Early settlements
SOME eleven hundred years before our era the inquisitive traders of Phoenicia discovered the mineral wealth of Spain. Soon a fleet of merchant vessels plied between Sidon, Tyre, and Byblus, at one end of the Mediterranean, and Tartessus, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, on the other. Since such voyages could not then be made without many stops, and the southern shores of the Mediterranean provided the shortest and safest route, the Phoenicians established intermediate posts and trading stations on the African coast at Leptis Magna (now Lebda), Hadrumetum (Sousse), Utica (Utique), Hippo Diarrhytus (Bizerte), Hippo Regius (Bone), and even beyond Gibraltar at Lixus (south of Tangier). The Semitic settlers at these posts married some of the natives and bribed the rest to peace.
Founding
About 813 B.C. a new group of colonists, perhaps from Phoenicia, perhaps from expanding Utica, built their homes upon a promontory ten miles northwest of the modern Tunis. The narrow peninsula could be easily defended, and the land, watered by the Bagradas (Medjerda) River, was so fertile that it quickly recovered from repeated devastation. Classic tradition ascribed the founding of the city to Elissa, or Dido, daughter of the king of Tyre: her husband having been slain by her brother, she had sailed with other adventurous souls to Africa. Her settlement was called Kart-hadasht—Newtown-to distinguish it from Utica; the Greeks transformed the name into Karchedon, the Romans into Carthago. The Latins gave the name Africa to the region around Carthage and Utica, and followed the Greeks in calling its Semitic population Poem—i.e., Phoenicians. The sieges of Tyre by Shalmaneser, Nebuchadrezzar, and Alexander drove many wealthy Tyrians to Africa. Most of them went to Carthage, and made it a new center of Phoenician trade. Carthage grew in power and splendor as Tyre and Sidon declined.
Maritime Empire
The strengthened city drove the African natives farther and farther inland, ceased to pay tribute to them, exacted tribute from them, and used them as slaves and serfs in its homes and fields. Large estates took form, some with 20,000 men;[^1] in the hands of the practical Phoenicians agriculture became a science and an industry, which the Carthaginian Mago summarized in a famous manual. Irrigated with canals, the soil flowered into gardens, cornfields, vineyards, and orchards of olives, pomegranates, pears, cherries, and figs.[^2] Horses and cattle, sheep and goats, were bred; asses and mules were the beasts of burden, and the elephant was one of many domesticated animals. Urban industry was relatively immature, except for metalwork; the Carthaginians, like their Asiatic forebears, preferred to trade what others made. They led their pack mules east and west and across the Sahara to find elephants, ivory, gold, or slaves. Their immense galleys carried goods to and from a hundred ports between Asia and Britain, for they refused to turn back, like most other mariners, at the Pillars of Hercules. It was presumably they who, about 490 B.C., financed Hanno’s voyage of exploration 2600 miles down the Atlantic coast of Africa, and the voyage of Himilco along the northern shores of Europe. Though their coinage was undistinguished, they were apparently the first to issue the equivalent of a paper currency—leather strips stamped with signs of value, and accepted throughout the Carthaginian realm.
Probably it was the rich merchants, rather than the aristocratic landowners, who provided the funds for those armies and navies which transformed Carthage from a trading post into an empire. The African coast—except Utica—was conquered from Cyrenaica to Gibraltar and beyond. Tartessus, Gades (Cádiz), and other Spanish towns were captured, and Carthage grew wealthy from the gold, silver, iron, and copper of Spain. It took the Balearic Islands, and reached out even to Madeira; it conquered Malta, Sardinia, Corsica, and the western half of Sicily. It treated these subject lands with varying degrees of severity, charging them annual tribute, conscripting their population for its army, and strictly controlling their foreign relations and their trade. In return, it gave them military protection, local self-government, and economic stability. We may judge the wealth of these dependencies from the fact that the town of Leptis Minor paid 365 talents ($1,314,000) a year into the Carthaginian treasury.
Peak
The exploitation of this empire and trade made Carthage, in the third century B.C., the richest of Mediterranean cities. Tariffs and tribute brought her annually 12,000 talents—twenty times the revenue of Athens at her zenith. The upper classes lived in palaces, wore costly robes, and ate exotic delicacies. The city, crowded with a quarter of a million inhabitants, became famous for its gleaming temples, its public baths, above all for its secure harbors and spacious docks. Each of the 220 docks was faced with two Ionic pillars, so that the inner harbor (“cothon”) presented a majestic circle of 440 marble columns. Thence a broad avenue led to the Forum, a colonnaded square adorned with Greek sculpture and containing administrative buildings, commercial offices, law courts, and temples; while the adjoining streets, Orientally narrow, teemed with a thousand shops plying a hundred crafts and resounded with bargaining. Houses rose to six stories, and often crowded a family into a single room. In the center of the city, providing one of many hints to the later builders of Rome, stood a hill or citadel—the Byrsa; here were the Treasury and the Mint, more shrines and colonnades, and the most brilliant of Carthaginian temples—to the great god Eshmun. Around the landward side of the city ran a threefold protective wall forty-five feet high, with still higher towers and battlements; within the wall were accommodations for 4000 horses, 300 elephants, and 20,000 men.[^3] Outside the walls were the estates of the rich, and beyond these, the fields of the poor.
Dress and habit
The Carthaginians were Semites, akin in blood and features to the ancient Jews. Their language now and then struck a Hebraic note, as when it called the chief magistrates shofetes—the Hebrew shophetim, or judges. The men grew beards, but usually shaved the upper lip with bronze razors. Most of them wore a fez or a turban, shoes or sandals, and a long loose gown; but the upper classes adopted the Greek style of dress, dyed their robes with purple, and fringed them with glass beads.
Social life
The women led for the most part a veiled and secluded life; they could rise to high place in the priesthoods but otherwise had to be contented with the sovereignty of their charms. Both sexes used jewelry and perfume, and occasionally displayed a ring in the nose. We know little of their morals except from their enemies. Greek and Roman writers describe them as heavy eaters and drinkers, loving to gather in dinner clubs, and as loose in their sex relations as they were corrupt in their politics. The treacherous Romans employed fides Punica—Carthaginian faith—as a synonym for treachery. Polybius reported that “at Carthage nothing that results in profit is regarded as disgraceful.”[^4] Plutarch denounced the Carthaginians as “harsh and gloomy, docile to their rulers, hard to their subjects, running to extremes of cowardice in fear and of savagery in anger, stubborn in decisions, austere, and unresponsive to amusement or the graces of life.”[^5] But Plutarch, though usually fair, was always a Greek; and Polybius was bosom friend of the Scipio who burned Carthage to the ground.
Religion
The Carthaginians appear at their worst in their religion, which again we know only from their enemies. Their ancestors in Phoenicia had worshiped Baal-Moloch and Astarte as personifying the male and female principles in nature, and the sun and moon in the sky; the Carthaginians addressed similar devotions to corresponding deities—Baal-Haman and Tanith. Tanith above all aroused their loving piety; they filled her temples with gifts, and took her name in their oaths. Third in honor was the god Melkart, “Key of the City”; then Eshmun, god of wealth and health; then a host of minor gods—“baals” or lords; even Dido was worshiped.[^6] To Baal-Haman, in great crises, living children were sacrificed, as many as three hundred in a day. They were placed upon the inclined and outstretched arms of the idol and rolled off into the fire beneath; their cries were drowned in the noise of trumpets and cymbals; their mothers were required to look upon the scene without moan or tear, lest they be accused of impiety and lose the credit due them from the god. In time the rich refused to sacrifice their own children and bought substitutes among the poor; but when Agathocles of Syracuse besieged Carthage, the upper classes, fearing that their subterfuge had offended the god, cast two hundred aristocratic infants into the fire.[^7] It should be added that these stories are told us by Diodorus, a Sicilian Greek, who looked with equanimity upon the Greek custom of infanticide. It may be that the Carthaginian sacrifice solaced with piety an effort to control the excesses of human fertility.
Records
When the Romans destroyed Carthage they presented the libraries they found there to their African allies. Of these collections nothing survives except Hanno’s record of his voyage, and fragments of Mago on husbandry. Saint Augustine vaguely assures us that “in Carthage there were many things wisely handed down to memory,”[^8] and Sallust and Juba made use of Carthaginian historians; but we have no native account of Carthage’s history. Of its architecture the Romans left not a stone upon a stone. We are told that its style was a mixture of Phoenician and Greek, that its temples were massive and ornate; that the temple and statue of Baal-Haman were plated with gold valued at a thousand talents;[^9] and that even the proud Greeks considered Carthage one of the world’s most beautiful capitals. The museums of Tunis contain some pieces of sculpture from sarcophagi found in tombs near the site of Carthage; the finest is a strong and graceful figure, perhaps of Tanith, in a manner essentially Greek. Smaller statues, unearthed from Carthaginian graves in the Baleares, are crude and often repulsively grotesque, as if designed to impress children or frighten devils away. The surviving pottery is purely utilitarian; but we know that Carthaginian craftsmen did good work in textiles, jewelry, ivory, ebony, amber, and glass.
Government
Any clear picture of Carthaginian government is now beyond our pens. Aristotle praised the constitution of Carthage as “in many respects superior to all others,” for “a state is proved to be well ordered when the commons are steadily loyal to the constitution, when no civil conflict worth speaking of has arisen, and when no one has succeeded in making himself dictator.”10 The citizens met occasionally in an Assembly empowered to accept or reject, but not to discuss or amend, proposals referred to it by a Senate of three hundred elders; the Senate, however, was not obliged to submit to the Assembly any measures upon which it could itself agree.11 The people elected the Senate, but open bribery reduced the virtue or danger of this democratic procedure, and replaced an aristocracy of birth with an oligarchy of wealth. From nominations presented by the Senate, the Assembly annually chose two shofetes to head the judicial and administrative branches of the state. Above all these bodies was a court of 104 judges, who, in contravention of the law, held office for life. As it was empowered to supervise all administration, and to require an accounting from every official at the end of his term, this court acquired, by the time of the Punic Wars, supreme control over every governmental agency and every citizen.
Army
The commander of the armies was nominated by the Senate and chosen by the Assembly. He was in a better position than the Roman consul, for his command could be continued as long as the Senate desired. The Roman, however, led against Carthage legions of landowning patriots, whereas the Carthaginian army was a mercenary force of foreign—chiefly Libyan—origin, feeling no affection for Carthage, but loyal only to its paymaster and, occasionally, to its general. The Carthaginian navy was without question the most powerful of its time; 500 quinqueremes, gaily painted, slim and swift, ably protected Carthaginian colonies, markets, and trade routes. It was the conquest of Sicily by this army, and the closing of the western Mediterranean to Roman commerce by this navy, that brought on the century-long duel to the death known to us as the three Punic Wars.