Destroy Carthage (27 page)

From now on, every citizen would be occupied in land de­fence.

The
day following the naval action, Roman troops equipped
with rams and assault machines could have been seen crossing
the mole toward the
choma.
Their objective was a defence
post on the broad outer quay from which Carthaginian artillery
had pounded their warships. Revengefully, the attackers ap­plied their engines to the stronghold, smashing part of its
guard-wall.

A vicious struggle ensued for the
choma,
a vital stepping-stone to the docklands. Since the building of the mole, both
sides had land connections with the essentially sea-bound quay,
whose merits as a missile platform were obvious. The Carth­aginians defended it desperately.

In a classic operation against the Roman engines, a party
of swimmers from the city scrambled from the water, slipped
to the machines under cover of darkness, and suddenly lit
torches. Startled by the flaring lights, the Romans responded
with a hail of darts. The naked swimmers were vulnerable.
With suicidal preoccupation they pursued their task until the
siege engines were blazing.

So affected was the Roman camp by the shock of the attack,
the fanatical intensity of its participants, that the wisdom of
confronting such defenders was widely doubted. Scipio is said
to have deployed a cavalry squadron to prevent desertions
among his troops. Meanwhile, the Carthaginians repaired the
damaged strong-post.

The fight for the
choma
resumed with fresh fury. New at­tacks were repulsed. Among Scipio's problems was the diffi­culty of manhandling heavy assault equipment across the
slender footway of the mole. Huge metal-capped battering-
rams of the type employed by Censorinus would have done
the job quickly, but were impractical on the causeway. Such implements demanded the tractive power of men and oxen by the hundred.

Lighter contraptions were brought forward to replace the burnt engines. Still, the Punic post resisted. Only when Scipio, borrowing inspiration from the enemy, resorted to incendiary tactics was he eventually successful. Forcing the defenders from their station with burning projectiles, the Romans oc­cupied the whole outer quay. To prevent its recapture, Scipio built a wall on its landward side behind which he placed ballistae and catapults.

The fall of the
choma,
coming at summer's end, was a death-blow to the harbours. Roman artillery could now cover the merchant pool with heavy missiles (the ancient ballista could throw crushing stones some 400 yards) and cast lighter ones into the naval base. In any case, the impunity with which Scipio's warships were enabled to lie beside the quay denied even the slipperiest of Punic craft use of the new channel.

Carthage entered the winter with starvation not far ahead. Subsistence depended on the gardens of the Megara - a mere supplement, in normal times, to inland and overseas pro­duce - together with some fish and goods smuggled across the lake from Nepheris. Nepheris, still held by the forces of Diogenes, became the next target for Scipio.

Reviving the wilted interest of Gulussa, the Roman com­mander organized a joint Roman-Numidian campaign against the inland fort. The legate Laelius led the allies, with inter­mittent supervision from Scipio, who shuttled between his camp and siege headquarters. The operation was opposed more by winter's blows than by the enemy's. Diogenes's mercen­aries were in poor heart. The peasant levies enlisted to support them showed less zeal. Most broke and ran at an early stage, to be ridden down and slaughtered by Gulussa's cavalry.

Galled by wintry conditions in their field camp, the legion­aries pressed Nepheris, and the promise of shelter, tenaciously. The fall of the stronghold, cutting Carthage's last flimsy life­line, signalled the capitulation of the few other African towns yet to bow to Rome. Though of little practical assistance, their resistance had helped to keep up spirits in the metropolis.

The most extreme of Punic optimists could no longer dispute the outcome of the conflict. In the course of the winter, the Carthaginians made at least one final attempt to obtain toler­able terms from the Romans. Perhaps it was felt that the ap­proaching termination of the consulship of 147 was a favourable moment. Roman generals were notoriously anxious to conclude their campaigns in time to retire as popular victors. Unfortunately for Carthage, reasoning on these lines was in­validated by confirmation of Scipio's understanding that his command would continue until the war was over.

When Hasdrubal, through the mediation of Gulussa, ap­proached Scipio on behalf of the city, the Roman refused to budge from his purpose of destruction. Though apologists were at pains to stress not only his military competence but his sympathetic qualities, it seems that Scipio lacked the magna­nimity, the capacity for the big human gesture, that had made his grandfather by adoption great.

Instead, he displayed mere cunning in offering safe-conduct to Hasdrubal, his family and ten friends of the Carthaginian's choosing. Polybius and the Romans defamed the Punic general, but, whatever his failings, he dismissed the invitation with the contempt it merited. Negotiation impossible, he returned to Carthage for the last scenes of the tragedy.

For three years the city had stood at bay, stripped of empire, bereft of allies, strength ebbing but still dangerous. Even now, her people dying wretchedly of hunger, Carthage evoked fear in her assailants - like some great beast lying mortally crippled with barred fangs. Determined in the spring of 146 to deal the
coup de grace,
Scipio moved with prudent caution.The first step was to assure the operation on religious grounds. Omens were consulted to check on the timing; the protective gods of the city entreated 'to forsake the places, temples, sacred sites, the people and the buildings, and depart from them. Cast terror and confusion on the enemy; fly to Rome and her people.' In return, Scipio's chaplains were pre­pared to promise 'that temples and games shall be founded to honour you.'

This ceremony, the
evocatio,
was followed by the dreadful
devotio,
consigning Carthage and her forces to the demons of the netherworld. Such formulae, vital to troop morale, were essential in the assault of a city whose evil mystique was a watchword in Roman quarters.

Little doubt can have attached to the location of the attack. Throughout winter, Scipio's artillery had commanded the docks from the
choma.
From his camp on the
taenia,
storm- troops could move safely by the mole to the outer quay, a sprint from the merchant harbour. Once this were taken, the section of wall facing the
taenia,
outflanked, would be unten­able by the Carthaginians. Roman reinforcements could stream into the city from the southeast.

Accordingly, the assault infantry, under Laelius, massed by the bay of Kram.

Probably supported by amphibious units, the storming party on the
choma
launched the offensive at an early hour. Rising in line from the Roman-built bulwark on the outer quay, the legionaries had the sun behind them, casting bedazzling shafts from their helmets and arms toward the guard posts. Resistance on the seaward side of the harbour was desultory.

Here, cut off in rear by the rectangular basin, the coastal wall was a hazardous station. Hasdrubal seems to have resigned himself to its abandonment, for he promptly set fire to the harbour sheds, covering his tactical withdrawal.

The Roman infantry technique against missile fire, the 'armadillo,' involved a roof of interlocked shields held aloft in formation. In such a fashion the leading units most likely reached the east wall, scrambling on to it with little opposition. According to Plutarch, the foremost troops included the pro­spective historian Fannius and a youthful brother-in-law of Scipio, Tiberius Gracchus, later of agrarian distinction.Laelius now found himself amid a bewildering scene of fire and bombardment, partly blinded by swirling smoke. Swiftly turning the confusion to advantage, he picked his way north by the wall to the region of the naval base. This, the Romans quickly overran. Scarcely pausing, the attackers swept boldly against a secondary wall dividing the docks from the city-proper.

Here, the first fierce fighting was encountered. But the rapidity of the Roman advance precluded organized resistance at this point, and Laelius stormed into the narrow, winding streets which characterized the Byrsa.

In such streets the mercenaries of Bomilcar had come to grief at the time of his abortive coup, pelted with missiles from the balconied roofs of the houses. Lacking outer windows, their doors barricaded, the faceless white dwellings were hard to enter. Where the hungry inmates had the strength to bear weapons, they now represented a new peril to Laelius. Circum­spectly, he checked the charge, allowing his units to con­solidate.

By evening, the Romans had reached the main square and were mopping-up in the rear. Scipio could be pleased with the day's work. The shell of the city had been breached; the docks and surrounding levels cleared. His army had unimpeded access in the southeast, but much yet depended on continued speed. Resistance, so far light, was likely to stiffen if the garrison and citizens of other quarters were given time to concentrate - especially since the heights of the city were still ahead.

Next morning, Scipio called forward fresh troops. Four thousand moved in through the captured walls. They were ebullient. Expectations of easy victory and long-awaited booty had soared overnight. Now, as they advanced among enticing symbols of affluence - rich temples, inviting houses, merchant banks - avarice overcame discipline and they ran amok.

Vital hours were lost in plundering. At one temple, dedicated to the Carthaginian Apollo, shrine and statue were hacked to pieces with swords in the grab for gold. A thousand talents of the stuff were carried off, so the story goes. By the time authority was restored, the day was wasted. Perhaps luckily for Scipio, the richest temple in Carthage, that of Eshmoun, presented an incentive for renewed attack. It stood a few hundred yards from the square, beyond climb­ing streets - streets now held in strength by the citizens. None could have forecast the cost of the journey. A week of savage fighting, involving all Scipio's reserves and frightful losses, was to pass before the Romans reached their objective.

The
total population of Carthage at the start of the siege, in­cluding freed slaves, has been estimated at 200,000, of whom about 30,000 bore arms in defence of the city. Some had perished in the fighting over three years; more by starvation. Perhaps 100,000, or thereabouts, occupied the densely urban­ized Byrsa in the closing days.

Of these, most must have been enfeebled by hunger, though doubtless Hasdrubal's soldiers were fairly strong. The troops would have secured a priority claim to food. Their vigour could only delay the end. Without ships, or an exit by the isthmus, there was no escape. Either the inhabitants of the tenemented slopes surrendered at discretion, or they died fighting. Tempera­ment dictated the second course.

Three roads led from the square to the vicinity of the temple of Eshmoun, each narrow, lined by multi-storey buildings. Characteristic of such Phoenician cities as Tyre and Motya, where scarcity of space encouraged vertical construction, the tall blocks had become fashionable in the Mediterranean. Oc­cupied by armed men, they were veritable strongholds, every floor a fresh obstacle to assailants; the roofs becoming decks from which missiles could be hurled at troops in the streets below.

Appian recounted the fierce resistance from these ten­ements : 'The defenders showered projectiles on the Romans from six-storey buildings. Inside, the struggle continued to the roofs, and on planks across the gaps between them. Many people were pitched to the ground, or on to those fighting in the streets.'

The perilous procedure of assaulting rooftops by plank from nearby buildings indicates the difficulty of clearing the ten­ements from inside. It also suggests the reluctance of theRomans to take their chances among the plunging bolts and masonry in the streets. Often little more than alleys, the thoroughfares of the Byrsa were not difficult to barricade. Resistance faced the storming troops at every step.

Unnerved by suicidal opposition, by the chilling sights and sounds in the upper town, the legionaries recoiled. Repeatedly, they reformed and charged, to be driven back. Fresh legions were thrown in; exhausted and despondent men pulled out. Squads of Romans were assigned to haul the dead from the streets so that reinforcements would not be obstructed. A day passed; another dawned, and yet another. Through each, the defenders fought with mounting frenzy.

So pressing was Scipio's need for support that he brought his cavalry into the city, a recourse the more exceptional in view of the hilly ground.

According to Appian, the Roman general remained in per­sonal command, without sleep, through the entire attack, snatching refreshment at irregular intervals. Carthaginian fury was matched by Roman savagery. In the buildings, the at­tackers slaughtered everyone they came across, tossing many of the disarmed to troops below, who impaled them on raised pikes. Dead and dying citizens were used to fill ditches across which advanced Scipio's transport.

'The body of one,' wrote Appian, 'was used to plug a hole.' The brutality, he thought, was 'not deliberate but in the heat of battle,' a distinction lost in the flow of his macabre lines:

At length Scipio ordered the whole region to be fired and the ruins flattened to make space for his advancing troops. As this was done, the falling buildings included the bodies of many (civilians) who had sought refuge on upper storeys and been burnt to death. Others, wounded and badly burnt, were still alive . . . dead and living were thrown together into pits, and it often happened that those not yet dead were crushed by the cavalry as it passed.
On the sixth day, Scipio, pausing wearily on an 'elevated place,' surveyed the results of the most protracted and fero­cious street battle recalled in ancient history. Behind him, the docks were in ashes. Once-rich temples and monuments had been torn apart in the scramble for loot. Smoking rubble re­placed scores of former dwellings.

Everywhere, bodies festooned the tortured city: young and old, male and female - dumped uncovered in hollows, sprawled on footways, protruding amid crumbled masonry and charred beams.

The Roman losses are not recorded, but they must have been grievous. Street fighting is costly; against fanatical defenders, extremely so. Some idea of the carnage may be gained from the figure given for Carthage's survivors. On the seventh day, a group of men approached the Romans and offered the sur­render of those still in the Byrsa if their lives were spared. Fifty thousand tragic people emerged - all who remained of garrison and populace save Hasdrubal and a small band barricaded in the temple of Eshmoun.

Of this last group, 900 strong, most were men who had de­serted from the Roman side during the long siege. They were excluded from the terms of safe conduct; in no doubt of their grisly fate if captured.

Carthage was lost.

Withdrawing up the sixty steps to the great shrine, the doomed guard held first the precincts then, at last, the temple itself, climbing to the roof with its sweeping view of the blue gulf. Here, according to the sources available, they perished like Dido on a pyre of their own firing. Though not improb­able, the burning of their refuge suspiciously echoes Scipio's earlier tactics.

At the last moment, Hasdrubal surrendered his person and his family.

A dramatic if dubious account of the incident told how the general's wife appeared briefly from the temple to compliment Scipio as a noble foe, reviling her husband as a coward and traitor before consigning herself and their children to the mounting flames. The story, blatantly Scipionic in bias, flies in the face of Hasdrubal's dauntless behaviour throughout the siege. That he declined to perish with Roman deserters could scarcely be held traitorous to Carthage.

Indeed, Scipio himself appears to have regarded his ad­versary with some respect, for not only was Hasdrubal allowed life and liberty but a peaceful seat of retirement in Italy. Most of the city's other survivors were sold as slaves.

Looting was now officially sanctioned, the rank-and-file per­mitted to retain the lesser treasures while important items were earmarked for the Roman government. Others were re­turned diplomatically to Sicily, from which island many works of art had come to Carthage. Acragas regained her prized Bull of Phalaris; Segesta, a valued statue of Diana.

What remained of Carthage was burned, and the empty ruins flattened. Demolition complete, the ceremony of sowing salt in a furrow was enacted to symbolize eternal desolation. Scipio solemnly cursed the site. For ten days, as if loath to abandon its charred womb, a pall of smoke hung over the promontory - the last message from a city which, as Appian put it

had flourished for seven centuries since its foundation, which had ruled vast territories, seas and islands, as replete in arms, fleets, elephants and money as the greatest empires, but had surpassed them in daring and courage, for though disarmed and lacking ships it had withstood siege and famine for three years before meeting destruction . . .

Perhaps sensing the need for a touch of warmth in the victor, the writer added that Scipio 'is said to have wept' when the deed was done. The cause of the weeping is somewhat ambigu­ous. Seemingly reflecting on the mortality of cities and empires, as of life itself, Scipio turned to Polybius, who was with him, 'and took him by the hand, saying: "This is a glorious moment, Polybius, and yet I am strangely fearful that some day the same fate will befall my own country." '

It was the mark of a great man, in the opinion of Polybius,
to be aware in success of the fickleness of fortune. Apprehen­sion, not remorse, it seems induced the general's tears.

* * *

Thus, at a stroke as final in effect as a nuclear missile strike, an entire city, the centre of imperial government - indeed, of a civilization - was blotted from the earth's face. Since Zama, Carthage had languished as a martial power. In some ways she had been archaic, resistant to development; but, in others, virile still and ingenious, commercially adroit and regenerative. Rome built nothing to equal her in Africa for well over a century.

In 122
b.c.,
the Roman senate proposed to place a colony on the site. The enterprise, dedicated to Juno Caelestis, was doomed from the start by poor omens. It was said that hyenas tore up the boundary marks, recalling Scipio's solemn curse. In
46 b.c.,
Julius Caesar, pursuing the last of Pompey's sup­porters to North Africa, camped on the ruins. His decision to rebuild the city for Roman citizens was carried forward by Augustus, and in the pro-consulship of 14 to
13 b.c.
the head­quarters of the African province was moved there from Utica.

Strabo described the Roman Carthage -
Colonia Julia Carthago
- as among the foremost cities of the empire, but old suspicions persisted in Italy and the colonists were forbidden to replace the walls. After a chequered history of revolt and imperial pretension, during which Carthage became the centre of Christianity in Africa, the city was approached by the Vandals. The belated raising of walls proved a vain expense. Encountering feeble opposition, the Vandals sacked the colony, retaining a mere pirate stronghold there. In
553 a.d.,
as
Colonia Justiniana Carthago,
Carthage re­ceived 'a last ray of lustre' from the Byzantine general Belisarius who, defeating the Vandals, restored something of the city's former stature. It was shattered, ultimately, by the Arabs. The final devastation, ordered in 698
a.d.
by Hasan ibn en-Noman, Gassanid governor of Egypt, left Carthage little
more than a quarry from which the passing pageant of North
Africa - Berbers, Bedouins, Turks, Spaniards, Italians, Germans,
French - built its transient camps.

Of the small band of survivors from Punic Carthage knowl­edge is minimal. At the beginning of the ist century
b.c.,
the
Roman general Marius, proscribed by Sulla, found scattered
groups of Carthaginian origin in the region of the deserted
ruins. With pathetic unreality, they sent delegates to Mithridates, king of Pontus, on the Euxine, pledging support for his
own fight against Rome.

Few can have escaped assimilation or servitude. It is true
that Carthaginian culture lingered in the coastal cities of North
Africa, and in Numidia, where the courts encouraged Punic
skills, but its erosion was rapid. Customs and religion soon bore
Rome's impress. Baal and Tanit (the latter at length identified
with Dido) were Romanized by colonial society. The language
of Carthage dwindled to dialect, traces of which St Augustine
claimed to have recognized in the Libyan tongue for their like­ness to Hebrew.

So extraordinary, even in antiquity, did it seem that Carth­aginian civilization should have vanished virtually without
trace that legend cast her, like Atlantis, as a lost realm, the
repository of untold riches lying undisclosed. Nero cherished
vain hopes of finding the fabled hoard. Later theorists envisaged
the Carthaginians wandering like the tribes of Israel in search
of a new home - even settling, improbably enough, in
America.

In fact, Carthage's treasures had departed with Scipio. Of
racial posterity, there was none. Her genius perished with the
city from which it stemmed. For a state once unrivalled as the
mercantile hub of the western world, doomsday had arrived
2,091 years before the atom-bomb.

Bibliographical Note

The
list below is intended to give a brief indication of the scope for further reading, not as a catalogue of sources for students. In undertaking a book aimed at general interest, the author has drawn gratefully on the knowledge of a wide range of specialists without whose scholarship any such work would be impossible. In particular, he acknowledges his use as arbiters on the main topics covered as follows: (general) Stephane Gsell's masterly
Histoire Ancienne de l'Afrique du Nord
(vols i-iv), Paris 1913-29, and the
Cambridge Ancient History;
(Carthage and the western Greeks) Brian Warmington's fine book
Carthage,
London 1969; (the Punic Wars)
Rome Against Carthage,
London 1971, a concise and eminently readable modern study by T. A. Dorey and D. R. Dudley; (the city and its people)
Daily Life in Carthage at the Time of Hannibal,
English trans. London 1961, which upholds the fascination of all works by the great French authority Gilbert Picard, here with C. C. Picard.