Carthage Must Be Destroyed (54 page)

In addition to the more obvious slurs, therefore, is the intimation of potential incest, adding the charges of perversion and sacrilege to an already considerable list of sins.
²⁷
Moreover, Hanno is lampooned for the outlandishness of his dress, for his lack of a cloak and his unbelted tunic were signs of effeminacy to a Roman, as were the earrings worn by his companions.
²⁸

In an apparent highlight of the play, Hanno pretends that he can speak only Punic to two other characters, Agorastocles, a young gentleman, and his rascally slave Milphio. The latter, after erroneously leading his master and the audience to believe that he is proficient in Punic, proceeds to mistranslate, to great comic effect. Whether the language Hanno speaks is Punic or not (which has never been conclusively demonstrated or disproved), the joke lies in the bizarreness and incomprehensibility of the language to the audience.
²⁹
Furthermore, Hanno, who is in fact a wealthy gentleman, is portrayed by Milphio as a pedlar of a ridiculously diverse range of products, including African mice, cutlery, farming tools, nuts and maybe sewage pipes, all of which was surely a play on the Carthaginian reputation for mercantile trade. In the ensuing farce, Milphio also suggests to Agorastocles that he should be wary of being scammed by the Carthaginian.

Throughout the play, even when the probity of Hanno’s intentions has been ascertained, the abuse and ridicule that his character is subjected to continue. In one particularly raucous scene, a soldier mistakes Hanno for a client of his daughters when he comes across the Carthaginian embracing them:

Instead of placating the soldier by explaining his familial relationship with the girls, Hanno further winds him up by suggesting that he is in fact a punter looking for some business. The soldier explodes again into another round of racist abuse:

George Franko has commented, ‘Plautus sought to make his audience laugh, and these remarks presumably catered to a racist element in the Roman audience. Veterans of the Hannibalic War might well have enjoyed such anti-Carthaginian abuse. The soldier’s remarks indicate that sharing a Carthaginian’s joy at the recovery of his daughters will not have precluded laughing at the abuse of that Carthaginian.’
³²

At the same time, however, the
Poenulus
conveyed a far more subtle message, for, despite portraying Hanno as licentious and deceitful, Plautus lays a heavy emphasis on his protagonist’s true
pietas
, the recognition and discharge of one’s duties to the gods and family.
Pietas
was a particularly Roman virtue, and it was truly extraordinary, and indeed provocative, that it should be ascribed to a Carthaginian, even in a comic context. Hanno’s
pietas
, furthermore, is matched by another (perhaps bizarre) accomplishment: his seemingly expert knowledge of Roman law, which he uses to great effect to retrieve his daughters from their pimp. The message of the
Poenulus
, therefore, was that the Roman virtue of
pietas
and the rule of Roman law were the route to success, rather than Punic trickery and deceit–the strategies that Hanno had first used in the play. The
Poenulus
thus not only pandered to popular prejudices against Carthaginians, it also emphasized the superior nature of Roman values and institutions.
³³
While the play had been based on a Greek original, its message was unmistakably contemporary.

While the Carthaginians could perhaps cope with their negative presentation within Roman comedy, by the 160s some within the Senate had begun to conceive of more serious anti-Carthaginian action. It is clear that Roman foreign policy now became more aggressive, while continually hiding behind the pretext of ‘just war’. In the previous decade, Roman suspicions of King Perseus of Macedonia had led the Senate to declare war. The road to the Third Macedonian War (171–168) had followed an alarmingly familiar path. A series of complaints were laid against Macedon by smaller states favoured by Rome, and diplomatic missions between Macedon and Rome had been quietly hostile. Finally, Perseus’ most powerful regional rival, Eumenes, king of Pergamum, had persuaded the Romans that their suspicions about Macedonian aggression were well justified. The final justifications for war were in fact mostly fictitious, including the supposed assassinations of key Roman allies in the region. As Rome mobilized its troops, Perseus’ requests for dialogue and information were met by increasing evasiveness and equivocation. A truce was eventually offered to Perseus by the Roman general Philippus, which the young Macedonian naively accepted as a sign of Roman goodwill. Philippus, however, was simply buying time to get the main bulk of his forces to the Balkans. Although some senators balked at this supposedly un-Roman duplicity, their colleagues colluded in it by deliberately delaying Macedon’s envoys to Rome from returning home. It was, as one historian has suggested, ‘as disreputable a piece of Roman diplomatic duplicity as many senators had ever witnessed’.
³⁴

Perseus’ final defeat, at Pydna in 168, which had spelled the end of the Macedonian monarchy, signalled the adoption of an even harder line against Carthage in the Roman Senate.
³⁵
Indeed, a number of ancient authors saw this as a watershed in Roman attitudes to other Mediterranean states. In a famous passage, Diodorus, who perhaps took the notion from Polybius, wrote, ‘In more recent times, the Romans, when they went in pursuit of world empire, brought it into being by the valour of arms, then extended its influence far and wide by the kindest possible treatment of the conquered . . . But once they held sway over virtually the whole inhabited world, they confirmed their power by the wielding of terror and by the destruction of the most eminent cities.’
³⁶

Although that development was in fact far less clear than Diodorus suggests, it nonetheless appears that, in the wake of Rome’s victory over Macedon, the Senate was indeed far more willing to use wars in order to protect its interests. At the same time, however, Diodorus sets out a further feature of Roman foreign policy, which appears, superficially at least, directly to contradict his previous pronouncement: ‘The Romans make it a point to embark only upon wars that are just, and to make no casual or precipitate decisions on such matters.’
³⁷
What Diodorus means, however, is that the Roman Senate was
sensitive to the accusation
that it might start a war unjustly. In Roman relations with Carthage, we therefore witness a painfully drawn-out process whereby the Carthaginians eventually provided the Romans with a (weak) justification for further military action.

When, in 162, Masinissa overran the fertile coastal farmland of Syrtis Minor–territory that had been in Carthaginian possession for centuries –the ensuing dispute provided the Romans with the pretext that they required. The real target of this encroachment had been the wealthy trading emporia that dotted the coast, but these were well defended and remained outside Numidian control. What military force had initiated was completed by Roman arbitration. Carthage was ordered to relinquish any claim to the territory seized by Masinissa, and the injustice was further compounded when the former was required to pay the Numidian 500 talents of silver, which represented the revenues the Carthaginians had received from Syrtis Minor since the dispute had begun.
³⁸
Even Polybius clearly highlighted the unfairness of this ruling, writing that ‘their [the Carthaginians’] claim to the country was evidently just,’ and proved by Masinissa’s previous request to enter the territory in order to pursue a renegade general.
³⁹

While Livy’s account of this episode appears to lack the fullness of that of Polybius, it nevertheless includes an interesting detail about the arguments made to Rome by either side. For the Carthaginians, the territory fell within the boundaries set by Scipio Africanus at the end of the Second Punic War, and was therefore indisputably theirs.
⁴⁰
The Numidians, however, not only disputed the assertion that these lands were included within the 201 agreement, but also countered the Carthaginian claim with much older historical precedent. They asked:

Part of the problem was the vagueness with which Scipio had actually set the boundaries in 201, but the Numidian argument actually seemed to confirm the Carthaginian possession of the lucrative trading emporia, for in defence of these Carthage had indeed proved itself ‘stronger in arms’.
⁴²
When the Roman Senate decided in favour of the Numidians’ dubious and opportunistic claims, it was an ominous warning of what was to come. Within a decade Masinissa employed the same aggressive tactics to seize the fertile Thusca region, which had long been Carthaginian territory. Once more the Carthaginians complained to the Roman Senate, but the subsequent embassy sent from Rome merely compounded their problems, for it was led by a man who was already implacably opposed to the city.
⁴³

Marcus Porcius Cato was an old man of 81 years, but he had lost little of the hard-nosed political skill and ferocious determination that had driven his rise from relatively humble beginnings to the summit of the Roman political system, the consulship. Famed for his ascetic lifestyle and sense of moral rectitude, Cato had throughout his career rigorously pursued those fellow senators who had failed to meet his own high standards, and it was indeed Cato who had led the successful campaign to drive Scipio Africanus into the political wilderness.
⁴⁴
Cato’s apparent hatred towards Carthage was most probably born from his experiences during the Second Punic War, in which he had served in the Roman army at Capua, the siege of Tarentum and the Battle of the Metaurus in 207.

Arriving in Carthage in 152, the Roman embassy led by Cato decided to leave the seized territory in Numidian hands, but Cato himself was nevertheless alarmed by what he found. According to Plutarch, ‘The city was by no means in a poor and lowly state, as the Romans supposed, but rather teeming with vigorous fighting men, overflowing with enormous wealth, filled with arms of every sort and with military supplies, and not a little emboldened by all this.’
⁴⁵
Moreover, in the countryside crops were growing in abundance to feed the city’s burgeoning population.
⁴⁶
The Roman envoys also found evidence of large quantities of stored timber, which they presumably feared would be used to build a war fleet.
⁴⁷

On his return to Rome, Cato set to work lobbying his fellow senators. Although the famous aphorism ‘delenda est Carthago’ is a later invention, he would nevertheless end all speeches in the Senate with the uncompromising statement that Carthage indeed had to be destroyed.
⁴⁸
His primary argument was that Carthage not only was restoring itself to its former strength, but had also learned from and corrected the errors of the past.
⁴⁹
In his desperate efforts to get his senatorial colleagues to back his position Cato proved himself unabashed by a little histrionics. Standing on the speaker’s rostrum, he shook out the folds of his toga and revealed a large, juicy African fig. He then told his audience in the Senate House that the fig had been picked in Carthage just three days ago, thereby driving home not only the city’s renewed prosperity, but also its proximity to Rome.
⁵⁰
At the same time, and despite the obvious exaggeration, Cato made his senatorial audience aware of the agricultural riches that could be appropriated if Carthage were destroyed.
⁵¹

Cato’s position was opposed by a group of senators led by Scipio Nascia, the son-in-law of Scipio Africanus, who reportedly argued that to destroy Rome’s greatest enemy would be simultaneously to destroy its political equilibrium. Without a great enemy like Carthage, they predicted, the common citizenry would refuse to obey the authority of the Senate and, drunk with greed and power, would drag Rome into a series of ill-thought-out and potentially disastrous adventures.
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Diodorus summarized Scipio’s arguments as follows: