Carthage Must Be Destroyed (28 page)

Some scholars, in particular William Harris, have argued for the inevitability of conflict between Carthage and Rome once Pyrrhus was defeated. Rome now had control over Magna Graecia, and the affairs of the Greek cities in southern Italy had long been intertwined with those of their counterparts on the island of Sicily. Such scholars point to the Roman capture of Rhegium (just across the Strait of Messina from Sicily), in 270, the foundation of two new Roman colonies at Paestum and Cosa on the Tyrrhenian coast, in 273, and the confiscation of the Bruttian forests (a source of timber ideal for shipmaking) as signs of Roman designs on Sicily.
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All these developments have been seen as evidence of the growing influence of a cabal of several Roman senatorial families of Campanian origin who wanted to provoke a war with Carthage so that they could control the flow of Campanian goods, especially wine and fine black-glaze pottery, into Punic Sicily and North Africa.
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However, there is little evidence for the export of substantial quantities of Campanian goods into either Punic Sicily or Carthage during this period.
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In fact these initiatives probably had far more to do with Rome’s growing concerns over its lack of a maritime defence, especially as the capture of Magna Graecia had greatly increased the amount of Tyrrhenian coastline under its control.
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It is extremely unlikely that any significant grouping in either Rome or Carthage actively sought war with the other; however, new political realities meant that tensions between the two states were bound to arise. The Sicilian cities had a long tradition of playing off the larger regional powers against one another, and now that Rome had joined the number of the latter it would be only a matter of time before it became embroiled in the affairs of the island. Furthermore, any Roman reticence about challenging Carthage on land must have been diminished by the Carthaginian army’s unimpressive showing against Pyrrhus in Sicily. Despite the lack of overt warmongering, therefore, by the early 260s the central position of a divided Sicily within the influence and interests of both cities, and the apparent swing of contemporary military might away from Carthage and towards Rome, made for a highly combustible situation.

Behind the political pragmatism and strategic diplomacy lurked a growing sense among the Roman senatorial elite that the Carthaginians inhabited a different side of an important ethno-cultural divide. By the fourth century, the Roman elite had become increasingly interested in a number of theories propagated by Greek authors on the origins of their city. The earliest known example of such ethnographical speculation, by the fifth-century-BC writer Hellanicus of Lesbos, claimed that the great wandering hero Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and the Trojan prince Aeneas, who had come to Italy after Troy had been destroyed by the Greeks, were the joint founders of Rome.
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Superficially this may have looked like a strange combination, as it was the enmity between the Greeks and the Trojans which had been the subject of the most famous Greek epic ever written, and, theoretically at least, Trojans were in Greek eyes barbarians.

In fact in much Hellenic literature the Trojans were often characterized as possessing many of the same qualities and virtues as the Greeks.
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Indeed, by the late fourth century the Roman aristocracy appears to have embraced the idea of a Trojan heritage precisely because, while it allowed them to maintain their own ethnic distinctiveness, it also permitted them to share in the prestige of the Hellenic cultural tradition.
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Over the next century, as the western-Greek intelligentsia, especially in Sicily, had become increasingly aware and interested in Rome, so the number of stories that linked the city’s foundation to either Greek or Trojan settlers would be multiplied into a bewildering number of versions.
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Although the Romans had their own indigenous foundation myth, which centred on the twin foundlings Romulus and Remus, by the end of the fourth century BC those stories that associated the origins of the city with Trojan and Greek settlers had become very influential among sections of the Roman aristocratic elite who were beginning to show a deep interest in Greek language, art and politics.
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Indeed, over time this diffuse set of stories concerning Rome’s origins was skilfully incorporated into a prehistory that emphasized different waves of Greek and Trojan incomers, eventually leading to the foundation of the city by Romulus and Remus, now considered to be the direct descendants of Aeneas. These stories were not just quaint pieces of cultural narcissism. They came to have important political ramifications, for instance in the appeal to common kinship made by Demetrius Poliorcetes, king of Macedonia in the early third century, in an attempt to gain Roman assistance in dealing with Etruscan pirates.
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Among these Greek foundation myths, the cult of Hercules began to have an increasingly high profile by the time of Rome’s great Italian expansion in the fourth century BC. Although, as we have seen, the cult at the Forum Boarium stretched back into the archaic period, it had by this period divested itself of its earlier syncretistic properties, and especially any connections with Melqart. In 399 BC the cult of Hercules was accepted into the Roman religious calendar, and then in 312 it received the ultimate accolade of becoming an official state cult. The first official temple to Hercules Invictus, ‘the Invincible’–a clear nod to the triumphalism of the Hellenistic world–was also built around this time. And it is clear that the Herculean legacy had seeped into the private familial histories of Rome’s aristocratic elite, with one of the major senatorial families, the Fabii, claiming the hero as their progenitor.
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Although the story of Hercules’ association with Rome was a very old one, the myth of his visit to Pallanthium and the subsequent killing of Cacus may have been refined as late as the last decades of the fourth or the early third century BC, which suggests that the association of Hercules with Rome was very closely linked to Roman political aspirations in Italy.
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The claim that Pallanthium (the future site of Rome) was the location for the slaying of Cacus by Hercules certainly lent the city some prestige among its Latin neighbours. Indeed, in some versions of the story Hercules fathered Latinus, the eponymous founder of the Latin people, at the site of Rome.
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Armed with their own Herculean legacy, the Romans could not only claim a distinguished Greek pedigree, but also legitimize their political ambitions over the rest of Italy as establishing a Herculean commonwealth. Then there were the obvious connections with the venerable cities of Magna Graecia, many of whom claimed the great hero as their founder. With a Herculean legacy of their own, not only could the Romans claim to hail from as distinguished an ancestry as their Greek counterparts, but the association also promoted Rome’s political ambitions in the region.

Thus, through their investment in a supposed Trojan heritage and the promotion of the cult of Hercules Invictus, the Roman senatorial elite had by the late fourth/early third century BC come to culturally ally itself increasingly with the Greek world, a development which had important ramifications for Roman attitudes towards the Carthaginians. Romans certainly never thought of themselves as Greeks, but they had begun to view themselves as inhabiting the same side of the Greek-authored ethno-cultural divide that separated the civilized Hellenic world from the barbarian world, a category into which Carthage was emphatically placed. These foundation theories represented something far more potent than mere obtuse scholarly speculation. They were a body of ideas in which there had been considerable material and political investment, for they increasingly came to provide the intellectual justification for war being waged, territory being conquered, and treaties being signed. Rome’s membership of the club of civilized nations by dint of its Trojan antecedents was inherently a political decision open to periodic revision by opportunistic Hellenistic leaders (if circumstances dictated it). Indeed, the Romans themselves had been the target of a brilliant propaganda campaign waged by Pyrrhus, for silver tetradrachms that were minted under his authority were clearly designed to create a firm link in the minds of contemporaries with Alexander the Great. Among the portraits on them were the Greek heroes Heracles and Achilles.
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These images were aimed at the idea that Pyrrhus, like his heroic forebears, would lead the Italian Greeks in crushing the barbarian menace that now threatened them. Pyrrhus tried to use Rome’s supposed Trojan provenance as a propagandistic weapon to marshal the Italian Greeks under his banner, by declaring that he would copy the example of his famous ancestor, the great Greek hero Achilles, by conquering the Romans, the descendants of the Trojans.
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The political importance of ethnic categories was also highlighted later when in 263, during the diplomatic manoeuvring that signalled the escalation of the First Punic War, the Elymian city of Segesta killed its erstwhile Carthaginian allies and defected to the Roman side, citing their common descent from the Trojan prince Aeneas.
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The Romans’ growing interest in their Trojan and Herculean ‘inheritance’ was not in itself a major reason for the breakdown of the relationship with Carthage, although the Roman elite may have become more susceptible to Sicilian Greek stereotyping of Carthage as an aggressive and acquisitive power. It did, however, provide a powerful intellectual model for explaining the growing tensions and final breakdown of that relationship in the early decades of the third century BC. From the remaining fragments of his work, it appears that this was the particular historiographical approach that Timaeus favoured. Despite decades of exile in far-off Athens, he had grasped that, after the failures of Agathocles and Pyrrhus, the future of the central Mediterranean would now be decided between the Carthaginians and the Romans, with the Greeks very much on the sidelines.
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With that painful (for western Greeks at least) reality very much in mind, he had constructed the elaborate fiction that Carthage and Rome had in fact been founded in exactly the same year, 813 BC.
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Through diligent research that had supposedly involved the actual interviewing of informants, Timaeus had satisfied himself of the Trojan origins of both the Romans and the Latin people.
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In the Timaean world view, Rome, as a Trojan–Greek city, was both the new counterweight to the menacing threat of Carthage and the potential champion of the western-Greek world–a view that the Romans may have been happy to encourage. Although very little survives of Timaeus’ account of Pyrrhus, we may speculate that a major theme was the terrible mistake that the western Greeks had made in allying themselves against Rome, a Trojan–Greek city, and a true heir of the Heraclean tradition (in contrast to Pyrrhus, who had falsely tried to claim that tradition for himself), rather than focusing their energies against their common enemy, Carthage.
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It was surely no coincidence that Timaeus was careful to emphasize the Heraclean antecedents of Italy in his work, with particular attention paid to the Greek hero’s progress down through the peninsula and Sicily with the cattle of Geryon.
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The focus on the southern-Italian and Sicilian travels of Heracles in Timaeus’ work may have been deployed in order to emphasize the western Greeks’ and Romans’ shared investment in the great hero’s legacy. Indeed, we know that this connection was not just the product of Timaeus’ imagination, but an idea in which the Romans themselves also had a growing investment. In 270 Rome minted an issue of silver coinage in commemoration of the final victory over Tarentum, and the obverse showed the famous image of Romulus and Remus suckling from the she-wolf. The reverse, however, featured Hercules in the Greek iconographical tradition wearing a lionskin. The city states of southern Italy had a long and proud tradition of putting Heracles on their coins, and the hero had long epitomized the success of Greek colonial endeavour in the region. Now Roman coinage proclaimed Rome’s membership of the Heraclean tradition.
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The catalyst for hostilities between Carthage and Rome was a group of troublesome mercenaries who had decided to make Sicily their home once their services were no longer required by Agathocles. The Mamertines, or ‘followers of Mamers’ (the Italian god of war), had originally hailed from Campania, but on demobilization they had made a new home for themselves by massacring the citizens of the Sicilian city of Messana and taking over their wives and property. However, by the mid 260s they were themselves under sustained pressure from Syracuse, which was enjoying a resurgence under the dynamic leadership of a new populist leader, Hiero. In 265, with their future in serious jeopardy, the Mamertines hedged their bets by appealing for assistance not only to Carthage but also to Rome.

This diplomatic initiative achieved the desired result. The Carthaginian military command on the island eagerly took up the invitation and sent a small force to garrison Messana.
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Later Greek and Roman sources, hostile to Carthage, made the erroneous claim that this was just the first stage of a new attempt by the Carthaginians to seize control of Sicily, after which they had designs on Italy.
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However, the real attraction for the Carthaginian army was most likely to have been that Messana gave them a base in an area that was traditionally considered to be a Syracusan zone of influence. Indeed, this episode was probably nothing more than another of the frequent Sicilian defections between Carthage and Syracuse that occurred on the island. Nevertheless, in Rome a fierce debate took place in the Senate as to how they should respond to the Mamertine plea. If help was provided then it would almost certainly lead to some kind of diplomatic confrontation with Syracuse–which, as we shall see later, may have been the very hope of some senators.
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