The Carthaginians

by B D Hoyos

  CARTHAGE VS DIONYSIUS I

  Had Carthage maintained her hands-off policy towards Greek Sicily, simply staying on guard against any incursions that might be made into her territories, much wasteful bloodshed could have been avoided over the next century and a half. The changeover to vigorous and even vengeful aggression from 409 on is therefore surprising. As noted earlier, the claim that Carthage’s leading citizen Hannibal, the now elderly grandson of Hamilcar the Magonid, was eager to avenge his forebear’s disaster hardly seems reason enough – especially as the war began with the total obliteration of Selinus, Carthage’s ally in 480 and his own father Gisco’s home in exile later. At odds with nearby Segesta, Selinus had turned to Syracuse for help, prompting Segesta to call on Carthage. It looks as though the republic now decided deliberately on a reversal of dealings with Greek Sicily, for which she enlisted native Sicilian allies as well: now it was to be projection of power well beyond the epikrateia. Apart from the current Magonids’ likely keenness for military distinction, the impulses for change must have been Carthage’s success in developing an effective empire in North Africa and her concern at Syracuse’s expanding dominance in Sicily. Diodorus in fact mentions this concern, which Hannibal played on to persuade his fellow citizens to act. Greece and the Aegean world, moreover, were now absorbed in the last stages of the Peloponnesian war, with Athens so uninterested in the fortunes of Greek Sicily as to become a formal ally of Carthage.

  The ferocious energy of the offensives that began in 409 stunned the Sicilians. Selinus was besieged, sacked and depopulated, then Himera. Two years later Carthaginian and other North African colonists founded a new city, Thermae Himeraeae, at hot springs not far west of Himera. Then a new campaign began in 406, led by Hannibal and Himilco, which led to the sack of Acragas after most of its inhabitants had fled. There followed in 405 the same treatment for Gela and Camarina. Tens of thousands of refugees were left to wander across the island.

  The remorseless Carthaginian advance in those years was only briefly halted by a plague that killed Hannibal among others (it was to appease Baal Hammon that Himilco then sacrificed a boy victim), and by Syracusan forces led by the ambitious and devious Dionysius, soon to make himself tyrant of his city. With most of central and eastern Sicily occupied but his forces beset by sickness, Himilco made peace on very favourable terms: the epikrateia in western Sicily recognised, the southern Greek cities from Acragas to Camarina made tribute-payers to Carthage, and others in Sicily’s centre and north-east guaranteed their independence.

  The peace of 405 looked like a triumph for Carthage and her Magonid leadership. In reality it was fragile, as every informed Carthaginian must have realised. Himilco brought back not only victory but plague. Dionysius soon moved to take over many eastern and central Sicilian cities, like Leontini, Catana and the Sicel stronghold Enna, despite their promised independence. After an ostentatious military and naval build-up over the next few years, including his newly-invented warship the quinquereme, he opened a new war in 397 using huge military forces – reportedly eighty thousand infantry, three thousand cavalry and two hundred warships. He matched the sack of Selinus, Himera and Acragas by besieging the island city of Motya with massive siege machines, building a causeway to the walls from the mainland. Motya’s last hours saw fighting in a tableau which one day would be strangely recalled in the sack of Carthage herself, as the attackers fought on wooden plank-bridges from one tall house across to the next on the crowded island:

  The Sicilian Greeks found themselves in a very difficult position. For, fighting as they were from the suspended wooden bridges, they suffered grievously both because of the narrow quarters and because of the desperate resistance of their opponents, who had abandoned hope of life. As a result, some perished in hand-to-hand encounters as they gave and received wounds, and others, pressed back by the Motyans and tumbling from the wooden bridges, fell to their death on the ground. (Diodorus 14.51.5–52.4 (Loeb tr.))

  What had been one of Phoenician Sicily’s most flourishing centres was reduced to a deserted wreck. Himilco retook it the following year but it was never fully restored. Instead the Carthaginians founded a new port named Lilybaeum on the mainland, a short way south, which proved to be impregnable against all attackers, even the Romans.81

  Himilco struck back in 396, but his and his deputy Mago’s new series of successes – Messana taken and razed, Dionysius’ fleet defeated, Syracuse laid under siege – were ruined by a fresh onslaught of plague. This was the occasion when the Carthaginians sought to appease Demeter and Kore, whose shrine outside Syracuse had been destroyed along with many others, by inducting their cult into the city. Himilco himself bribed Dionysius to let him and the surviving citizen troops sail home, abandoning everyone else. This disgrace drove him to his suicide. More calamitously for the Carthaginians, it led to the great Libyan and slave rebellion which for a time threatened the city’s own existence.

  The rather wearisome sequence of wars went on. The new general in Sicily was Himilco’s deputy Mago – not, it seems, a member of the Magonid family, which now disappears from record – who put down the Libyan rebellion, warred with large forces against Syracuse in 393 and 392, but then negotiated a new peace. It kept the gains of 405, but conceded the Sicel communities in the central regions to Dionysius’ unsympathetic rule. This step backwards may reflect difficulties at home resulting from the recent revolt and the long-lasting plague. Dionysius, left alone for the next nine years, used ruthless methods to create an impressive Syracusan dominion in eastern Sicily and even southern Italy, along with naval interventions in the southern Adriatic and a spectacular raid on Pyrgi on Italy’s Etruscan coast. The Carthaginians probably foresaw a new war with so dynamic a power, so when Dionysius (predictably) began to seek alliances with cities in the island’s west – ignoring Carthaginian remonstrations – they sent Mago against him in 383.

  A disaster followed, with Mago defeated and killed in battle; but when Dionysius countered a peace offer with ill-advised demands that Carthage abandon Sicily altogether and pay him a large indemnity, she put Mago’s son in command of fresh forces which shattered the Syracusans at Cronium (a place apparently near Panormus) probably in 382 or 381. Carthage still wanted peace, as Dionysius too now did, but not surprisingly her terms were sharp: he had to pay a thousand talents and accept a demarcation line at the river Halycus, today’s Platani just west of Acragas, and in the north at the territory of Thermae Himeraeae (the city founded by Hannibal and Himilco in 407 to replace Himera).

  The name of Mago’s son and the date of the new peace are not certain. An anecdote in Polyaenus of a military stratagem might refer to him (a general called Himilco deceiving Dionysius’ men outside Cronium), but in the same paragraph another Himilco story is about the earlier general who later committed suicide. On Diodorus’ evidence, the peace soon followed the victory at Cronium. But Carthage in 379 or 378 re-established the town of Hipponium in southern Italy, destroyed earlier by Dionysius – an action which, if part of the same war, would put the peace during the 370s. This is not a strongly convincing argument, all the same, for peace before then would not ban Carthage from intervening at the edge of the tyrant’s area of south Italian dominance.

  In the later 370s fresh troubles at home afflicted the republic. The plague came back to kill large numbers in the city. This in turn encouraged both Libyans and Sardinians to rebel once more, rebellions successful so long as the epidemic continued to rage. The Libyans made no attack on the city, unlike in 396; perhaps they simply renounced Carthaginian authority, refusing to pay tribute and resisting efforts to bring them back into obedience. The Sardinians ‘attacked the Carthaginians’, which must mean the settler population, but seem not to have taken any cities like Tharros, Sulcis, Carales or Olbia. As soon as Carthage recovered her strength she put down this revolt fairly quickly, which suggests that the Sardinians had made only limited gains. Control was reimposed in Libya perhaps rather earlier, for only with her African t
erritories secure could the republic feel free to act decisively beyond.

  By this time Hanno ‘the Great’ was directing affairs: he was the general who achieved the submission of Libya (Chapter VIII) and he then had to face the latest challenge from Dionysius. Encouraged by Carthage’s troubles, according to Diodorus, and further heartened by news of the disastrous fire in Carthage’s dockyards, the ageing tyrant mobilised for yet another war in 368 but (not for the first time) his plans went awry. Despite the dockyard blaze, no fewer than 200 Carthaginian warships annihilated his fleet anchored near Drepana and Mt Eryx; little happened after that, with Dionysius dying in 367 and his son and namesake leaving the war in limbo until a formal peace years later. The two sides’ regions of dominance seem to have stayed much as before.

  Carthage had not wanted the war any more than the previous one. Hanno had other concerns, like keeping the Libyans subject and dealing with his enemy ‘Suniatus’. The supposed ban in 368 against studying or speaking Greek – whatever its real content – would fit a resentful attitude towards Greek Sicily. The results of the four decades of conflicts were mostly bad, particularly for Sicily with their countless sieges and sackings, enslavements and at times slaughtering of cities and their populations. Carthage did replace Motya with Lilybaeum and Himera with Thermae Himeraeae, both destined to prosper, and settled war refugees at Tauromenium near the destroyed town of Naxos on the east coast (it would soon be the birthplace of the historian Timaeus). Dionysius founded the city of Tyndaris in 396, on the north-east coast, with war refugees from Greece. These creations hardly compensated, though, for the damage inflicted in southern Italy as well as Sicily.

  CARTHAGE AND TIMOLEON

  The general peace in Sicily after 367 was overthrown from 357 on, although the Carthaginians still stayed carefully aloof. The younger Dionysius, cultivated and feckless, was deposed by his high-minded but unbending brother-in-law Dion (helped initially by his friend ‘Synalos’ or Eshmunhalos, the commandant at Heraclea Minoa). The cost was anarchy at Syracuse and across Greek Sicily, with Dion murdered in 353, petty tyrants seizing power in other cities, and the ousted Dionysius II trying twice between 356 and 344 to retake Syracuse by force. That city from 345 on was held by one Hicetas, who like so many Sicilian Greeks had good relations with Carthage and who, faced with the ex-tyrant’s return, called on her for help.

  Hanno ‘the Great’ was gone, and with him the hands-off policy towards Greek Sicily. Whatever faction or competing factions had taken over, they needed military as well as political successes, for Hanno’s group remained active even though his son Gisco was exiled. The republic had recovered prosperity, as her powerful and lavish armaments of the next four years imply; the convulsions in eastern Sicily offered the real chance of repeating, even outdoing the achievements of 409–405. Hicetas was sent help: 50,000 infantry (including many Greek mercenaries), up to 10,000 cavalry and 300 chariots under a Mago, whose colleague Hanno had 150 triremes. There were, Diodorus states, ‘weapons and missiles of all kinds, a profusion of siege engines, and a great quantity of food and other supplies’. Mago was able to place some troops actually in the sector of Syracuse held by Hicetas against Dionysius II – the first and last time that Carthaginian forces ever set foot there.

  Yet again a promising start ended badly. Hicetas had earlier sought help from Syracuse’s mother city Corinth. An elderly Corinthian leader, Timoleon, now arrived with a few hundred Greek mercenaries, to make an immediate impact on events. Dionysius II agreed to go and live in Corinth. Next, reportedly after Mago’s and Timoleon’s mercenaries began fraternising, the Carthaginians abandoned their mission entirely to march back to the west (it was now 343). This aroused such anger at home that Mago killed himself, though his unforgiving fellow citizens insisted on crucifying his body; his deputy is not heard of again. Two new generals, named Hamilcar and Hasdrubal, took the field in 341 with still larger forces, as described earlier.

  The lengthy preparations, though, had given Timoleon time to strengthen his position in Sicily. He met the Carthaginians at the river Crimisus (probably today’s Belice) north of Selinus, in late May or early June, where his army – badly outnumbered, but aided by a gigantic thunderstorm – shattered the Carthaginians. The Sacred Battalion of 2500 eminent citizens, and with it over 7000 other citizen troops, were destroyed, thousands more soldiers were captured, and the booty was colossal. The Carthaginian army virtually ceased to exist as a fighting force. Although Timoleon was content to return in security and glory to Syracuse, at Carthage there were panic-stricken fears of a Greek invasion. The city’s next move was to recall Gisco, son of Hanno the Great, and appoint him general, or possibly general and sufete together for full control. Gisco opted for caution and the status quo, making a peace which returned the island to the dividing-line of 367 at the Halycus.

  Carthage’s expeditions of 343 and 341 failed not through inadequate resources but because of poor generalship. None of the generals performed well, while the Greek side found a totally unexpected rescuer in the charismatic Timoleon – not only a phenomenally successful commander, but a remarkable political and social leader. He had much to do: grass was growing in the agora of a wrecked and depopulated Syracuse; other cities were in a similar plight; and tens of thousands of new migrants from Greece were needed to rebuild the devastated and depopulated island. Yet in a few years his measures began to revive Greek Sicily, which of course promised to make any Carthaginian attempt to overpower it still more problematic. Gisco preferred to take the republic back to his father’s non-interventionist attitude; so did his successors until around 320.

  THE AGE OF AGATHOCLES: CARTHAGE AT BAY

  The Carthaginians had other overseas developments to watch. Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian empire – including Tyre and then Egypt – threatened to re-order Carthage’s priorities, especially given the king’s unsubtle threats that he had military ambitions for the west too. We saw earlier that Hamilcar, the secret agent at his court, was later put to death by his unappreciative countrymen: perhaps it was because he had failed to wean Alexander off this idea. The breakup of the empire after Alexander died in 323, and Egypt’s new ruler Ptolemy’s indifference to westward ventures, finally eased that worry.

  Timoleon’s pacification measures began to unravel in the 320s. The oligarchs he put in change at Syracuse sought to imitate the elder Dionysius’ interventions in southern Italy, while their rule was challenged by a new popular leader, Agathocles – born, it so happened, at Thermae Himeraeae around 360 to a father exiled from Rhegium. Rather than see another tyrant take over Syracuse, the Carthaginians supported the oligarchs, even helping them in 319 with troops led by the Hamilcar whose obscure link with Gisco’s family has been mentioned before. Then, paradoxically, Hamilcar and Agathocles came to a hands-off agreement that allowed the Syracusan to become, in practice, tyrant after all. In a style that became one of his trademarks, Agathocles cemented his rule in 316 by massacring his oligarchic opponents with their families.

  Why Hamilcar switched his support is hard to tell, yet he was not punished. Perhaps he and his friends at home reasoned that the oligarchs had no long-term future, making a good relationship with their rival the only prospect for stability. If so it was mistaken optimism. The next decade and a half became a saga of evenly matched and dramatic conflict never before seen in Carthage’s or Sicily’s history.

  Agathocles soon began to reimpose Syracuse’s old dominance over the rest of Greek Sicily. This naturally drew anxious attention from Carthage. In 315 her envoys put a stop to him attacking Messana; then in 314 Hamilcar brokered a peace of sorts between Syracuse and its growing number of opponents, though this failed to last and tension now grew between Syracuse and Carthage too. When a Carthaginian fleet stopped Agathocles in 312 from taking Acragas after at last seizing Messana, he invaded the epikrateia to bring a number of places (unnamed) under his power. So began the next great Sicilian war, defeating Carthage’s long efforts at averting it.


  Hamilcar died before he could be recalled in disgrace, to be replaced by his kinsman or friend Hamilcar son of Gisco. The new general, combining his own troops with anti-Agathocles Greeks, defeated the tyrant near Gela in 311, won over most of eastern Sicily with a (slightly paradoxical) message of liberation, and laid siege to Syracuse by land and sea. Agathocles responded with astonishing bravado, which at the time surely seemed mad. On 14 August 310 (the day before a solar eclipse), he slipped out of Syracuse with a small army of 13,500 on 60 ships, evaded pursuit, and landed near Cape Bon. Burning the ships, he marched on Carthage.

  This epic expedition lasted three years, causing upheavals even worse than those of the Libyan rebellions earlier in the century, partly because yet again the Libyans launched their own revolt. The Carthaginians were taken utterly by surprise. Their first resistance measures, drawing on the city’s own resources because the invaders had largely cut it off from the chora and Libya, were disastrous. Of the two generals, Hanno was killed along with most of the new Sacred Battalion, while his political rival Bomilcar retreated to focus on the city’s own security. This led to the notorious mass sacrifice of hundreds of children from aristocratic families which Diodorus describes. Agathocles could not assault Carthage but established his headquarters at Tunes, then marched through the countryside plundering it. He brought the east coast under his power, from Neapolis and Hadrumetum to Thapsus, and in 309 defeated another Carthaginian army.