Carthage Must Be Destroyed (18 page)

From at least the seventh century BC, in the eastern Mediterranean Heracles had come to be increasingly associated with the Tyrian god Melqart. When Herodotus travelled to the great temple of Melqart at Tyre, he found compelling evidence that the temple of Heracles on the Greek island of Thasos had in fact started out as a sanctuary to the Tyrian god. In order to verify this information for himself, Herodotus then travelled on to Thasos, where the story was confirmed.
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Intriguingly, Herodotus commented that the Thasians perceived their Heracles as having two very distinct identities, who needed to be worshipped in different ways. The worshippers offered to one whom ‘they called the Olympian the sacrifices due to an immortal, whereas with the other they delivered funerary honours as with a hero’.
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On another Greek island, Erythrae, locals told how Heracles had come to them after a raft that was carrying him from Tyre ran aground in a shallow channel–surely a dimly recollected communal memory of the rites of
egersis
.
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The Phoenician world was clearly also struck by the synergies that existed between Heracles and Melqart, particularly on the island of Cyprus, which, like Sicily, also had a large Greek population. By the sixth century BC, workshops in the Phoenician Cypriot town of Kition were producing statuettes of a lionskin-clad male figure with a club, in a clear replication of the established Greek iconography of Heracles but posing in the manner of a Near Eastern or Egyptian deity, with his weapon raised in his right hand while holding in his left a lion ready for the kill.
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What were the similarities that Greek and eastern Phoenician and Punic populations saw in Heracles and Melqart? All were, of course, polytheistic religious cultures that actively sought to forge syncretistic connections between their own gods and foreign deities.
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More particularly, a bilingual inscription from Malta is dedicated by two Phoenician brothers in the third/second century BC to ‘Melqart, Lord of Tyre’ in Phoenician and to ‘Heracles
archegete
’ in Greek.
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The Greek word
archegete
was usually used in the context of a founder or progenitor, a role with which both Heracles and Melqart were strongly identified.
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Melqart was as synonymous with colonization for the Tyrians as Heracles was for the Greeks. As protector of both the mother city and the new colonial foundations, Melqart helped to foster lasting links between the two. The temples in the newly founded colonies also provided a neutral and sacred space for the first contacts between Phoenician settlers and local indigenous peoples. Although Melqart was not the chief deity in Carthage, the god continued to fulfil his traditional role as the city’s influence over the new Punic community in the western Mediterranean developed.

Punic colonization and economic consolidation on Sardinia had a notable impact on the religious landscape of the island. Indeed, there is some evidence for an organized initiative to represent Carthage’s new relationship with the island through the establishment of new religious centres. This is well illustrated at the temple of Sid at Antas, where archaeologists have also discovered a dedication to Melqart.
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The close relationship between Melqart and Sid on Sardinia is confirmed in the work of the second-century-AD Greek travel writer Pausanias, who claimed that ‘The first sailors to cross to the island are said to have been Libyans. Their leader was Sardus, son of Maceris, the Maceris surnamed Heracles by the Egyptians and the Libyans.’
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‘Sardus Pater’ was the name that Sid Babi came to be known by in the Roman epoch, and ‘Maceris’ almost certainly refers to Melqart, the Libyan Heracles.
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Indeed, epigraphic evidence points to the two gods having been closely linked with one another in Carthage.
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Unlike Sid, who was particularly associated with Sardinia, Melqart represented the overarching sweep of Punic colonization, and hence why the relationship between the two was represented as being unequal–with Sid as the son of Melqart–in Sardinia and in Punic iconography.
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The worship of Melqart on Sardinia was self-consciously linked with Tyre during the Punic period, for the epithet
‘L HSR
(literally, ‘that is on the Rock’) was often applied to the god–surely a reference to the great sanctuary.
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This emphasis on Melqart in a period when the Carthaginians were exporting their own population to Sardinia, and strengthening their economic ties on the island, was a way of articulating the increasingly paternalistic relationship with the older Phoenician population while at the same time emphasizing a common Tyrian heritage.
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Indeed, an inscription dating to the third century BC refers to a series of monumental improvements to the sanctuary of Melqart at Tharros, lists the senior officials of
Qrthdšt
(Carthage), and thereby explicitly links the god with the North African metropolis.
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Heracles and Melqart shared a number of striking characteristics. Most importantly, both transcended the boundaries between humanity and divinity: Heracles, the son of Zeus and a human mother, had to earn the right to become a god himself through his heroic feats
;
Melqart, although a god, was also the first mythical king of Tyre and ancestor of its royal lineage.
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Other striking connections included the crucial regenerative role that fire played, for Melqart at the
egersis
and for Heracles during his apotheosis, when his body was burnt on a pyre before his spirit ascended to heaven and he took his place among the gods. Each year, after the ritual burning of his effigy, Melqart was symbolically reborn, thereby making the same journey between humanity and divinity.
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Indeed, the syncretism between the two can be detected at the temple of Heracles in the Sicilian Greek city of Acragas, built around 500 BC, which contained twin staircases that led up to the attic of the structure. A recent study has suggested that this unusual architectural feature, although unlikely to have still have been used for such purposes in the fifth century BC, was originally associated with the ritual celestial ascent of deities found in Phoenician–Punic religion, such as the
egersis
. The temple at Acragas was just one of a number of archaic-era temples found with these staircases in Sicily and southern Italy.
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Ironically, the likelihood is that the tradition of Heracles and Eryx was derived not from the Greek but from
Phoenician
occupation of a site. Dorieus’ mission may have been represented as the championing of Greek Heracles against the ‘non-Greek’ Heracles who at that time occupied Eryx.
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The mountain, which rises to 750 metres above sea level, had been a sacred site for the indigenous Elymians before it had become the location for a temple to the goddess Astarte sometime in the second half of the sixth century BC.
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Melqart was widely recognized as the consort of Astarte.
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Indeed, even the Heraclean Way, that seemingly most strident of monuments to Greek colonial endeavour in the West, was not quite what it first seems. Its tortuous and often nonsensical itinerary reflected the rivalries and shared interests of both incomers and indigenous populations who sought to stamp their mark on what was clearly, in the sixth century BC, a region of unrivalled opportunity. Thus the terminus of the Heraclean Way may have been the city of Argos in Greece, but by the sixth century BC Greek authors were generally in agreement that Erythia, the legendary home of Geryon and the starting point of Heracles’ great western odyssey, was Gades, the oldest Phoenician settlement in the far West and site of the great temple of Melqart.
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Even the accounts of Heracles’ visit to Sicily, which could be construed as little more than the most aggressive kind of Greek colonial chauvinism, often contain small pieces of evidence that point to a far more complex set of relationships between the Punic and indigenous populations of the island. For instance, the genesis of Heracles defeating and killing the indigenous king Eryx very probably lay in the introduction of the Punic cult of Astarte into Eryx in the second half of the sixth century BC, which replaced a native Elymian shrine that had previously stood there. In this context, the story of Heracles appears to have been originally related to Melqart, who, as the consort of Astarte, was often worshipped in her temples.
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The Heraclean Way, rather than merely being the superhighway of Greek colonial ambition, instead represented the ubiquity of cultural exchange and religious syncretism in the archaic central and western Mediterranean. Nowhere was this clearer than on the Italian leg of Heracles’ great odyssey, which, with the Sicilian stage of the great hero’s journey, was already being written about by the fifth century BC.
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According to the first-century-BC Greek writer Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who was using earlier lost sources, after he had crossed the Alps Heracles was supposed to have made his way down through the Italian peninsula until he eventually pitched camp on the left bank of the river Tiber, at the settlement of Pallanthium, the future site of the city of Rome. While he slept, an ogre named Cacus, who had for many years terrorized the other inhabitants of the locality, stole several of his cattle. In order to cover his tracks, Cacus dragged the beasts to his cave on the Palatine hill backwards, by their tails. Heracles, on waking and discovering the theft, searched for his bovine charges in vain. However, eventually he found them by driving the rest of the herd past the entrance of Cacus’ cave, from where the stolen cows bellowed when they heard and smelled the others. Cacus then suffered the same grisly fate as all those who tried to separate the cattle of Geryon from Heracles: he was beaten to death with the giant club, before his cave was smashed down on top of his lifeless corpse.

Heracles then purified himself by washing in the Tiber and erected an altar to Zeus, where he sacrificed a calf in thanks for finding the cattle. When the indigenous peoples and Arcadians who lived in the neighbourhood discovered what had happened, they rejoiced at the fate of Cacus, whom they had long hated because of his thefts, and made garlands for themselves and Heracles. The hero was then invited to dine with their joint kings, Evander and Faunus.
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On discovering Heracles’ true identity, Evander in obeisance to a long-standing prophecy about the hero’s coming, erected an altar to the hero and sacrificed a calf upon it. Thus it was on the future site of Rome that the first altar to Heracles was set up. After performing the initial rites and sacrificing some of his own cattle, Heracles decreed that, ‘since they were the first who had regarded him as a god, they should perpetuate the honours they had paid him by offering up every year a calf that had not known the yoke and performing the sacrifice with Greek rites’. The remainder of the story told how Heracles had then taught two distinguished families, the Potitii and the Pinarii, the sacrificial rites that were to be performed in his honour at his altar, the Ara Maxima (‘Great Altar’) in the Forum Boarium, the ancient cattle market of Rome.
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Central Italy was the location of a large number of sanctuaries dedicated to Hercules and Hercle, the Italian and Etruscan interpretations of Heracles. Many of these temples were located on important links in key communication and transport arteries that traversed the Italian peninsula and acted as centres for trade, salt production and the seasonal movement of lifestock (an intriguing parallel with the myth of the hero and the cattle of Geryon).
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The popularity and growth of the cult have tended to be seen as a reflection of the strong influence of Hellenic culture on the inhabitants of central Italy, through their frequent interactions with Greek merchants and the cities of Magna Graecia.
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However, part of the story of Heracles in Rome appears to be an adaptation of a much earlier Latin tale. Originally the hero figure had been Recaranus, a local shepherd of Greek origin, with whom our wandering hero has been amalgamated.
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Cacus also appears to have started not out as the ogre of the Heracles myth, but as an indigenous divine seer. In fact the first identifiable artistic representations of Cacus were found not in Rome but in Etruria.
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In the earliest version of the story he was not a brigand but a dishonest slave of King Evander, whom the monarch himself unmasked as the thief.

At first sight, the Ara Maxima dedicated to Hercules in Rome appears to conform completely to this analysis.
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Its prestige and antiquity are proved by its position within the Pomerium, the traditional sacred boundary of the city. Furthermore, the old cattle-market district where it stood was on the nexus of two major transport links: the river Tiber and the land route which joined central Italy and the Sabine hills to Etruria (and thus fitting well with the familiar Herculean themes of cattle droving and trade). That it was Greek merchants who first brought the cult to Rome is strongly suggested by the widespread evidence that exists for their presence in the city during the archaic period, as well as the emphasis on the implementation of Greek rites for the cult in the Hercules and Cacus story.

This view appears to be confirmed by the discovery of a shrine dating to the mid sixth century BC in the Forum Boarium, under the church of Sant’ Omobono.
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The shrine was replaced by a more substantial temple with a podium in the late sixth century, reflecting both the growing prosperity of the city and the importance of the cult that was housed there. The presence of an almost life-size statue of Hercules with another of an armed female goddess strongly suggests that this is the archaic temple dedicated to the hero. As well as a large quantity of imported Greek pottery, the temple received a wide variety of offerings that included grains, hazelnuts, piglets, goats, sheep and cattle, as well as turtles, fish, geese and doves. The dedications left at the temple included loom weights, spindle whorls, perfume bottles, bronze pins, figurines, and carved amber and ivory plaques, and were also of a wide variety and exceptional quality for the period.
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