IT WAS WELL FOR THE development and civilization of the ancient world that the Hebrew fugitives from Egypt were not able to drive at once from the whole coast of Syria its old inhabitants; for the accursed race of the Canaanites whom, for their licentious worship and cruel rites, they were bidden to extirpate from Palestine itself, were no other than those enterprising mariners and those dauntless colonists who, sallying from their narrow roadsteads, committed their fragile barks to the mercy of unknown seas, and, under their Greek name of Phoenicians, explored island and promontory, creek and bay, from the coast of Malabar even to the lagunes of the Baltic. From Tyre and Sidon issued those busy merchants who carried, with their wares, to distant shores the rudiments of science and of many practical arts which they had obtained from the far East, and which, probably, they but half understood themselves. It was they who, at a period antecedent to all contemporary historical records, introduced written characters, the foundation of all high intellectual development, into that country which was destined to carry intellectual and artistic culture to the highest point which humanity has yet reached. It was they who learned to steer their ships by the sure help of the Polar Star, while the Greeks still depended on the Great Bear; it was they who rounded the Cape of Storms, and earned the best right to call it the Cape of Good Hope, 2,000 years before Vasco de Gama. Their ships returned to their native shores bringing with them sandal wood from Malabar, spices from Arabia, fine linen from Egypt, ostrich plumes from the Sahara. Cyprus gave them its copper, Elba Its iron, the coast of the Black Sea its manufactured steel. Silver they brought from Spain, gold from the Niger, tin from the Scilly Isles, and amber from the Baltic. Where they sailed, there they planted factories which opened a caravan trade with the interior of vast continents hitherto regarded as inaccessible, and which became inaccessible for centuries again when the Phoenicians disappeared from history. They were as famous for their artistic skill as for their enterprize and energy. Did the greatest of the Jewish kings desire to adorn the Temple which he had erected to the Most High in the manner least unworthy of Him? A Phoenician king must supply him with the well-hewn cedars of his stately Lebanon, and the cunning hand of a Phoenician artisan must shape the pillars and the lavers, the oxen and the lions of brass, which decorated the shrine. Did the King of Persia himself, in the intoxication of his pride, command miracles to be performed, boisterous straits to be bridged, or a peninsula to become an island? It was Phoenician architects who lashed together the boats that were to connect Asia with Europe, and it was Phoenician workmen who knew best how to economize their toil in digging the canal that was to transport the fleet of Xerxes through dry land, and save it from the winds and waves of Mount Athos. The merchants of Tyre were, in truth, the princes, and her traffickers the honourable men, of the earth. Wherever a ship could penetrate, a factory be planted, a trade developed or created, there we find these ubiquitous, these irrepressible Phoenicians.
We know well what the tiny territory of Palestine has done for the religion of the world, and what the tiny Greece has done for its intellect and its art; but we are apt to forget that what the Phoenicians did for the development and intercommunication of the world was achieved by a state confined within narrower boundaries still. In the days of their greatest prosperity, when their ships were to be found on every known and on many unknown seas, the Phoenicians proper of the Syrian coast remained content with a narrow strip of fertile territory, squeezed in between the mountains and the sea, of the length of some thirty miles and of the average breadth of only a single mile! And if the existence of a few settlements beyond these limits entitles us to extend the name of Phoenicia to some 120 miles of coast, with a plain behind it which sometimes broadened out into a sweep of a dozen miles, was it not sound policy, even in a community so enlarged, to keep for themselves the gold they had so hardly won, rather than lavish it on foreign mercenaries in the hope of extending their sway inland, or in the vain attempt to resist by force of arms the mighty monarchs of Egypt, of Assyria, or of Babylon? Their strength was to sit still, to acknowledge the titular supremacy of anyone who chose to claim it, and then, when the time came, to buy the intruder off.
The land-locked sea, the eastern extremity of which washes the shores of Phoenicia proper, connecting as it does three continents, and abounding in deep gulfs, in fine harbours, and in fertile islands, seems to have been intended by Nature for the early development of commerce and colonization. By robbing the ocean of half its mystery and of more than half its terrors, it allured the timid mariner, even as the eagle does its young, from headland on to headland, or from islet to islet, till it became the highway of the nations of the ancient world; and the products of each of the countries whose shores it laves became the common property of all.
But in this general race of enterprize and commerce among the nations which bordered on the Mediterranean, it is to the Phoenicians that unquestionably belongs the foremost place. In the dimmest dawn of history, many centuries before the Greeks had set foot in Asia Minor or in Italy, before even they had settled down in secure possession of their own territories, we hear of Phoenician settlements in Asia Minor and in Greece itself, in Africa, in Macedon, and in Spain. There is hardly an island in the Mediterranean which has not preserved some traces of these early visitors: Cyprus, Rhodes, and Crete in the Levant; Malta, Sicily, and the Balearic Isles in the middle passage; Sardinia and Corsica in the Tyrrhenian Sea; the Cyclades, as Thucydides tells us, in the mid-Ægean; and even Samothrace and Thasos at its northern extremity, where Herodotus, to use his own forcible expression, himself saw a whole mountain “turned upside down” by their mining energy: all have either yielded Phoenician coins and inscriptions, have retained Phoenician proper names and legends, or possess mines, long, perhaps, disused, but which were worked as none but Phoenicians ever worked them.
And among the Phoenician factories which dotted the whole southern shore of the Mediterranean, from the east end of the greater Syrtis even to the Pillars of Hercules, there was one which, from a concurrence of circumstances, was destined rapidly to outstrip all the others, to make herself their acknowledged head, to become the Queen of the Mediterranean, and, in some sense, of the Ocean beyond, and, for a space of over a hundred years, to maintain a deadly and not an unequal contest with the future mistress of the world. The history of that great drama, its antecedents, and its consequences, forms the subject of this volume.
The rising African factory was known to its inhabitants by the name of Kirjath-Hadeschath, or New Town, to distinguish it from the much older settlement of Utica, of which it may have been, to some extent, an offshoot. The Greeks, when they came to know of its existence, called it Karchedon, and the Romans Carthago. The date of its foundation is uncertain; but the current tradition refers it to a period about a hundred years before the founding of Rome. The fortress that was to protect the young settlement was built upon a peninsula projecting eastwards from the inner corner of what is now called the Gulf of Tunis, the largest and most beautiful roadstead of the North African coast. The topography of Carthage will be described in detail at a later period of this history. At present it will be sufficient to remark that the city proper, at the time at which it is best known to us, the period of the Punic wars, consisted of the Byrsa or Citadel quarter, a Greek word corrupted from the Canaanitish Bozra, or Bostra, that is, a fort, and of the Cothon, or harbour quarter, so important in the history of the final siege. To the north and west of these, and occupying all the vast space between them and the isthmus behind, were the Megara (Hebrew, Magurim), that is, the suburbs and gardens of Carthage, which, with the city proper, covered an area twenty-three miles in circumference. Its population must have been fully proportionate to its size. Just before the third Punic war, when its strength had been drained by the two long wars with Rome and by the incessant depredations of that chartered brigand Massinissa, it contained 700,000 inhabitants, and towards the close of the final siege the Byrsa alone was able to give shelter to a motley multitude of 50,000 men, women, and children.
Facing the Hermaean promontory (Cape Bon), the north-eastern horn of the Gulf of Tunis, at a distance of only ninety miles, was the Island of Sicily, which, as a glance at the map, and as the sunken ridge extending from one to the other still clearly show, must have once actually united Europe to Africa. This fair island it was which, crowded, even in those early days, with Phoenician factories, seemed to beckon the chief of Phoenician cities onwards towards an easy and a natural field of foreign conquest. This it was which proved to be the apple of fierce discord for centuries between Carthage and the Greek colonies, which soon disputed its possession with her. This, in an ever chequered warfare, and at the cost of torrents of the blood of her mercenaries, and of untold treasures of her citizens, enriched Carthage with the most splendid trophies—stolen trophies though they were—of Greek art. This, finally, was the chief battle-field of the contending forces during the whole of the first Punic war—in the beginning, that is, of her fierce struggle for existence with all the power of Rome;
Such, very briefly, was the city, and such the race whose varied fortunes, so far as our fragmentary materials allow us, we are about to trace. What were the causes of the rapid rise of Carthage; what was the extent of her African and her foreign dominions, and the nature of her hold upon them, what were the peculiar excellences and defects of her internal constitution, and what the principles on which she traded and colonized, conquered and ruled;—to these and other questions some answer must be given, as a necessary preliminary to that part of her history, which alone we can trace consecutively. Some answer we must give, but how are we to give it? No native poet, whose writings have come down to us, has sung of the origin of Carthage, or of her romantic voyages; no native orator has described, in glowing periods which we can still read, the splendour of her buildings and the opulence of her merchant princes. No native annalist has preserved the story of her long rivalry with Greeks and Etruscans, and no African philosopher has moralized upon the stability of her institutions or the causes of her fall. All have perished. The text of three treaties with Rome, made in the days of her prosperity; the log-book of an adventurous Carthaginian admiral, dedicated on his return from the Senegal or the Niger as a votive offering in the temple of Baal; some fragments of the practical precepts of a Carthaginian agriculturist, translated by the order of the utilitarian Roman senate; a speech or two of a vagabond Carthaginian in the Paenulus of Plautus, which has been grievously mutilated in the process of transcribing it into Roman letters; a few Punic inscriptions buried twenty feet below the surface of the ground, entombed and preserved by successive Roman, and Vandal, and Arab devastations, and now at length revealed and deciphered by the efforts of French and English archaeologists; the massive substructions of ancient temples; the enormous reservoirs of water; and the majestic procession of stately aqueducts which no barbarism has been able to destroy—these are the only native or semi-native sources from which we can draw the outlines of our picture, and we must eke out our narrative of Carthage in the days of her prosperity, as best we may, from a few chapters of reflections by the greatest of the Greek philosophers, from the late Roman annalists who saw everything with Roman eyes, and from a few but precious antiquarian remarks in the narrative of the great Greek historian, Polybius, who, with all his love of truth and love of justice, saw Carthage only at the moment of her fall, and was the bosom friend of her destroyer.
In her origin, at least, Carthage seems to have been, like other Phoenician settlements, a mere commercial factory. Her inhabitants cultivated friendly relations with the natives, looked upon themselves as tenants at will rather than as owners of the soil, and, as such, cheerfully paid a rent to the African Berbers for the ground covered by their dwellings. It was the instinct of self-preservation alone which dictated a change of policy, and transformed this peace-loving mercantile community into the warlike and conquering state, of which the whole of the Western Mediterranean was so soon to feel the power. The result of this change of policy was that the western half of the Mediterranean became—what, at one time, the whole of it had bidden fair to be—a Phoenician lake, in which no foreign merchantmen dared to show themselves. It was a vast preserve, to be caught trespassing upon which, so Strabo tells us, on the authority of Eratosthenes, ensured the punishment of instant death by drowning. No promontory was so barren, no islet so insignificant, as to escape the jealous and ever-watchful eye of the Carthaginians. In Corsica, if they could not get any firm or extensive foothold themselves, they at least prevented any other state from doing the like. Into their hands fell, in spite of the ambitious dreams of Persian kings and the aspirations of patriot Greeks, that “greatest of all islands,” the island of Sardinia; theirs were the Ægatian and the Liparaean, the Balearic and the Pityusian Isles; theirs the tiny Elba, with its inexhaustible supply of metals; theirs, too, Malta still remained, an outpost pushed far into the domain of their advancing enemies, a memorial of what once had been, and, perhaps, to the sanguine Carthaginian temperament, an earnest of what might be again hereafter. Above all, the Phoenician settlements in Spain, at the innermost corner of the great preserve, with the adjacent silver mines which gave to these settlements their peculiar value, were now trebly safe from all intruders.
Elated, as it would seem, by their naval successes, which were hardly of their own seeking, the Carthaginians thought that they might now at last become the owners of the small strip of African territory which they had hitherto seemed to occupy on sufferance only, and they refused the ground-rent which, up till now, they had paid to the adjoining tribes. Step by step they enlarged their territories at the expense of the natives, till the whole of the rich territory watered by the Bagradas became theirs. The Nomadic tribes were beaten back beyond the river Triton into the country named, from the roving habits of its inhabitants, Numidia, or into the desert of Tripolis. The agricultural tribes were forced to pay tribute to the conquerors for the right of cultivating their own soil, or to shed their blood on the field of battle in the prosecution of further conquests from the tribes beyond. Nor did the kindred Phoenician settlements in the adjoining parts of Africa escape unscathed. Utica alone, owing probably to her antiquity and to the semi-parental relation in which she stood to Carthage, was allowed to retain her walls and full equality of rights with the rising power; but Hippo Zarytus, and Adrumetum, the greater and the lesser Leptis, were compelled to pull down their walls and acknowledge the supremacy of the Carthaginian city. All along the northern coast of Africa the original Phoenician settlers, and, probably, to some extent, the Carthaginians themselves, had intermarried with the natives. The product of these marriages was that numerous class of Liby-Phoenicians which proved to be so important in the history of Carthaginian colonization and conquest; a class which, equidistant from the Berbers on the one hand and from the Carthaginians proper on the other, and composed of those who were neither wholly citizens nor yet wholly aliens, experienced the lot of most half-castes, and were alternately trusted and feared, pampered and oppressed, loved and hated, by the ruling state.
One enterprize which was undertaken by the Carthaginians in obedience to the fiat of the king of Persia, to the lasting good of humanity, failed of its object. Xerxes (B.C. 480), advancing with his millions of barbarians upon Athens from the east, bade, so it is said, Hamilcar advance with his 300,000 mercenaries upon Syracuse from the west. The torch of Greek learning and civilization was to be extinguished at the most opposite ends of the Greek world at one and the same moment; but, happily for mankind at large, both attempts were foiled. The efforts of Xerxes ended in the destruction of the Persian fleet at Salamis, and the disgraceful flight of the king to Asia; the efforts of Hamilcar ended in his defeat and death at Himera, and in the destruction of 150,000 of his army; and by a dramatic propriety which is not common in history, whatever it may be in fiction, this double victory of Greek civilization is said to have taken place in the same year and on the very same day.
Let us now turn to the political organization of the city which achieved so rapid and marvellous a development, and inquire how far it was the effect and how far the cause of her prosperity. The constitution of Carthage was not the work of a single legislator, as that of Sparta is said to have been, nor of a series of legislators like that of Athens; it was rather, like that of England, the growth of circumstances and of centuries. It obtained the praise of Aristotle for its judicious admixture of the monarchical, the oligarchical, and the democratical elements. The original monarchical constitution—doubtless inherited from Tyre—was represented by two supreme magistrates called by the Romans Suffetes. Their name is the same as the Hebrew Shofetim, mistranslated in our Bible, Judges. The Hamilcars and Hannos of Carthage were, like their prototypes, the Gideons and the Samsons of the Book of Judges, not so much the judges, as the protectors and the rulers of their respective states. They are compared by Greek writers to the two kings of Sparta, and by the Romans to their own consuls. Beneath these kings came, in the older constitution, a council, called by the Greeks the Gerusia, or Council of Ancients, consisting of twenty-eight members, over which the Suffetes presided. This council declared war, ordered levies of troops, appointed generals, sent out colonies. If the council and Suffetes agreed, their decision was final; if they disagreed, the matter was referred to the people at large. In this and in other ways each element of the body politic had its share in the administration of the State.
But the Carthaginian constitution described and praised by Aristotle is not the same as that of the Punic wars. In the interval which separates the two epochs, short as it is, a great change, which must have been long preparing, had been completed. The Suffetes had gradually become little more than an honorary magistracy. The Senate over which they presided had allowed the main part of their power to slip out of their hands into those of another body, called the Judges, or “The Hundred,” which, if it seemed to be more liberal in point of numbers and in conformation, was much more exclusive in policy and spirit. The appeal to the people was only now resorted to in times of public excitement, when the rulers, by appearing to share power, tried to lessen envy, and allowed the citizens to go through the form of registering what, practically, they had already decreed. The result was an oligarchy, like that of Venice, clear-sighted and consistent, moderate, nay, often wise in its policy, but narrow in its views, and often suspicious alike of its opponents and of its friends. By the old constitution the Senate had the right to control the magistrates; but this new body of Judges controlled the Senate, and therefore, in reality, the magistrates also. Nor was it content to control the Senate; it practically superseded it. Its members did not, as a rule, appropriate the offices of State to themselves; but they could summon their holders before them, and so draw their teeth. No Shofete, no senator, no general, was exempt from their irresponsible despotism. The Shofetes presided, the senators deliberated, the generals fought, as it were, with a halter round their necks. The sentences passed by the Hundred, if they were often deserved, were often also, like those of the dreaded “Ten” at Venice, to whom they bore a striking resemblance, arbitrary and cruel. The unsuccessful general, alike, whether his ill-success was the result of uncontrollable circumstances or of culpable neglect, might be condemned to crucifixion; indeed, he often wisely anticipated his sentence by committing suicide.
Within the ranks of this close oligarchy first-rate ability would seem to have been at a discount. Indeed, the exact equality of all within the privileged ranks is as much a principle of oligarchy as is the equal suppression of all that is outside of it. Language bears testimony to this in the name given alike to the Homoioi of Sparta and the “Peers” of England. It was jealousy, for instance, of the superior abilities of the family of Mago, and their prolonged pre-eminence in the Carthaginian State, which had in the fifth century B.C. cemented the alliance between other and less able families of the aristocracy, and so had first given rise to this very institution of the Hundred Judges; and it was the same mean jealousy of all that is above itself, which, afterwards, in the time of the Punic wars, united, as one man, a large part of the ruling oligarchs in the vain effort to control and to thwart, and to annoy with a thousand petty annoyances, the one family of consummate ability which Carthage then possessed, that noble-minded Barcine gens, that “lion’s brood,” who were brought to the front in those troublous times by the sheer force of their genius, and who, for three generations, ruled by the best of all rights—the right Divine—that of unswerving devotion to their country, of the ability to rule, and the will to use that ability well.
If we try, as we cannot help trying, to picture to ourselves the daily life and personal characteristics of the people whose political organization we have just described, and to ask, not what the Carthaginians did—for that we know—but what they were, we are confronted by the provoking blank in the national history which has been already noticed. Such few indications as we have are in thorough keeping with the view we have taken of the political exclusiveness of the ruling clique. There were public baths; but since no member of the Senate would bathe where the people bathed, a special class of baths were set apart for their use. There were public messes, as they were called; but these were not, as Aristotle supposed, analogous to the Spartan Syssitia, an institution intended to foster manliness and simplicity of life. The black broth of the heroes of Sparta would not have suited the Carthaginian nobles, who, clad in their famous cloth, dyed twice over with the purple dye of their African, their Spanish, or their Tyrian fisheries, and decorated with the finely-cut glass beads, the invention of their Phoenician forefathers, fared sumptuously on their abounding flocks and herds, or on such delicious fruits as those with which Cato moved the astonishment and the envy of the senators of Rome. The Carthaginian Syssitia were incentives to luxury, not checks upon it; they were clubs formed originally for social gatherings, and afterwards applied to the purposes of political gossip or corruption.
Dining-tables of the costly citron wood, a single specimen of which, Pliny tells us, in the time of the Roman empire cost as much as a broad estate, must have been common amongst those who monopolized the commerce of the countries where alone the citron-tree grows. Gold and silver plate cannot have been rare amongst those who controlled the rich mines of Spain, and to whom their ambassadors reported, with a touch of scorn, upon their return from Rome, that they had been hospitably entertained by senator after senator, but that one service of plate had done duty for all. Objects of fine art—statues, and paintings, and embroideries—there were in abundance at Carthage, but they were the work of Greek, not of Phoenician artists, and their abundance indicated not so much the genius, critical or creative, of the Carthaginian community as the number of Greek towns—Selinus and Himera, Gela and Agrigentum—sacked in the Sicilian wars.
Carthage was, beyond doubt, the richest city of antiquity. Her ships were to be found on all known seas, and there was probably no important product, animal, vegetable, or mineral, of the ancient world, which did not find its way into her harbours and pass through the hand of her citizens. But it is remarkable, that while in no city then known did commerce rank so high, the noblest citizens even of Carthage seem to have left commercial enterprize to those who came next below them in the social scale. They preferred to live on their estates as agriculturists or country gentlemen, and derived their princely revenues from their farms or their mines, which were worked by prodigious gangs of slaves. The cultivation of the soil was, probably, nowhere carried on with such astonishing results as in the smiling country which surrounded Carthage.
Those members of the Carthaginian aristocracy who did not find a sufficient field for their ability in agriculture or in politics, in literature or in commerce, took refuge in the profession of arms, and formed always the chief ornament, and often the chief strength of the Punic armies. At one period, at least, of the history of the state, they formed a so-called “Sacred Band,” consisting of 2,500 citizens, who, clad in resplendent armour, fought around the person of their general-in-chief, and, feasting from dishes of the costliest gold and silver plate, commemorated in their pride the number of their campaigns by the number of rings on their fingers.
But the most important factor in the history of a people—especially if it be a Semitic people—is its religion. The religion of the Carthaginians was what their race, their language, and their history would lead us to expect. It was, with slight modifications, the religion of the Canaanites, the religion, that is, which, in spite of the purer monotheism of the Hebrews and the higher teaching of their prophets, so long exercised a fatal fascination over the great bulk of the Hebrew race. Baal-Moloch was a malignant deity; he was the fire-god, rejoicing in “human sacrifices and in parent’s tears.” His worshippers gashed and mutilated themselves in their religious frenzy. Like Kronos or Saturn—to whom the Greeks and Romans aptly enough compared him—he was the devourer of his own children. In times of unbroken security the Carthaginians neglected or forgot him; but when they were elated by an unlooked-for victory, or depressed by a sudden reverse, that fanaticism which is often dormant but never altogether absent from the Semitic breast, burst forth into a devouring flame, which gratified to the full his thirst for human blood. Tanith or Astarte, in the nobler aspects which she sometimes presented, as the goddess of wedded love or war, of the chase or of peaceful husbandry, was identified by the Romans, now with Juno, now with Diana, and now again with Ceres; but, unfortunately, it was when they identified her with their Venus Coelestis that they came nearest to the truth. Her worship, like that of the Babylonian Mylitta, required immorality, nay, consecrated it. The “abomination of the Sidonians” was also the abomination of the Carthaginians.
But there was one god who stood in such a peculiar relation to Carthage, and whose worship seems to have been so much more genial and so much more spiritual than the rest, that we are fain to dwell upon it as a foil to what has preceded. This god was Melcarth, that is Melech-Kirjath, or the king of the city; he is called by the Greeks “the Phoenician Hercules.” and his name itself has passed, with a slight alteration, into Greek mythology as Melicertes. The city of which he was pre-eminently the god was Tyre. There he had a magnificent temple which was visited for antiquarian purposes by Herodotus. It contained two splendid pillars, one of pure gold, the other, as Herodotus believed, of emerald, which shone brilliantly at night, but there was no image of the god to be seen. The same was the case in his famous temple at Thasos, and the still more famous one at Gades, which contained an oracle, a hierarchy of priests, and a mysterious spring which rose and fell inversely with the tide, but still no image. At Carthage, Melcarth had not even a temple. The whole of the city was his temple, and he refused to be localized in any particular part of it. He received, there is reason to believe, no sacrifices of blood; and it was his comparatively pure and spiritual worship which, as we see repeatedly in Carthaginian history, formed a chief link in the chain that bound the parent to the various daughter-cities scattered over the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean.
The Carthaginian proper names which have come down to us form one among many proofs of the depth of their religious feelings; for they are all, or nearly all, compounded with the name of one or other of their chief gods. Hamilcar is he whom Melcarth protects; Hasdrubal is he whose help is in Baal; Hannibal, the Hanniel of the Bible, is the grace of Baal; and so on with Bomilcar, Himilco, Ethbaal, Maherbal, Adherbal, and Mastanabal.
A considerable native literature there must have been at Carthage, for Mago, a Carthaginian Shofete, did not disdain to write a treatise of twenty-eight books upon the agricultural pursuits which formed the mainstay of his order; and when the Roman Senate, in their fatuous disregard for intellect, gave over with careless profusion to their friends, the Berber chiefs, the contents of all the libraries they had found in Carthage, they reserved for this work the especial honour of an authorized translation into Latin, and of a formal recommendation of its practical maxims to the thrifty husbandmen of Rome.
It was the one fatal weakness of the Carthaginian State for military purposes that the bulk of their vast armies consisted not of their own citizens, nor even of attached and obedient subjects, but of foreign mercenaries. There were few countries and few tribes in the western world which were not represented in a Carthaginian army. Money or superior force brought to Carthage samples of every nation which her fleets could reach. Native Libyans and Liby-Phoenicians, Gauls and Spaniards, slingers from the far-famed Balearic Isles, Greeks and Ligurians, Volscians and Campanians, were all to be found within its ranks.
But it was the squadrons of light horsemen drawn from all the nomad tribes lying between the Altars of the Phileni on the east and the Pillars of Hercules on the west, which formed its heart. Mounted on their famous barbs, with a shield of elephant’s hide on their arm and a lion’s skin thrown over their shoulders, the only raiment they ever wore by day and the only couch they ever cared to sleep on at night; without a saddle and without a bridle, or with a bridle only of twisted reeds which they rarely needed to touch; equally remarkable for their fearlessness, their agility, and their cunning; equally formidable, whether they charged or made believe to fly; they were, at once, the strength and the weakness, the delight and the despair, of the Carthaginian State. Under the mighty military genius of Hannibal—with the ardour which he breathed into the feeblest and the discipline which he enforced on the most undisciplined of his army—they faced without shrinking the terrors of the Alps and the malaria of the marshes, and they proved invincible against all the power of Rome, at the Ticinus and the Trebia, at Thrasimene and at Cannae; but, as more often happened, led by an incompetent general, treated by him, as not even Napoleon treated his troops, like so many beasts for the slaughter, and sometimes even basely deserted or betrayed into the enemies’ hands, they naturally proved a two-edged weapon piercing the hand that leaned upon it, faithless and revengeful, learning nothing and forgetting nothing, finding once and again in the direst extremity of Carthage their own deadliest opportunity.
But if the life of the great capitalists of Carthage was as brilliant as we have described it, how did it fare with the poorer citizens, with those whom we call the masses, till we sometimes forget that they are made up of individual units? If we know little of the rich, how much less do we know of the poor of Carthage and her dependencies! The city population, with the exception—a large exception doubtless—of those engaged in commerce, well-contented as it would seem, like the Romans under the Empire, if nothing deprived them of their bread and of their amusements, went on eating and marrying and multiplying till their numbers became excessive, and then they were shipped off by the prudence of their rulers to found colonies in other parts of Africa or in Spain. Their natural leaders, or, as, probably, more often happened, the bankrupt members of the aristocracy, would take the command of the colony, and obtain free leave, in return for their services, to enrich themselves by the plunder of the adjoining tribes. To so vast an extent did Carthage carry out the modern principle of relieving herself of a superfluous population, and at the same time of extending her empire, by colonization, that, on one occasion, the Admiral Hanno, whose “Periplus” still remains, was despatched with sixty ships of war of fifty oars each, and with a total of not less than 30,000 half-caste emigrants on board, for the purpose of founding colonies on the shores of the ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
To defray the expenses of this vast system of exploration and colonization, as well as of their enormous armies, the most ruinous tribute was imposed and exacted with unsparing rigour from the subject native states, and no slight one either from the cognate Phoenician cities. The taxes paid by the natives sometimes amounted to a half of their whole produce, and among the Phoenician dependent cities themselves we know that the lesser Leptis alone paid into the Carthaginian treasury the sum of a talent daily. The tribute levied on the conquered Africans was paid in kind, as is the case with the Rayahs of Turkey to the present day, and its apportionment and collection were doubtless liable to the same abuses and gave rise to the same enormities as those of which Europe has lately heard so much. Hence arose that universal disaffection, or rather that deadly hatred, on the part of her foreign subjects, and even of the Phoenician dependencies, towards Carthage, on which every invader of Africa could safely count as his surest support. Hence the ease with which Agathocles, with his small army of 15,000 men, could overrun the open country, and the monotonous uniformity with which he entered, one after another, two hundred towns, which Carthaginian jealousy had deprived of their walls, hardly needing to strike a blow. Hence, too, the horrors of the revolt of the outraged Libyan mercenaries, supported as it was by the free-will contributions of their golden ornaments by the Libyan women, who hated their oppressors as perhaps women only can, and which is known in history by the name of the “War without Truce” or the “Inexpiable War.”
It must, however, be borne in mind that the inherent differences of manners, language, and race between the native of Africa and the Phoenician incomer were so great; the African was so unimpressible, and the Phoenician was so little disposed to understand, or to assimilate himself to his surroundings, that, even if the Carthaginian government had been conducted with an equity, and the taxes levied with a moderation which we know was far from being the case, a gulf profound and impassable must probably have always separated the two peoples. This was the fundamental, the ineradicable weakness of the Carthaginian Empire, and in the long run outbalanced all the advantages obtained for her by her navies, her ports, and her well-stocked treasury; by the energies and the valour of her citizens; and by the consummate genius of three, at least, of her generals. It is this, and this alone, which in some measure reconciles us to the melancholy, nay the hateful termination of the struggle, on the history of which we are about to enter. But if under the conditions of ancient society, and the savagery of the warfare which it tolerated, there was an unavoidable necessity for either Rome or Carthage to perish utterly, we must admit, in spite of the sympathy which the brilliancy of the Carthaginian civilization, the heroism of Hamilcar and Hannibal, and the tragic catastrophe itself, call forth, that it was well for the human race that the blow fell on Carthage rather than on Rome. A universal Carthaginian Empire could have done for the world, as far as we can see, nothing comparable to that which the Roman universal empire did for it. It would not have melted down national antipathies, it would not have given a common literature or language; it would not have prepared the way for a higher civilization and an infinitely purer religion. Still less would it have built up that majestic fabric of law which forms the basis of the legislation of all the states of Modern Europe and America.
IT IS TIME NOW TO take a glance at the origin and rise of the younger city on the banks of the Tiber, whose progress towards the dominion of the world Carthage, and Carthage alone of the states of antiquity, was able seriously to delay. The history of Rome is like, and yet unlike, that of Carthage. It is like it, for we see in each the growth of a civic community which, from very small beginnings, under an aristocratic form of government, and with slight literary or artistic tastes, acquired first, by the force of circumstances, the leadership of the adjoining cities, which were akin to her in blood, and subsequently, by a far-sighted policy, or by a strong arm, became mistress, not only of them, but, by their aid, of all the tribes whom Nature had not cut off from them by the sea, the mountains, or the desert.
But Roman history is intrinsically unlike the Carthaginian, for the greatness of Rome rested not, as did the greatness of Carthage, on her wealth, or her commerce, or her colonies, or her narrow oligarchy, but on the constitutional progress which, after a long struggle, obliterated the mischievous privileges of an aristocracy of birth, and raised the commonalty to a complete social and political equality with their former lords. It rested on the grand moral qualities which formed the groundwork of the Roman character in its best times, earnestness and simplicity of life, reverence for the sanctities of the family relations, reverence for the law, reverence for the gods. It rested on the extraordinary concentration of all these qualities, together with the soundest practical ability which the state contained, in the Senate, perhaps when taken at its best, the noblest deliberative assembly which the world has ever seen. And when the two orders in the State had become united and Rome was fairly launched in her career as a conquering power, her greatness rested (how unlike to Carthage!) on the real community of interest and of blood which united her to the greater number of the Italian tribes that she absorbed; on the self-sacrifice which bade her then, and for a long time to come, tax not her subjects but herself; on the wise precautions which she took to secure their permanent allegiance, partly by isolating them from one another, partly by leaving them in some sense to govern themselves, or by admitting them to a share, actual or prospective, in the Roman citizenship.
It belongs not to our purpose here to trace the vicissitudes of the long and eventful struggle between the privileged Patricians and the unenfranchised Plebs. It is incumbent upon us only to note the result of that long constitutional conflict; and that grand result was that the two orders became indissolubly united, socially and politically, into one nation, and were thus prepared, whether for good or for evil, to assert their natural supremacy over the rest of Italy, and then to conquer the world. Nor, again, does it fall within our scope to follow with any degree of minuteness the early progress of the Roman arms. It must suffice to trace only so much of its outline as may enable us to judge of the true position of the conquering city, when a wider field opened before her, and she had to face, no longer the petty warfare of bordering townships, nor even the collective strength of Samnite and Etruscan confederations, but Carthage, Macedon, and the East.
The expulsion of the kings left Rome still a prey to internal discord, a circumstance of which her nearest neighbours, the Etruscans, wholly alien as they were to her in race, were not slow to avail themselves. The Etruscan nation, with its gloomy and mysterious religion, the solemn trifling of its augural science, and the cruelty of its gladiatorial games, was just then at the height of its power by land and sea. Now was its opportunity; the fond but soul-stirring romances of the ballad-singers and annalists of early Rome have not been able wholly to disguise the fact that the city itself fell before the arms of Porsena. But the triumph of Etruria was not long lived. A protracted warfare of 150 years succeeded, in which the star of Rome came gradually into the ascendant, and the fall of Veii after a ten years’ siege, and, still more perhaps, the hurricane of Northern barbarians which just then burst over the fairest plains of Italy, set Rome forever free from danger on the side of Etruria.
But Rome was delivered from the Etruscans only (B.C. 390) to find that the Gaul was thundering at her gates. The city was burned to the ground, her temples desecrated, her historical records destroyed, her inhabitants dispersed or slain; but no such ephemeral calamity could shatter the traditions or shake the resolution of the Roman people. Rome rose, like the phoenix, from her ashes, and started afresh on her career of conquest. Her ancient enemies, theÆquians and Volscians, who, according to the patriotic narrative of Livy, had for so many years in the early history of the Republic been annually exterminated, and had annually revived to be exterminated again, had long since died their last death as independent nations. The Etruscans were now powerless. The last desperate effort of the Latins to restore, when it was too late (B.C. 340-338), the equality of their ancient league, was crushed in two campaigns, and Rome now found herself face to face with the worthiest antagonists she had yet met, the brave and hardy Sabellian race, which was akin to herself in blood, which had lately almost annexed Campania, and which clung with desperate tenacity and with manners that never changed to the rugged mountains and the inaccessible defiles of the Central and Southern Apennines. The struggle is memorable for the deeds of heroism which mark its course on either side; for the stubborn resistance and chivalrous bravery of the weaker, and, on more than one occasion, for the perfidy and the meanness of the stronger combatant. But it is yet more remarkable, in the eye of him who would read the story of the Punic Wars aright, for the light it throws upon the true secret of the Roman strength in war.
Never did the iron resolution and devotion of her citizens, never did the unbending consistency of purpose and the marvellous self-restraint of the Senate, display itself more brilliantly. Without haste, but without a pause, never elated by victory, never depressed by defeat, not caring to overrun what they could not hold by force of arms, or to obtain by treaty what they could not take without it, willing to employ years instead of months, and to conquer by inches where they might have conquered by leagues, the Roman Senate, slow but sure, held on the even tenor of their course, determined only that where the Roman eagles had once set down their talons, there they should remain, till the time came to plunge them more deeply into the vitals of the foe. Did Samnium at the close of the great twenty-two years’ struggle lie, to all appearance, prostrate at the feet of Rome, the last of her fortresses, Bovianum, in the grasp of the conqueror? That conqueror concluded an equitable peace, on terms of all but equal alliance, not because she liked to spare the conquered—that maxim is to be found only in the patriotic imagination of the author of the “Æneid”—but simply because she did not choose to be brought face to face with Southern Italy before she had made quite sure of Central. To build a new fortress, to found a new military colony, to complete a stage or two more of a great military road—if only it could better secure what lay behind, and give a vantage ground for future operations whenever the time should come—this was the strictly practical object of Rome when she took up arms; this she kept in view when smarting under a defeat; and, what is more remarkable, with this she rested content even when flushed with victory. In this way, always aiming only at what was feasible, making sure of every inch of her way, drawing her iron network of colonies and military roads over every district which she professed to claim, Rome found herself at length (B.C. 293) with not a single danger behind her, and with nothing in front save some luxurious Greek cities, and some insignificant tribes of Italian aborigines, to separate her from that which was at once the object of her highest hopes and of her most practical and stem resolves, the union of the whole of Italy beneath her sway.
We have said that there was but one obstacle to the realization of the aim of Rome; but one other there shortly appeared, which, as it had been beyond the visible, so was it necessarily beyond the mental horizon of so matter-of-fact a body as the Roman Senate. The adventurous king of Epirus, whose erratic course it would have required a genius like his own to have anticipated, shot down like a meteor on the scene (B.C. 280). Fired with the ambition of emulating his great relative Alexander, and of founding a vast Greek empire in the west on the ruins of Italy and Carthage, as Alexander had founded his on the ruins of Persia and of Egypt, he eagerly seized the opportunity afforded him by the appeal of the frivolous Tarentines, and offered to lead the Greek cities of Italy in their opposition to Rome.