The Rest Is History - 422. Ancient Carthage: Rise of a Superpower (Part 2)

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

“An aristocratic republic, secret and well-ordered, where individuals are subject to the harsh laws of the austere and disciplined rich…” The mysterious, wealthy and glamorous city of Carthage flourished between the ninth and second centuries BC, becoming one of the greatest naval and mercantile powers in the world. By the sixth century BC the Carthaginians were a force to be reckoned with, holding off assaults from various Greek rivals, and starting to colonise larger parts of the Mediterranean. Where once there had been a barren wasteland, now stood glittering villas and temples, bustling marketplaces, and vast walls stretching down to the sea. Yet Carthage also had a reputation for violence and cruelty. Bloody human offerings were made to the gods, with hundreds of Carthaginian children cast into the flames, whilst crucifixion was often inflicted on generals who fell short of Carthage’s exacting standards… Join Tom and Dominic as they explore the extraordinary rise of Carthage, a city of blazing innovation and sinister mystique. By the third century BC it seemed that no power could ever rival it. But little did the Carthaginians know that another city, a minnow from an Italian backwater, was on the rise. A city that may even one day challenge her supremacy: Rome. *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London!  Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. It is said that Scipio Aemilianus, as Carthage was going up in flames, its annihilation almost complete, gazed at the city in its death throes and openly wept for his enemies. He stood, wrapped in thought for a long time, pondering how every city, every people, every empire, must, as men do, meet with their doom in the end. For such had been the fate of Troy, once a proud and flourishing city, and of the empires of Assyria, Media and Persia, each in their own day the greatest in the world,

and of Macedon, which only recently had blazed with such a brilliance. And then, either deliberately or because he could not help quoting them, Scipio spoke two lines of Homer. A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish, and Priam and his people all be slain. And when Polybius, speaking to him with the freedom he was granted as Scipio's tutor, asked him what he meant by these words, it is said that without any attempt to veil his meaning, Scipio made reference to his own country. For when he pondered how all things that are mortal must fall he dreaded how Rome too would fall so that's the end of the story of Carthage the destruction of Carthage and the great Roman

general Scipio looks out and he mourns not just the fate of Carthage and of all empires but he thinks about the fate that awaits Rome itself. And so, Tom, we're doing this mighty series about Carthage. We're looking forward here to the end of the story. And that's an absolutely fascinating passage because that implies a degree of empathy for Rome's great enemies that we wouldn't normally associate with the Romans. Which we have to say is very unusual. So the Polybius who is mentioned in that passage is really our great source for much of the story we're going to be telling. So he was a Greek who had been taken hostage and taken to Rome in the second century BC.

And he wrote a history about how what had been a multipolar world, so a Mediterranean full of different states, had become a unipolar world ruled so a Mediterranean full of different states, had become a unipolar world ruled by Rome. And this was his great theme. And the destruction of Carthage is the climax of his story. And the fact that the city is obliterated and that the Romans hated it so much that they were willing to inflict this terrible fate on what had been one of the great, great cities of the Mediterranean, kind of points to what is kind of glamorous, mysterious, and cruel about Carthage's reputation. Because the fact that most of what we know about Carthage comes from its enemies gives it a slightly kind of malevolent aura in the sources that we have. So it's a bit like the city equivalent of Cleopatra, right? All we know about Cleopatra

generally comes from her enemies. And the same is true of Carthage too. They're both seen as really glamorous, sinister, depraved, degenerate, luxurious, all of those kind of orientalist things. Is that fair? Yeah. And we've talked about how Dido, the legendary founder of Carthage, in Virgil's great poem, The Aeneid, she is equated with Cleopatra. So that sense of kind of simultaneous, the glamour and the cruelty is absolutely enhanced by the fact that, I mean, the Romans really hated Carthage. Carthage is the city that pushes Rome closer to destruction than any other enemy that she has to face. And of course, I mean, even Scipio in that passage, he's not really weeping for Carthage. As you say, he's weeping for Rome. And throughout the Roman sources, the Latin word

for Carthaginian, punicus, I mean, it's almost always used as a kind of term of abuse. It's always associated with negative connotations. And even if you look at the Greeks, when they write about Carthage, because the Greeks had been rivals with the Carthaginians for centuries and centuries, kind of trade rivals, and particularly in Sicily, they'd been geopolitical rivals. I mean, they hate the Carthaginians too. So Polybius begins his history with the first great war between the Romans and the Carthaginians too. So Polybius begins his history with the first great war between the Romans and the Carthaginians, what we call the first Punic war. But there had been a history that had ended at that point written by a guy called Timaeus. And Timaeus hated the Carthaginians.

Everything he writes about them is kind of negative. And so he liked the Romans. It's endlessly going on about how the Carthaginians are treacherous. They're cruel. So Timaeus, I mean, he can't get enough about child sacrifice. He absolutely loves that. He's always going on about it. And perhaps the most shocking thing that Timaeus alleges about the Carthaginians is that they wear underpants beneath their robes. They wear underpants underneath their robes. Yeah.

Not like Scotsmen. Right. Okay. Did Greeks not wear underpants, Tom? Apparently not. I don't believe that. I think they probably did. Tobias condemns it as absolutely shocking behavior. I find that implausible. So just to step back a second for people who are completely bewildered where we are and what we're talking about. So I'm at the city of Carthage, which flourishes from very roughly its dates, Tom? 9th century up to the 2nd century.

So it becomes one of the great superpowers of the Mediterranean, this maritime power, very mercantile. And the thing about it, so going back to that reading, Carthage going up in flames, the thing that gives Carthage this enduring, one of the things anyway that gives it this enduring glamour and mystery is that almost everything is destroyed. Now you said last time that there are some stones and stuff left in Tunis,

pretty much on the site of Carthage. But all its library is destroyed, everything written by the Carthaginians. We're told that they're given away to a people in Libya, a famous horseman called Numidians. The story goes that they give it away. The one collection of books that the Romans do keep is a 28-volume treatise on agriculture. That's depressing.

No, but apparently the Carthaginians were tremendous agronomists. Right. And as you say, there's this story that it gets sown with salt, the ruins get sown with salt. This isn't actually true. It actually got invented in 1920. Oh. And it's now been repeated over and over again.

Right. And there are kind of places. So we talked about the Tophet, the place where they did the child sacrifices in the previous episode, and that kind of got buried beneath kind of the rubble of the city, which the Romans used as filler for new settlements. So there are fragments of it, but there's not a huge amount. Right.

I mean, you have to try and stop seeing it through Roman, and perhaps particularly Greek eyes, because the Greeks did kind of respect Carthage as almost being on a level with the Greeks themselves. And there was no higher source of praise. So Aristotle, for instance, he has a list of all the various constitutions of cities and Carthage is the only non-Greek city to be included in that. He actually rates Carthage very highly. He ranks it with Sparta and Crete as one of the top three constitutions in the world. So there are kind of positive takes as well. But of course, it's really important to emphasize that Carthage is not just a kind of ersatz, Greek city. It's Phoenician. Yeah, because you talked about that in the last episode. So the Phoenicians who are these people from modern day Lebanon, Tyre and Sidon. Yeah. You think they did

exist. Some historians kind of think they're invented. But you and other historians think that there was a kind of commonality of identity among those Lebanese people. And that still matters in Carthage. They're still very conscious of themselves as descended in the same way that Americans would look to Great Britain. Same kind of relationship, Tom. So you think about the most famous Carthaginian of all is Hannibal, who leads an army against the Romans, elephants over the Alps. I mean, that literally means the grace of Baal. So Baal is the Lord. So the grace of the Lord. And that is one of really only a handful of names that the Carthaginian elite seem to have used and which derive from Tyre.

And it makes it very, very annoying because there are multiple people. They've all got the same name. Right. There are waves upon waves of Hanno's who appear throughout Carthaginian history. So we'll have to try and negotiate that. And are we going to get more child sacrifice in today's episode? No, we're not. Oh. But listeners can be reassured that the very final section of this series,

there's some sensational torture to look forward to. So all kinds of atrocities. Okay, brilliant. We love a bit of sensational torture. So should we go through the sweep of Carthage's history? I would love nothing more, Tom. Good. So again, we talked about this in the previous episode. The traditional date of Carthage's founding is 814, and it's absolutely not implausible. And it is called the new city, Carthage in Phoenician, which implies that it is founded to be a city, to be a kind of permanent colonial settlement.

And I think the reason for that is that its location is tremendously advantageous. So as you said, it's just north of where Tunis is now. So it's that bit of Africa that sticks out towards Sicily. And its location is very, very advantageous. So it's a bit like Constantinople. There's a peninsula that sticks out. So it's defensible, but it is also large enough that there is room for expansion. I believe, Tom, you can get a light rail now that goes along the peninsula and all the stops are called kind of Hamilcar.

Oh, that's so romantic. I've never actually been. Have you not? So to give people a sense of it, you get this sort of little railway stroke tram thing out of the centre of Tunis, which I have to say I don't massively recommend. And every now and again you get off. The various stops, they'll say, brilliant Carthaginian site here. And I went with a former girlfriend who it's fair to say

was not a massive convert to Carthaginian history. Punic history. So we'd kind of get off this and we'd walked a little bit and there was like a sort of what looked like a kind of disused bit of waste ground and a load of old stones hanging around. Oh, I love it. I can't believe I haven't taken my children on a holiday there. And a very sort of garbled little caption would say,

possibly child sacrifice things, who knows? You know, and that was it. I wouldn't say I was held in massively high regard by my travelling companion during that holiday. I know, but Dominic, imagine that you were back there in the eighth century, shortly after its founding. That was what I was saying, Tom. That was what I was saying. And you've got the Acropolis in front of you. So this was called the Birsa, which in Greek means oxide. And so they had this story that Daida, when she landed, she was allowed by the local king to have as much space as could be covered by an oxide.

And so she cuts it into tiny slices and puts it around the beer cellar. I think I've heard that story about 20 different cities. I know. And it's definitely not true because actually the name derives from an Akkadian word for fortress. So, but it's a nice story. And of course it has harbours, spectacular harbours. And this is really why they settle it. But the other thing is that it is perfectly situated to dominate two alternative trade routes. So one, obviously from Phoenicia in the east, right the way up to Spain in the west, but also just as crucially, north-south. So you've got Sicily, very accessible just across the sea. And then, of course, you've got Italy. So Carthage is perfectly placed to control all this kind of trade. And as a result of this, it grows very fast. And so archaeologists looking at all these fascinating sites that you visited with your girlfriend, estimate that probably within a century of its founding, there may be 30, 40,000 people.

And it expands so fast that the walls keep having to be knocked down and rebuilt to make room for people. And just, you mentioned agronomy. So the sort of hinterland is very fertile. And actually, you see that today in Tunisia. You know, people probably haven't been to North Africa think, oh, it's probably all desert. It's absolutely not. It's kind of olive groves and lovely fields and all that kind of thing. Yes.

And it actually takes time for the Carthaginians to develop this. Because to begin with, I think they definitely remain a trading power. They're not particularly expanding into the hinterland, because there are tribes there. Yeah, Bedouin, Tom, surely, or Berbers or something. Berbers, yeah. Libyans, they're called. Or the Numidians, who we also mentioned. So I think to begin with, it's primarily a trading city. And so this is why Carthage itself, of course, is a colonial settlement, but they

then start going out and planting settlements across the Western Mediterranean, particularly on Sardinia. These are not towns, these are just trading posts. Rather like the settlements that the Venetians would have put up later, or the Portuguese in Africa. So sort of forts and markets, basically. Yes. As with the Portuguese settlements, there's a kind of underpinning of violence. So it's kind of bad news for the locals, really. Right. And so by the 6th century, Carthage is no longer colonial relative to Phoenicia. And in part, that's because back in Phoenicia, the Babylonians have conquered Tyre. So there's been a long 13

year siege. Nebuchadnezzar takes control of it, the guy who will go on to conquer Jerusalem. And at the same time, there's a kind of collapse in the price of silver because the Phoenicians have been mining all this silver in Spain and there's a glut. And so basically the Tyrian economy implodes. Inflation, Tom. Galloping inflation, as with Spain, when they discover silver. And so this leaves the field open for Carthage to basically displace the mother country. So again, a bit like America and Britain, I guess. So a sad story. But it's imperialism. It's still very

Venetian. It's not, say, like the Romans, conquering territory. It's still planting settlements and kind of constructing trade nodes. But there is a straw in the wind at this point, because there's a kind of garbled account in both the Greek and the Roman sources, writing much later, of a guy called Malchus. And that has a hint of the Phoenician word for king. And he is supposed to have campaigned very hard in Sicily and Sardinia. And his exploits seem to be slightly exaggerated, but it does suggest that the Greeks are starting to arrive on the scene now. So the Carthaginians have had it all their way, but now the Greeks are turning up and starting to compete for resources in Sicily,

in Sardinia, in Southern Gaul, in Spain. So at this point in the Mediterranean, there is no, as it were, superpower. It's all up for grabs, right? Nobody is sophisticated and powerful enough. Well, Carthage is the most powerful city. Even at this stage? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And has been accustomed to having its own way on the kind of the trade front for a fair

while. Right. Which is why the arrival of the Greeks, particularly in Sicily, is so destabilizing. So in the 730s, the most significant Greek city in Sicily is founded, and that's Syracuse, which of course is still there. I mean, kind of wonderfully situated. And so Syracuse is squaring up to Phoenician cities that have been founded in the East. So the most significant of these is Panormus, which is today Palermo. So these are cities that are being founded in places that are

kind of absolutely perfect for cities so panormous is actually the greek name for it brilliantly the phoenician name seems to have been ziz ziz that's a brilliant name apparently it means flower right so it's such a shame it's not still called ziz and the other very significant phoenician settlement is a place called mochia which we mentioned in the previous episode as having a top tophet, top place for child sacrifice. And a bit like Tyre, it's on an island. And so archaeologists have been able to look at it. They know what it was like in the 6th century. It had kind of incredible dry docks, temples, had a tophet, of course, industrial zones. And again, it was involved in making dye. So this involves smashing up mollusks and leaving them to dry in the sun. And also it's making garum, which is this kind of fish-based sauce. So I think you could assume that Phoenician cities stank. I mean, you can imagine drying mollusks and drying fish. I mean, that's quite hard. But would they stink more than others,

Tom? That's the question. So surely Greeks, it is, would have had their own stench, wouldn't they? But the Phoenicians control the dye market. The Greeks never really work out how to do that. So I think that adds a kind of extra dimension. Extra level, yeah. So Pernomus and Mochia, they're not subject to Carthage, but obviously they're under Carthaginian influence. And the sense that Phoenician settlements in Western Sicily are going to be absorbed into a Carthaginian sphere of influence intensifies because, of course, the Greeks are spreading from Eastern Sicily westwards, and they are starting to crash into the Carthaginian sphere of influence, the Phoenician sphere of influence. So by 600, you are getting cities that are almost going toe to toe with the Phoenicians. So you have a place called Salinas on the south

coast of Sicily and a place called Himera on the north coast. And in 580, Greek colonists try to build a city directly opposite Mochia on its island. The Phoenicians, they form an alliance, Carthaginians join in, they drive the Greek colonists away. And the result of this is that Mochia improves its defences, but so also does the Greek city of Salinas. So there's a sense that a cold war is really starting to hot up. Do we know about this from archaeology? Because you mentioned improving their defences. And also we know about it from historians because Herodotus, this is kind of almost within living memory. And so he writes about this, but he also writes particularly about a city on the eastern seaboard of what's now

Turkey. So on the Aegean coast called Phakia, the amusingly named Phakia. And the Persians have arrived on the scene and they have conquered the Greek cities on the eastern Aegean. And the Phakians are besieged. They all get into their ships while the Persian siege works are outside. They sail off west. And so when the Persians break in, the city is empty and deserted. And so the Phicians head westwards, they sail into the Western Mediterranean. And basically, you know, they are operating as pirates because by this point there are Greek cities that they've been planted in Corsica and in southern Gaul.

So Nice is originally Nicaea and Marseille is originally Marsilia. They are Greek cities. And the Phicians are just sailing around acting like pirates, preying on Carthaginian ships. So the Carthaginians ally themselves with a people called the Etruscans who are in northern Italy. They've given their name to Tuscany. Yeah, of course. And the Etruscans and the Carthaginians, they make an enormous fleet.

They sail out. They fight the Phicians in a battle that comes to be called the Battle of the Sardinian Sea. And although both sides suffer heavy losses, the Phicians have the worst of it. Lots of them are taken prisoner and the Etruscans take them back to Tuscany or Etruria, we should probably call it,

and stone them to death. Tom, before you move on, one fact for you about this settling of French cities. take them back to Tuscany or Etruria, we should probably call it, and stone them to death. Tom, before you move on, one fact for you about this settling of French cities. The nickname for Olympique de Marseille, the football team, is still, I believe, the Phoenicians. Is it? Yeah, I think so. I didn't know that. That's wonderful.

I can remember seeing that in Les Quipes or something in the 1990s and being completely baffled by it. Theo, our producer, says it is indeed a terrible team. Well, that's a sorry reflection on the decline of the Phoenicians. Yeah. Very sad. When I saw them, they had Tony Cascarino playing for them, Tom. Goodness. A fake Irishman.

Anyway, that's by the by. Well, the Irish also falsely claimed to be descended from Phoenicians. Really? In the 18th century, yeah. It all connects. It does all connect. That's the case for renowned novelist Dan Brown. Yes. To get his teeth into there. So basically the Carthaginians I think are absolutely holding their own. They're seeing off Greek trade rivals. They are keeping

the Western Mediterranean shipping lanes under their control. And what they are also starting to do by this point is what you alluded to earlier, that they are colonizing the African lands that lie beyond the city itself. So probably up until the 6th century, they'd been dependent on Sardinia for food imports. I mean, that's basically why they'd kind of set up settlements there, because they could grow the kind of staples that they needed. But certainly by the 6th century, it's clear from archaeological remains that the foodstuffs that they are using in Carthage are mainly coming from their own backyard. And they can do this basically for two reasons. So one is that they now have the money that they can afford mercenaries and thereby subdue the Libyan tribes in the hinterland, subordinate them.

And the other is what we alluded to earlier this agrarian revolution so the 28 volumes of agricultural know-how that the romans saved this was written by a guy called mago and he basically for the romans is synonymous with making the desert bloom so he is the first guy to as far as know, advocate the regular use of fertilizers, the pruning of trees, so olives and so on, of vines. And Carthage becomes very famous for its sweet wines, also for its fruit. So the Romans know the pomegranate, for instance, as the Marlon punicum, the Carthaginian apple. And they're very technologically adept when it comes to agriculture. So there's this kind of weird threshing machine, which comes to be known by the Romans as a punic cart. They're very good at irrigation.

They love a bath. That's perhaps because of the smelling issue, Tom. Yes, exactly. Yes, you walk past all that garum and you need to have a wash. So Tom, just stop you a second. Yeah. You're talking about the hinterland. The African hinterland, it says in your notes.

So here's a question for you. If we've got any American academics who listen to this podcast, they will undoubtedly be thinking of this question. Is there any meaningful sense in which the Carthaginians, other than those purely sort of starkly geographical, is there any sense in which they are African? Africa at this point, I mean, the Roman province of Africa is, I mean, essentially the kind of the lands that were ruled by Carthage. So in that sense, Carthage is the capital of Africa. The word Africa for the Romans wouldn't have the sense that it has for us of this vast continent. So yeah, I mean, Carthage as Phoenician, as we've said, but there are Phoenician settlements in Sicily, in Africa, in Spain. They preserve their Phoenician identity, but of course they're aware of the geographical context that they're in.

But when they think of the world, they're basically looking outwards to the Mediterranean. They're not looking backwards. I mean, the Sahara is behind them. Do they have sub-Saharan links? This is why they are sending ships out through the Straits of Gibraltar. They're always looking to the sea. Right. That is how they trade.

Right. The lands that lie behind Carthage, heading inland, are there basically to sustain and feed Carthage and to provide it with troops, with mercenaries. Yeah. But I think their ultimate loyalties is always with the sea. And just one last question on this front. I know this is probably a very difficult question to answer, but as it were, ethnically, they are still the descendants

of the Phoenician settlers or settlers from elsewhere in the Mediterranean. So presumably, again, not, I mean, there might well be some admixture with kind of sub-Saharan migrants or something, but probably not great. All these people are calling themselves Hannibal and Hanno, the elites. These are the Phoenician equivalent of wasps. Oh, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Or people in 19th century New York who claim Dutch heritage. These are people who are very, very aware of their pedigree and very, very proud of it. But of course, Carthage is a great teeming cosmopolitan city. So there are people drawn from across the Mediterranean. There are

people from the interior of Africa. It is a great melting pot in that sense, but it absolutely retains its Phoenician identity. Absolutely. And actually it is kind of, if there's such a word, punicising, Phoenicianising the interior, because by the fifth century, thanks to Mago and his threshing machines and his, you know, his fertiliser and all that kind of stuff. What had previously been scrub is really starting to bloom. Greek visitors from Sicily marvel at the fecundity of it. To quote, the beauty of the land is prosperity. There are gardens everywhere, there are orchards, there are irrigation channels filling what had previously been dry and barren with flowing water. And so you were getting country estates, the equivalent of the villas that Roman aristocrats start to

build outside Rome. You're finding these as well. And you're getting stud farms and you're getting livestock everywhere. So a Greek visitor to Carthage in, say, I don't know, the very early fifth century would know that he was visiting a city of impressive and intimidating power. It's very beautiful. It's pretty exotic and it is potentially a menace. And again, this goes back to what we were talking about at the start of the program, that for the Greeks, Carthage is a place of mystery and fear. Wow, exciting. So Tom, it will be fascinating to know a little bit more about who ruled Carthage, Carthaginian politics, and the long and dramatic history of Carthaginian imperialism. Let's do that after the break.

I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com I've been reliably informed that when battle was joined and Hamilcar was having the worst of it, he disappeared off the face of the earth

and was never seen again alive or dead. The explanation for this, given by the Carthaginians themselves, and not implausibly as well, is that the battle between the barbarians and the Greeks dragged on from dawn until late afternoon, and that Hamilcar stayed for the entire duration of this clash in the camp, where in his attempt to secure favourable omens, he offered up the entire bodies of sacrificial victims on a massive pyre. And it so happened, as he was pouring libations onto them, that he saw his troops turning tail and he hurled himself onto the blaze.

The reason then that he was never seen again was because he had been burnt to ashes. So that's Herodotus' account of the Battle of Hymera, which was fought in the year 480 BC between a Carthaginian army, which was led by the great bigwig of the day, Hamilcar, ends up burning himself alive, and an army from Syracuse, its great trading rival in Sicily,

led by its tyrant who was called Gellon. Yes. Great name. Yeah. So, Tom, by this point, the Syracusians and the Carthaginians, they're the great rivals. This is the great Mediterranean derby. Heavyweight clash, Dominic. Heavyweight clash.

Heavyweight clash. And Syracuse, which we now think of as an Italian city, Sicilian. So that's the big Greek city at this point. Is that right? Yes, in Sicily. And in fact, very possibly in the whole Greek world, because 480, of course, is the year that Xerxes, the Persian king, invades Greece. And this is the year that sees the Battle of Thermopylae and Salamis.

And before Xerxes invades, the Greeks in Greece itself, so Athens and Sparta particularly, know the Persians are coming. And so they send ambassadors to Syracuse to ask Galon if he will help them face the Persian onslaught. Galon doesn't really want to do it, but he doesn't want to seem like he's not standing by the Greeks in their hour of need. So he says, yeah, I'll do it, provided I can be commander in chief. And the Spartans are not having this, and so they refuse. So Herodotus says that actually Galon might still have come and helped the Greeks, had it not been for the fact that the Carthaginians that summer of 480 decided to launch a massive invasion of Sicily, so of Greek Sicily. And there's no question that the Battle of Himera,

which you read in that magnificent translation of Herodotus, was a really stunning Greek victory, because as far as we can tell, no Carthaginian force would invade Sicily again for about half a century after that. And of course, the eeriness of that account of Hamilcar vanishing, supposedly having thrown himself into the flames i mean again this is an absolute riff yeah the greeks are obsessed with the idea that the carthaginians are endlessly hurling things including their children into flames so there's a sense i think that hamilcar is condemning himself to a kind of tophet there that he's offering himself up as a living sacrifice so that's mysterious and this is the greek obsession with Carthaginians behaving in a kind of, they have the sense that the Carthaginians are unsettling.

And alien and eerie. Weird, supernatural. Yeah, exactly. Okay. And there's a further sense of the uncanny about this battle of Himera, which is that numerous Greeks claim that the battle was fought on the same day as Salamis. So there's this kind of dovetailing of the Persian barbarians and the Car day as Salamis. So there's this kind of dovetailing of the Persian barbarians and the Carthaginian barbarians being defeated at the same time. And the claim is that the Carthaginians were invading Sicily to distract Syracuse and the other Greeks in Sicily from going to the rescue of Athens and Sparta, because the Tyrians are

subjects of the Persian kings. And so there's been kind of liaison between the Persians and the Carthaginians. But that's perfectly plausible, right? I mean, it's perfectly plausible that ambassadors could have gone between the two, that they could have said, listen, we're attacking such and such a time. You know, why don't we do this? No, because I think the ulterior motive there very plainly is that Gaelon is trying to cast himself as a hero, kind of alongside Laenidas or whatever. Of course. But that doesn't mean that that couldn't have happened. I mean, people do collude all the time in history.

But we know enough about how this battle came to be fought that it's very clear that this was nothing to do with a kind of synchronized geopolitical clash of titans. Hamilcar is not launching an invasion in cahoots with Xerxes. What he's doing is he has a Greek ally called Teralus, who is the tyrant of Himera. They have a very kind of close bond, a sacred bond of guest friendship, as it was called. And this guy, Teralus, has been expelled by Galon's forces. He's been kicked out. And so Teralus goes to his friend, Hamilcar, and says, would you, you know, would you help me? And Hamilcar says, yeah, sure I would. And so Teroulas goes to his friend, Hamilcar, and says, would you help me? And Hamilcar says, yeah, sure I would. And of course, Hamilcar is doing it for strategic reasons. He knows how

dangerous Galon is, not least because actually, and this shows how the idea of absolute division between Greeks and barbarians makes no sense because Hamilcar's mother is actually from Syracuse. So he knows the city very well. So he's half Greek. He's half Greek. But more significantly, he belongs to a clan called the Magonids. So descended from a guy called Mago. And it's this that enables him to do what he's doing because he's by miles the most powerful, wealthy, influential figure to the degree that he's described in many of the Greek sources as being a Basileus, a king. And he is operating kind of as a private citizen, going to the help of a friend, doing it for the good of his city at the same time. And that essentially is his motivation. And there's a sense, I think, that it's tremendous chutzpah from Galen, because Galen is a tyrant.

He has crushed the democracy in Syracuse. There's no sense of that. He's made himself its sole leader. And it's Carthage which will go on to be praised by Aristotle for the perfection of its constitution, precisely because it's not subject to tyrants. Okay. So I'm absolutely sticking up for Carthage here. I think the idea that Himera is a kind of great battle won for the Greeks against barbarian despotism is shameful propaganda. Oh, good for Carthage. Yeah.

Good for Carthage. Yeah. So, Tom, Aristotle loves his constitution. So it doesn't have a king, doesn't have an emperor, but it's not quite a republic. What is it? We're not entirely sure, partly because it evolves quite a lot, I think, over time. And partly also because, you know, the Romans got rid of all the Carthaginian writings. So we're reliant on the Greeks and the Romans for descriptions of it.

And they use their own words, which come freighted with all kinds of baggage. Yeah, of course. So Hamilcar, you know, is he a king? It's difficult to know because Herodotus says that he's a king, but he also says that he had become king of Carthage by virtue of his courage. So that suggests that he's kind of been elected. And Romans, when they talk about the dynasty of Mago, so the dynasty that Hamilcar belongs to, they use the word dux, which is a military leader or dictator, which of course is the office where,

in times of emergency, a citizen is appointed to lead the state. So I think that whether there was a monarchy that got replaced by a kind of an appointed king substitute or whether there was never a monarchy and that was always what happened, we're not sure. But essentially the monarchical element is probably elective if they did have it. A strong man chosen by his peers. Yeah. Yeah. But I think what is definite is that there is a kind of dynastic quality to the authority that the family of Mago exercise. So interestingly, the reputation of Hamilcar, despite the defeat at Himera, it's not particularly blackened. The Magonid prestige doesn't seem to have been

particularly impaired by it. And the Magonids remain the dominant dynasty in Carthage over the course of the fifth century. So it's likely that we talked about Hanno the Navigator. So he's one of the many Hanno's that will feature in this story. You remember the guy who sails out through the Pillars of Hercules, goes down the coast of Africa and sees what were maybe chimpanzees. So he was probably Hamilcar's son. And you said these are descended from a guy called Mago, but he's not the agronomist. The guy's writing about like crops. No, he's a different one. one this is the awful confusion there are only about 10 carthaginian names right no he's a different mago okay and then hano the navigator son hannibal but he's not

hannibal no he's not hannibal so he goes back on the attack in sicily and he gets a spectacular vengeance for himera so he captures selenus which, which is the Greek city on the south coast near the Venetian zone of influence, raises its walls completely and he captures Himera and he obliterates it from the face of the earth. Crikey. So, yeah. And he then, according to the Greeks, he rounds up 3,000 prisoners taken at Himera and he leads them to the place where Hamilcar is supposed to have immolated himself in the fire. And there he slaughters the lot of them.

Oh my word, Tom, very strong stuff. As a bloody offering to the memory of his grandfather. But then in the fourth century, it goes wrong for the Magonids. They attack Sicily again and that's a bit of a shambles. Is that right? It's a complete shambles. And this time, it's not just that the invasion gets defeated, but that the guy who leads it, who's a guy called Himilco, so that's the great-grandson of the Hamilcar who threw himself on a funeral pyre, he commits all kinds of terrible sacrilegious acts. So he's endlessly burning down Greek temples and doing things like that. And so as a result,

as the Greeks see it, and indeed perhaps the Carthaginians, his army gets kind of ravaged by an epidemic. They're camped out in front of Syracuse trying to capture the city and plague just sweeps the Carthaginian camp. And Himilco kind of goes mad and he flees the siege. He goes back to Carthage. when he gets there he's so ashamed that he takes off all his finery he puts on the rough tunic of a slave he covers his hair in ashes and he kind of roams around lamenting his utter failure in front of syracuse the fact that he's abandoned his troops that he's betrayed them and then he walls himself up in his own house and kills himself okay and so obviously you know this isn't good branding for his dynasty. No.

And it's at the end of the Magnates. Oh, my word. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Terrible way to end. With that story, you have the sense that perhaps something is not entirely being told. Yeah. It seems quite odd.

Yeah. Having listened to all this, so the way that the Carthaginians are behaving strikes me as absolutely standard kind of Mediterranean. It is. Great power politics. For all that the Greeks try to paint them as like these weird, sinister, you know, depraved, even the way their constitution works, I mean, it's not so outlandish. It's not as weird and orientalist as we would think, right?

I mean, this is pretty standard. Right. And so this is why Aristotle is able to praise it, is able to compare it to Crete or to Sparta. And Aristotle is praising Carthage for resisting kind of tyranny as he would praise a Greek city. And actually the backdrop to Aristotle writing about this is a demonstration of the Carthaginian refusal to accept tyranny so in the wake of the collapse of maganid power there's another guy who emerges and he inevitably is called hanno yes but of course as i say waves of hanno's yeah so he comes to be called hanno the great and it's honestly like a kind of football league where year after year syracuse and carthage

are meeting up and sometimes Carthage wins and sometimes Syracuse wins. But basically they're kind of, you know, they're top of the league. You know, sometimes, you know, one is at the top, sometimes the other is at the top. The middle of the fourth century. So this is when Aristotle is very much hanging around in Greece. Hanno the Great wins this crushing naval victory over Syracuse. And this kind of redounds tremendously to his glory. He's incredibly rich. It enables him to rule in Syracuse as the dominant figure for about two decades. But as the time passes, the Carthaginians become ever more restive and they fear that Hanno is kind of aiming at, I suppose, what we today would call anachronistically

a dictatorship. Perhaps the Greeks would call it tyranny. And so Hanno, it is said, is aware that there are conspiracies against him among his peers in the Carthaginian elite. And so he invites them all to a banquet to celebrate the wedding of his daughter. And the plan is that he's going to poison them. So the wine comes out, he's waiting for all his guests to kind of keel over dead. But he gets rumbled. We're not told how. Maybe there's a kind of, you know, a taster or someone keels over. But anyway, his attempt to poison the elite fails.

And so on the back of this, it is said that Hanno decides that he's openly going to launch a coup against the constitution. So he frees 20,000 slaves. He recruits the local Libbyan tribes but he gets defeated he gets captured and he gets crucified and we should say that there is quite a lot of crucifixion in carthaginian history okay and the carthaginians have a habit of i mean basically if you you know you get appointed to a command and you screw it up you'll be crucified the likelihood is that you will be crucified.

And so this is one of the things that the Romans attribute to the Carthaginians is the invention of crucifixion. And although, of course, the Romans are great, they love a bit of crucifixion themselves. They say this is a marker of how cruel the Carthaginians were. So a general is watching a battle and he says, oh God, I'm going to be absolutely crucified for this. Yeah, literally.

Literally, yeah. Literally. But again, it's this, you know, the football manager who's failed. Exactly, exactly. Up on a cross. Yeah. Tortured to death.

So going back to Aristotle, he thinks, brilliant, Carthage resisted tyranny, all this kind of thing. But like all these places, Tom, this is still a place that is defined by wealth, by breeding, by this kind of patrician elite

who basically control the levers of power. And by Phoenician inheritance. And that's actually what Aristotle admires. I mean, Aristotle was a tremendous snob. He thinks that people with wealth and breeding should be in a position of power. So it's like Boston, 19th century Boston, Tom. I think it's even more like Venice. And there's a wonderful description of how the Carthaginian aristocracy functioned by a French historian called Gilbert Charles Piccard. And he writes, an aristocratic republic, a sort of ancient Venice, secret and well-ordered, where individuals are subject to the harsh laws of the austere and disciplined rich. So just as in Venice, you know, you have the doge, but you also have, you know, these councils that meet in sinister conclave. So in Carthage, you have the Council of the Elders, as it's called. So that's

literally a senate. I mean, that's what a senate means, you know, assembly of elders. And you have this mysterious body of men called the Tribunal of 104. These are the guys who appoint the generals, who appoint the officials, who supervise the law courts, who set up panels of commissioners to investigate things that go wrong. So these are the people who would sentence an incompetent general to crucifixion. But equally, of course, if they turn out to be incompetent, then the same fate may be visited on them. Then they could be crucified. Absolutely. And you have two senior magistrates called sufets know it's kind of analogous to the the hebrew word for judge and these are they're kind of like consuls yeah so the romans have consuls they are magistrates

who are elected in pairs and they serve a term of office for one year and there's a popular assembly as well there is also a popular assembly so there is also a kind of democratic element as well so it's kind of complicated system that does nevertheless seem to work. And I think the reason for that is that, you know, it is above all a city of merchants and everyone in Carthage recognises that the wealth and the power of Carthage is founded in its commercial aptitudes. And so people at the head of the state recognise what the goals of Carthaginian policy have to be. I mean, Carthage has to kind of keep markets open. It has to open

up new markets, whether that is by, you know, at the point of a sword or by kind of imposing trade treaties on kind of distant parts to monopolise the exploitation of these various territories. If you can't have a monopoly, then you establish pacts that will determine how much things should be sold for, to ensure the freedom of the seas, to abolish piracy, to cut down rival powers, all these kinds of things. These are the constants of Carthaginian policy throughout its history. But by the fourth century, I think you are starting to see a kind of move from that kind of Venetian Portuguese policy of imperialism. To a more Spanish approach. Or dare one say a Roman one. So those Venetian settlements in the west of Sicily, so Pernomus

and Mocia, for instance, by the fourth century, they have basically been absorbed into a Carthaginian empire. And at the same time, Carthage is also planting colonies in Sicily of its own directly to maintain its control. Because of course, you've got Carthage on the African side of that strait, and you've got Sicily, the western side of Sicily. Carthage absolutely needs to control those seas because without it, you know, its trade will be throttled. So the major city that it founds in this period is what's now Marsala, as in the wine, Nelson's favourite wine, but was known by the Romans as Lilibaeum. And this is founded in 397 after the Syracusans had captured and obliterated Mochia, the foul-smelling

city on the island with its garum factory. And Lilibaeum is founded to be a kind of, you know, a sanctuary for people who had fled Mochia. But also it's settled by lots and lots of Carthaginian colonists. And it's basically the westernmost point of Sicily. And it has massive walls, so kind of Sicily. And it has massive walls, so kind of 20 feet, has a great big ditch. It's built to be completely impregnable. And this idea of a Carthaginian empire that is simultaneously Phoenician, I think is exemplified by the fact

that this is the point when the Carthaginians introduced their coinage with the palm tree on it. And the Greek word for palm tree is phoenix. And so there's an illusion there to the point when the carthaginians introduce their coinage with the palm tree on it and the greek word for palm tree is phoenix and so there's a kind of allusion there to the idea of the phoenicians so they're still even at this late stage very much into the kind of phoenician heritage they are because it provides a way of allowing what had previously been independent phoenician settlements to feel that they have a kind of stake in what effectively is becoming a Carthaginian empire. And if they capture Greek cities, so they capture Salinas, for instance, on the south coast, it had always been a kind of thorn in the Carthaginian side. They capture that and they plant a Phoenician garrison on the Acropolis and other Greek cities are made tributary. So that basically in this

period, the fact that Carthage rules the western half of Sicily is being established by treaties that are being signed with Syracuse and with other Greek cities in the east. And so we're now into the age of Alexander the Great. And so I think that by this point Carthage is kind of becoming an empire in a way that would be recognisable, say, to Alexander. Yes, so Tom, Alexander obviously never did conquer Carthage, but he was said to have thought about it. And presumably that reflects a wider ambition among sort of Greek warlords, as it were. They think, you know, let's bring Carthage down. Carthage is a prize worth taking.

Well, I mean, I think obviously what Alexander's example does is give to other Greeks the notion that going off and conquering great empires, you know, what a tremendous thing to do. And Carthage is a kind of obvious one. And so say in Syracuse, you know, as we've said, the Syracusans are endlessly going to war with Carthage, but there is this sense that it's kind of like a sport where, you know, it's governed by rules. Neither one is trying to knock the other one out. But in the wake of Alexander and his successes, you have this guy called Agathocles, who's actually a very humble stock. He's a kind of a son of a potter, but he rises to become the tyrant of Syracuse. And he actually ends up invading Africa.

I mean, this is the first time that a Greek army has landed in Africa. And at one point, it looks as though Carthage is going to fall to Agathocles. And if that had happened, then obviously that would have been a feat comparable to Alexander overthrowing Persia. by this invasion that they immolate 500 of the children of the Carthaginian elite. In desperation. In desperation. In the event it all goes wrong, there's a kind of uprising back in Syracuse and Agathocles has to go back home, Scarpa's back. And the Carthaginians sign a treaty with Agathocles, which is, I mean, it's pretty tough on them. They have to pay a large indemnity, but they survive. And within a few decades, they are back as prosperous, as intimidating as ever. And so Carthage has survived where Persia didn't. Carthage has held off the Greek adventurer trying to overthrow it. And I think that that's tribute to the fact that it's just a very, very formidable power. I mean,

probably we arrive at the dawning of the third century BC. It's clearly the most formidable power in the Western Mediterranean. The comparison that we mentioned in the last episode, we talked about how after the French Revolution, during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the French would say, well, we are the land power, we are Rome, and Britain is Carthage, you know, sort of only interested in money and navies. Is Carthage still similar? So you said that Carthage was becoming more of a kind of land empire with bases and forts and stuff like that. But is it still very, very reliant on its navy rather than its army? Well, I mean, to pursue the comparison with

Britain, of course, I mean, the British are not averse to conquering territory, but they are tending to do it because they need naval bases and then to maintain their naval bases, they need to control the hinterland and they need to keep the French out or whatever. And I think it's rather similar to that. The Carthaginians are not necessarily interested in territory for its own sake, but they are interested absolutely in maintaining their control of Western Sicily because otherwise they'll lose control of the Straits. They want to keep control of Sardinia. They want to keep control of Southern Spain because without that, they won't be able to maintain the source of their wealth, which is trade. But that is why the French do compare

Britain in the Napoleonic Wars to Carthage. And actually the weird thing is that all the places that you've mentioned, they're the sort of places, I mean, you said about Nelson liking that wine, they're the places that he's always visiting. Absolutely. For the same reason. So the Carthaginians are interested in the same harbours that the British were interested in in the 18th century. Yeah.

Because if you want a blue water empire, you have to have a bit of territorial control. I mean, by this point i realized that we haven't actually described what carthage looks like in its its heyday it is a very very impressive city because it's a very wealthy city so you've still got you know the beer service acropolis which is the kind of the old town the old city is counterpointed by a kind of grid system yeah that's kind of cutting edge design, the same kind that you have in Alexandria. And if you imagine kind of the Acropolis, the Bersa, and slopes running down to the sea,

the streets look like a kind of fan running down to the shoreline. Further from the old centre of the city, you have kind of beautiful villas. You have docks. You have harbours. You have massive arsenals. You have teeming industrial zones yeah you have the tophet of course you have cemeteries temples beautiful temples yes particularly to baal hamon the great patron and tanit his partner these are the great patrons of carthage but you also have massive bristling walls and these extend more than 18 miles around

the limits of the city. And these are what had seen Agathocles off. He just, you know, he couldn't break through. And you'd look at Carthage at the beginning of the third century BC and you'd say, you know, she is absolutely secure. No one can possibly rival her. Her only conceivable rival Syracuse has had a crack and has dismally failed you know she's going to last forever i mean who can rival her but tom on our rides and thinking a new rival will emerge from the backwater of italy central italy and that that will set the stage for the most extraordinary superpower clash in ancient history. Is that about right?

Well, we'll find out in our next episode when we will be looking at the rise of Rome. Crikey, what drama. So listen, if you are a member of our own sinister and decadent mercantile empire, the Rest is History Club, as you probably know, you can listen to those episodes about the battle between Carthage and Rome. You can listen to that right now. If you're not, if you're very much on the outside looking in,

then I'm afraid you'll just have to wait until, as the young people say, that episode drops. So yeah, you can either be part of the elite or you can be part of the rabble. Your choice. But either way, it's Carthage versus Rome next.

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