Carthage Must Be Destroyed (56 page)

The stairways and steps that were needed to compensate for the gradient of the slope, and the lack of paved surfaces, made it impossible for vehicles to access its streets, but the area was still a thriving hub for local business. One floor was still covered with coral, obsidian and cornelian chippings from a jeweller’s workshop. In another street a miller’s yard was found deserted, with parts of a rotary grain mill still lying discarded on the floor.
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When the Roman consuls eventually began their siege, what confronted them was a very formidable challenge. Although Appian’s account of the fortifications on the isthmus on which Carthage was situated is undoubtedly fanciful–it describes huge walls and fortified towers, as well as barracks and stables large enough to house 20,000 infantry, 300 elephants, and 4,000 horses and their riders–archaeological excavation has proved the existence of triple defences made up of ditches, banks and walls.
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It was these defences that the Roman consuls tested for the remainder of 149, with very little success. At one point Censorinus used massive battering rams to break down a southern section of the outer walls, but he was once more driven back. The siege dragged on throughout 148, and indeed the Carthaginians, despite the desertion of the old Punic cities of North Africa, had reason to be confident. The reprieved general Hasdrubal was roaming freely around Carthage’s hinterland with an army, disrupting Roman communications and supply lines, and the Roman onslaught in general had been repelled with some ease.
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In 147 the new Roman consul Lucius Calpurnius Piso attempted a new tactic, and attacked the last towns in the region which still supported the Carthaginians, thus preventing the latter from receiving supplies and reinforcements. His second in command, Lucius Hostilius Mancinus, also led an opportunistic commando assault on a weak section of Carthage’s defences, but, after initially breaching the wall, Mancinus and his men were set upon, and were saved only by the timely intervention of the adopted grandson of Scipio Africanus, Scipio Aemilianus, who had just arrived in Africa with reinforcements to take over command of the campaign.
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The appointment of the young Scipio Aemilianus, who was underage and without the proper credentials, reflects a general dissatisfaction in Rome with the progress of the war against Carthage. Scipio had been elected consul for 147 not only for his promise as a military commander, but also for the record of his family against the Carthaginians.
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He had already served with some distinction as a legate on the African campaign, and this experience proved invaluable as he looked to restore the morale, and review the strategy, of his army.
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Even Cato, the scourge of the Scipios, believed Scipio Aemilianus was the man for the job.
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Scipio first made sorties to test the Carthaginian defences at different points, and attacked Megara, a large suburban area of the city. Intended or not, the result of the latter action was that Hasdrubal, still camped with his army in the countryside, was at last sufficiently alarmed to move his forces back inside Carthage. Now all the Carthaginian forces were trapped inside the city, and all Scipio needed to do was to mount an effective blockade, which he did by securing the isthmus with a fortified camp complete with watchtower. His final action to effectively seal off the city from the outside world was the construction of a mole to block the harbour, and thus also the arrival of provisions from the sea.

The Carthaginians, initially sceptical about the possibility of building such a structure, noted its rapid progression and attempted to thwart the project by secretly excavating a new entrance on the other side of the harbour. When it was ready, they sent out at dawn a flotilla of makeshift warships built out of old materials, and launched a surprise attack on the Roman positions.
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The Romans, completely taken unaware, were at first thrown into confusion, but the Carthaginians failed to take proper advantage of the situation. Three days later an inconclusive sea battle was fought between the two fleets in the old harbour, with the smaller, more nimble, Carthaginian craft having some initial success in damaging the Roman ships. However, when attempting to withdraw so that they could resume battle the next day, some of the Carthaginian ships became entangled at the new harbour entrance, blocking those that followed and leaving them exposed to Roman attack. A number of ships were therefore lost before the Carthaginian naval squadron could retreat inside the city.
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With the completion of the Roman mole it quickly became apparent that its purpose had been not merely to block the harbour, but also to provide a thoroughfare along which Roman troops and siege equipment could be brought right up to the harbour fortifications. The target was the large external platform that had been used by the Carthaginians as an external harbour and quayside. In their desperation to keep the Romans at bay, the Carthaginians launched a daring mission in which naked men, carrying aloft unlit torches, swam or waded through the water and, in the face of Roman arrows and spears, managed to set light to and destroy completely the first siege engines that Scipio had dragged up to the walls. The next day, however, the Romans began the process of constructing new machines, which were then dragged forward on to tall mounds. From there torches and vessels full of burning pitch were hurled down on to the Carthaginian defenders, who were subsequently forced to retreat from the platform. Now that his troops held this precious foothold, Scipio knew that it was only a matter of time before the city fell. Leaving a portion of his army to ensure that nobody escaped from the city, he went off with the remainder to mop up the last pockets of resistance in the surrounding towns and countryside.
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In Carthage itself the situation was critical, for there was now no food entering the city by land or by sea. The subdivision of many of the houses in the Hannibal Quarter into much smaller living spaces may well be a reflection of overcrowding as Carthage’s population was swelled by refugees from the countryside and the suburbs. With the seizure of the last allied cities, there appeared to be little hope of salvation. Now, after centuries of ruthlessly defending their political authority, the Carthaginian elite succumbed to the autocratic ambitions of one among their number.

Hasdrubal had already shown himself well versed in the art of political machination, for he had already engineered the fall from grace of his chief rival, the military commander of the city. (The unfortunate man had been beaten to death with benches in the Popular Assembly, no doubt by supporters of Hasdrubal, after the latter had falsely accused him of treachery.)
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Once Hasdrubal and his army had taken residence in the city, it was not long before the general revealed his demagogic aspirations.
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Those among the Council of Elders who dared to oppose him were executed, while Hasdrubal took on the insignia of the city’s supreme general, garbed in full armour and a purple robe, and accompanied by a retinue of ten swordsmen. Like the Syracusan tyrants of old, Hasdrubal used a potent mix of populist gestures and brutality to maintain his authority. In a city where supplies were in short supply, food was used as weapon of control, and, as the general citizenry starved, Hasdrubal kept his troops and supporters well fed with banquets and parties.
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Moreover, by torturing captured Roman soldiers to death in full view of their comrades outside the city, he ensured that the Carthaginians had little option but to stay loyal: after this conspicuous display of barbarity, any chance of mercy from the Romans was gone.
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Carthage’s lapse into military tyranny was, however, only short-lived. By the spring of 146, Scipio, with his troops mustered, the bridgehead secure, and the rest of Africa subdued, was at last ready to order the fateful final assault with which this book began. Extraordinarily, an eyewitness to Carthage’s bloody demise was the most important historian of the Second Punic War, Polybius. Polybius had been a senior official of the Greek Achaean League and, suspected by the Romans of harbouring pro-Macedonian sympathies, had been taken to Italy in the early 160s as a hostage. In Rome he had become a close friend of Scipio Aemilianus, and had consequently travelled with his patron on campaigns in Spain, Gaul and Africa (hence his presence in Carthage in 146).
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According to Polybius, as Scipio watched Carthage burn he wept, and then:

It is, of course, difficult to know if Polybius really did write these words down exactly as he heard them. Whatever the provenance of this anecdote, however, Scipio’s tears had little to do with the ghastly horror that the general had unleashed upon Carthage, but were in fact shed for his own city, Rome. With the obliteration of its greatest rival, Rome had arrived as a world power, while at the same time setting in motion the cycle that would eventually lead to its own destruction.

Remarkably, Carthage was not the only venerable, ancient city to be destroyed by the Romans in 146. In the same year a Roman army under Lucius Mummius had captured, looted and destroyed much of the city of Corinth after a revolt by the Achaean League.
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On the one hand, the fate of Corinth serves to highlight the hypocrisy of Roman claims that a particular fear of Carthage had led to the extraordinarily brutal and unwarranted treatment of the city. On the other, it strongly suggests that there was more to the destruction of Carthage than simple aggression. The sacking of two of the richest port cities in the ancient Mediterranean was, for one thing, a hugely profitable business. Both cities were brutally stripped of their wealth, and their works of art were shipped back to Rome. Scipio Aemilianus could at least partly exculpate himself by the fact that the Greek Sicilian cities were invited to come and reclaim the works that the Carthaginians had previously looted from them.
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But slave auctions and the seizure of a large swathe of previous Carthaginian territory, which now became public land owned by the Roman state, unequivocally contributed to a massive infusion of wealth into both public and private Roman coffers.
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At the same time, the conspicuous destruction of two ancient cities sent an unequivocal message: dissent against Rome would not be tolerated, and past glories counted for nothing in this new world. As Nicholas Purcell puts it, ‘Founding, refounding and major embellishment were normal ingredients in rulers’ city policy. Destruction was just as effective . . . At Carthage and Corinth in 146 BC the Romans made a carefully considered statement in the old symbolic language, one which went far beyond any recent experience of city war.’
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The earlier fate of Capua–its people enslaved, its civic status repealed, and its access to the sea removed–had merely been the dress rehearsal for a wider Mediterranean drama.
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The destruction of Carthage and Corinth now stood as a bloody memorial to the cost of resistance to Rome, and a suitably apocalyptic fanfare for Rome’s coming of age as a world power.

The escalation in demands by the Senate to the Carthaginians served as a testing ground for the newly acquired power which Rome now wielded. What began with demands for children as hostages ended in total oblivion, and the reversal of centuries of Carthaginian history and tradition. The attempt to justify that act on ethical grounds was patently disingenuous, particularly when measured against the parallel destruction of Corinth and increasing Roman claims to the Mediterranean Sea as
mare nostrum
, ‘our sea’.
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Rome’s newly found status was expressed not only in the power to obliterate, but also in the power to justify the unjustifiable. With the destruction of Carthage, therefore, the Romans became the makers of history in more ways than one.
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Already the Hannibalic wars had played a crucial role in the genesis of Roman historiography, and Fabius Pictor was followed by other senatorial historians keen to document Rome’s glorious past.

While Pictor had written in Greek, the seminal
Origines
of (none other than) Cato were composed (tellingly) in Latin. Divided into seven books, the
Origines
set out the history of the Romans up until 149, the year of its author’s death.
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Cato, like Pictor before him, sought to show how particularly Roman virtues such as courage and piety had brought about the rise of Rome as a great power. At the same time, however, he was anxious to emphasize that this success was the result not of the glorious actions of individual generals or statesmen, but rather of the collective endeavour of the Roman citizen body.
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But the chronological (and geographical) spread of Cato’s magnum opus was by no means even. Two whole books were devoted to the origins of the peoples of Italy, perhaps with the intention of emphasizing the peninsula’s cultural and historical integrity, as well as the legitimacy of Rome’s leadership of it.
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Much of the first few centuries of Rome’s existence were then condensed into one book, while the First and Second Punic Wars were contained within a book each. Finally, two whole books were devoted to the short period from the early 160s until 149.
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The lack of balance may be explained by the paucity of sources for earlier Roman history, but it also highlights the extent to which the
Origines
was intended as a contemporary manifesto. Not least, the work was perhaps designed to explain (or excuse) both Cato’s and the Senate’s role in the utter destruction of their greatest enemy. Certainly, it was here that Cato presented the infamous dossier of Carthage’s six reputed transgressions of its obligations to Rome.
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The Carthaginian perspective was, one must imagine, completely erased.