Carthage

Carthage was not a monarchy and had not been one for centuries by the time Rome encountered it. It was an oligarchic republic, headed by two suffetes elected annually, advised by a senate of several hundred, with a popular assembly that could decide matters when the magistrates disagreed.

The most unusual institution was the Council of One Hundred and Four, a body that audited generals and could crucify those who failed. A commercial state that treats military command as a role subject to review, and punishes incompetence lethally, has a very different relationship with its commanders than a Roman or Macedonian state did.

The strongest evidence for how this looked from outside is that Aristotle discusses the Carthaginian constitution in the Politics alongside those of Sparta and Crete, as an example of a well-mixed system that had avoided both tyranny and popular disorder. A Greek philosopher treating a Phoenician state as a serious constitutional model is a useful corrective to how the tradition later developed.

Politics was factional and the factions are visible. The Barcid family, based on Spanish silver and the army, stood against a landed aristocratic bloc associated with Hanno the Great, which repeatedly declined to reinforce Hannibal in Italy. Carthage lost the Second Punic War partly for reasons internal to its own politics.

Carthage fought its wars with a citizen navy and a hired army, and this was a considered allocation rather than a failing. A trading state with a small citizen body and enormous revenues can buy infantry more cheaply than it can conscript it, and the Carthaginian army at its best combined Libyan, Numidian, Iberian, Balearic and Gallic contingents, each doing what it did best, the Numidian light cavalry above all.

The risk was real and was realised. After the First Punic War, unpaid mercenaries revolted and nearly destroyed the state in the Mercenary War, a conflict Polybius describes as the most savage he knew of.

At sea Carthage was formidable until Rome refused to accept it, building a fleet from a captured model and adding the corvus boarding bridge to turn naval battles into infantry fights. It is the clearest instance in the Archives of a state neutralising an opponent’s advantage by changing what the contest was about.

Hannibal is the clearest case in the Archives of tactical genius that could not win a war. At Cannae in 216 BCE he destroyed a Roman army of perhaps eighty thousand, killing around fifty thousand, in a double envelopment still taught in staff colleges, and Rome simply raised more men, refused to negotiate, and turned the war into one of attrition against a general who could not be reinforced.

Carthage was a commercial state in a sense none of its rivals were. It inherited the Phoenician network of western Mediterranean ports and turned it into something closer to a controlled trading system, with treaties defining where others could sail and a reputation for enforcing them.

The reach was long. Carthaginian traders worked the Atlantic coast for tin from Brittany or Cornwall and for gold from West Africa, and Hanno’s Periplus records a voyage down the African coast that is the earliest surviving account of exploration beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

Less famous and more important is agriculture. The North African hinterland was developed into highly productive estate farming, and Carthaginian expertise was respected enough that when the city was destroyed the Roman senate ordered the agricultural treatise of Mago translated into Latin. It was the only Punic book they thought worth saving, and a telling admission from the people who had just razed the city.

Punic coinage came late, as it did for most Phoenician-derived states. A trading network running on weighed silver and credit does not need coin until it has to pay soldiers, and that is exactly when Carthage began minting.

Carthaginian society was layered by descent and by wealth: an aristocracy of old families dominating trade and office, a broader citizen body, the Libyphoenicians of mixed descent in the subject towns, the Libyan population of the hinterland who paid heavy tribute and revolted when they could, and slaves.

The relationship with the Libyans is the political weakness that recurs. Carthage taxed its African hinterland hard and did not extend citizenship to it, so its own territory supplied enemies as readily as revenue. Numidian defection to Rome under Masinissa was decisive in the second war and fatal in the third.

Evidence for daily life comes almost entirely from excavation: dense multi-storey housing on a regular street plan, bathing facilities, extensive use of imported goods, and a level of urban organisation that impressed visitors.

Carthaginian women appear in inscriptions dedicating monuments in their own names and in the funerary record with independent standing, and some held priesthoods. Greek and Roman authors say almost nothing about them, so the inscriptions are nearly the whole of the evidence.

The principal deities were Baal Hammon and, increasingly, the goddess Tanit, whose symbol, a triangle with a bar and disc above it, appears on thousands of stelae. Melqart, the god of Tyre, retained a place as the mother city’s deity, and an annual tribute was sent to Tyre for centuries after independence.

The tophet is the hardest question anywhere in the Archives, and it should be presented as unresolved. At Carthage and other Punic sites, walled precincts contain urns holding the cremated remains of infants and young animals, marked with dedicatory stelae to Baal Hammon and Tanit, deposited over centuries.

Greek and Roman writers describe these as sites of child sacrifice, sometimes in lurid detail. One scholarly position accepts this. The language of vow and offering on the stelae fits, the age profile is narrow, and the practice would not be unique in the ancient Near East. The opposing position argues these are cemeteries for infants who died naturally, a population with high infant mortality needing somewhere to bury children who died before full incorporation into the community, and that the classical accounts are atrocity propaganda against a defeated enemy.

The evidence has been read both ways by competent people and the argument is live. What can be said firmly is that the confident version found in popular accounts rests on sources with an obvious motive, and that the archaeology does not settle it either way.

The single most impressive Carthaginian structure was functional. The cothon was an artificial harbour complex with a rectangular commercial basin opening into a circular military one, the inner harbour ringed with covered ship-sheds around a central island that held the admiral’s headquarters. Appian describes it and excavation has confirmed it. Nothing else in the western Mediterranean matched it as a purpose-built naval base.

The city itself was densely built on a regular grid with multi-storey housing, running up the slope of the Byrsa hill. It was an urban form more like a modern city than like Rome of the same date, and it impressed the Romans.

Carthaginian art is usually called derivative, which is both true and beside the point. It borrows from Egypt, Greece and the Near East because Carthage traded with all of them, and a merchant culture makes objects that sell in several markets. Its characteristic carved ivories, glass, metalwork and terracotta masks are eclectic by design.

Almost nothing above ground survives, because Rome demolished the city and then rebuilt on the site a century later, and the Roman colony’s foundations cut through what was underneath. The Punic city is known largely from what lay below Roman street level.

The Punic language was a Phoenician dialect written in the same consonantal alphabet, and it survived the city. Augustine, more than five centuries after the destruction, notes that country people in North Africa still spoke it. Thousands of dedications, funerary texts and building records survive, and they are what we have instead of literature.

Because a literature did exist. Carthage had libraries, and when the city fell the Romans handed them to the Numidian kings rather than keeping them, which is why they are lost. The exception is Mago’s twenty-eight books on agriculture, translated by senatorial decree and quoted extensively by later Roman agricultural writers, so we have fragments of the only Punic technical work Rome valued.

Hanno’s Periplus survives in Greek translation and records a colonising expedition down the Atlantic coast of Africa, with descriptions of a volcano, of night fires along the shore, and of hairy people the Greek text calls gorillai, the origin of the modern word.

Carthaginian medicine and natural knowledge are attested only indirectly, through Greek references and through what the agricultural tradition implies about botany and estate management. The honest statement is that a literate, technically capable civilisation left us almost nothing of its own thought.

There is no Carthaginian historian. Not one. Everything narrative comes from Greeks and Romans, most of it written after Carthage had been destroyed by the people the authors identified with.

Polybius is the best of them and was physically present at the destruction as a companion of Scipio Aemilianus. He is careful, analytical and interested in constitutions, his account of the wars is the fullest we have, and he is also writing to explain to a Greek audience why Roman power was inevitable. Livy is more hostile and further from events. Appian preserves valuable detail on the city itself.

Against this stands a growing archaeological record: the harbours, the housing, the tophet precincts, the cemeteries, the Punic settlements across Sicily, Sardinia, Ibiza and North Africa, and inscriptions in quantity. Modern scholarship on Carthage is substantially the work of correcting literary sources against material evidence.

There is also a live debate about whether ‘Carthaginian’ and ‘Phoenician’ name self-conscious identities at all, or categories imposed by Greek observers on a set of cities that shared a language and a trading world without thinking of themselves as one people. That question, pursued most prominently in Josephine Quinn’s In Search of the Phoenicians, reframes the whole subject and is not yet settled.