This language of Greek freedom from barbarians is found soon after Himera itself in an epigram by Simonides written to accompany the dedication Gelon and his brothers made at Delphi “having defeated barbarian peoples, giving great support to the Greeks in the cause of freedom” (Schol. Vet. in Pind. Pyth. 1.152). Shortly after that, Pindar’s ode to celebrate a later chariot victory at Delphi by Gelon’s successor, his brother Hieron, linked the Greek defeat of the Persians at Salamis and Plataea, Hieron’s own victory over the Etruscans at Cumae in 474 bce, and Gelon’s defeat of Carthage at Himera, “saving Hellas from weighty bondage” (Pind. Pyth. 1.75, with Feeney 2007: 45). Hieron also propagated this rhetoric himself, according to Eratosthenes, arranging for Aeschylus’s Persians to be performed in Syracuse in 472 (Schol. Venet. in Ar. Ran. 1028), as did the later Syracusan ruler Timoleon, who is reported to have erected inscriptions at Corinth after the Battle of the Crimisus, ca. 340 bce, saying that he had “freed” the Greeks living in Sicily from the Carthaginians (Plu. Tim. Gracch. 29.3; cf. 39.5; and Diod. Sic. 16.90.1 for a contemporary claim that he defeated “barbarians”). This seems to have been part of a broader strategy of cultural distancing: in a speech preserved (or invented) by the third-century bce Sicilian historian Timaeus of Tauromenium, Timoleon also mocks the Carthaginians’ cowardice as well as their underpants (Polyb. 12.26a).
This also means that the connection between Carthage and Phoenicia is reimagined in a more negative light than that we have seen in Herodotus. It is no surprise that Carthaginians are regularly called “Phoenician,” since there was no separate word equivalent to our “Punic” to designate western Phoenicians (Prag 2014), but the military contexts in which the label is used in relation to Carthage can make the Phoenicians as a whole a threatening and foreign presence (Pind. Pyth. 1.72; [Pl.] Ep. 8.353e; Theoc. Ep. 16.76–81; Diod. Sic. 14.46, 65, and 15.15–17). This discourse about events in the western Mediterranean also seems to bring the wider Phoenician people into more dubious repute—it is in a discussion of colonial foundations in Sicily that Thucydides is the first surviving eastern Greek author to call Phoenicians “barbarians” (Thuc. 6.2.6), and he is followed in this in the fourth century by the geographer Pseudo-Scylax in his list of the “barbarian peoples” who inhabit Sicily ([Scyl.] 13.2, with [Pl.] Ep. 8.353a). Pseudo-Scylax is also the first surviving author to call the Phoenicians an ethnos, or “people,” both in Sicily and in the Levant ([Scyl.] 13.2; 104.1), which could suggest a hardening sense of them as a group, and one separate from the Greeks.
Western Greek rhetoric about the Carthaginians and other Phoenicians remained severe into the very late Republic: another Sicilian author, Diodorus Siculus, takes a very hard line on the Carthaginians in the later first century bce, although his account must at least in part go back to his Hellenistic sources on western Mediterranean history, including Timaeus (Prag 2010: 59–60). Diodorus’s Carthaginians are not only barbarians but also unusually cruel ones. When they take Selinunte in 409 bce, not content with looting and pillaging the city, they burn the inhabitants in their houses and slaughter those who escaped into the streets—men, women, and children: “They mutilated even the dead according to the custom of their people, some carrying around heaps of hands about their bodies and others carried heads stuck on the ends of their javelins and spears” (Diod. Sic. 13.57.1–3). Diodorus’s Carthaginians are also extravagantly superstitious; when Carthage itself is under siege by Agathocles in 310 bce, the city aristocracy tries to make amends to Baal Hammon for offering him infants bought from others by sacrificing two hundred noble children at once, with another three hundred young people sacrificing themselves voluntarily, as well as renewing their ancient custom of sending a tithe to Melqart, the god of Tyre (Diod. Sic. 20.14.2–5) (on Phoenician-Punic Sicily, see chapter 35, this volume; for the tophet and infant sacrifice, see chapter 21, this volume).
Diodorus not only ties Carthage back to its Levantine homeland but he also paints his descriptions of eastern Phoenicians with the same palette as those of the Carthaginians. They, too, are “barbarians” of a peculiarly brutal kind. During Alexander’s siege of Tyre, the townspeople filled bronze and iron shields with sand and then roasted them over a hot fire, before contriving to scatter this over the bravest Macedonians, so that the hot sand slipped under their armor and clothing, burning them badly. Although “they screamed supplications as if they were being tortured” there was no one to come to their aid, and “through the awfulness of their suffering they went mad and died” (Diod. Sic. 17.44.2–3; see also 26.14.2). And during the same siege the Tyrians also reveal their own naïve superstition: suspecting the god Apollo of planning to desert their city, they chained his statue to its base (Diod. Sic. 17.41.8). The first thing that Alexander does when he takes the city is to remove these chains, representing the victory of Greek rationality as well as might (Diod. Sic. 17.46.6, with Bonnet and Grand-Clément 2010: 164–65).
There is, however, little evidence for straightforwardly negative literary accounts even of Carthaginians during the Classical and Hellenistic periods outside Sicily itself. The idea that they are particularly given to trickery and cunning persists, but it is not necessarily a negative stereotype. In the second century bce, Polybius seems to be impressed by Hannibal’s “truly Phoenician ploy” against the risk of attack from his new Celtic allies during the Second Punic War, whereby he uses wigs and disguises constantly to change his appearance and even his apparent age (Polyb. 3.78.1–4; cf. 6.52.10 and 9.11.2 for more critical comments on Phoenician traits, with Prag 2006: 18–19). Posidonius’s contemporary description of stories about the foundation of Gadir as a “Phoenician lie” seems more dismissive, if Strabo reports his words precisely (Strab. 3.5.5, with Gruen 2011: 121 on both these passages).
Furthermore, many Greek discussions don’t strongly differentiate Carthaginians from Greeks. In the third century bce, Eratosthenes praises the good qualities of Carthaginian government (Strab. 1.4.9), and Aristotle in the fourth century compares Carthage’s constitution to that of Greek poleis, especially Sparta (Arist. Pol. 2.8 [1272b–73b]). Two centuries later, Polybius not only compares Carthage to both Sparta and Rome (Polyb. 6.43, 6.51–56) but once again closely associates them with the sea; maritime pursuits are their “ancestral craft,” and something they are much better at than all other people (Polyb. 6.52.1, see also 1.20.12; and Diod. Sic. 5.20 for similar points).
For these Greek scholars, all these cities and their inhabitants are comparable with their own. And this view is it seems more broadly shared: when Polybius describes the range of views held by Greeks about Rome’s demand of Carthage in 149 bce that the defeated city move ten miles inland, opinion ranged from outright condemnation to pragmatic support of Rome, but he documents no criticism of the African city, and both polities are treated as equal participants in an international moral and political code which only the Romans suggest that Carthage has broken (Polyb. 36.9).
Even the Carthaginian practice of child sacrifice is not treated, in the few contemporary literary sources to mention it at all, as reprehensible (Schol. in Pl. Resp. 337a [Cleitarchus]; Enn. Ann. 221 V). It is seen as unusual, but when the Pseudo-Platonic dialogue Minos notes in the fourth or third century bce that some of the Carthaginians “sacrifice even their own sons to Kronos” ([Pl.] Min. 315c), it is precisely to make the point that people vary a great deal in what they consider culturally acceptable. The practice was treated differently, however, in contemporary political rhetoric: Theophrastus claims that Gelon of Syracuse ordered the Carthaginians to give up human sacrifice; if true, this order seems to have been ineffective, but it would have underlined to contemporaries the differences in custom and religious practice between Greeks and Carthaginians (Schol. Vet. in Pind. Pyth. 2.2; Plut. Mor. 175a, with Prag 2010: 57–58). For us it illustrates the gap between literary and political discourse, no less striking in the ancient world than our own.
Republican Rome and the Punic Wars
Roman political rhetoric respo
nded to the Punic Wars in much the same way as the Greek tyrants to their conflicts with Carthage in Sicily. As we have seen, Diodorus Siculus is not a neutral source, and when he tells the story of a false treaty made by a Roman embassy with Macedon in 172 bce that prompted some senators to reflect that “it was not fitting for Romans to imitate Phoenicians, so as to overcome their enemies through deception and not through virtue” (Diod. Sic. 30.7), he seems to be reproducing a contemporary Roman rhetoric of Punic treachery. This had not yet crystallized into the later notion of punica fides (Gruen 2011: 123–25, 132), but the Second Punic War began among Roman accusations of Carthaginian treaty-breaking, and vice versa (Polyb. 3.15, 3.21). Cato accused the Carthaginians of violating treaties in the run-up to the Third Punic War, at least in his writings (FrRH 5 F 77), and a late Republican rhetorical treatise gives similar accusations as an example (Rhet. Her. 4.20; see also Derow 2015: 186, for the contemporary political discourse). One indication that such ideas had spread beyond the strictly political arena comes a few years after the Hannibalic War, when the speaker of the prologue to Plautus’s play Poenulus, or “The Little Phoenician,” says that the hero, who knows every language but “knowingly pretends not to know” is in this sense “a true Carthaginian” (Plaut. Poen. 112–13). (On the Punic Wars, see chapter 13, this volume.)
This trope not only survives the destruction of Carthage but becomes more powerful. In Cicero’s speech for Scaurus at his trial for provincial extortion in 54 bce, he again accuses the Poeni of breaking treaties, and makes the broader point that “the Phoenician people (genus…Phoenicum) is the most deceptive (fallacissimum); the Punics (Poeni) who arose from them have taught us through the many rebellions of the Carthaginians that they have not degenerated from their ancestors” (Cic. Scaur. 42), suggesting that he expects the notion of Phoenician treachery to have some persuasive power among the senatorial and equestrian judges. Cicero’s attack on the Phoenicians and their western “descendants,” the Poeni, buttresses his argument that the Sardinian witnesses for the prosecution of his client are unreliable, both because they have (he claims) been bribed and because of the bad reputation of their people (41), which he explains through the Phoenician connection: the Sardinians are a mixed race of Poeni and Africans, who came to the island as refugees (42). (For Carthage after the Punic Wars, see chapter 14, this volume.)
This passage is also important as evidence for developing ideas about what “Phoenician” actually meant, as it preserves one of the first surviving uses of a new distinction in Latin in the first century bce between “Phoenicians” and “Punes,” which occurred when the aspirated term phoenix emerged as an alternative to the older Latin transliteration of the Greek phoinix as poenus (Prag 2014). Here Poeni must mean western Phoenicians, as in modern English usage, but the difference between the two terms is often unclear, and poenus continues to be used regularly in Latin to designate Phoenicians from the east as well as the west (Prag 2006: 11–12; 2014: 13). “Poenus” is also, however, used as a synonym for “African,” contradicting Cicero’s distinction in this speech between Poeni and Africans; the first surviving occurrence of the Latin phrase punica fides, found just a few years later, is used not of a Carthaginian or Phoenicians but of the Mauretanian king Bocchus (Sall. Iug. 180.3).
Not only are Roman literary sources of this period still quite vague on who the Poeni actually are but they also fail to reflect the contempt for Carthaginians found in contemporary public discourse. Despite its prologue, Plautus’s Little Phoenician gives a sympathetic portrayal of its hero, a Carthaginian merchant in search of his kidnapped daughters: it depicts him as learned, clever, and kind, and caricatures instead the braggart soldier and the cunning slave who poke fun at the merchant and his attendants for their clothing and earrings (Plaut. Poen. 975–82, with Gruen 2011: 126–29). In the first century bce, Cornelius Nepos wrote a highly complimentary biography of the Carthaginian general Hannibal, in his opinion the greatest general who ever lived—though he was, he notes, let down by the jealousy of his compatriots (Nep. Hann. 1). And at the end of the Republic, Sallust recounts a very flattering legend about the Carthaginian Philaeni brothers, taken, I have argued, from Carthaginian sources (Quinn 2014). As the story goes, the people of Greek Cyrene and of Carthage wanted to set a boundary between their realms, and without a convenient river or mountain to appropriate for this purpose in the desert that lay between them, they decided to send out pairs of runners from each city, and agreed to establish their frontier wherever they met. The Carthaginian brothers made swifter progress, but the Cyreneans, fearing the consequences at home of their tardiness, falsely accused their rivals of cheating. When the Carthaginians protested, the Greeks offered them a new deal: they could be buried alive at the spot they had reached, or they could allow the Cyreneans to advance as far as they desired on the same condition. The Carthaginians accepted these terms and gave their lives for their own honor and that of their city (Sall. Iug. 79).
At the same time, Roman authors of this period continue to emphasize the connection with the sea for both Carthaginians and eastern Phoenicians. It is no coincidence that Plautus’s “Little Phoenician” is a merchant, and in de Republica, Cicero says of the Phoenicians that “none of the barbarians themselves were originally seafarers except the Etruscans and the Phoenicians (Poeni), the latter for commerce and the former as pirates” (Cic. Rep. 2.9). This maritime association comes through even in Cicero’s more negative references. In his speech on the agrarian law of 63 bce, he explains that the Carthaginians have a tendency to fraud and falsehood because their harbors brought them into contact with merchants and strangers (Cic. Leg. agr. 2.95).
From the Principate to Late Antiquity
As we have seen, imperial Latin authors can take a very positive stance on the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, and interest in them seems if anything to have increased in this period. As well as Pomponius Mela’s description of the Phoenicians, Pliny the Elder praises their achievements in science, seamanship, and war (Plin. HN 5.67; with Strab. 16.2.23 for a Greek-language version), the emperor Claudius wrote eight books of Carthaginian history (Suet. Claud. 42.2), and in the early second century ce, Annaeus Florus calls the Carthaginians a “noble people” in the context of a discussion of the Hannibalic war (Flor. 1.22). Furthermore, their association with the sea survives in both positive and negative accounts; for Verrius Flaccus in the Augustan period, “Tyrian waters have become proverbial because the Poeni, originally from Tyre, have become so powerful on the sea that navigation is dangerous for everyone” (as epitomized at Festus, Gloss Lat. 484.21 [Lindsay]).
However, the negative stereotype of Punic faith, shared between the Carthaginians and the wider Phoenicians, if anything intensifies in this period. It is naturally found most often in accounts of the Second Punic War, such as Livy’s famous description in the late first century bce of Hannibal’s perfidia plus quam punica—a “more than Phoenician treachery” (Livy 21.4.9; see also 22.6.12), or Silius Italicus’s first-century ce description of Carthaginian soldiers who are prone to deception (Sil. 3.231–34). At the same time, there is derision of contemporary Phoenician populations as simply unsophisticated by comparison with Italians (Stat. Silv. 4.5.29–48, with particular reference to the inhabitants of Lepcis Magna).
A distinct shift can also be tracked in new versions of stories first told in an earlier period. The story of the Carthaginian Philaeni, for instance, acquired a new and more critical aspect in the first century ce. Valerius Maximus, writing under the emperor Tiberius, makes the Carthaginians the cheats, claiming that they started early (5.6 ext. 4; cf. for the continuing concept of Punic cunning and deceitfulness, 7.3 ext. 8; 7.4.4; 7.4. ext. 2; 9.6 ext. 1), although Pomponius Mela writing a few years later draws only on Sallust’s “Carthaginian” version of the story (Mela 1.38).
This dynamic can also be traced by comparing earlier and later versions of the foundation of Carthage by Dido, whose tale was according to Appian the story told at Carthage itself
(App. Pun. 1). The earliest version we have of the story goes back to Timaeus of Tauromenium and is preserved in fragments in an anonymous ancient work On Women (Haegemans 2000). Despite Timaeus’s Greek Sicilian background, the story as he told it seems to be a neutral or even sympathetic one: when King Pygmalion of Tyre killed his sister Elissa’s husband, she fled the city with some other citizens, traveling first to Cyprus and then to Africa—travels which according to Timaeus later acquired her the epithet Dido, or Deido, “the wanderer.” In Africa she founded Carthage, but then refused to marry the local king, Hiarbas, throwing herself instead from her palace onto a flaming pyre (BNJ 566 F 82).
In Justin’s Epitome of Pompeius Trogus’s Augustan-period universal history, however, there is a new element of deceitfulness not visible at least in what survives of Timaeus’s version. When Dido arrives on the African coast, she persuades the local population to sell her only as much land as can be covered by an ox hide—but then contrives to slice the hide into such implausibly thin strips that it can surround the whole of the hill on which she then builds her city; the hill comes to be called Byrsa, the word for an ox-hide (Just. 18.4–6). Not only is this likely to be a later addition to the original tale of Dido’s adventures, but it must come from a Greek rather than Carthaginian source, since it is in Greek, not Phoenician, that byrsa means “ox-hide.” Trogus seems furthermore to have emphasized the link between this deceitful Carthaginian queen and the eastern Phoenicians by noting the importance of Dido’s example for Tyrian morale during Alexander’s siege of their city (Just. 11.10.13–14) (see discussion in chapter 11, this volume).
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