Finding Carthage Among The Romans

The destruction of Carthage by the armies of the Roman Republic in 146BC was a seminal event in the rise of Rome to power across the Mediterranean. In popular memory, Carthage has, ever since, been remembered as that ‘enemy’ of Rome. The wars between Carthage and Rome, conventionally called the ‘Punic Wars’ were fought for a century across the middle-3rd to middle-2nd centuries BC (c. 264-146). This was a formative time for the rise of Roman power and it is from their memories and commemorations of war that much of what we know about Carthage is recorded.  Carthage plays the role of the ‘forever enemy’ of the Romans, while the real Carthaginians have been forgotten even though the legacy of them and their Phoenician forebears still reside with us today. Carthage lives on in the alphabet we write with and many of the ancient myths and stories still so popular, those of Aphrodite and Herakles, and in their technological and agricultural economies that the Romans conquered, took over and thrived upon.

But, in 146BCE, the city of Carthage and the people who had built it, the history and identity that the place embodied, and the culture that thrived there were wiped from existence.  The violence of the long, three-year siege and the eventual sack and looting of the city, the murder of its people or their sale into a life of enslavement is graphically remembered in Roman History written by Appian of Alexandria a few centuries after the event.  Appian’s story of the Punic Wars, thought to be based on an earlier account by a contemporary to the sack, Polybius, remembers the resilience of the Carthaginian people, their ingenuity and brilliance, and is a testament to all that we lost when the city was destroyed.

What comes to mind today when we think of ancient Carthage are the great general Hannibal and his elephants who crossed the Alps, or Dido, the mythical founder of the city from the Phoenician city of Tyre. These stories dominate how we remember Carthage and the Carthaginians and are Roman memories that have persisted through the millennia. The very first Latin language histories and epics were written about the Punic Wars in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC making the wars with Carthage foundational in the develop of Latin literature. This early history was curated by the writers of the early Roman empire, like Livy and Virgil in the 1st century BC, for an audience who looked back and remembered the middle Roman Republic as a time of great achievements and relative simplicity. For this was the time before Rome had descended into civil war and chaos, its republic fragmented and an imperial power put in its place. These stories, especially Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita (From the Founding of the City) and Virgil’s Aeneid passed on and were repeated over and over into cultural memory, into medieval histories, Arabic geographies to Renaissance literature and early modern opera like Berlioz Les Troyens or Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.  The story of Carthage appears again in 21st century with villains like Hannibal Lecter, or, more recently, in the series Game of Thrones season 2 as the city of Qarth – which shows the enduring influence of Roman stereotypes of their enemies – wealthy and decadent, secretive and othered.

There is no more important example than from the 1st century BC, a hundred or so years after the destruction of Carthage, when the Roman poet Virgil wrote an epic called the Aeneid. In Virgil’s poem, which tells a foundational story about the Trojan hero Aeneas who makes his way across the Mediterranean to Italy to help found the Roman people, Carthage appears entwined in the Roman story very early, right at the start:

Against the Tiber’s mouth, but far away,

An ancient town was seated on the sea;

A Tyrian colony; the people made

Stout for war, and studious of their trade:

Carthage the name; belov’d by Juno more

Than her own Argos, or the Samian shore.

Here stood her chariot; here, if Heav’n were kind,

The seat of awful empire she design’d.

Aeneid 1.12ff, translated by John Dryden.

This translation from John Dryden – the first translation to appear in English from the 17th century – really captures the sense of the memory of the city of Carthage in the Roman mind. The Romans wanted us to think of Carthage as ‘that awful empire’. But even when the poem was written, Carthage had already been gone for over a hundred years and a Roman colony was being built on the very land where Carthage once stood. Virgil wrote under the patronage of the first Roman emperor Augustus, and he was looking back on the Roman story to both rationalise and make it epic.  Rome’s foundational stories were woven into the epic tales of war and heroism of the ancient Mediterranean, and we see in these lines of Virgil that immediately the city of Carthage is depicted as an existential threat to Rome. For there it sat ‘against the Tiber’s mouth’ that river that was the lifeblood of the city of Rome. And then there were those Carthaginian people who were ‘stout for war, and studious of their trade’ (code for violent and greedy) and they were a ‘Tyrian colony’ so we also understand that Carthage was a foundation from a city far away in the eastern Mediterranean, that of Phoenician Tyre.

So Tyre is where we need to start to understand the origins of Carthage and the civilisation that flourished in the central and western Mediterranean up until the 2nd century BC. For Carthage was a city founded by Phoenician-speaking peoples from Tyre (now in southern Lebanon) in the 9th century BC who ended up on the coast of North Africa settling a city on a very strategically beneficial spot. It was a location made for success, surrounded by rich agricultural land, right in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea with just short hops across to Sicily and connected to towns and cities all along the coasts, east and west.

This city founded by Tyrians prospered. It was called Carthage – the Greco-Romanised word for the Tyrian name, Qart Hadasht, which literally means New City in the Phoenician language. This is just like Naples which is Nea Polis in ancient Greek, the New City.  Carthage, and Naples, were ‘colonial’ foundations – settled by people from the eastern Mediterranean in the west – but we should use that word carefully because it is a Latin concept that does not necessarily apply to the status of the founders of Carthage. Some other stories claim the original settlers fled from Tyre, perhaps as refugees, across the Mediterranean to safety (Justin, Epitome of Pompeius Trogus 16-20) and we do know that throughout its whole history Carthage kept its connections to Tyre.  The city paid a tithe, a tax of its annual income (a percentage of its GDP if you will) to the great temple of the god Melqart at Tyre.

At the time of its destruction, Carthage was one of the most important cities in the Mediterranean and in the 3rd century BCE – at the time of the great wars between Carthage and Rome – it was a sophisticated urban centre and one of the most prosperous and by reputation one of the most beautiful cities.  Archaeological evidence puts the date of Carthage’s foundation to the late 9th century BC.  Excavations have shown us that after its foundation, Carthage grew gradually, with trade links north, south, east and west and agricultural self-sustainability evident early on in its history. The city grew and eventually prospered and set up its own connected settlements. There were culturally linked Phoenician-Carthaginian settlements all along the coast of Africa, in Sicily, Sardinia and the Balearic Islands and in coastal Iberia (Spain and Portugal).  The population was a mix of Phoenician-speaking peoples and others from the eastern Mediterranean, North Africans (Numidians or Libyans in the ancient sources and today’s Amazigh), and people from the western Mediterranean (new DNA article).  Politically, Carthage was, like Rome, a republic that had evolved out of a monarchy.  It was governed by yearly-elected magistrates and run by an oligarchy made up of the elite families.  The Romans liked to characterise Carthaginians as different – because their language, culture and religion were based in the Semitic traditions of the Near East, but there was also a long and deep connection between the two cities, who had signed treaties of alliance from the late 6th century BC onwards (Polybius, 3.22).

The complexity of the western Mediterranean in these formative years, when cities were founded and had mixed populations developed into a more divisive narrative in the 5th century BC and much of that happened over the island of Sicily.  Carthage was allied to the Phoenician settlements and indigenous Elymians who occupied the coastal and inland parts of western Sicily, while the Greek cities of the east of Sicily came to be dominated by Syracuse, a colony of Corinth that grew to be another of the metropolises of the west.  The 5th and 4th centuries were periods of war and struggle for strategic positions on the island – never a simple story of Carthaginian vs. Greek vs. Sicilian, but often depicted as such in our sources. Key battlegrounds like the city of Himera have recently shown us through the evidence of mass burials of soldiers that identities and allegiances were much more complex than had previously been understood. Into this already complicated mix, the Romans launched themselves in the 260s BC and the so-called First Punic War began over Sicily. Rome’s conquest of the south of the Italian peninsula led to its engagement in Sicilian matters. This long first war between Carthage and Rome lasted over 20 years, but, after both sides were exhausted from fighting, by the losses of men and of ships, the expense of creating new navies, raising new troops, it finally ended in 241BC in a naval battle near the island of Levanzo. It was an epic war and Polybius writes that it was like watching two boxers, evenly matched, slugging it out round after round (Polyb. 1.57.1). The depleted resources of the combatants can be seen in the devalued silver content of the coinage minted at Carthage and we hear about tax rises at Rome and their recruiting enslaved people into the navy and, at Carthage, further hardships and famine as all resources went to pay for more ships and more weapons. 

This hard-fought war had a profound effect on both Carthage and Rome and would lead on to the next war after just over 20 years – the exact length of the peace treaty they both signed.  Carthage had extended to the west, into the Iberian Peninsula, where culturally-allied Phoenician-speaking peoples lived (in places like Cádiz) and where some of the most important silver mines, iron ore deposits and mineral wealth in the Mediterranean basin lay, along the Guadalquivir River not far from modern Seville. So, we can follow the money and also the cultural links here. Over the same period the Romans had conquered equally north up to the Alps in Italy and to the east into coastal Illyria.  

The intertwined destiny of the two cities continued when the Second Punic War (218-201BC) began just 23 years after the end of the first. The Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca, son of a famous commander named Hamilcar, would lead an army into Italy and challenge Rome at its very core. That Hannibal did this to try to protect the Carthaginian lands of Spain and Africa from an imminent Roman attack in 218BCE is largely forgotten.  History blames Hannibal for the war, even though our ancient sources acknowledge so much confusion around the actual causes of the second conflict that just 60 years later Polybius refers to the details as ‘the common gossip of a barber shop’ (3.20).  This was contested history in action, and we know more than ever today that historical ‘truth’ is not always easy to come by. 

When Hannibal crossed the mighty Alps with elephants, horses and an army he created a legend for posterity and mayhem in Italy, taking allies from Rome and defeating their armies in battle after battle from 218 to 216BC. The Roman memory of Hannibal and the challenge he presented to the Roman state in these years really epitomizes how much the Romans created themselves in the face of their battles with Carthage. In the Roman mind, Hannibal was the perfect enemy – brave, intelligent, and committed while at the same time he was cruel, treacherous and without integrity (Livy 21.4.9).  

It is worth noting that Livy uses a famous Latin phrase – perfidia plus quam Punica – which is translated into English as ‘a treachery more than Punic’ and epitomises the cultural stereotype that the Romans created for the Carthaginians. Punic was the term that the Romans used to refer to the culture and language of Carthage that comes from the Latin poenus thought to derive from name for the original founders of Carthage, the Phoenicians.  As a concept, the word Punic is an ethnic stereotype and one that was current in Latin literature by the late 3rd and early 2nd centuries BC.  By the 1st century BC when Livy wrote his history, this concept becomes very important to the memory of Carthage. Livy describes the events of the Second Punic War (21.1.1) as ‘an account of the most memorable war ever fought’.  

Hannibal and Carthage lost the Second Punic War and signed a peace treaty in 201BC. The Romans had been challenged to their very core of existence and their eventual fightback against Hannibal became the stuff of great epic and legend. The city of Rome was covered with temples and memorials to those great victories, and triumphs over so many cities celebrated, and the final defeat of the master tactician Hannibal made the Roman general Scipio (known as Africanus from his victory) a legend of equal proportion.  

The destruction of the city Carthage and the displacement of its people fifty years later was in no way uncontroversial even at the time. Carthage had thrived in the inter-war years, unable to wage war by the terms of the treaty with Rome, but had also been politically stifled by the Roman support of their Numidian neighbours. The eventual destruction of Carthage was as much a product of Roman domestic politics as imperial ambition. The Roman senator Cato famously declared, over and over in the Senate of Rome ‘Carthage must be destroyed’ (delenda est Carthago) while his opponent Scipio Nasica (descendent of Scipio who defeated Hannibal) would declare: Carthage ‘must be saved’. Carthage had become a political football whose fate was batted back and forth between rival generals in the Roman senate. 

What is so important for our story is that when Rome captured and destroyed Carthage – they also captured her history, her story and her memories and that is what we are left with – a history that is uniquely the perspective of Rome. While history is entirely written by the victors in this case, more and more work has been done through archaeology and new science at Carthage and around the Mediterranean, that begins to tell us the story of the city and culture of Carthaginians beyond the tales of Hannibal and Dido.  A new history of Carthage can begin to be told that centres the city as a foundation place in the history of the western Mediterranean. 

Eve MacDonald is an archaeologist, ancient historian and lecturer at Cardiff University and the author of Carthage: A New History of An Ancient Empire.