CARTHAGO DELETA EST
Close on eight-and-twenty centuries ago (in 846 B.C. according to one
historian) a young Phenician princess fled from her native country,
Sidon, after abetting her brother in the murder of her husband, and,
putting half the length of the Mediterranean between her and her
pursuers, beached her purple-sailed galley on the shores of Africa, not
far from the promontory which to-day we call Cape Bon. Her given name
was Elissa, so tradition tells us, but she is better known as Dido—“the
fugitive”—and from her day down to this a girl who indulges in capers of
which her family do not approve is said to be cutting up didos.
Now it should be clearly understood that this region was already in a
fairly civilized state when Dido landed on its coast, for Phenician
adventurers, sailing westward in quest of the Hesperides, had established
themselves there nearly four centuries earlier and had founded
cities—Cambē, on the very site afterward occupied by Carthage; Outih,
or Utica; Hadrumetum, later known as Sousse; Hippo Zarytus, the modern
Bizerta; and Thines, which to-day we know as Tunis. So the fugitive
princess and her followers, instead of being pioneers in an unknown land,
found themselves hospitably received by settlers of their own race and
by their ruler, King Iarbas, who quickly became a suitor for the young
widow’s hand.
But she had had enough of matrimony, and, denying his pleadings to share
his throne, she set about building a kingdom of her own. She chose for
the site of her future capital a low hill beside the sea-shore, looking
down upon a little sheltered bay, and guilefully induced its Berber
owners to sell her as much land as could be covered by the hide of a
bull. Thereupon—and for the sake of her reputation the less said about
the ethics of the transaction the better—she proceeded to cut the hide
into a long and narrow strip, as sometimes, for amusement, one strives
to see how long a paring can be obtained from an apple. With the lengthy
strand of rawhide thus ingeniously obtained, she inclosed an area of
sufficient size on which to build her city, which, it is to be assumed,
was in the beginning a mere collection of wattle-and-daub huts. At first
the settlement was known as Byrsa (the name means bull’s hide), but later
it took the name of Carthage, or Karthadasht, “the New City” in the
Phenician tongue.
So much for the legendary version, which Virgil gave to the world in the
Æneid and which has been so expanded and embroidered in the centuries
which have intervened that even the men of science have been unable to
determine with any certainty where the fable ends and history begins.
* * * * *
We have grown so accustomed to referring to the inhabitants of the city
traditionally founded by Dido as Carthaginians or Phenicians that it
is difficult to realize that the name by which they called themselves
was neither of these, but Canaanite—a lowlander, a man of the plains.
The Greeks gave the country at the eastern end of the Mediterranean,
from which these people came the name of Phœnike, the Land of Purple—so
called, no doubt, from the purple dyes for which the Tyrians were famous;
the Romans in their turn corrupted the name into Pœni; yet well into the
Christian era the farmers of Libya, which roughly corresponded to the
Tunisia of to-day, were wont to speak of themselves as being of the land
of Canaan.[1]
The Carthaginians, be it understood, never fought if they could help
it. Essentially a commercial-minded, luxury-loving people, they had no
lust for empire, save that of the sea, mastery of which insured them
control of the ports and markets which were necessary to their commercial
supremacy. But as the city grew in wealth, power, and population,
territorial expansion became imperative, and they pressed forward
gradually until they occupied, more or less completely, a territory
roughly corresponding to modern Tunisia plus the Algerian department of
Constantine. This gradual expansion of Carthage’s sphere of influence was
effected not so much by the sword, however, as by treaty with the warlike
native tribes, from which she recruited her armies of mercenaries. Even
in Carthage itself, whose inhabitants at one period numbered close to
three quarters of a million, but a small minority of the population was
of pure Phenician stock, the bulk of the people consisting of the native
Libyans with a sprinkling of half-castes, negro slaves, and traders of
all races. The Carthaginians might be said, indeed, to have occupied a
position somewhat analogous to that held by the French in the Tunisia of
to-day.
The government of Carthage was a pure oligarchy, in which none save the
old Punic families had any voice. All powers of government, legislative,
executive, and judicial, were vested in the Council of One Hundred,
whose decrees were carried out by officials known as “suffetes.” As
these offices were for sale, the oligarchy eventually degenerated into a
plutocracy, corrupt, vulgar, arrogant, and heartless, in which political
dominance was exercised by one or another of the great families, as was
the case in medieval Italy.
Save in the single field of agriculture, which they developed
scientifically and with remarkable success, the Carthaginians have to
their credit no achievements in science, literature, or art, even their
architecture showing the effect of Greek and Egyptian influence. As has
been said, they were first, last, and always traders, money-makers,
possessing to an exceptional degree that Semitic aptitude for business
and banking which has made the Jews the financiers of the world.
The religion of the Carthaginians was characterized by cruelty and lust.
The state religion, the established church, as it were, was based on
the worship of the deity called Eschmoun, identified by the Romans with
their god of healing, Æsculapius, whose chief sanctuary was within a
vast inclosure, half-temple and half-fortress, on the brow of the Byrsa
Hill, from which an imposing flight of marble steps led down into the
city. But there were other gods as well, the most venerated being Hammon
and Tanith. That fear of their anger and faith in their power—they could
hardly have inspired affection—was deeply implanted in the hearts of
the common people is indicated by the fact that, whereas the worship of
Eschmoun virtually ended with Punic Carthage, the other two not only
survived the destruction of the city by the Romans, but, under the names
of Saturn and Ceres, their cult was adopted, developed, and disseminated
by the conquerors.
They were always dark and terrible, these gods of Carthage, worshiped
with bestial and bloody rites which had their beginnings in the very dawn
of time. Of his priests Hammon demanded the sacrifice of their manhood;
of her priestesses Tanith required the sacrifice of their chastity.
Though there can be little doubt that both had temples within the
confines of the city itself, the principal sanctuary of Hammon was set
in the saddle formed by the twin peaks of Bou-Kornein, which are clearly
visible some miles to the southward, beyond the lagoon of El Bahira. It
was in this macabre setting, consisting in all probability of little
more than a sacred grove within an inclosure, that there took place the
awfulest rites of all, the human sacrifices. Here the victims of Baal,
who comprised not only slaves and prisoners of war but children of the
most aristocratic families in Carthage—usually girls of marriageable
age—were laid naked upon the brazen arms of the god to be roasted alive,
their bodies dropping thence into a fiery furnace. Though we know
that the worship of Hammon and Tanith was characterized by rituals so
hideous and obscene as to stagger the imagination, their details—and it
is well that it is so—can only be conjectured. Small wonder that the
superstitious Arabs shun the slopes of Bou-Kornein after nightfall,
asserting that the lonely spot is cursed with the evil deeds which were
performed there, and that with the coming of darkness can be heard the
shrieks of tortured men and maidens, can be seen the dull glow of the
fires on the altar of the unclean god.
* * * * *
The Carthaginians first came into armed collision with their historic
enemies, the Romans, 264 years before the Crucifixion. For nearly two
centuries Carthage had been undisputed Mistress of the Mediterranean,
dominant in the East and so supreme in the West that her ambassadors
told the Romans that they might not even wash their hands in the
sea without her permission. Her empire stretched from end to end
of the Middle Sea: North Africa was fringed with her outposts and
trading-stations; the south of Spain owed her fealty; her rule was
accepted in Sardinia, the west of Sicily, Malta, the Balearic Islands.
But she was as an idol of brass with feet of clay; the foundations of
her supremacy were rotten, for they rested upon her sea-power only. And
history has shown, over and over again, that no nation can endure unless
it can make its might felt upon the land. The Carthaginians, as has been
said, were not a fighting race, so that when Carthage needed troops she
had to recruit them from the warlike and barbarous Berber tribes which
surrounded her. It is said that when Hamilcar Barca landed in Spain at
the beginning of the Second Punic War he had not a single Carthaginian
soldier in the ranks of his army, the officers of his general staff alone
being Carthaginians. And, as Carthage discovered to her cost, it is not
safe for a nation to trust to the very uncertain loyalty of a mercenary
army.
In 264 B.C. began the series of tragic events known to history as the
three Punic wars, which lasted 120 years, cost millions of lives, and
terminated with the capture and destruction of Carthage by the younger
Scipio, who left not one stone of the famous city resting on another.
As I have already remarked, Carthage’s supremacy rested on her sea-power,
and her sea-power, in turn, rested on her vast armada of triremes—galleys
with three banks of oars, each manned by ten soldiers and 130 rowers,
the latter being slaves who never left the benches to which they were
chained. It has been estimated that the average length of a trireme was
about 130 feet, or approximately that of a small destroyer. The naval
tactics of the Carthaginians, be it understood, consisted in sinking
the enemy by ramming, not in boarding and hand-to-hand fighting. Now
they turned their attention to the development of a much larger class
of fighting ship, the quinquereme, its five banks of oars manned by 300
rowers, and each carrying about twenty marines. The Romans improved on
this, however, for they not only copied the quinqueremes, but they fitted
them with gangways which could be lowered upon contact with an enemy
vessel, so as to permit the complement of 120 legionaries which each
Roman war craft carried to gain access to the adversary’s decks. Relying
on this combatant superiority of six to one, they endeavored always to
get alongside and board the enemy by means of the “flying-bridges”; with
the Romans, as with Nelson and John Paul Jones, it was always, “Broadside
to broadside! Boarders up and away!”
The first sea-battle under these new conditions was fought off Lipara in
260 B.C. and ended in complete disaster for the Romans, their admiral
and his entire squadron being captured. But shortly thereafter the
fortunes of war were reversed, for in a second encounter, near Palermo,
fifty Carthaginian vessels were captured or sunk. Four years later, off
Agrigentum, was fought one of the greatest sea-battles of all time, in
which upward of three hundred thousand men were engaged and in which
nearly a hundred Carthaginian galleys, together with a like number of
Roman, went down. Though the Carthaginian fleet was only temporarily
put out of action, the Romans were enabled to bring their transports in
safety across the narrow seas and to effect a landing on the eastern side
of Cape Bon, their army under Marcus Attilius Regulus capturing Tunis
and menacing Carthage itself. But the Carthaginians summoned to their
aid the renowned Spartan general, Xanthippus, thanks to whose brilliant
leadership the invaders were all but exterminated, Regulus himself being
taken prisoner.
The Romans having been repulsed, the Carthaginians now carried the war
into Sicily. The long series of reverses suffered by the Africans in
this campaign, which lasted nine years, were somewhat alleviated by
the genius of Hamilcar Barca, then a youth in his early twenties, who,
had he been adequately supported, might have made by sea that attack
on Rome which his son, Hannibal, was forced to attempt a quarter of a
century later by the long and perilous overland route through Spain
and across the Alps. But after the great Roman sea-victory at Ægusa
the Carthaginians instructed Hamilcar to make peace on the best terms
he could obtain. And onerous indeed were these terms. By them Carthage
was compelled to evacuate Sicily, Sardinia, and Malta and to pay an
indemnity of thirty-two hundred talents—about six millions of dollars.
Thus ended, in 241 B.C., the First Punic War, which had dragged along for
three-and-twenty years, greatly to the disadvantage of Carthage. She had
lost the most important of her insular possessions; the Mediterranean was
no longer a Carthaginian lake, a _mare clausum_; and her prestige as a
naval power had been irretrievably shattered.
* * * * *
They were always poor losers, the Carthaginians, and so, despite the
brilliant generalship of Hamilcar, when he returned to Carthage he was
deprived of his command, which was given to his bitterest rival, Hanno.
But, knowing the temper of his people, it is to be presumed that the
famous leader did not complain, for he doubtless considered himself
lucky to escape crucifixion, the fate usually awarded to defeated
generals according to the pleasant custom of the Carthaginians. Their
ingratitude quickly brought its own reward, however, for, within a few
months after the disastrous end of her struggle with Rome, Carthage was
called upon to suppress the revolt of her mercenary and barbarian allies.
This bloody business, which lasted from 240 to 237 B.C., was precipitated
by Hanno’s refusal to give the returned troops their pay, which was
greatly in arrears. The conflict which followed was known as the War of
the Mercenaries, or as the Truceless War, for no quarter was asked or
given.
The mutinous mercenaries were now joined by hordes of barbarians from the
hinterland, who saw in Carthage’s enfeebled condition an opportunity to
overwhelm and loot the richest and most luxurious city in the world. From
every quarter of North Africa they came, drawn by the prospects of rapine
and plunder as buzzards are attracted by a dying animal. An unforgettable
picture of the assembling of these Barbarian hordes has been given us by
Flaubert in his “Salammbô”:
Nomads from the table-lands of Barca, bandits from Cape Pluscus
and the promontory of Dernah, from Phazzana and Marmarica,
they had crossed the desert, drinking at the brackish wells
walled in with camels’ bones; the Zuacces, with their covering
of ostrich-feathers, had come on quadrigæ; the Garamantains,
masked with black veils, rode behind on their painted mares;
others were mounted on asses, onagers, zebras, and buffaloes;
while some dragged after them the roofs of their sloop-shaped
huts together with their families and idols. There were
Ammonians, with limbs wrinkled by the hot water of the springs;
Ataranians, who curse the sun; Troglodytes, who bury their
dead with laughter beneath branches of trees; and the hideous
Auseans, who eat grasshoppers; the Achyrmachidæ, who eat lice;
and the vermilion-painted Gysantians, who eat apes.
[Illustration: THEY SPEND THEIR HOLIDAYS AMONG THE DEAD
On Saturdays the Jewish women of Tunis visit the cemetery
And on Fridays the Moslem women do the same]
Because of the stubbornness and incapacity of Hanno, disaster followed on
disaster. Tunis was taken by the mutineers, and Carthage was threatened.
At length the situation became so critical that Hanno was superseded and
the command restored to Hamilcar, who, enlisting the aid of the Numidian
sheikhs, drove the mercenaries back into the mountains to the east of
Bou-Kornein, eventually hemming them in a narrow pass known as the Defile
of the Hatchet. Here forty thousand of them were trapped like wolves,
encircled by a ring of unrelenting steel. When their food was exhausted
they warded off starvation for a time by eating their dead and their
prisoners. But even cannibalism could not save them, and in the end the
mutineers, too weak to offer further resistance, were trampled by the
ponderous feet of Hamilcar’s war-elephants until all that remained of
them was chunks of bloody pulp.
* * * * *
In the very nature of things, a peace made after so inconclusive a
struggle as the First Punic War could not endure, for the Carthaginians
still despised the Romans and thought only of obtaining revenge. Thus it
came about that only three years after the conclusion of hostilities an
expeditionary force under Hamilcar Barca landed in Spain with the avowed
purpose of checking Roman penetration of the peninsula and of building
up there an empire which should more than compensate Carthage for the
insular territories which she had lost.
In nine years Hamilcar brought under Carthaginian rule all the country
south of the Tagus; then—229 B.C.—he fell in battle. He was succeeded by
his son-in-law, Hasdrubal, who continued the course of conquest until,
eight years after the death of Hamilcar, he met his own end by the knife
of an assassin. Thereupon the command passed to Hamilcar’s son, Hannibal,
then only twenty-six years of age. I doubt not that when the youngster
was advanced to the supreme command the graybeards of the general staff
shook their heads dismally, and said, “Too young; too young,” and
prophesied failure and disaster. For how could they have dreamed that,
when history should grant him the justice of perspective, this youthful
Carthaginian would be recognized as one of the greatest captains of all
time? For, in the whole history of the world, there have been only two
other men—Alexander the Great and Napoleon—who approached him in military
and administrative genius.
As a boy of nine, before the altar of the gods, Hannibal had taken an
oath of undying hatred for Rome. And this oath he now proceeded to
fulfil. Just as Sherman broke the heart of the Confederacy by his March
to the Sea, so Hannibal determined to smash the power of Rome by carrying
the war into the enemy’s territory, by sweeping across Italy itself. So
audacious a plan of campaign depended for its success upon the rapidity
with which it was executed. The Romans must be paralyzed by the speed
of his advance. They must know of his coming only when they heard the
trample of his elephants and saw the sun glinting on his spear-heads.
What he planned was, in short, a great raid through Spain and Gaul and so
down the whole length of the Italian peninsula, capturing Rome itself,
if that were possible, and, if it were not, joining hands with Carthage
across the narrow seas.
Intrusting the command of the troops he left in occupation of Spain to
his brother, Hannibal left New Carthage (Carthagena), which had been
founded by his father some years before, and, late in the May of 218
B.C., set out with an army of ninety thousand men and a great number of
elephants, on one of the most daring enterprises recorded in military
history. Crossing the Pyrenees, and evading the Roman army which had
been set to watch the mouth of the Rhone, he made friends with the Gauls
and pressed on unhindered to the foot of the Alps. Though the savage
Alpine winter, with its deep snow and bitter cold, was already at hand,
though the barbarians hung on his flanks like ravening wolves, and
though his losses in men and animals from exposure were enormous, he
crossed into Italy by the Pass of the Great St. Bernard, as it is known
to-day, cutting his way through the snow-drifts and splitting the rocks
which impeded the passage of his wagon-trains with vinegar, for, be it
remembered, he had to make his own roads as he advanced. In the words of
Napoleon, “Hannibal forced the Alps; I turned them.”
Smashing Scipio on the Ticinus and Sempronius on the Trebua, he went into
winter quarters on the Upper Po, where he contracted the ophthalmia which
cost him an eye. In the following spring he resumed his southward march,
annihilating the army with which the consul Flaminius sought to check
him. Rome he did not venture to attack, deeming his decimated force too
weak to justify the venture, and therein he committed his fatal error.
But at Cannæ, on the second of August, 216 B.C., he turned suddenly upon
Quintus Fabius Maximus, who had closed in upon his rear, and out of a
Roman army numbering seventy-six thousand men, seventy thousand perished
in the awful slaughter. Again the road to Rome was open to Hannibal, but
without the reinforcements which he had asked from Carthage, he did not
dare to attack, though he once stood within three miles of the city’s
walls. For thirteen years he held his ground in southern Italy, winning
victories of which he was too weak to take advantage and straining his
eyes seaward in quest of the troop-laden galleys which never came.
But, while Hannibal was being kept at bay near Capua, the arms of Rome
had not been idle elsewhere. Under Publius Scipio—who in later years
was destined to gain imperishable fame as Scipio Africanus—a Roman
army had invaded Spain and, defeating the small Carthaginian force
which garrisoned the peninsula, had undone all the work that Hamilcar,
Hasdrubal, and Hannibal had accomplished.
Crossing over into Africa, Scipio sought to form an alliance with
Syphax, king of the Massæsylians, whose capital was Cirta, the modern
Constantine. But, thanks to the influence of his beautiful Carthaginian
wife, Sophonisba, daughter of Hasdrubal Giscon (whom Scipio had defeated
in Spain), Syphax remained faithful to Carthage. Sophonisba’s marriage
to Syphax, however, cost Carthage the allegiance of another great
Numidian chieftain, Masinissa, to whom she had been betrothed. Piqued
by this rejection, the haughty Berber deserted Carthage, for which he
had always fought, and became the stanch ally of Rome. Yet how strangely
does history reverse itself! For some years later, when the kingdom of
Syphax, who had been defeated and had died in captivity, had been given
to Masinissa by the Romans, and that chieftain came riding into his new
capital, Cirta, in triumph, there was the widowed Sophonisba, beautiful
as ever, awaiting him at the entrance to the citadel. The lovely creature
threw herself at the feet of the conqueror and begged with tears in her
eyes that she be not handed over to her hereditary enemies, the Romans.
So he married her, for he loved her still and doubted not that she would
be safe under his protection. But when Scipio heard of it he bitterly
upbraided Masinissa for having betrayed his Roman allies by marrying a
Carthaginian. More, he demanded Sophonisba’s surrender, for he wanted her
to grace his triumph when he returned to Rome. Whereupon Masinissa, who
dared not keep her yet would not give her up to the Romans, escaped the
dilemma by sending her poison. By drinking it Sophonisba saved herself
from dishonor and degradation, her husband from humiliation, and the
Roman Republic from an embarrassing situation.
But I am getting ahead of my story. So let us go back to the autumn of
206 B.C., when Scipio, having returned to Italy, persuaded the Senate to
let him carry the war into Italy, the dwindling forces of Hannibal, who
had been callously abandoned by Carthage, still being held at bay near
Capua. Landing near Utica, Scipio was joined by his new ally, Masinissa,
their combined forces making a night attack upon the camps of Hasdrubal
and Syphax and burning them both. Two decisive battles followed. Syphax,
as has already been mentioned, was utterly defeated and taken prisoner
and his kingdom handed over to his rival, Masinissa. The Carthaginians,
their capital invested, sued for peace. The terms imposed by Scipio
were amazing in their moderation: Spain, already lost, and the Balearic
Islands were to be formally ceded to Rome; the transfer of Syphax’s
kingdom to Masinissa was to be recognized; all vessels of war, save ten,
were to be surrendered; and an indemnity of five thousand talents—not far
from ten millions of dollars—was to be paid the conquerors. These terms,
which deprived Carthage of her battle-fleet and her remaining overseas
possessions and exacted a huge indemnity, are strongly reminiscent of
those which were imposed two thousand years later at Versailles upon the
Germans.
The envoys of Carthage formally accepted the terms and an armistice was
declared while they were being ratified by the two governments. Then, too
late, Carthage repented her desertion of the one man who might have saved
her and recalled Hannibal from Italy. When the hero of a hundred battles
landed at Leptis with the remnant of his ever-victorious army, the hopes
of the mercurial Carthaginians revived. The terms of peace which they had
just accepted were brazenly repudiated. Hannibal, though disheartened and
disillusioned, did his best to save a cause which was already lost and
which did not deserve saving. Gathering an army consisting mainly of raw
levies and undisciplined mercenaries, he met Scipio in battle at Zama,
five days’ march to the west of Carthage, in the spring of 202 B.C. But
Hannibal’s green troops were unable to withstand the assault of the Roman
shock-battalions, and his defeat—the first he had ever known—was utter
and complete. With a handful of followers he escaped to Carthage and
advised the Council of One Hundred to make the best terms it could with
the thoroughly exasperated Romans.
The conditions now imposed by the victors were far more humiliating than
the original ones. In addition to the former demands the Carthaginians
were required to pay an annual tribute of two hundred talents for a
period of fifty years; they were not to wage war outside of Africa; and
in Africa they were not to make war without the permission of Rome, or
of Rome’s allies, and then only within Carthaginian territory. By the
acceptance of these terms, which left the once haughty Mistress of the
Seas little more than a Roman protectorate, there ended in 201 B.C.,
after seventeen years’ duration, the Second Punic War.
Just as, centuries later, the Allies believed that they had permanently
crippled Germany by the terms imposed on her at Versailles, so the Romans
congratulated themselves on having crushed their rival forever. But
their gratulations were premature. Relieved of the burden of maintaining
great military and naval establishments, free to devote themselves to
the profitable pursuits of peace, the Carthaginians proceeded to come
back with a rapidity which amazed and alarmed the Romans. Under the wise
administration of Hannibal, Carthage set its house in order, reorganized
its finances, suppressed its political abuses, and paid off in less than
half the allotted time the enormous war indemnity which had been imposed
upon it.
Ere long the anxiety of the Romans turned to something not far removed
from panic. Though Hannibal had scrupulously observed the terms of
peace, with such a man at liberty, Rome could not sleep o’ nights and
the Senate peremptorily demanded his surrender. Carthage was powerless
to refuse the demand; so Hannibal, who had no illusions as to the fate
his malignant and unchivalrous enemies, smarting from their long series
of defeats at his hands, had in store for him, fled from the city which
he had served so long and brilliantly and to whose arms he had brought
imperishable fame. At first the illustrious fugitive sought refuge on
the Kerkenna Islands, off the eastern coast of Tunisia, near the modern
Sfax; but, when the long arm of Rome reached out to pluck him thence, he
again sought safety in flight, this time to Asia Minor, where he found
a welcome at the court of King Prusias of Bithynia. But even there he
was not safe from the hatred of Rome, and in 183 B.C., rather than bring
disaster on those who had befriended him, the great captain died in
exile by his own hand.
Though Rome and Carthage remained outwardly at peace for fifty years,
Carthage, in spite of the numerous restrictions with which her rival
sought to cripple her, so waxed in prosperity and wealth that the Roman
leaders, despairing of wresting from her commercial supremacy, determined
on her destruction. This ruthless decision was inspired by both jealousy
and fear, and, in some measure at least, by the eloquence of the
celebrated orator Marcus Cato, who, as chairman of a commission sent to
Carthage to settle a boundary question, had been so impressed by what he
saw there that thenceforward he devoted himself to inflaming the passions
of his countrymen against Carthage. It is said that after his return
from Africa he never failed to conclude a speech with the impassioned
declaration, “_Delenda est Carthago!_”—“Carthage must be wiped out!”
History has shown that, when one power has determined to attack another,
it has never been found difficult to invent a plausible pretext. In this
instance, however, no pretext was necessary; in deliberately forcing
war upon a people with whom she was at peace, and who wished to remain
at peace, Rome was scourged by the lashes of those terrible sisters,
Hatred, Jealousy, and Fear. No demands, no ultimatum, no declaration of
war preceded the outbreak of hostilities, the news that the Roman fleet
was approaching being the first intimation the Carthaginians had that
they were again to undergo the horrors of war. The expedition landed
unopposed at Utica in 149 B.C., where the Roman commander was waited
upon by peace commissioners sent by Carthage to learn the city’s fate.
They were informed that peace terms would not even be discussed until
the complete disarmament of the city had been effected. Whereupon all
military and naval stores, all arms and armor, whether owned privately
or by the state, even the insignificant remnant of the once all-powerful
fleet, were surrendered.
Now that the city was apparently helpless, and even a semblance of
resistance was out of the question, the Roman commander informed the
Carthaginian envoys of the brutal sentence which had been passed by the
Senate and which he had been ordered to carry out. Carthage was to be
utterly destroyed! But the Romans had made one serious miscalculation;
they had failed to take into account the fighting spirit which can
be aroused in the most unwarlike of peoples, as in the most timid of
animals, when driven to desperation. In fact, the Roman ultimatum had
precisely the opposite effect to that which was intended, for, instead
of paralyzing the Carthaginians with fear, it fanned their smoldering
resentment into a fierce flame of heroism; it inspired them with a
determination to sell their city and their lives at a price which would
stagger Rome.
Now it must be kept in mind that, though the Carthaginians had
surrendered their arms and engines of war, there remained intact the
remarkable system of defenses which made Carthage the most strongly
fortified city of its time. The city, whose population at this period
numbered something over seven hundred thousand, was built upon a
fan-shaped peninsula surrounded on three sides by water, the handle of
the fan corresponding to the narrow isthmus, barely three miles in width,
which afforded communication with the mainland. The sea-front, naturally
precipitous, was rendered virtually impregnable by massive ramparts,
while across the neck of the isthmus, so as to afford protection by an
attack from land, ran a tremendous wall, thirty-three feet in thickness
and forty-five feet high, broken at frequent intervals by lofty towers
from which a withering cross-fire could be brought to bear upon besiegers.
That they had surrendered their catapults—the heavy artillery of the
ancients—did not weaken the determination of the Carthaginians to defend
their beloved city to the bitter end. With beams obtained by tearing
down public buildings, they hastily constructed new engines of war; to
provide the ropes for these, the women (since this was before the vogue
of the boyish bob) sacrificed their hair; for ammunition they tore up the
great stones which paved the Forum. So, when the Romans jauntily advanced
to take possession of a presumably defenseless city, they found the
Carthaginians prepared for a last desperate stand, a hopeless but heroic
defense whose epic story was destined to reverberate down the endless
corridors of time.
The Roman commander, belatedly realizing how formidable had become the
undertaking on which he had embarked so confidently, sat down before
the city walls. For two long years the siege dragged on, the occasional
attacks delivered by the Romans doing more harm to the besiegers than
to the besieged. But Rome’s determination to end for good and all the
threat offered by her great rival never wavered, and in 147 B.C. she
intrusted the command of her armies in Africa to her most brilliant
general, Scipio Africanus the Younger, then only thirty-seven. Scipio was
quick to realize that his most powerful ally in the taking of the city
was famine. Up to this time the Carthaginians had succeeded in obtaining
supplies both by sea and by land, but Scipio now proceeded to build
across the neck of the isthmus a great fortification which effectually
cut off the city’s communications on the land side. His next step was
to block the entrance to the commercial and military harbors by throwing
across the entrance to the little bay on which they opened a gigantic
jetty of hewn stones, thus making impossible relief from the sea. Then,
the enemy completely hemmed in, he sat himself down and waited with such
patience as he could summon for famine to do its ghastly work. So passed
the terrible winter of 147-6 B.C. When, early in the spring, Scipio
renewed his attacks, he was confronted by an enemy gaunt with hunger and
decimated by disease but indomitable still.
Every stronghold, no matter how formidable its defenses, has its weak
point, and Carthage’s, as Scipio discovered, was at the entrance to its
harbors. This, he decided, must be his immediate objective; here he
determined to deliver his grand assault. So, utilizing the jetty which
he had built, he poured his storm-battalions of seasoned legionaries
upon the breakwater and so by the harbor-mouth into the edge of the city
itself. Hurling his troops forward in the mass formations for which the
Romans were famous, gaining ground foot by foot and then only by sheer
weight of numbers, he slowly drove the defenders back upon the Cothon,
or military harbor. This also he stormed, and that night his weary
legionaries bivouacked in the Forum, within the innermost of the city’s
triple walls.
From the Forum to the foot of the precipitous Byrsa Hill, from the brow
of which the citadel frowned down upon the city, is barely a quarter of
a mile, yet so desperate was the house-to-house fighting in the maze of
narrow alleys and crowded, high-walled buildings which formed the lower
town, so frenzied the resistance of the Carthaginians, that it took the
Romans six terrible days to cover that short distance.
Street fighting is always a savage business; in this labyrinth of
lanes and passages and culs-de-sac it was terrible beyond description.
Quarter was neither asked nor given. Women and children were slaughtered
as remorselessly as the men. The streets were carpeted with dead and
dying; their entrances were barricaded with cadavers; the pavements
were slippery with blood; the waters of the harbor and the bay beyond
were reddened by the sanguinary torrent which descended from the city’s
gutters. Huge paving-stones, hurled by the improvised Carthaginian
catapults, crashed into the Roman ranks, crushing their victims into
masses of reeking, quivering flesh which resembled nothing human.
War-elephants, trumpeting with rage and fear, tore through the teeming
thoroughfares, trampling the soldiers underfoot or dashing their brains
out against the walls of the buildings. From the housetops disheveled,
wild-eyed women poured molten pitch upon the attackers, who shrieked
in agony as the flesh was scalded from their bones. Other women, armed
with knives, slipped from their hiding-places as the storming-columns
passed to cut the throats of the wounded and to hideously mutilate them.
Men fought breast to breast with swords and daggers and battle-axes
and spears, and when these were shattered they used their naked hands,
gouging their enemies’ eyeballs from their sockets, tearing out their
throats, even biting each other to death like famished wolves.
Hanging low over the stricken city was a dark pall of dust and smoke,
beneath which the grim specters of lust and hatred went about their
dreadful work. Women were raped in the presence of their dying husbands.
Children were transfixed with spears or torn asunder before their
mothers’ eyes. The priests were murdered on their own altars and sobbed
out their lives at the feet of their gods. Houses were sacked and set
aflame. The barbarian allies of the Romans, with their braided hair and
painted bodies, flitted through the inferno, intent on loot and rapine,
like creatures escaped from the Pit.
The din of battle was terrific; the deep-throated roar of the charging
legionaries, the answering war-cries of the defenders, the shrieks and
groans of the wounded, the shrill imprecations of frenzied women, the
wailing of terrified children, the trumpeting of the war-elephants, the
clash and clang of metal, the thunderous concussion of the catapult
stones, the twang of bowstrings, the whine of arrows, the sickening
_plunk_ as they sank in human flesh—all these combined to make a
hurricane of horrors, a very hell of sound.
Then, at last, came a pause in the slaughter, but not until the proudest
city in the world had been transformed into a shambles, a human
abattoir. Hasdrubal, the Carthaginian commander, agreed to surrender on
the sole condition that the lives of the survivors should be spared.
Scipio accepted, and fifty thousand half-naked, starving wretches—all
that were left alive out of the city’s seven hundred thousand—emerged
from the citadel to claim such mercy as the blood-drunk victors might
show. They were sent to Rome in chains and sold in the market-place as
slaves. But nine hundred fighting-men, deserters to whom Scipio sternly
refused amnesty, barricaded themselves in the great temple and, setting
it on fire, perished in the flames. With them died Hasdrubal’s wife
and children, Hasdrubal himself, a prisoner of the Romans, being an
eye-witness of their heroic end.
The work of Scipio was accomplished, and he returned to Rome. When
consulted by the Senate as to the future of Carthage he declined
to express an opinion, though he is said to have opposed the wanton
destruction of what remained of the city. But the Romans closed their
ears to the counsels of moderation and reason. Too proud to admit it,
they knew in their hearts that fear would haunt them as long as one stone
of Carthage remained upon another. It was decreed, therefore, that the
city should be razed to the ground, the ruins plowed under, and a solemn
curse laid upon any one who should venture to build upon or cultivate the
site. Ten commissioners were appointed to execute the decree. But they
were forestalled in this final act of spite and hatred, in their craving
to wreak vengeance on a corpse, for when the residents of the suburb of
Megara learned that the obliteration of the city had been determined
upon they themselves set the torch to what remained. The conflagration
raged for seventeen days, and when at last it died for want of something
further to consume the once-proud Empress of the Seas lay in ashes.
Cato’s demand had been complied with. _Carthago deleta est._
But the site of Carthage was too important to remain unoccupied for
long, or to be permitted to fall into other and perhaps hostile hands,
and, within less than a quarter of a century of its destruction by
Scipio, Caius Gracchus was despatched with six thousand settlers to
establish there a Roman colony. The project failed to meet with success,
however—perhaps the curse of Rome was still in working order—and, though
Julius Cæsar, sleeping on the Byrsa for a night after the battle of
Thapsus, dreamed of rebuilding the city, the work was not undertaken
until Augustus had ascended the imperial throne.
Then arose upon the Punic ruins a great metropolis which took rank as
the third city in the Roman Empire, rivaling in her opulence and glory
Antioch, Alexandria, even Rome herself. The new Carthage was richer, more
beautiful, more luxurious than the old, the repository of the arts of
Greece and the sciences of Rome, and the cradle of early Christianity.
Whereas the Phenicians had sought merely to produce an effect of massive
weight, the architecture of the Roman city was characterized by beauty of
outline and an almost unequaled wealth of sculptural detail and richness
of decoration. During the second century A.D., Carthage, its material
prosperity now greater than ever, was the scene of the persecution and
martyrdom of thousands of Christians, even women of the noblest birth,
such as Perpetua and Felicitas, being devoured in its amphitheater by the
lions.
Notwithstanding the immense importance of Carthage, the Romans, curiously
enough, made but little attempt to expand their African frontiers, their
trans-Mediterranean territory at this period consisting of little more
than that portion of the modern Tunisia which lies to the east of a line
drawn from Tabarca to Sfax. This formed the Provincia Africa, and it was
from this little triangle of land that the whole of the vast continent
took its name.
But the haughty spirit and iron will of the Romans were broken by
Alaric the Goth, who sacked Rome in 410, so that the empire was already
tottering to its fall when the terrible Genseric, deformed in body and in
mind, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar with his barbarian hordes, swept
like a cyclone along the northern shore of Africa, took Carthage in 439,
and made it a Vandal stronghold. But the African empire which the Vandals
had built in a day perished in a night; for less than a century later, in
533 to be exact, the barbarians were defeated and Carthage occupied by a
Byzantine army under the leadership of the famous soldier Belisarius—or
Beli-tzar, the White Prince, to give him his proper name. Within three
months of his landing Belisarius was able to send word to his master
Justinian, at Constantinople, that the Provincia Africa was once more a
part of the empire of Rome.
For a hundred years the Greek emperors kept a precarious hold on what is
now Tunisia; then the flood of Arab conquest broke upon the shores of
North Africa, Roman civilization was swept away along with Christianity,
the priests were murdered on their own altars, the crescent replaced the
cross above such towns as were permitted to remain standing, and Carthage
was stormed by Hassan, who laid the afflicted city in ruins for a second
time, everything that was left above ground being carried away to be
used in the reconstruction and adornment of Tunis, Kairouan, and other
Arab cities. Thenceforward Carthage was to be but a quarry for Arab and
European builders, the Genoese sailors boasting that they never returned
from an African voyage without a ballast of Carthaginian marbles, great
quantities of which, it is said, were utilized in the construction of the
cathedral of Pisa. Only once more does Carthage make its bow to history,
when Louis IX of France, leading the Last Crusade, died from the plague
while encamped upon its site.
For upward of twelve hundred years Tunisia suffered under Arab barbarity
and misrule, and the shores of the Western Mediterranean from Arab
depredations. Then the troop-laden transports of a regenerated France
dropped anchor off La Goulette, and the harassed, war-torn country
entered on a new era of civilization and prosperity under the tricolor.
All this is history, of course, and to my readers doubtless already
familiar, but I offer no apologies for repeating it here, because,
without the background of the Punic Wars, of the Roman, Vandal, and
Byzantine occupations, and the Moslem conquest, it is impossible to
realize the tremendous significance of that sun-drenched hill-slope,
littered with heaps of débris and dotted with excavation mounds, strewn
with the rubble of crumbling walls and shattered marbles, where the
Mistress of the Mediterranean once sat enthroned in her pomp of pride and
power.