Carthage Must Be Destroyed (57 page)

Within the pages of literature, therefore, Carthage remained as unfinished business. However, the Roman attempt both to control and to reshape the past manifested itself in the works not only of historiographers, but also of a new generation of Roman epic poets. These poets self-consciously based their works on Greek precedent, but by emphasizing specifically Roman themes they sought to create their own ‘national literary culture’.
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The first of these writers of epic were in fact not Romans but Italians from the south of the peninsula, where the cultural influence of the Hellenic world was strongest. Coming to Rome during or immediately after the Second Punic War, they established close links with a wide variety of influential Roman senators.
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Unsurprisingly, the wars with Carthage loomed large in their work. Gnaeus Naevius, a Campanian and a military veteran of the First Punic War, wrote, in the last years of the third century BC, the first Latin epic poem,
The Punic War
, taking that conflict as his subject.
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Naevius was followed by one of Rome’s greatest poets, Quintus Ennius, a Calabrian, who had seen military service against the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War. His epic masterpiece, the
Annales
, took the whole of Roman history as its ambitious theme.
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Both Naevius and Ennius explored recent historical events within a broader overarching frame of ancient myth.
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The history of Roman–Carthaginian relations was forsaken for an epic narrative that emphasized an epic struggle between the two cities for the leadership of the world, a state of affairs divinely ordained from their very foundation. In Naevius’ epic, and also one must suspect in that of Ennius (which, like many works from this period, survives only partially, in fragmentary form), the Carthaginian queen and founder Dido (based upon Elissa in the Greek Hellenistic writers) was portrayed as a contemporary of Aeneas. The intention, clearly, was to maintain the fake equivalence between the respective ages of Carthage and Rome, first propounded by Timaeus.
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For both Naevius and Ennius, it was not the affairs of men but the affections and rivalries of the gods which had brought about the Punic wars. Rome’s patron deity and protectress was Venus, the mother of Aeneas, while Juno fulfilled the same role for the Carthaginians.
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Indeed, it was only when the latter’s hatred was placated that a Roman victory was assured.

On one level, such divine partisanship was in no way new, for in the
Iliad
, the great Homeric epic tale, for which both Naevius and Ennius had provided a partial sequel, Hera, the Greek equivalent of Juno, nursed a famous hated of the Trojans (among whom was Aeneas), while Aphrodite, the Greek equivalent of Venus, supported Troy.
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The mapping of this animosity on to contemporary divisions between Rome and Carthage was, however, a far more recent development, and surely a reflection of the claims to divine favour made by both sides during the Second Punic War. Indeed, the notion of Venus as the ancestress of the Roman people had been securely established only in that period (with the construction of the temple of Venus Erycina on the Capitol), and the acknowledgement of Juno’s enmity was made only soon after, with the various ceremonies to appease her.
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Naevius’
Bellum Poenicum
, written while Hannibal was still in Italy, was thus a further response to the religious propaganda of the Carthaginian general and his entourage.
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Ennius, by contrast, wrote the final sections of his
Annales
in the 170s, when Rome’s relationship with Carthage had once more deteriorated.
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Although it took in all of Roman history, the work, like Cato’s
Origines
, still displayed a marked bias towards more recent events, in particular the Second Punic War.
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What survives of the work certainly condemns the Carthaginians, describing them as ‘petticoated lads’ and ‘wicked, haughty foes’ and claiming that they sacrifice their own little sons to the gods.
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Like Naevius before him, Ennius similarly presented the struggle between Carthage and Rome in divine terms, and predicted the triumph of the latter by promise of Jupiter.
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In both the
Bellum Poenicum
and the
Annales
, therefore, the Punic wars were presented as a divinely ordained battle for supremacy from which only one of the participants could, eventually, emerge intact.

The impact of such ideas on the final decision to destroy Carthage cannot be gauged. Nevertheless, one of the last acts reportedly undertaken by Scipio Aemilianus before the final assault on the city suggests that they represented something far more prescient than mere literary embellishment or fantasy. Before sending his troops upon their final assault, Scipio, according to one later source, performed the solemn religious ritual of the
evocatio
, exhorting the gods of Carthage to desert their city and accept a new home in Rome.
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The ceremony was significant for a number of reasons. In its immediate context, it meant that the Romans could avoid any charge of sacrilege, for they were now attacking an essentially godless city. More broadly, however, the ritual of the
evocatio
represented a final statement in the long-drawn-out battle for the sacred landscape of the central Mediterranean–a battle which had shaken Roman self-belief to its very core. The ritual was carried out at the moment when Scipio was already assured of his victory, and therefore his appeal for divine favour was certain to appear successful. The divine favour bestowed on the Roman people was now compellingly confirmed by the presence of their legions on the verge of final victory at the enemy city. As the Carthaginian gods supposedly deserted to the Roman cause, Rome’s domination of the central and western Mediterranean emphatically received the divine sanction for which it had so long struggled.

As an intense fire raged on the Byrsa, Scipio ordered his troops to demolish Carthage’s walls and ramparts. Following military custom, the Roman general also allowed the soldiers to loot the city, and rewards were handed out to those legionaries who had displayed conspicuous bravery during the campaign. Scipio personally distributed all gold, silver and religious offerings, and other spoils were either sent to Rome or sold to raise funds. The surviving arms, siege engines and warships were burnt as offerings to the gods Mars and Minerva, and the city’s wretched inhabitants were sent to the slave markets—with the exception of a few grandees (including Hasdrubal) who, after being led through Rome as part of Scipio’s triumph, were allowed to lead a life of comfortable confinement in various Italian cities.
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Besides these few commanders, the only Carthaginians who fully escaped their fellow citizens’ collective fate were those who had been absent from the city during the siege. One was a well-known philosopher called Hasdrubal, who had relocated to Athens further to pursue his academic career. After arriving in Greece, where he had wisely changed his name to Clitomachus, in 129 he had eventually risen to the headship of the prestigious Athenian Academy. During a long and illustrious career, Clitomachus wrote an astonishing 400 treatises, which earned him praise from a number of prominent Romans. Besides his philosophical works, he reportedly addressed a work to his fellow Carthaginians after the destruction of the city, in which he opined that at such calamitous times much comfort was to be gained from philosophy (a sentiment that would no doubt have been appreciated by his fellow citizens as they were murdered by marauding Roman soldiers or dragged into a life of miserable slavery).
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After the initial ravaging of the city by the legions, the Senate sent a ten-man commission from Rome in order to supervise a series of measures designed to ensure that Carthage remained uninhabited. To that end Scipio was ordered to raze the remainder of the city to the ground, and a solemn curse was put on any persons who in the future attempted to settle on the Byrsa or in the Megara district. Moreover, those cities that had remained loyal to Carthage would pay for their loyalty with utter destruction, while Roman allies in the region were rewarded with Carthaginian territory. Those that had remained neutral were placed under the control of a senior senatorial official who would be sent out from Rome each year.
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When word of final victory reached Rome, there was an extraordinary outpouring of happiness and relief on the streets of the city. According to Appian, the news was greeted with understandable joy, for ‘no other war had so terrified them at their own gates as the Punic wars, which ever brought peril to them by reason of the perseverance, skill, and courage, as well as the bad faith, of those enemies.’
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While most surviving accounts of the Punic wars contain a high degree of hyperbole, in this instance such extravagant language perhaps accords well with the general reaction of the Roman public. The end of a series of wars which had seen Rome’s divine sanction undermined, and the enemy at the very gates of the city, can surely only have brought relief.
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The extraordinary outpouring of Roman religious and literary activity in the course of the wars, at least, demonstrates the extent to which success or failure on the battlefield was bound up with the Romans’ perceptions both of the world and of themselves.

While the Second Punic War was perceived as the confirmation of predestined Roman hegemony, for many it simultaneously signalled the start of a long decline. For Polybius, whose views appear to have been shared by many of the Roman senatorial elite (and the wider intellectual community of the Hellenistic world), it was the unavoidable fate of all great powers that they should eventually fall.
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Thus, while the well-balanced Roman constitution would help prevent decline for a time, the fate of Carthage also awaited Rome. In Polybian political philosophy, however, future decline lay less in the rise of alternative powers than in destructive internal conflict and the rise of irrationality. The decline, defeat and eventual destruction of Carthage were thus attributed to the demagogy of the Barcids and the increasing influence of popular politics within the city. Even Hannibal, whom Polybius greatly admired as a military commander, was viewed as being fatally flawed by an irrationality and impulsiveness that symbolized the last years of the city.
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In destroying Carthage, therefore, the Romans had confirmed a theory that forecast the eventual doom of their own city.

In the last decades of the second century BC and into the first, as the Roman Republic plunged into political crisis and bloody civil war, that political philosophy which foretold the decline of Rome must have seemed all the more prescient. As well as providing an ominous blueprint for Rome’s troubled future, a fallen Carthage now played a conspicuous role in the genesis of the bitter discord that broke out among the ranks of the Roman Senate. In fact the internal dissension that Carthage would stir within the Roman senatorial elite had become apparent even before the city had fallen. The Roman commander Hostilius Mancinus, piqued at what he perceived as a lack of recognition of his achievements, in contrast to the plaudits and glory showered on Scipio Aemilianus, commissioned an elaborate painting of Carthage and the assaults that he had led against it, which he then erected in the Roman forum. Standing next to this billboard, Mancinus even went as far as to offer onlookers a commentary on how his heroic actions had helped bring about the capture of the city.
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Personal glory was not the only disputed spoil of the Third Punic War, however, for the extensive and fertile North African territories that had become Roman land became a major source of tension. Land reform–particularly for the military veterans who had played such a major role in the glittering successes on the battlefield, but afterwards had often indecorously ended up among the growing ranks of disenfranchised poor–became a point of increasingly bitter contention within the Senate. In 123 the senator Gaius Sempronius Gracchus and his supporters in the reformist faction successfully forced through a measure that allowed for not only the settlement of some old Carthaginian territory, but also the establishment of a new colony called Junonia on the site of the old city. The move had met with serious opposition from the conservatives led by Scipio Aemilianus, but Gracchus reportedly won the debate by citing the old argument of Scipio Nascia: that the destruction of Carthage would lead to the emergence of demagogues and would-be tyrants in Rome (a clear reference to Scipio Aemilianus). Aemilianus, understandably sensitive to such accusations, deflected the accusation by blaming factionalism in the Senate on luxury and greed spurred by Rome’s conquest of the East.
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Both sides were nevertheless seemingly agreed: Rome was in moral decline, and conquest was the cause.

The reformers, although they had scored a victory in this particular round of the battle, not long after found their efforts thwarted, for their opponents had turned the tide of public opinion by spreading rumours that the boundary markers of the new colony had been pulled up by wolves (which soothsayers considered an ill omen). The Junonia project was dramatically abandoned soon afterwards.
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The tensions between reformers and conservatives nevertheless continued, and culminated a year later, in 121, in a bloody putsch perpetrated by the consul Lucius Opimius, whereby Gracchus and 3,000 of his supporters were murdered. In an act of calculated brazenness, Opimius then controversially commissioned a temple on the Capitol to be dedicated to the divine virtue of
Concordia
(Concord).
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For many it stood as an ironic and unwelcome reminder of the bloody discord that now stalked Rome. The following graffito had been inscribed on the building: ‘A work of mad discord makes a temple of Concordia.’
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