The Carthaginians

by B D Hoyos

  In reality aid was not needed, as Hiero (now King Hiero by acclamation) had taken his forces home. But when word reached Carthage that her force at Messana had been dismissed, her reaction was both fast and thoroughly unexpected. The force’s commander was crucified (for stupidity), troops were set in motion, alliances were made both with Acragas and – unprecedentedly – with Syracuse, and together the new allies Carthage and Syracuse put Messana under siege by land and sea. Facing this remarkable turn of events, the consul at Rhegium belied his earlier warlike stance by sending an offer to negotiate. It was rejected by both the Carthaginian general (another Hanno) and Hiero, an act they may soon have regretted. Eluding Carthaginian warships, Appius ferried his legions across to Messana; then defeated first the Syracusan and next the Carthaginian army, which retreated to their own territories. In this way hostilities began.

  The reasons for the outbreak of war have been debated from that time to this. One standard explanation basically accepts the ancient one: the Romans feared Carthage’s expansionism and acted to avert it militarily. Another reverses it: the Romans were aggressive, expansionist, and greedy for the wealth of both Sicily and Africa, and therefore launched the war – while of course seeking to cover this up by blaming their opponents. A blended view (going back to the later Roman historian Cassius Dio) sees both powers as greedy, aggressive, suspicious of each other, and keen to annex each other’s territories. The events themselves suggest a different and less easily defined set of causes. The Mamertines had sought Rome’s help against Hiero; Appius offered talks when he found himself facing not just Syracusan forces but also Carthaginian. Having driven them off, he and then his campaigning successors the consuls of 263 focused their offensives on Syracuse until Hiero in summer 263 asked for peace. The Carthaginians sent Syracuse no help until too late (a fleet sailed up just after Hiero made peace; then sailed away). Once Hiero was out of the war, on easy terms, one consul returned home with half the Roman forces.

  In sum, these events indicate that in 264 the Romans had expected to fight alongside their new Mamertine allies against Syracuse. Eastern Sicily was renowned for its wealth (even if this had not recovered fully from past wars) while Hiero’s city, though far below its Agathoclean power, was rebuilding its strength and reach. The Romans, having replaced Agathocles’ and Dionysius’ mastery over southern Italian Greeks with their own, could feel entitled to worry. Carthage had been concerned about Syracuse, too, as the rescue of Messana showed, yet was prepared to hold her nose and ally with her old enemy against the town she had just rescued: the reasonable inference is that she feared letting the Romans into Sicily, whatever Appius’ peaceful protestations. They had been her trading partners and nominal allies for two hundred and fifty years; but to have them permanently in the same island as the epikrateia was plainly seen at Carthage as a threat – rightly or wrongly. The astonishing speed with which Rome thrust Syracuse out of the war, and thus effectively achieved dominant power over eastern Sicily, made the threat still more critical.

  If so, hostilities resulted from a series of fears and miscalculations, starting with the Roman decision to accept the Mamertines as allies and Carthage’s double volte-face in reaction, attacking Messana and allying with Syracuse. It was another mistake to refuse to talk with Appius at Rhegium – not to mention the failure after that to block him from crossing with some 16,000 troops – and yet a third error was to leave Hiero to carry on the war alone. Syracuse’s capacity to fight wars for years, and its physical impregnability, had so impressed the Carthaginians for more than a century that they no doubt expected the same again, only to find that they had miscalculated.

  PHASES OF WAR: 264 TO 257

  The First Punic War turned into something entirely new in Carthaginian experience. It lasted almost a quarter of a century, nearly as long as all of Carthage’s 4th-Century Sicilian wars put together. It demanded large and lasting forces both on land and at sea, with operations that ranged over all her territories. Her fleets played a much more crucial role than ever before, without enjoying more than a few successes. At no time in twenty-three years did she use her naval strength to send military forces into Italy, not even after the Romans’ invasion of Africa in 256–255. Of course, doing so might have had no better luck than that adventure. On the other hand, the impact could have been crucial to her fortunes.

  Instead the Carthaginians showed themselves more conservative than their enemies in waging war. They had always warred in Sicily, Africa or Sardinia: this one brought no change of practice. By contrast the Romans moved their war effort outside Italy for the first time (Polybius notes the historical significance of this); and then after a time took a still more momentous initiative – becoming a naval as well as a land power. It may have been only because they waged the war with remarkable clumsiness that Carthage was able to keep fighting until 241.

  Another novel feature was that most of the war in Sicily was fought in the island’s west, especially the epikrateia. Already in late 263 Segesta there declared for the Romans. A planned Carthaginian counter-offensive in 262 was derailed by the new consuls (Roman commanders changed yearly). Four legions besieged Acragas, defended by the Mamertines’ rescuer Hannibal, and routed a relief army under Hiero’s old collaborator Hanno, whose 60 elephants were badly mauled – incidentally, the first Carthaginian elephant corps we hear of. When the Carthaginians left Acragas to its fate in early 261, Greek Sicily’s second city was sacked yet again, with up to 50,000 people made slaves. More significantly still for Carthage, it was now (as Polybius tells it) that the Romans decided to drive her altogether out of Sicily. To put it another way, three years into the war Rome finally resolved to impose its own hegemony over the entire island.

  The fateful resolve to create a Roman navy followed, once Carthaginian warships started raiding Italy’s western coasts from Sardinia. A Carthaginian quinquereme captured by Appius Claudius three years before gave the Romans their model; their Italian coastal allies, Greeks included, supplied most of the crews; and an unknown designer hit on a device to combat the Carthaginians’ greater battle-skills – fitting a long wooden bridge attached, through a slot at one end, to a pole on each ship’s foredeck and with an iron spike at its other end. It could be swung with ropes to fall immovably onto an enemy deck as the two ships closed for action, allowing the 300 or so waiting Roman troops to charge across and overwhelm the enemy. This was the famous ‘raven’ (corvus), another Roman initiative. In 260 the grand fleet (built in sixty days, says Polybius) of about 120 ships under the consul Duillius met and thrashed Hannibal’s 130 off Mylae. The corvus took the Carthaginians by surprise, accounting for heavy losses in ships and men. As was noted earlier, even for Carthaginian crews the quinquereme was probably still a fairly recent acquisition, and they lacked much combat practice. The tactic of head-to-head ramming could be outmatched, they discovered, if a Roman ship swerved aside a little and then dropped its boarding-bridge, for Roman and Italian allied heavy infantry were too much for the Carthaginians’ shipboard troops.

  A later copy of Duillius’ understandably pleased triumphal inscription survives, rather damaged, to tell both of his exploits on land (he rescued Segesta from siege) and of his naval victory over the Carthaginian ‘dictator’ Hannibal with copious booty and prisoners. Yet even with naval equality established, the Romans for some years merely raided Sardinia and Corsica. Another victory, off Sulcis in 258, so shamed the defeated Carthaginian crews – many if not most of them citizen sailors – that they themselves crucified their admiral Hannibal (probably the same man as before). This lesson failed to prevent a third setback off Tyndaris in 257. It is another example of their conservative approach to war that the Carthaginians never copied the corvus or devised some means of countering it.

  AFRICA INVADED AND SAVED: 256–255

  On land the war briefly moved eastward in 259 with a Carthaginian victory near Thermae Himeraeae and the capture of both Enna and Camarina, but the Carthaginian forces were pushed back
to Panormus the following year. Then the entire struggle stalled. This led the Romans to try a fresh initiative: invading Africa. A hugely increased fleet – Polybius’ perhaps exaggerated figure is 330 warships – led by both consuls of 256 used the corvus to demolish a comparable Carthaginian fleet off Cape Economus west of Heraclea Minoa, and disembarked four legions of Romans and Italian allies on the Cape Bon peninsula. These then took the little town of Clupea (Aspis to Greeks) and marched south. A few old Carthaginians surely had vivid memories of Agathocles landing near there half a century before.

  In spite of a surprising, and hard to explain, order from the senate at Rome now recalling one consul, the fleet and part of the army, the invasion force of some 15,000 Romans and Italian allies under Marcus Atilius Regulus rolled forward much as Agathocles’ had. The same wealthy countryside was plundered, some twenty thousand people were seized for enslavement, and numbers of enslaved prisoners from Italy were freed. The Carthaginian army that confronted Regulus at ‘Adys’, probably Uthina near the river Catadas 40 kilometres south of Tunes, was totally defeated on a hilltop (where its elephants proved useless). It had probably not been helped by having no fewer than three generals in command: Hasdrubal and Bostar appointed at Carthage, and Hamilcar summoned over with troops from Sicily. Things grew worse, with refugees flooding into Carthage and, again as in Agathocles’ time, revolts starting to erupt in the countryside. Though Polybius calls the rebels ‘Numidians’, he all but certainly is writing about the Libyan subjects of Carthage. Over the winter of 256–255 the Carthaginians did what they had refused to do with Agathocles: they sent envoys to Regulus to ask for his terms.

  We know of his demands not from Polybius but from Dio, whose list gives some which look plausible: Carthage to abandon Sicily, free all her prisoners of war and ransom her own prisoners from Rome, and indemnify the Romans for their war costs. Others in his list, tacked on like an addendum, are invented exaggerations of later peace terms (no fleet, no war or peace without Rome’s permission), but even the plausible demands were more than the Carthaginians would accept. Instead they succeeded in turning the tables by accepting the guidance of a newly-arrived Spartan mercenary officer named Xanthippus (not that it made him popular with his employers, as mentioned earlier). The Romans were brought to battle in spring 255, on level ground, by a roughly equal army 16,000 strong, with no fewer than 100 elephants across its front. These broke up and trampled the Roman infantry while on the wings the Carthaginian cavalry drove off the enemy’s: then it was virtually inevitable that the victorious horsemen would strike the legions in flank and rear, causing a catastrophe. Regulus and a few hundred others fell into Carthaginian hands; 2000 survivors got away to Clupea, where a fresh Roman fleet eventually arrived to rescue them after first smashing an opposing fleet off Cape Bon. A further and still grimmer Roman disaster followed, for a summer storm caught the returning Romans off Sicily’s unfriendly south-eastern coast, sinking all but 80 of their several hundred ships and drowning the nearly unbelievable total of some 100,000 seamen and soldiers.

  The Roman invasion had lasted only about a year, in contrast to Agathocles’s three. Its failure no doubt delighted the Carthaginians, but offered them some sobering though perhaps unappreciated lessons too. The Romans might have done better had they not reduced their invasion force and had Regulus made some effort to collaborate with the Libyan, or ‘Numidian’, rebels. The Carthaginians might well have done better had they put one general, such as the experienced Hamilcar from Sicily, in command from the start. They owed the final victory to a foreigner – something they resented, it seems, for Xanthippus soon left their service for that of the king of Egypt. (That the ungrateful Carthaginians had him murdered is a myth, like the famous tale of them later torturing Regulus to death when he would not urge the Romans to make peace.)

  VICTORIES, DEFEATS, STALEMATE: 254 TO 242

  The war, already almost a decade old, shifted focus back to Sicily where in 254 it began to go wrong again for Carthage. An unusually sophisticated amphibious Roman assault on Panormus in 254 cost her the richest city in the shrinking epikrateia, where the Romans extracted ransom in the usual way from the residents who could pay (some fourteen thousand altogether) while the rest, about thirteen thousand souls, were sold into slavery. Other places, such as Solous and the isolated allied town Tyndaris, were lost too. When a Carthaginian general, Carthalo, retook shattered Acragas, he could not hold it and therefore razed it. By 253 the epikrateia was merely a stretch of the west coast from Drepana in the north (now a strongly fortified port) round to Heraclea Minoa in the south. Thermae and the Lipara islands were still in Carthaginian hands, but went the way of Panormus and Tyndaris a year later. On the other hand, the rebels in Africa were subdued by Hamilcar, and a large new Roman fleet which raided Libya’s east coast in 253 was devastated by another storm on the open sea between Sicily and Sardinia, with thousands more men drowned. On one theory the corvus was given up after these tragedies, because its weight could overbalance ships in heavy weather. At any rate, it never reappears in the historical record.

  Both sides were by now under severe strain. Carthage had suffered much lower losses of life overall, but around 250 approached Ptolemy II of Egypt to lend her 2000 talents (12,000,000 Greek drachmas, a very large sum), a request which he diplomatically turned down. The war, again limited to western Sicily, continued more or less at a standstill until a sudden pounce at Panormus, at harvest-time in 250, by the then Carthaginian general Hasdrubal. He had no fewer than 140 elephants and hoped to retake the city, held by two legions under Lucius Caecilius Metellus, but once more the animals brought trouble on his army – running amok under a hail of spears and javelins from the walls to trample the Carthaginian infantry – with the catastrophe then completed by a bold Roman sortie. Not only were the Carthaginians bloodily beaten but scores of elephants (if not the entire herd) were captured by Metellus, who sent them off to Rome for display. Hasdrubal suffered the regular fate of disgraced generals at Carthage.

  By now she had lost all of her old territories in Sicily except the two fortress ports Drepana and Lilybaeum. The rest of the war focused on these two closely-besieged places; save for Hiero’s moderately-sized kingdom, the rest of the island was controlled by Rome.

  Carthage’s first victories since the defeat of Regulus, and her last in the war, were won in 249. When one consul tried to take out the Carthaginian fleet anchored in Drepana’s harbour, Adherbal the general there brilliantly outmanoeuvred him to sink or capture 93 of his 120 ships and thousands of prisoners. Next his colleague Carthalo, arriving from Africa with naval reinforcements, first mauled the surviving Roman warships anchored near the army besieging Lilybaeum, then sailed round against a second enemy fleet escorting a large supply convoy along the south coast. Without a battle he forced them to beach on the unfriendly shores between Camarina and Phintias, where he left them to the even unfriendlier mercies of yet another giant storm. The 800-strong supply convoy was wrecked, as were all but two of the other consul’s 120 warships. In perhaps a couple of weeks, in a sequence of remarkable fleet actions, two enterprising Carthaginian commanders thus wiped the existing Roman navy off the sea.

  Yet the victories were not effectively followed up, partly because the Carthaginians were now financing the war on a shoestring, despite squeezing massive taxes out of their Libyan subjects. Adherbal’s and Carthalo’s victories did not break the twin sieges; by 247 both were replaced, never to reappear. The agile fleets and crews of 249 were reduced to convoying and raiding. The Romans, too, made no new naval push but maintained the relentless pressure on the western ports, while also encouraging private citizens’ ships to harass Carthaginian merchant craft. In 247 the new general in Sicily, an officer named Hamilcar, tried to shift the focus of action by seizing a broad mountaintop in the hinterland of Panormus – various locales have been suggested – to launch attacks on enemy forces in Sicily and renew seaborne raids on Italy’s coasts. The Romans responded by putting him
, too, under blockade on the mountaintop, though he still broke out from time to time. After three years he made a lightning move over to Mt Eryx above Drepana, obviously hoping to have greater impact on the besiegers there. But this time, able to occupy only a ridge under the enemy-held summit and above their siege camp outside Drepana, he was still more restricted.

  Hamilcar’s raiding style, or his skill at fighting on in these hard positions year after year, earned him the nickname ‘Barca’ – Baraq in Punic, meaning either ‘lightning’ or (rather likelier) ‘blessed’ – and quite unstinting admiration from Polybius, who judges him the war’s most outstanding general. His achievements were very limited in fact, mainly because the forces he had were small and funds hard to find. By war’s end the mercenary and Libyan troops in Sicily, including the garrisons of the ports, numbered only about 20,000, a far cry from the imposing armies of previous decades, and they had not been paid in a long while.

  One brighter spot for Carthage was that in these years her Libyan territories expanded. This was achieved by another newcomer on the scene, the second Hanno to be called ‘the Great’ in Greek and Roman authors. While Hamilcar operated in Sicily, Hanno campaigned in the hinterland, around 247 taking – and treating humanely – the town of Theveste in the fertile plateau-country some 250 kilometres south-west of Carthage. He may well have annexed Sicca too, again in a fertile countryside north of Theveste and about 175 kilometres west of Carthage, for this town was under the city’s control by 241. Their regions, and those nearby around Mactar and Zama, meant fresh taxpaying sources at a time when the republic’s finances were under worse pressure than ever. Even though Hanno the Great later became Hamilcar Barca’s irreconcilable opponent, they probably began as political collaborators around 248–247: Hamilcar as general in Sicily, Hanno as an equal-ranking general in Libya. Hanno in these years certainly enjoyed military success, and therefore prestige, denied to Hamilcar. He seems to have been Carthage’s leading figure politically, with Hamilcar relying (partly anyway) on his support to keep his own command across the water.