly, though maybe exaggeratedly, 200 strong (Illustration 24i). Hannibal’s feat in 218, shepherding 37 from Spain across the Alps and into Italy, both helped him to his first big victory at the river Trebia and immortalised him in the memory of future ages – but then all save one died in the bitter winter that followed. When next he had a large body of elephants (80 at Zama) they inflicted a more devastating impact on his own army than on Scipio’s.

  CARTHAGINIANS AND GREEKS IN THE 5TH CENTURY

  Carthage’s dominance over the western parts of Sicily, established under the first Magonids, led to recurrently strained dealings with other peoples in the island, above all the Greek city-states. These had been founded between the later 8th and early 6th Centuries, Syracuse for example in 734 and Acragas in 580. Many quickly grew in size and wealth, often competing and sometimes co-operating with one another. The Sicilian Greeks, as warlike as their kinsmen in Greece, developed a populous and powerful civilisation (their repetitive conflicts notwithstanding) even more impressive than their colonial brethren’s in southern Italy. Competition, though, could be lethal. Syracuse destroyed its own recalcitrant colony Camarina not once but twice (in 533 and then 484) as well as another, Megara Hyblaea, in 483. Naxos, on the east coast near Mt Etna, was depopulated first by Gela in the 490s and then by Dionysius ninety years later.

  As noted earlier, Greeks from further east sought more than once, too, to plant themselves in districts under Carthaginian influence: Pentathlus in the west of Sicily around 580, then Dorieus towards the end of the same century – first near Lepcis in the Emporia region and then in western Sicily again. Carthage treated them, like Corsica’s Phocaean settler-pirates, as threats. When, in the 480s, Syracuse under Gelon and Acragas under his kinsman Theron seemed intent on imposing a shared hegemony over the rest of Greek Sicily, the republic reacted anew. A conflict around 485 was indecisive and probably was small-scale: we know of it only because in 480 Gelon complained to envoys from Greece that Athens and Sparta had earlier refused to help him against the Carthaginians’ ‘barbarian army’, while Justin vaguely alleges ‘constant wrongdoings’ inflicted by the Carthaginians on the hapless Sicilians. Disconcertingly, Justin also makes these summon the Spartan prince Leonidas to lead them (in fact he was to die that year at Thermopylae) – no doubt a blurred confusion with the Spartan Dorieus a generation earlier.80

  The great clash came when Hamilcar the Magonid and his army landed in 480, reportedly after three years of preparation. The enterprise was not a clash simply of Carthaginians versus Greeks. Hamilcar himself was responding to an appeal from friendly Greeks: Terillus the ex-ruler of Himera on the north coast – recently deposed by Theron – and his powerful father-in-law Anaxilas, tyrant of Rhegium on the straits opposite Messana which was under Anaxilas’ control too. Terillus was a guest-friend of Hamilcar, himself of course half-Greek on his Syracusan mother’s side, while Anaxilas was so keen for intervention that he gave Hamilcar his own children as hostages. Selinus on the south-west coast also aligned itself with Carthage, even promising a contingent of cavalry (Anaxilas in the end supplied no troops). Theron and Gelon’s power bloc, of quite novel size in the island, plainly alarmed not just Magonid Carthage but other western Greek states, while the links between all the leading individuals remind us that – whatever propaganda might claim – the Carthaginians were far from genuine outsiders or mysterious aliens in the Greek world.

  To them the new bloc posed a far worse threat to their Sicilian epikrateia than Dorieus ever could. Given this sound reason for confronting the expansionist tyrants, it is not essential to believe the story in Diodorus – not in Herodotus – that Hamilcar’s enterprise was concerted to match Xerxes’ mighty expedition against Greece. Possibly enough Carthage kept in touch with Persia, via Tyre, about their two expeditions, but anything beyond that looks like imaginative Greek embroidery. Hamilcar landed at Panormus with his impressive armament, but while he was besieging Himera for his friend and protégé he was attacked by Gelon and Theron, his army was crushed after a long battle, and he himself was killed or – according to Herodotus’ Carthaginian informants – threw himself into the great fire in which he had been offering sacrifice after sacrifice for victory (the tale sometimes viewed as supporting claims of Carthaginian human sacrifice: Chapter VII). Herodotus was also told that memorials to him had been set up at Carthage and other cities, with Hamilcar himself receiving cult offerings. As with Elissa, all the same, this claimed divinisation has no trace in surviving Carthaginian evidence.

  The wars of the 480s opened a long and fruitless cycle of CarthaginianGreek struggles in Sicily, which was to last two centuries even though Gelon’s and Theron’s own bloc did not last beyond another decade or two. Each war followed a predictable path: either a Carthaginian thrust against hostile Greek cities – usually but not always including Syracuse – which after some successes was beaten back, or a Syracusan thrust into the epikrateia which, often after some successes again, failed to maintain itself. A peace that restored more or less the pre-war status quo then ensued until the next clash. Not only in 480 but in several later wars, Carthage had Sicilian Greek allies who preferred associating with her, an overseas and (relatively) distant overlord, to falling under the control of a powerful and dangerous Greek neighbour which, more often than not, was Syracuse.

  The war of 480 was the shortest of them all, a few months at most. Its effects were limited. The victors did not follow up their success by moving against Carthage’s epikrateia, Selinus was not victimised for supporting her, Anaxilas made his peace with Gelon, and the prospect of Syracusan-Acragantine hegemony over Sicily disappeared after Gelon and Theron died in the 470s. The cost in men, materials and money to Carthage must have been severe even if the entire expedition was not annihilated (as our sources claim), but she maintained her grip over western Sicily while turning her attentions to imposing control over Libya. The Magonids continued in power even though Hamilcar’s son Gisco was scapegoated for the disaster, to die in exile at Selinus.

  Trade and relations with the Greek world went on. Although the shame of the defeat was not forgotten, the Carthaginians for the next seventy years left the rest of Sicily politically an
d militarily to itself. They were not tempted to intervene when a powerful native Sicilian leader, Ducetius the Sicel, united most of the remaining independent native peoples in a league that proved a temporary match for Syracuse and Acragas in the 460s and 450s; nor when Syracuse and Acragas, having defeated the Sicels, fell out. Carthaginian restraint is all the more striking in face of Syracuse’s expanding strength and adventurousness. Its naval victory of 474 over the Etruscans in waters near Naples, and sea raids in the 450s against the Etruscan coasts and even Corsica, failed to upset the Magonids. Nor did they react against Syracuse’s broadening hegemony over other Sicilian states, both Greek and Sicel. When Rhegium, Syracuse’s neighbour Leontini, Camarina and Segesta wanted support against Syracusan expansionism in the 430s, they made alliances with Athens – without much benefit until years later.

  The Magonids’ hands-off attitude to Greek Sicily for most of the 5th Century contrasts remarkably with their warlike policies down to 480 and, still more so, from 409 on. The benefits that accrued from this restraint, combined with the vigorous development of Carthaginian power in Africa, much impressed Greeks. Thucydides reports the Syracusan Hermocrates in 415 extolling Carthage’s wealth in gold and silver; around the same time Athenian general Nicias (at least according to Diodorus) was insisting that her military strength far outdid his own city’s. Hermocrates claimed, too, that she was as worried as Syracuse about Athens’ ambitions for conquest. But throughout the great Athenian expedition against Syracuse, from 415 to 413, Carthage stayed aloof. The destruction of the invaders was achieved by the Syracusans with some help from Sparta – while the Magonids’ attitude to Athens, at any rate after the catastrophe, may be gauged from a treaty of friendship made between Carthage and the Greek city in 406, marble fragments of which survive in Athens.