Carthage Must Be Destroyed (26 page)

Although he now found himself in control of a huge swathe of Carthaginian territory in North Africa, Agathocles now received alarming news of renewed conflict in Sicily, where several vassal cities had decided to take advantage of the lengthy absence of the Syracusan army to declare their independence. Agathocles was forced to return to try to retrieve the situation, leaving his son Archagathus, who had inherited little of his father’s political or military talents, in command of his army.
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The Carthaginians, clearly re-energized by the defeat of the coup and the absence of their talismanic opponent, intelligently refocused their military strategy away from set-piece battles, in which they had fared so badly. They now split their forces into three combat groups with explicit areas of operation: the coast, the interior and the deep interior. Faced with this fresh challenge, Archagathus made the catastrophic decision to match this move by dividing his own forces in the same way. Soon the two battalions that had been sent into the interior to hunt down their Carthaginian foes were ambushed and cut down.

Deserted by his fickle Libyan allies, Archagathus rallied the remainder of his forces at Tunes, and sent messages to his father requesting urgent help.
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Although Agathocles did return, he found the situation irretrievable. A further defeat at the hands of the Carthaginians was followed by a terrible conflagration, which Diodorus–surely fancifully –states was started by the Carthaginians incinerating the fairest of their Greek captives as sacrificial victims to their gods. Many Sicilian Greek troops were killed, which led the Syracusan general to decide to leave Africa. Knowing that a large-scale evacuation would quickly come to the attention of the Carthaginians and lead to an attack, after one failed attempt to flee, Agathocles eventually managed to slip away, leaving his army and at least two of his own sons behind.
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This last detail, probably taken from Timaeus, whose loathing of Agathocles made him want to portray him in as poor a light as possible, may well have been false. A Roman account, clearly using other sources, related that Agathocles tried to take Archagathus with him, but they became separated during the night and the latter was captured and brought back to the Syracusan camp.
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After killing their erstwhile general’s progeny, Agathocles’ deserted army swiftly negotiated surrender with the Carthaginians. The latter offered them generous terms: all the army received cash donatives, and those who wished to be were co-opted into the Carthaginian army; the remainder were transported to Sicily and allowed to settle at the Punic city of Solus. Those who, out of misguided loyalty to their old leader, refused to cooperate were set to work to restore the lands which as soldiers they had laid waste. The most recalcitrant were crucified.

After settling with his troops, the Carthaginians then concluded a peace with Agathocles himself, which superficially offered surprisingly generous terms. Carthage agreed to pay Agathocles a large amount of gold and grain, in exchange for which he would recognize Carthage’s rights over all the territory that it had previously controlled in Sicily.
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The question remains as to why the Carthaginians did not press home their clear advantage in the treaty. The answer probably lies in the fact that the wars against Agathocles had brought Carthage to the brink of financial ruin. To pay for this protracted conflict, there had been an enormous increase in the production of electrum coinage in Carthage, yet the gold content of the new coins had fallen dramatically.
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In a further sign of economic difficulties, the Carthaginian and Sicilian mints had started producing larger amounts of very heavy large bronze coinage, probably meant as substitute for gold and silver currency.
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The strategy of trying to capture Syracuse and completely dismantle the Agathoclean regime had backfired spectacularly. Agathocles, left with nothing to lose, had simply transported the conflict to North Africa, where Carthage’s discontented Numidian, Libyan and Greek neighbours had been more than happy to join the attack. Of even greater concern had been the conduct of those elements of the Carthaginian army who had participated in Bomilcar’s coup attempt. Having large Carthaginian armies operating in North Africa for long periods of time clearly posed a threat to the current political regime. All these factors must have persuaded the Carthaginians that the old territorial status quo in Sicily was preferable to the tumult that they had just experienced. By resettling and incorporating Sicilian Greek soldiers who were extremely hostile to Agathocles (after he had deserted them in North Africa), Carthage may have been already preparing for the next round of conflict with Syracuse.

A change in the named minting authority that issued military coinage in Sicily may be a sign of a wider change in Carthage’s relationship with its army on the island. There is little reason to think that the army’s actions during the Agathocles crisis had done much to promote confidence in either its loyalty or its military capabilities. Indeed, the armed forces on Sicily had been in complete disarray, and had contributed nothing to the defence of North Africa. Moreover, senior military commanders such as Bomilcar had been involved in the planning and execution of coup attempts.

These concerns may explain the gradual transferral of minting authority for the military from
mhmhnt
(‘the people of the camp’) to
mhsbm
(‘the controllers’).
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Were the
mhsbm
Carthaginian officials sent to take over the financial administration of the army in Sicily, so that the authorities in Carthage could reassert their authority?
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After all, mercenary soldiers tended to be loyal to those who paid them. Tellingly, all Carthaginian military coinage production had ceased by the end of the first decade of the third century BC, with troops presumably being paid with electrum shekels which were now being minted in Carthage.
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More importantly, it is clear that the disruption caused by Agathocles’ African onslaught had left Carthage on the brink of financial exhaustion.

In fact there was no new war with Agathocles. Clearly unchastened by his recent humiliation in North Africa, in 306 Agathocles declared himself a king, before turning his attention northward to the Italian peninsula in an attempt to build up a new empire which might be able to challenge the dominance of the Carthaginians.
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However, his dreams of an Adriatic/southern-Italian empire were dashed, as were his hopes of contracting a grand alliance with Ptolemy, king of Egypt, and several other Hellenistic potentates. Eventually a terrible illness, most likely to have been cancer of the jaw, finally robbed Agathocles not only of his Carthaginian ambitions, but also of his life.
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As a final irony, the man whose silken tongue had propelled him to such notoriety was reputedly burnt alive on his funeral pyre, because the disease had robbed him of the capacity to move or speak.
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In eventually prevailing over this most persistent of enemies, the Carthaginians had shown resilience and resourcefulness. Over two decades, they had survived coup attempts, disastrous military defeats, Libyan and Numidian rebellions, an invasion, and a siege of their home city. Yet, despite his grand pretensions, Agathocles was no Alexander, and the grave difficulty that the supposedly dominant power of the western Mediterranean had in finally overcoming the threat that he posed suggested that it might struggle even more against a betterresourced and more consistent opponent. Other Hellenistic warlords would now view Africa as a viable target in a way they had not done before Agathocles.

Thus the Greek biographer Plutarch’s account of the African ambitions of the Molossian general Pyrrhus, who spent 278–277 attacking Punic interests in Sicily, may have been apocryphal, but it probably accurately reflected contemporary opinion: ‘For who could keep his hands off Libya, or Carthage, when that city got within his reach, a city which Agathocles, slipping stealthily out of Syracuse and crossing the sea with a few ships, narrowly missed taking?’
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By the late fourth century BC, the treaty that Carthage in 509 BC had concluded with what had then been a small city in upper Latium must have begun to look like an inspired piece of forward-thinking diplomacy. Although Rome had faced a number of serious setbacks, including internal political stasis, catastrophic military defeat, and the humiliating capture of much of the city by a Gallic war band in 387, its successes had been extraordinary.
¹
Latium had been brought under Roman control through a seemingly endless round of military and diplomatic initiatives. This had been followed by three terrible wars of attrition against the powerful Samnite confederation who lived in the mountainous Apennine region of central and southern Italy, which had eventually led to the latter’s subjugation. At the same time, the regions of Etruria and Umbria were brought under Roman control, and an alliance with the city of Capua brought much of the agriculturally rich region of Campania into the Roman sphere of influence.
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Such had been the scale of Rome’s conquests that one general, Manius Curius Dentatus, issued the famous boast that it was unclear which was the greater: the amount of land which been taken or the number of people captured. It has been calculated that by the early third century BC Rome controlled 14,000 square kilometres of territory –more than two and a half times more than it had just under half a century before. The Roman domain spread right across the expanse of central Italy, and decades of war and conquest had brought considerable wealth to the city. It was recorded that during the great triumphs of 293 BC, to celebrate the final victory over the Samnites, one consul brought back 830 kilograms of silver and 1,150,000 kilograms of bronze.

It was not just the scale of Roman expansion that was extraordinary, but also the manner in which it was achieved. Perhaps the most striking feature that emerged from these years of conquest was not the incredible run of military triumphs, but the fact that these victories had been interspersed with some devastating defeats. Rome in this period is conventionally defined above all by its extreme aggression and acquisitiveness, but it is clear that these were precisely the characteristics required not only to thrive, but even to survive, in Italy during this period.
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As the historian Arthur Eckstein has commented, ‘The Roman experience of competition for influence, power and security, first in Latium, then in central Italy, and then in the wide western Mediterranean, was a harsh experience, against formidable and warlike rivals.’
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Rome quickly developed a marked capacity to absorb the loss and shock of defeat. The Roman state responded to defeat not with offers of peace treaties and truces, but with the sending out of new armies to recover what had been lost. It was often the relentless pressure that Rome was able to exert which led to final victory. One of the key problems which Rome presented for its enemies was that no one individual or clan had such a monopoly on political power that a lasting or meaningful peace treaty could be negotiated. All regular senatorial offices were held for only a year, and consecutive terms were forbidden. It was also exceptional that any Roman held the consulship more than once. The competition to hold the top job in Roman politics was so ferocious, and the tenure of office so short, that no Roman general would risk the disapproval and opprobrium of his peers by daring to negotiate when facing defeat.

However, military success was only one part of the equation. There was also the extraordinary efficiency with which the Romans asserted their control over the newly subjugated territory. This was achieved in a number of different ways. First there was an emphasis on the implementation of new physical infrastructure to connect the new lands to Rome. Within a short period of time a network of roads was cut through the countryside connecting the city to all the major settlements in the region, both old and new. Large-scale movement of the population was instigated, with colonists from Rome being sent out to establish new settlements and Latin peoples being moved from their traditional homes to new territories.
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But Rome’s greatest strength in this regard was an extraordinary ability to integrate quickly and efficiently the native populations of the newly subjugated lands and thereby create a large and very stable territory for itself. By using newly created legal statuses rather than ethnicity or geography as the basis for membership of the state, Rome quickly drew on a huge reservoir of human resources to fight its battles, rather than relying on mercenaries like most of the Mediterranean world.
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A new body of knowledge was created that represented these newly won lands in explicitly Roman terms, and divine portents and signs which occurred in these lands were carefully recorded and expiated by Roman ritual practice. The cities of Latium enjoyed the same legal rights that they had previously enjoyed in respect to Rome, but they were now bound by a series of treaties to provide Rome with troops whenever they were required. The ancient Latin identity survived, but only as a set of duties, rights and privileges enshrined in Roman law. Thus Rome sought to display its mastery and indeed
ownership
of this territory. Italy would never be just a piece of conquered territory that could be evacuated if circumstances dictated.
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It was Roman land that was to be defended as if it were within the city itself.

The Roman genius for appropriation and redefinition extended also to the religious sphere. Latin religious cults and practices were sustained by the Romans, but only under strict supervision and with an agendum that placed Rome at the heart of Latin identity. The religious ritual of
evocatio
, for example, designed to entice an enemy deity from its native land to Rome (where it could expect due and, indeed, greater reverence), was now used to great effect. The first instance of the
evocatio
being used by a Roman general occurred in 396 BC at the siege of the Etruscan city of Veii, where Iuni/Juno was the chief deity. After the fall of the city, the cult of the goddess was transferred to Rome, where she was worshipped as the queen of the Roman divine pantheon. Superficially this process appears comparable to the religious syncretism that took place in central Italy in the archaic period, but in fact it was an abrupt departure. Foreign gods were incorporated on strictly Roman terms.