The Carthaginians

by B D Hoyos

  The war was also going badly for Carthage in Sicily. Hamilcar failed in two attempts to capture Syracuse – and the second, in 309, ended with his army totally routed and Hamilcar himself captured by the Syracusans. They tortured him brutally to death in the streets, sending his head over to Agathocles. Disgusted at these defeats, Carthage’s Sicilian Greek allies including Acragas broke away to act for themselves, convulsing much of the island with fresh fighting, sieges and sackings. Carthaginian fortunes seemed bleak enough to encourage Bomilcar to make his coup attempt late in 308, just at the time when Agathocles was reinforced from Cyrene by a fresh army under an ambitious commander named Ophellas. Ophellas’ notion of a North African kingdom for himself was promptly snuffed out by his murderous ally, but Agathocles kept his soldiers and went on to capture both Hippacra and Utica, just to Carthage’s north.

  Then, as so often in previous wars, the situation reversed itself. Syracuse’s own fortunes in Sicily worsened, causing the tyrant (by now calling himself ‘king’ like Alexander’s successor generals) to leave the expeditionary forces under his son Archagathus’ command while he returned home. Stalemated at Tunes, the invaders turned to raiding inland. An officer named Eumachus made a profitable sweep through western Libya, taking Thugga and later Hippo Regius on the coast. His next foray took his division into Numidia, though we have seen that the places in Diodorus’ narrative – Miltine and three ‘cities of the apes’ – cannot be identified. Eumachus’ booty-haul was again great, but the pressure on Carthage had eased. Three new armies, small but efficiently led by the new generals Hanno, Himilco and Adherbal, fell on the equally divided invasion forces. What was left of these retreated to Tunes where they were themselves blockaded.

  Agathocles hurried back from Sicily, only to be defeated in his turn. The Carthaginians did give him some unintended respite, accidentally setting their own makeshift camp ablaze with much loss of life (allegedly they were sacrificing their choicest prisoners by fire, but this is a dubious Greek claim: Chapter VII). Nevertheless Agathocles realised that the game in Africa was lost. With the same rational ruthlessness as always, the self-styled king slipped away by sea late in October 307, abandoning even his two sons whom the furious soldiers at once murdered.

  The Carthaginians ended the war quickly in both theatres. Most of the deserted army took service with them; the rest were enslaved and put suitably to work restoring the ravaged countryside. We happen to know that Archagathus’ killer Arcesilaus, an officer and former friend of the king, settled at Carthage as an exile: he would have interesting grandsons (Chapter XI). Rebel Libyans were brought back under control, no doubt with heavy penalties. Agathocles, still facing bitter enemies in Sicily, was ready to make peace, and the Carthaginians were prepared to make it bearable for him. The division of the island at the Halycus was confirmed; he earned (ironically enough) a large Carthaginian subsidy too; and he remained free to subdue his Greek enemies, bringing virtually all Greek Sicily under his rule. Some years later he copied Dionysius I by intervening in southern Italy and across the Ionian sea.

  On the evidence we have, this war, one of the longest – and surely the costliest – that Carthage had ever waged, had not been sought or planned by her. She had made repeated efforts to keep Sicily stable, against continual prodding and provocation from Syracuse. Nor was it well waged. The attempt to fight it on traditional lines was met by Agathocles’ untraditional, desperation-born response; her generals in both theatres showed little ingenuity and élan, in contrast to Agathocles in Libya and some of his lieutenants in Sicily.

  What did distinguish Carthage was her solid resolution not to give in. At no stage were the invaders offered terms. The war in Libya showed that she could maintain access to munitions and manpower although most of the hinterland was cut off. The defeat of one army was followed by the raising of another, just as was done in Sicily after Hamilcar’s first siege of Syracuse failed. Even with the city short of food, in early 307, the authorities could still assemble, equip and send out the armies that turned the tables. The war illustrated, too, the mixture of fragility and strength in her dominion in North Africa. Subjects and even allies could turn readily against her when an inviting opportunity came, yet were soon brought back under control. Another striking feature was the secondary role played by her navy. Besides transporting armies and supplies, it was used mainly in blockading Syracuse by sea – not always successfully.

  A further feature of Agathocles’ war was the unquenchably, often viciously competitive energy of Greek Sicilians. They waged wars more often among themselves than against Carthage; repeatedly inflicted and suffered slaughter and devastation; then regouped, recovered and, after a generation, fought bitterly again over territory, plunder and hegemonies.

  The only real gainer from the century of wars from 409 to 306 (at horrendous cost) was Syracuse. Under Dionysius I and then Agathocles it achieved a level of hegemonial power in Sicily and southern Italy that made it almost the equal of the great powers of the eastern Mediterranean, reducing one-time rivals like Acragas and Gela to local autonomy at best. In the west, Carthage had for long been the only great power, though never powerful enough to impose dominance on the many Greek and Italian states with which she did business. The imperial greatness of Syracuse would not last; but, halfway up the Italian peninsula, another concentration of power and hegemony was growing, which would one day sweep up all the rest.

  The Carthaginians gained few lasting benefits from the wars. The gains that did come their way were short-term, like the wider Sicilian hegemony won in 405. Peace based on the limited status quo of the Halycus or, arguably, even the narrower status quo of 480–410 would have avoided the social, economic and physical damage of the wars on Carthage while (arguably) doing far more for her prosperity. The growing impact of Greek culture would quite likely have been still greater, and Carthage’s own contribution to western Mediterranean life likewise.

  CARTHAGE AND PYRRHUS

  The peace of 306 lasted until Agathocles died in 289. Carthage had to be watchful, for the king’s dominions kept growing: southern Italy as far north as Croton, and for a few years the island of Corcyra, modern Corfu, once he had amassed a 200-strong navy. His daughter married Pyrrhus, the ambitious warrior-king of Epirus. Still dissatisfied, according to Diodorus, he was planning a new war against Carthage when he sickened and died.

  This was no doubt a relief to the republic, but the outcome was to renew her involvement in the rowdy affairs of Greek Sicily. Quite soon her general in the epikrateia intervened to settle political strife at Syracuse; but before long a new tyrant named Hicetas (maybe a descendant of the tyrant of the 340s) took power there, while intercity enmities blossomed anew. Agathocles’ Campanian mercenaries, forced to leave Syracuse, seized Messana – slaughtering or expelling the male citizens – then under the warlike name of ‘Mamertines’ (Mamers was the Campanian war-god) became a plundering terror to the entire island for decades. Tyrants again arose in cities everywhere, Diodorus dolefully remarks. Acragas’ tyrant, Phintias, asserted his city’s ambitions in typical ways: he emptied Gela of its population to make them found a new city nearby named Phintias (Licata today), and warred against Syracuse.

  Hicetas defeated Phintias, then chose to invade Carthaginian Sicily, perhaps hoping for quick booty and more prestige. Instead he was so badly defeated that a rival overthrew him in 280. Phintias’ successor also intervened at Syracuse. Now roused to action, the Carthaginians sent troops and ships to lay the city and the warring leaders under siege, rather as they had done in 344–343 against Dionysius II and the earlier Hicetas. The reprise was completed when another Greek outsider joined the action: Pyrrhus of Epirus, who was waging war against the Romans in southern Italy as Tarentum’s ally and rescuer. Pyrrhus’ own ambitions were grander than just saving the Tarentines – a western empire appealed to him – but his victories over the Romans, like Agathocles’ over the Carthaginians, merely produced a stalemate. At this point an invitation from Syracu
se to be its rescuer arrived. Of course he agreed.

  While he was negotiating (fruitlessly) with the Romans about peace, the Carthaginians made a pact with them – backed up with a large subsidy delivered by an admiral, Mago – requiring that, if either state made an alliance with the king, this should still allow each to aid the other if it was attacked (obviously by Pyrrhus). It also set the rules under which that help might be rendered. As matters turned out, the Romans did not make peace with Pyrrhus, who then warred on Carthage and later against Rome again.82

  Pyrrhus crossed to Sicily in 278, eluding a patrolling Carthaginian fleet to lead an alliance of Sicilian Greeks in a new drive against the ‘barbarians’. But much the same happened as with his Italian war: success followed by frustration. First he swept right across the epikrateia, capturing one place after another – even the mountain fortress of Eryx above Drepana, and Panormus – until the Carthaginians held only the heavily-fortified port of Lilybaeum. It was a blitzkrieg unparalleled in their two and a half centuries in western Sicily. They offered him terms, including an indemnity and ships for transport (back to Italy, apparently) – terms which ignored Rome despite the recent pact. Pyrrhus rejected the offer. But his Sicilian allies were aghast at his proposal to invade Libya; they began to suspect his ambitions and were affronted at his high-handed behaviour towards them. As defections spread, the king left the island in disgust in 276 to rescue Tarentum all over again – only to be defeated by the Romans the following year and abandon Italy too. Tarentum capitulated in 272 to become Rome’s newest subject ally.

  At Syracuse a new and intelligent general, Hiero, came to power in 275 or 274, more concerned to curb the lawless Mamertines than to prolong hostilities with Carthage. The old status quo along the Halycus was restored, with the modest improvement that Acragas remained free from, and suspicious of, Syracuse and therefore had friendly relations with Carthage. The Carthaginians continued to watch Syracuse’s doings carefully, but now they kept an eye on events in Italy too, where by 270 Rome exerted total control.

  X

  THE FIRST WAR WITH ROME, AND AFTER

  THE SECOND AND THIRD TREATIES WITH ROME

  Carthage’s relations with Rome went back many centuries, as shown earlier. They were mainly commercial and were regulated from 509 on by the first treaty between the two, which laid down how merchants from Rome should and should not do business in Carthaginian territories, and made stipulations about attacks on cities in each other’s neighbourhoods. These stipulations, so far as is known, never had to be acted upon.

  Livy and Diodorus report another treaty in 348, without details, while Polybius gives the text in Greek – this time with no comment on its archaic Latin. It declared friendship between the Romans and their allies on one side, and ‘the Carthaginians, Tyrians and Uticans’ and their allies on the other. Some provisos resembled the old treaty. Should Carthaginians take any ‘city in Latium’ not subject to Rome, they could keep the booty and prisoners but must hand the city over to the Romans; a Roman could do business freely at Carthage and in Sicily ‘which the Carthaginians govern’, and a Carthaginian ditto at Rome; but Romans were not to sail past the Fair Cape (either Cape Farina or perhaps Cape Bon); and if a Roman or Carthaginian had to stop over in the other state’s territory for provisions, he should not harm the locals and must leave within five days.

  On the other hand, the new treaty put some fresh bans on Romans. No sailing, either, past Mastia Tarseion – apparently the Iberian town in south-eastern Spain which Carthage later refounded as New Carthage – and no raiding, commerce or city-founding in Libya or Sardinia (the old treaty had allowed trade in both). For the Carthaginians, if they captured any persons who had ‘a written peace’, meaning formal treaty links, with Rome and brought them into a Roman port, a Roman could free them; this applied vice versa to Romans.83

  Much in this new agreement surprises. Rome was far more powerful and prosperous in 348 than around 509, so banning Roman traders from Libya and Sardinia must have been very disagreeable to them. Perhaps, after the rebellions around 370, the Carthaginians aimed to recoup the economic and financial damage by monopolising Libyan and Sardinian commerce. Banning Romans from sailing past a given site in south Spain looks superfluous if they could not sail westwards past Cape Farina in any case; perhaps it was just fussy drafting. Again, to ban Roman city-foundings in Libya and Sardinia is peculiar, for such settlements were being planted only in the regions around Rome itself, such as southern Etruria and Latium. Diodorus does have the Romans send a small colony ‘to Sardinia’ (Sardonia – not the usual Sardo or Sardous) in the 380s: but this may well be an error for the one they placed at Satricum in Latium in 385.

  Peculiarly too, the Carthaginians were not banned from planting a city anywhere they might like in Italy or indeed Latium. Nor was Rome banned from founding one in Sicily – in or outside the epikrateia – though it was surely out of the question, from Carthage’s viewpoint, to let that happen. The Campanians already in the island, like the mercenaries who had taken over Entella in the west in 404 and those settled by Carthage herself near Mt Etna later, gave enough trouble.

  Aristotle’s description a few years later of treaties made ‘to prevent unjust acts by anyone’ and ‘for mutual commerce and dealings’ – noting those between Carthaginians and Etruscans as examples – fits this one well. All the same, it put more prohibitions on the Romans than on the Carthaginians. Strikingly, it offered no fuller recognition of Roman hegemony in Latium than the first one did, and it only implicitly acknowledged Rome’s diplomatic ties beyond Latium (in the ‘written peace’ clause, which did not specify Latin persons alone). The treaty seems something of a selective potpourri: modifying some existing rules, adding new ones which included superfluous or very hypothetical provisos, and leaving out other matters that were arguably just as or more relevant. Conceivably it may have been based on a standard template that Carthage used for territorial and commercial agreements. We might even wonder whether the text that Polybius saw was in Greek and was used by both signatories.

  Polybius, who found the first two treaties, the anti-Pyrrhus pact of 279, and the later Roman–Carthaginian treaties in an archive at Rome, found too that neither Romans nor Carthaginians in his time knew of them. Later writers were just as uninterested, apart from registering treaty dates (real or supposed): thus Livy reports a ‘third’ renewal in 306 and a ‘fourth’ in 279. An exception was the pro-Carthaginian Philinus of Acragas, who reported that Rome and Carthage had a treaty banning the former from Sicily and the latter from Italy. This allowed him to put the Romans in the wrong over the outbreak of war in 264, when Roman legions crossed to Messana. Polybius, the only source for his claim, dismisses it because Philinus knew none of the other treaties and his supposed text was not in the archive. By contrast, many moderns dismiss Polybius instead.84

  The chief argument for the ‘Philinus’ treaty is that it fitted international conditions in 306 better than a renewed 348 treaty, for by 306 Rome directly controlled not only all Latium but much of Italy, notably Campania and Etruria. By 279 in turn, Roman hegemony covered the entire peninsula except its Greek south. This could seem to make nonsense of Polybius’ report that the pact against Pyrrhus ‘confirmed the existing agreements’, if that meant confirming the seventy-year-old treaty. Later ancient historians, Livy included, certainly tried hard to find some Carthaginian act before 264 which could count as an incursion against Italy: obviously they were seeking to turn Philinus’ claim to Rome’s benefit.

  Yet in 306 Carthage was in no position to think about warring in Italy, and the Romans were still fighting the Samnites and Etruscans. Neither had military or political grounds for making an agreement like Philinus’ – even apart from the obvious fact that neither had control over ‘all Sicily’ or ‘all Italy’ in 306. Later writers’ anxiety to put the Carthaginians in the wrong before 264 proves only that they had read and believed Philinus. The one item in the 348 treaty making no sense in 306 or 279 wa
s the ‘cities in Latium’ clause: but, without the words ‘in Latium’, even this could still apply as late as 279, though Polybius might well ignore (or overlook) the omission.

  Philinus very probably knew of the 279 pact, for he not only recorded the First Punic War but began with an introductory book leading up to it. As outlined above, the terms added in 279 bound each state, if it were to ally with Pyrrhus, to retain the right to help the other militarily. Carthage would supply naval transport for troops of either state, and would send warships too to help the Romans ‘if need be’. As it proved, neither Rome nor Carthage did ally with Pyrrhus, or ask the other for help – not even when the Carthaginians were confined to Lilybaeum by the king’s blitzkrieg. The only fruit of the pact was that before he crossed to Sicily, a small Carthaginian force went over to Italy via Roman-held Rhegium, to do minor damage to a Greek ally of his. Philinus might draw the seemingly clear deduction that military intervention in Italy or Sicily was normally disallowed. He did not know the real treaties of 509 and 348, which envisaged and regulated just such acts.

  THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR

  Pyrrhus supposedly remarked on sailing from Sicily: ‘What a fine wrestling-ground we are leaving for the Romans and Carthaginians!’ This may be ben trovato rather than true, for at the time those states were trading partners and allies (of a sort) against him, the Tarentines’ war was not yet lost, and the remark left out of account the other great power in the island. All the same the wrestling began just a few years later, in strange circumstances.85

  In 264, facing destruction from Hiero of Syracuse, the trapped Mamertines at Messana appealed both to nearby Carthaginians – a fleet at Lipara under one Hannibal – and to the more distant Romans. As in 315 against Agathocles, once again Carthage saved Messana, putting some troops into the city to deter the Syracusans. The Mamertines accepted the troops until they learned that Rome would also help: then they sent the Carthaginians away. Their appeal to Rome had made much of their Campanian background, but at Rome a good deal of debate had taken place over whether to agree to an alliance with such thuggish freebooters. According to our sources, Polybius included, the interventionists – among them the consuls, Rome’s equivalent of sufetes – argued that Italy was menaced by Carthaginian expansionism, and also that there would be plenty of plunder. Finally one consul, Appius Claudius, was sent with a consular army of two legions to cross the straits at Rhegium to aid the new allies.