Carthage

by Ross Leckie

  Letter preserved in the archives of Rome

  Sempronia to Lucius Valerius Flaccus, Father of the Senate of Rome. My husband Cato died last night. In my grief, I want to say little more. Your officials will, I presume, attend to all the formalities. But please note that I want my husband buried here. As for his last words, I wish it were otherwise, but here they are. He was raving, delirious with fever. He sat up suddenly, called out ‘Delenda est Carthago!’, collapsed back, coughed, looked up at me, and was no more.

  Letter preserved in the archives of Neapolis

  Flaccus to Curtius. Now I have seen it all. I was hoping to keep proceedings short. They were, but no thanks to me. I had just begun the ritual stuff about choosing commanders in times of war when Antoninus stood up. ‘Father of the House,’ he said, ‘before you go any further I have a motion here, already signed by a binding majority of members, and so––’

  ‘And sponsored by?’ I interrupted, annoyed.

  ‘By Marcus Porcius Cato, Father, in absentia.’

  ‘Oh, yes. And what does this motion move, Antoninus?’

  He flourished the scroll before him. ‘It appoints a commander of our army which is to destroy Carthage, and root out the evil which has continued since the last war.’

  ‘And that man is?’

  ‘Publius Cornelius Scipio, Father, Africanus minor.’

  The House broke into uproar. I didn’t check the propriety of the document. I couldn’t care.

  The first ship our fleet intercepted was a quinquereme, out of Carthage by its course, new and fast, but not fast enough to outrun a wind that favoured Rome. On board was a Spartan, Nicomachus. He refused to talk. Scipio simply asked him which limb he would prefer to lose first. On Scipio’s word that he could go free, he told us. He was on his way to raise a mercenary army for Carthage. So are matters of the utmost moment decided not by people or potentates, but by the wind. As for the Spartan, Scipio had him thrown overboard. ‘I know Spartans can fight,’ he said. ‘But can they swim?’

  The troops took heart, I heard, as the word spread from ship to ship. Thanks to Astylax, we knew how few there would be to defend Carthage’s walls. Now we knew no mercenary army would take us in the rear. By nightfall, our fleet was moored within the bay of Carthage.

  Letter preserved in the citadel of Carthage

  Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus to Hanno Barca. Thanks to Labienus, I feel I know you. I feel sometimes I am you. Thanks to Labienus, I feel I know Bostar, who may have meant otherwise but has brought me here. Sometimes I curse him. Thanks to Astylax, I know of your wife and children, of Mastanabal and your Council, of Massinissa. Thanks to the reports my father lodged and to Astylax, though I despise him, I have detailed plans of Carthage. I know of your walls and cisterns, your secret stores. I know how many men you have. I know your position. You know Rome. Until the stars are overturned in the heavens, she will be here.

  Rome wants to destroy you. I know that I do not. Our fathers fought. Both lost, in their different ways. That is enough. Intercede with Mastanabal and the Elders of the Council. I beg you to surrender. Just open your gates, or the harbour, and not a hair of any of you will be harmed. I will force our Senate to grant you generous terms. By our fathers’ shades, I swear.

  From Bostar’s journal

  We are all exhausted. No one in this city has done more than snatch at sleep for many days. Tancinus is a marvel. He trains five hundred citizens a day. Hanno is in charge of armaments. To make balls for the catapults, we are even melting down the city’s silver and gold. Fetopa organises the women. We have many bows, but no strings. To make them the women of Carthage have all cut off their hair – bar Fetopa. I saw the women beg her not to, so that they might have hope for when theirs grows again. Halax is in charge of all the city’s animals. His elephants work wonders, moving munitions everywhere. Artixes has taken command of our hospitals, nurses and doctors. My responsibility is stores and food. The other Elders fill the temples with their dreams and pious prayers. And Mastanabal? He spends much of his time in the city’s cemetery. Staring at what will be his own sarcophagus, he broods.

  Letter found among Cato’s papers

  Cato the Censor to Massinissa, King of the Libycians. My legate tells me that you have agreed. If we ever attack Carthage, you will not come to her defence, neither by sea nor land. With this letter comes your gold. Sign this letter on the bottom, as proof that you accept these terms, and return it to me.

  Letter delivered to Scipio at camp on the landward plain of Carthage, and now lodged with papers here

  Hanno Barca to Scipio. I do not know you, and it is fruitless to wish I did. Without my knowing it, you came to be at the bottom of my mind, perhaps not least because you are a bastard, as am I. But we have gone astray, and showers of time and place have poured between us. You will never rise to the surface, although my hands should be hauling ceaselessly. I am only what other people have told you my father was. I pity you. Fate and the gods have made us what we are. They will determine what will be.

  When my messenger returns, our western gates will open, and close again, for the last time. Treat with Mastanabal if you want to try. My way is set. My mind is clear. Perhaps you are different, only half Roman. I do not know. But rather than submit to Rome, my father Hannibal took his own life. If I have to, so will I. The cycle turns. Let it be. Horror does not sharpen the senses. It blunts them. I saw things to burn the brain, and yet my memory is bovine. Let me see if I can make it stir. For the siege of Carthage, Scipio had a clear, agreed, considered plan to which the Carthaginian deserter Astylax contributed a great deal. But in such matters, the Romans are a machine. They have manuals of siege warfare, you know, ponderous things, in the Roman way taking the best of what others have learned and making it their own.

  Indeed the bibliography of besiegement is already long. One of my countrymen, Aineias Tacitus, an Arcadian from Stymphalos, wrote an excellent and now standard work one hundred and fifty years ago. Scipio has a copy here. It is called Poliorcetica, or ‘How to survive under siege’. As that of Carthage unfolded, I often wondered if its leaders were sitting, as our soldiers laboured, reading Aineias.

  Fire was out, we agreed on the voyage. The city would be very hard to burn. So was mining. Astylax assured Scipio that the western moat had been so deepened as to make tunnels impossible. What the Romans often do, when their own lines of supply, as in this case, are clear is shut the besieged city or town or camp off, and let disease, hunger or thirst, usually all three, do their work for them. Again, this did not apply. According to Astylax, Carthage could survive on its resources for years.

  But what about disease, I asked. We could catapult dead cows over their walls, I said. Astylax argued that would be pointless, the city being underpopulated without an army and having much space to burn or bury all the dead cows we could throw at them.

  Then what about bribery, I asked. I pointed out that the great Alexander said the best way to take cities is with gold. Astylax was not amused. We had with us, it seemed, Carthage’s only traitor – although I found it hard to believe that everyone in Carthage agrees with Plato: the way to become rich is not to increase your possessions, but to decrease your desires. Still, I kept my thoughts to myself.

  We had also rejected escalade. Long before we got to Carthage, our engineers had calculated that the ladders and sambucas necessary to mount a wall ninety feet high would be far too long. They would be unable to take the weight of two men, let alone whole maniples.

  Towers too were considered, and dismissed. The only possible way to take Carthage was from the south-west. That, of course, meant the lagoon. That meant the ground would be too soft to support the weight of the huge tower that would have been necessary. I was disappointed, I confess. I had imagined a huge helepolis, like that made by Demetrius the Besieger. We could have drained the lagoon, but Scipio was advised that would take too long.

  So there we were, sixty thousand soldiers, five thousand pioneers, I never d
id establish just how many sailors, and all the apparatus and arsenal – rams, onagers, catapults, grapplers, mantlets, sheds and shields – that the might of Rome could command.

  But Rome besieged Carthage, in the end, with a lesser, ancient implement – the spade. Our deliberations on the spot merely confirmed the Senate’s prior plans. Scipio decided, and I believe he was right, that the only way to take Carthage was by a ramp. So, for four weary months, in shifts of night and day the Roman army dug.

  It was a desperate business, though. First the Romans had to breach the outer wall. Because of the many shields, protective mantlets and sheds required, progress was very slow. We lost many men. However good your shields and screens, the legs holding or moving them have to be exposed. The Carthaginian catapulters became adept at shooting their stones low and short, so that they bounced and skipped into our ranks, smashing many shins. The soldiers lived then, but most died later of gangrene.

  Bridging the moat, behind sheds of timber crossed with iron and protected from fire by thick leather hides, was going well – until concerted catapult balls brought the main shed tumbling down. A new and stronger one proved adequate, and the bridge was finished in a day. The rams had harder work with the inner wall. It was stronger, and the Carthaginians rained down incessant fire.

  To draw defenders away, Scipio ordered a simultaneous naval attack on the seaward wall with ship-borne onagers and rams. By the time the Carthaginians realised it was a ruse, we had broken through. But the land beyond the second wall rose steeply to the last. The Carthaginians had peppered it with sharpened stakes, covered with iron hooks and caulked with razor shell. It proved impossible, there being no room between the stakes and under constant fire, to construct a screen. By the evening of each day, there would be twenty, thirty legionaries impaled. Only under cover of darkness could their bodies, dead or dying, be removed. The ground grew slippery with blood, and clouds of flies brought new misery to the men. It took our legions nine whole days to clear that way.

  The engineers constructed the largest shed the world can ever have seen. It took three thousand men to push it, inch by cursing inch, into place. Then the digging began, the soil and rock then having to be carried with great labour and difficulty in baskets along the causeway. Scipio’s foraging parties scoured the countryside for donkeys and mules. In the blood and sweat of many men, the ramp began to rise.

  The Carthaginians grew ever more ingenious. When there was wind, they poured down basket after basket of burning sand. The eddies carried enough of it behind and under the screen. Men ran screaming from the work, tearing off their clothes and, from the walls, arrows poisoned with arsenic brought them down. They died dreadful deaths, choking on their own tongues and retching blood as their faces turned green. Whole cohorts were on burial duty. Two protested. Scipio had them decimated, each tenth man left swinging on the gallows on the causeway until the crows and carrion had stripped them clean.

  Each time we began to raise the screen the defenders boiled great vats of viscous fenugreek and dropped them down, making the heaving men lose their footholds. They used ropes of burning tar which snaked and insinuated their way behind the screen, or through the grilles it had to have for light. They threw down huge amphorae of water, turning our position into a muddy swamp. One day the shed slipped, crushing two hundred and eleven men. Far beyond our camp, in a bowl of silent, sullen hills, Scipio had yet more pits dug for the Roman dead. But still the rampart rose.

  One day, our scouts led into camp a large caravan, captured on its way back from Senegalia. There were over two hundred camels, each carrying sacks of topaz. Scipio ordered an assembly. From the rostrum, he promised each cohort a pound of the jewels for every foot the rampart rose. That brought a cheer. What matters to most men is money, now as of yore.

  From Bostar’s journal

  My only surprise is that he had not ordered earlier what I had long dreaded. The tophet, or ritual infanticide, is what Carthaginians have always done in times of crisis. They believe it propitiates their gods. Children are cast into the great bronze arms of a statue of Moloch, through which they slip into a burning pit below. I was with Mastanabal on the inner western wall, looking out at the vast Roman camp beyond the lagoon, when he told me a tophet was to be held. I protested about killing innocent children. I said Carthage might need them if we survived the siege.

  ‘But we won’t use healthy children,’ the High Sufet replied.

  ‘Then?’ I asked, puzzled.

  ‘When I told you about our treatment of deformed children, Bostar, it was not entirely true. We keep some of them for just such an occasion. Do you want to see?’

  I followed him and two stewards down, down into long passages and chambers under the city until I was struck by a sudden smell of sweat and excrement. One of the stewards passed nosegays around, and unlocked a large, studded door. Now I have seen hell. In a large room, lit only by one grille, its floor covered with stinking straw, I saw over a hundred children, hunchbacked, mutant, crippled, maimed, packed together like fowls, cheeping like chicks, creeping back away from us in fear.

  I wanted to be sick. I wanted air. I turned, and ran back the way we had come. What is it that I have tried to preserve? Have I been a fool? Have I been naïve?

  Curious to a Greek, because we are uneasy with abstractions, the Romans have a concept called clementia. When the siege began, it was in the air. Scipio even sent to Rome for more transports in order to be able to ship away the Carthaginian survivors of the siege: to be sold as slaves, no doubt, but to be alive. He talked to his commanders about preventing rape, pillage and so on.

  I am not sure when the mood turned. The change came from the dreadful privations and labour of the besiegers, almost imperceptibly, as a winter dawn. There were some desertions. Scipio had the men pursued, caught, and crucified. The whole army grew silent, sour. Men worked and ate and slept and worked and died.

  So when the rampart was finally finished and the assault took place, I expected some breaches of discipline. But when I entered Carthage, on horseback, through the open western gate, in the early evening, six hours after Rome’s army had taken the city by storm, nothing had prepared me for what I saw.

  The carnage was general. But at such times the human mind fixes on the particular. Three sights come to the fore: lying on top of a well filled with corpses, a woman, naked, covered in blood, one breast hacked off and stuffed in her mouth, her legs spread and a man’s cut arm stuffed up her vagina; the steps of a temple, strewn with the cadavers and slippery with the battered brains of seven small children; in a doorway, a decapitated dog lying on the chest of a man who had been castrated.

  Guarded by two smoke-and sweat-stained centurions, I found only one house full of the living – though they might have preferred it otherwise. Thirty or forty women were inside. Women? Many were not yet so. The sobs, the torn clothing, the straw mattresses in rows on the floor told me all I needed to know. One of the centurions interrupted my survey of this misery. ‘Better be off, sir,’ he said. ‘There are two maniples due in any minute now.’

  ‘Two?’ I asked him. ‘How many more will take their turn?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ he said. ‘There’s a rota published for the whole army. But at fifteen men a day, I doubt the women’ll last too long. Three have died already. So we’re taking the maniples two at a time according to length of service, and giving each man three minutes––’

  ‘All right, centurion. Thank you,’ I interrupted. ‘I’ll be on my way.’ I had never encountered a rubric for rape before. But then this is Rome, after all.

  Note found on creased and dirty sheet of papyrus in the citadel of Carthage. It was unsigned, and the only example of this hand I found. But I am in no doubt as to the author:

  Fetopa, wife of Hanno

  I have my period, and in this citadel there is nowhere to hide my bloody towels. I am ashamed. This man I married disappoints me. He has thought only for his memoir, and hopes only of rescue from the
sea. My children fret and fight and are afraid. But I know what must be done. I–– [Here the sheet was torn, and here we have Fetopa’s only document – which is why I have told the scribes to include it. It is assumed that men determine, and record, events in which women are mere ciphers. I wonder when that will change?]

  A week of destruction later, sweat sprayed off the two hundred dripping soldiers as they heaved, and heaved, and heaved again. I had to cover my ears at the booming, crunching noise of splintering wood and buckling brass. The doors of Carthage’s citadel seemed to sigh, but did not move. Then just as the Romans were swinging back the deadly ram again, its sharp point of iron, its timber dressed with lead, just then the vast doors sheathed with brass swung open, inward, of their own accord. Smoke billowed out. I felt the heat of a great fire burning within.

  Scipio was in front of me, at his insistence and against his officers’ advice there at the front for the final fall. The soldiers, in muttering agitation, were lowering the ram just as we passed. Scipio unsheathed his sword, hesitated, took off his helmet, put it and his sword down and then moved forward, climbing the penultimate set of steps to the open doors. He froze.

  In a shift torn and filthy, his hair matted, his legs red and brown with blood, demented, the man who came to meet him was known to me. I knew also who the woman had to be. They stood on the citadel’s threshold above Scipio, the man swaying, panting. The woman stood still beside him, her dress of purple clean and new, a woman with a mass of lustrous chestnut hair and a scar across one cheek. She seemed composed and calm. Perhaps, I thought, she is drugged. Or perhaps she knows the opiates of the mind that suffering brings.