References
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Chapter 44
Phoenicians and Carthaginians in Greco-Roman Literature
/> Josephine Crawley Quinn
“The Phoenicians have made Phoenicia famous. They are a clever stock of men and they excel in the duties of war and peace. They invented the alphabet as well as literature and other arts: how to set sail on the sea by ship, how to conduct naval conflict, how to rule over other peoples, dominion and battle.” So writes the geographer Pomponius Mela around the middle of the first century ce (Mela 1.65). There is a striking focus on Phoenician people, places, and history in Mela’s periplus, or “coastal journey,” around the Mediterranean, and it has been suggested that he was of western Phoenician descent or culture himself (Batty 2000; cf. Ferrer Albelda 2012). He does say that Phoenicians from Africa inhabit his Spanish hometown of Tingentera Mela 2.96), but in truth his enthusiasm needs no special pleading: the Phoenicians were often depicted enthusiastically in Greek and Latin literature, praised for their achievements and skills, and the subject of considerable scholarly interest (Gruen 2011: 115–40, contra Isaac 2004: 324–35).
Mela’s description also reflects two consistent themes that characterize accounts of the Phoenicians from archaic Greece to imperial Rome: their close association with trade and the sea, and their extensive legacy among the Greeks and Romans. Here that point is a cultural one—Phoenician inventions enabled the literary, military, and imperial successes of those later Mediterranean civilizations—while other authors celebrate a Phoenician strand in Greek lines of descent. Descriptions of an “other” always tell us about their author’s own culture, but the Phoenicians are usually presented not as a reflection or inversion of Greek and Roman civilization but in relation to it, with Greek and Latin authors invoking parallels, models, and even kinship relations to cast a new and more interesting light on the Greeks and Romans themselves. This may be why they tend to avoid presenting the Phoenicians as a distinct “people”: they are categorized as a group less often through shared descent or history than in terms of their contemporary links, whether professional, social, or linguistic.
The Carthaginians are something of a special case, unsurprisingly less popular among their military foes in Greek Sicily and in Rome, and these negative stereotypes of Carthage are sometimes extended to Phoenicians as a whole. Literary accounts tend to be more friendly, or at least ambiguous and curious, than the political discourse of the republic, but derogatory references to punica fides, “Punic faith,” became a commonplace in both genres by the early empire. In Roman authors, however, the very concept of “Phoenician” is still vague, to the extent that the terms poenus and punicus can be used to mean “Phoenician,” “western Phoenician,” or even “African” well into late antiquity (see Quinn 2018: 44–62).
Archaic and Classical Greece
The word phoinix appears in Greek texts as early as the Mycenean period (po-ni-ki-jo), but the term had a range of meanings in Greek, including “crimson” and “palm tree.” Phoenicians are, however, mentioned unequivocally in the earliest Greek literary texts, beginning with Homer. The Iliad still has very little to say about them, although it mentions their commerce and praises their industry. A beautiful silver mixing bowl made by Sidonians, “skilled in handicrafts,” is the first prize in the footrace at Patroclus’s funeral games, and Homer adds that it had been brought across the sea by “Phoenician men” (Il. 23.740–45, with 6.288–95 on Hecuba’s Sidonian-made clothing). By contrast, the Odyssey introduces Phoenicians both in real life and in fictive encounters. Beyond the fact that they are always at sea, these characters do not reflect a single or negative stereotype (Gruen 2011: 116; cf. Winter 1995; Bohak 2005: 223–24): the trader who takes Odysseus from Egypt to Phoenicia to Libya is a villain who plots to sell Odysseus into slavery (Od. 14.287–307), but the sailors who allegedly carry him from Crete to Ithaca treat him well, leaving him safely in Ithaca with all his possessions (Od. 13.250–86). Other Phoenician sailors seem to have mixed or ambiguous motivations, such as the merchants who attempt to rescue a kinswoman who has been sold into slavery in a foreign royal palace, but are happy to take along the child that she looks after as additional merchandise (Od. 15.403–84).
The Phoenicians continue to be of interest to Greek authors throughout the Classical period (Mazza et al. 1988). Herodotus has much more to say about them than Homer, and it is almost relentlessly positive, with particular praise for Phoenician engineers (Gruen 2011: 119). Again, however, the Phoenicians are seen almost exclusively as people of, and on, the sea. Herodotus says that they migrated to their current homeland from the Persian Gulf, a tale he attributes both to the Persians and to the Phoenicians themselves (Hdt. 1.1.1–2, 7.89.2; cf. Strab. 1.2.35, 16.3.4, 16.4.27; and Plin. HN 4.120), and that once settled in their current homeland they immediately started to make long trading voyages in the Mediterranean (Hdt. 1.1.1). They also made up the heart of the Persian naval fleet—so much so that Herodotus simply calls the Persian navy “Phoenician” (Hdt. 6.14.1); they traveled the Mediterranean, founding sanctuaries and settlements (Hdt. 1.105, 2.112, 4.147, 5.57, 6.47), and they explored the coasts of Africa (Hdt. 4.42). Their connection with Carthage in particular is presented by Herodotus in a positive light: the Phoenicians refuse to make war on Carthage for the Persian king in the late sixth century because they are tied to that city by “great oaths,” and they cannot make war on their “children” (Hdt. 3.19).
Unlike other peoples Herodotus discusses, such as the Egyptians, Persians, or Scythians, he never gives the Phoenicians an ethnographic portrait detailing their common customs and practices, or clarifies their differences from Greeks (Bondì 1990: 256; Mavrogiannis 2004: 64). Indeed, Herodotus presents the Phoenicians as unusually close to Greeks: even the Athenian tyrant-slayers Harmodius and Aristogeiton, he reports, are members of the Gephyraian clan who (despite their own claims to the contrary) came with the Phoenician prince Cadmus to found Thebes, in the same expedition that brought the Greeks their Phoenician alphabet, as well as the worship of Dionysus (Hdt. 5.57–58, 2.49; see also 4.147 for other Phoenician Greeks).
Cadmus and his family appear in Greek myths as early as Homer, although it is only from the sixth or fifth century bce that they are associated with Phoenicia in our surviving evidence (Mitchell 2007: 182–84; cf. Gruen 2011: 233n62). From then on, at least, the stories associated with them confirm a notion of kinship between Greeks and Phoenicians: in Euripides’s Phoenician Women, for instance, the chorus is a group of Tyrian women who have come to Thebes “sailing in a ship across the Ionian sea” on their way to serve as temple slaves to Apollo at Delphi, because of the kinship between Tyre and Thebes through Cadmus (Eur. Phoen. 208–19; cf. 5–6, 638–39).
All this is quite at odds with the boundary definition and “othering” often supposed to be core aspects of fifth-century bce Greek mentalities. It must have been easy though for Greek authors to see the similarities between their own cultures and those of Phoenician city-states, and these similarities meant that far from using the Phoenicians as a model to define themselves against, they could articulate their own identities through comparison and relation with them: they, too, were people of sea, traders and migrants, and their kinship with the Phoenicians gave them a share in an older, more splendid and exotic history than their own.
Identifications between Greeks and Phoenicians could also have more ambiguous implications. A stereotype of the Phoenicians as to some degree wily or even mendacious does begin to appear in the Classical period, but the examples we have implicate Greeks, too. In Plato’s Republic, for instance, Socrates calls a useful myth of origins for his imagined community a “Phoenician thing,” but then immediately glosses this as the kind of story about the past that (Greek) poets tell (Pl. Resp. 3.414c); there is no criticism implied, but the association of Greek myth with this “Phoenician” practice calls into question simplistic notions of Greek virtue and superiority. The same may be true of a fragment of a comic play sometimes attributed to Aristophanes, in which a character says “I am becoming a true Phoenician: with one hand I give and with the other I take away,” but
we do not know whether the character is actually supposed to be a Greek or a Phoenician (Austin and Kassel 1983, Ar. no. 957).
There are indications of more straightforwardly negative views of Phoenicians, but these occur in specific and disputed contact zones between Greeks and Phoenicians. An anecdote recounted by the poet Hermesianax of Kolophon around the year 300 bce, about fourth-century Cyprus, for instance, depends on the notion that the island’s substantial Phoenician population was unpopular in elite Greek political circles there: a Cypriot called Arkeophon fails to win the hand of the princess he loves because her father, King Nikokreon “was ashamed of Arkeophon’s ancestry, since his parents were Phoenicians” (Hermesian. fr. 2 = Ant. Lib. 39). More examples come from the west, however, where Carthage’s fifth-century bce wars with Greek cities in Sicily, and especially with Syracuse, crystalized western Greek opinion against the African city and established it as the other pole of a Greek–barbarian opposition that would come at least at times to encompass the Phoenicians as a whole.
Carthage and the Western Mediterranean
The first momentous clash was the Battle of Himera in 480 bce, a great victory over Carthage for Syracuse and its king Gelon, and one that Herodotus tells us the Sicilians claimed took place on the very same day as the Athenian victory over Persia at the Battle of Salamis (Hdt. 7.166). Although untrue, this notion persists in Greek literature, and over time it became more elaborate, with the fourth-century bce historian Ephorus of Kyme claiming that the Persians and Phoenicians had approached Carthage before Himera, asking for their aid against Greece, just as the Greeks were supposed to have approached Syracuse for support against Persia (BNJ 70 F 186, with Feeney 2007: 43–46); Ephorus’s contemporary, Aristotle, by contrast, accepts that the battles happened in the same year, but rejects the notion that this has any significance (Arist. Pol. 1459a24–27). Jonathan Prag has shown that the synchronism between Himera and Salamis worked in Sicily as part of a new form of propaganda that conflict with Carthage gifted the island’s Greek tyrants: just like Athens and Sparta in their wars against the Persians, they could now pose as the liberators of Greeks from barbarians (Prag 2010).
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