Carthage Must Be Destroyed (59 page)

In 29 BC, after his victory in the civil war, Augustus arrived in Rome to celebrate a triple triumph from 13 to 15 August. These dates were carefully chosen, for the festival of Hercules at the Ara Maxima fell upon 12 August, and the arrival of Rome’s new saviour thus dovetailed perfectly with that of his heroic predecessor.
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This dramatic display was but the first stage in the Augustan takeover of the Heraclean tradition, for in 13 BC a new road was constructed, the Via Julia Augusta. Named after the emperor, it followed the path of the old Heraclean Way, from Placentia in northern Italy, over the Alps, and into Transalpine Gaul. At its terminus at La Turbie, just a few kilometres from modern Monaco, a splendid monument, complete with a rotunda of twenty-four columns and a statue of an enthroned Augustus, was built to celebrate the imperial conquest of the Alps. An inscription, furthermore, gave a copious list of all the tribes in the region that the emperor and his two stepsons, Drusus and Tiberius, had pacified.
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A few years later this road was followed by the renovation, between 8 and 2 BC, of the 1,600-kilometre stretch of the old Heraclean Way from Gades to the Pyrenees. It was renamed the Via Augusta.
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That this route was also the one that Hannibal had taken on his march to Italy may have remained unstated, but poetic praise of the Augustan Alpine campaign indicates that the association was implicit in the minds of contemporaries.
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In a eulogy to the feats of Drusus and Tiberius in the Alps, Horace skilfully weaved into the fabric of his poem a long reference to Hannibal and the defeat at the Metaurus, which had been masterminded by Nero Drusus, an ancestor of the imperial stepsons. In the final lines of the excursus, Hannibal bemoans the failure of his dreams of conquest, as the vigorous youth of Rome finally triumph.
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The Augustan reappropriation of the Heraclean Way, Horace implies, marks the final defeat for the Carthaginians, and with it the battle for the gods and for the past.

The transformation of the Heraclean Way was, however, insignificant in comparison to the new venture which Augustus now envisioned: the rebuilding of Carthage itself. Other self-proclaimed saviours of the Roman Republic had contented themselves with building and beautifying the temple of Concord in Rome, but for Augustus that would have been a controversial move. While he would indeed eventually remodel the temple, in the early 20s BC his later reputation as
pater patriae
, ‘father of the country’, was far from secure. Most must surely have regarded him then not as the bearer of concord, but as a brutal butcher who had ruthlessly avenged his adoptive father’s murder with the slaughter of political opponents. If Augustus were to construct a monument to Concord, then it would have to be outside Rome, where the risk of hypocrisy was less, and the promise of consensus more. Where better, indeed, to lavish the spirit of reconciliation than on the site of Rome’s bitterest enemy?

It was in fact not Augustus but his adoptive father who had first (quite literally) dreamt up the seemingly unthinkable plan of rebuilding Carthage. Appian reports that in 44 BC, while campaigning in North Africa against his fellow Romans, Julius Caesar had a dream in which he had seen the entire army weeping, and upon waking he had immediately issued a memorandum that Carthage should be colonized.
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The dream itself has been interpreted in several different ways by modern scholars. The most plausible version is that the army represents the dead Carthaginians, so that the reconstruction of their city would illustrate the spirit of
clementia
(clemency) upon which Caesar would pride himself. Alternatively, the army might represent Roman veterans, thereby placing the colonization of the city within the populist Gracchan tradition of land redistribution.
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The ambiguity may indeed have been deliberately fostered, for a tale so equivocal could represent Caesar’s
clementia
both to the defeated and to his own veterans. Although one of Caesar’s deputies, Statilius Taurus, was tasked with establishing the new colony, the work undertaken does not appear to have been extensive.
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Nevertheless, the plan to re-establish Carthage –Rome’s most bitter enemy–stood as a potent symbol both of the new Caesarian regime’s self-confidence and power, and of the concord brought by Rome to the Mediterranean.
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Caesar’s infamous murder later in that year postponed much of the new North African project, but by 29 BC Augustus was willing to resuscitate it. From its inception the new city was clearly meant to impress. The street plan was set out with a regularity that was unusually exact even for a Roman city. Each block measured 120 by 480 Roman feet (35.5 by 142 metres), making up precisely one hundredth of the original Roman land allotment.
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The administrative and religious centre of the new foundation was built on top of the Byrsa, the heart of the old Punic city. The summit of the hill was now crowned by a series of magnificent monumental buildings and grand spaces, including a huge civic basilica, temples and a forum. This dramatic reshaping of the physical landscape, and the construction of a new (Roman) religious and administrative topography, proclaimed not only the absolute supremacy of Rome, but also the unity which it had brought to once hostile states.
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Thus Carthage was reborn as Colonia Iulia Concordia Carthago, the administrative capital of the Roman province of Africa Proconsularis.
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Although other Roman colonies had been named in celebration of the concord restored by the Julian clan, the name of the restored Carthage must have had a particularly powerful resonance for the Roman people.
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Paradoxically, the rebuilding of Carthage involved a far more extensive destruction of the old Punic city than that achieved by Scipio in the previous century. To prepare the terrain for this monumental building project, the entire summit of the hill was levelled, and an enormous rectangular platform was constructed for the city centre. Over 100,000 cubic metres of rubble and earth–the debris created by this enormously ambitious project–were then pushed down the slopes of the Byrsa. By building a system of retaining walls, a series of terraces was created on the sides of the hill, where residential neighbourhoods and other structures would eventually be built. The new city of Roman Carthage managed to proclaim not only the extraordinary powers of concord and reconciliation possessed by the Augustan regime, but also Roman mastery over an alien landscape. Thus Augustus conquered Carthage with the spade and the trowel with a finality that his predecessors had failed to achieve with fire and the sword.

At roughly the same time that Carthage was being rebuilt, the Italian poet Vergilius Maro had started to write his epic masterpiece, the
Aeneid.
Although Vergil was certainly not an uncritical supporter of the Augustan regime,
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a number of themes within his work nevertheless dovetailed with the propaganda which surrounded Augustus, for, as one who had lived through the horrors of war, he too must have longed for the new golden age that the regime trumpeted.
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The
Aeneid
retold the familiar story of Aeneas’ turbulent journey from Troy to Italy, where he became the forefather of the Roman people. Within a few lines of the poem’s beginning, however, the audience is made aware that Carthage will play a far more important role in this version of the story than it had done previously:

Although the Punic wars themselves receive very little attention in the
Aeneid
, the poem nevertheless self-consciously acts as the sequel (or perhaps prequel) to Ennius’ narrative of the conflict.
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As with the earlier epics of Naevius and Ennius, in the
Aeneid
the enmity between Carthage and Rome is divinely ordained, with each side having its immortal champion: Juno for the Carthaginians and Venus, the mother of Aeneas, for the Trojans. The
Aeneid
, however, was far more than a mere recapitulation of previous Roman poetry. Indeed, the work provided a new and dramatic pre-history for this famous enmity: a doomed love affair between Aeneas and Dido, the respective founders of the Roman and Carthaginian races. Although some kind of meeting between the two had taken place in Naevius’ epic, the idea of a romance was in itself a daring and provocative departure.

In the first book of the
Aeneid
, as the Trojan refugees travel away from their destroyed homeland, their ships are caught in a terrible storm instigated by their enemy, the goddess Juno. The survivors eventually wash up on the coast of North Africa, where they are given succour by another group of refugees from the East, the Carthaginians. Venus, fearing that the Carthaginians may do harm to her son, sends Cupid to Dido to ensure that the queen, who has previously resisted all approaches from suitors after the murder of her husband, falls passionately in love with Aeneas. Then Juno, who sees an opportunity to prevent Aeneas and the Trojans from fulfilling their destiny in Italy, suggests to Venus that some kind of marriage should be arranged between the prince and the Carthaginian queen:

Venus agrees to the scheme in order to secure the temporary safety of her son, although she already knows through a prophecy by Jupiter that Aeneas will eventually reach Italy and found the Roman race. Therefore, after the couple have been purposefully separated from the main party by a storm while out hunting, their love is consummated in a cave.

Throughout this episode, Vergil played with knowledge that his audience already possessed: that, despite the apparent amity of the cities’ great founders, great conflict would eventually break out between the Carthaginians and Romans. He therefore set up the ultimate ‘what if’ scenario: what if Aeneas and the Trojans had remained in Carthage and made it their city? Indeed, Vergil even treated his audience to the extraordinary sight of Rome’s proto-founder dressed in a cloak of Tyrian purple with gold inlay, and directing the building of that very city that would become Rome’s greatest enemy.
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The poet even ponders the possibility that Rome’s foundation will be prevented entirely by the contentment of its champion in North Africa:

The reader knows, however, that Aeneas’ presence at Carthage cannot last. Beyond the knowledge of the enmity that existed between Rome and the city, Aeneas’ destiny has already been ordained. For him to compromise that destiny not only would be impossible, but would furthermore compromise the virtue of
pietas
, a tenet upon which the Roman character had been founded.

Eventually Jupiter sends Mercury, the messenger god, to persuade Aeneas to abandon Carthage. Realizing his inescapable destiny, and the duty which he owes both to the gods and to his (future) homeland, Aeneas gives orders to his men to set sail for Italy. As Aeneas secretly slips away, however, Vergil dramatically confronts his audience with the deserted queen’s desperate complaints and scorn. In the climax of the book, as she makes secret preparations for suicide, the grief-stricken Dido issues forth an electrifying curse that foretells the eventual coming of a Carthaginian avenger:

In the final bitter lament of an abandoned queen, the antiquity and intensity of the hatred that historically existed between Carthage and Rome is represented in uncompromising fashion. Even at the end of the work, when Juno finally accepts the foundation of the Roman race through the intermingling of the Trojans and the Latins, her grievance over Carthage is pointedly and ominously left unresolved.
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The
Aeneid
thus provided a powerful reminder of the intractable hatred between Carthage and Rome, while at the same time greatly extending the horizon of its antiquity. The poem, however, simultaneously pre-empted the Augustan revival of the city as the great final act of reconciliation. Indeed, the description of Aeneas’ first arrival in Carthage must have had a very particular and vivid resonance for the Augustan audience, for it vividly described the frenetic building activity taking place there: