Carthage Must Be Destroyed (20 page)

The victory brought great material wealth to Gelon and his allies. Not only was there a huge quantity of war booty to be distributed among the victors, but an enormous number of prisoners of war were available to labour on a number of ambitious building projects.
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At the city of Acragas, a series of giant columns depicting what are thought to be the sculpted figures of Punic slaves were built as supports for the architrave of a temple to the Olympian gods.
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In Carthage itself, after the initial panic had subsided, the political fallout was surprisingly mild. In the decades that followed, there were political changes, including the creation of many of the political institutions that would operate throughout the remainder of the city’s existence: the Tribunal of One Hundred and Four, the suffeture and the Popular Assembly.
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Although the creation of the Popular Assembly, in which all citizens, whatever their socio-economic status, could participate, might seem to hint at some form of democratization of Carthage’s political apparatus, this was very far from being the case. Rather, the main aim of these constitutional reforms was the establishment of a new, more clearly defined, senior executive council and officers. The Popular Assemby’s ability to act was extremely limited, and, as the Athenian political scientist Aristotle noted approvingly, wealth remained as the defining factor in judging an individual’s fitness to hold political office.
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The Sardinian cities also adopted many of the political reforms that had originated in Carthage.
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Further proof that these changes were part of a reorganization by the existing elite comes from the Magonids remaining the dominant political clan in Carthage, suggesting that they may have had a major hand in the formulation and implementation of these reforms. Although the suffeture was non-hereditary, and incumbents were selected from any elite family, Aristotle nonetheless observed that particular individuals monopolized a number of state offices simultaneously, which suggests that it was still possible for the particular clans to dominate many important posts.
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As a measure of undiminished Magonid influence, the posthumous reputation of Hamilcar was spared the opprobrium that was the usual lot of those commanders who had presided over military defeat on this scale. In fact his reputation appears to have been enhanced rather than diminished: monuments were built in his memory and sacrifices were offered up in his name all over the Punic world.
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Perhaps the tale of his martyrdom on the altar of guest-friendship played well with the Carthaginian public. And Magonid prestige was probably protected by the surprisingly modest terms that Gelon had demanded. Carthage was to pay 2,000 talents of silver as reimbursement for war costs, and was compelled to build two temples where copies of the peace treaty were to be kept. Himera was now recognized as part of the Syracusan bloc.
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No Carthaginian force would enter Sicily for over half a century. In fact the Carthaginians rejected a number of opportunities–including an overture from the Athenians for an alliance against their great nemesis, Syracuse–to become involved once more in Sicilian affairs.
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There are, however, few signs of Carthage suffering any kind of economic decline due to the defeat. Indeed, it was during the fifth century that the physical fabric of the city was transformed, with the creation of a coordinated street grid that took in both the old and the new districts of the city. The undulating topography of Carthage was integrated within this plan by the creation of a fan-shaped series of streets climbing the southern and eastern slopes of the Byrsa hill. New residential districts were built close to the shoreline, where a sea wall and a monumental gate were constructed.
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Although greatly hampered by the belt of cemeteries around the city, the spatial integrity of which continued to be respected, other new residential and industrial zones were also established.
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Himera would, however, have repercussions that affected Carthage in other, less direct, ways. Momentous events a long way away in Greece gave Carthage’s enemies in Sicily the opportunity to recast Himera in a grand narrative of how a barbarous invader had attacked and attempted to destroy the western Greeks, rather than the reality of a failed attempt by one of the Carthaginian political clans to come to the aid of a Greek ally. During the first two decades of the fifth century, the notoriously quarrelsome city states of Greece had twice united to repel the invading armies of Persia, the greatest superpower of the age. The result of Greece’s ‘finest hour’ was the crystallization of a set of ideas about what it meant to be Greek. In particular, the exclusivity and superiority of Greek ethnicity was defined against the ‘barbarian’ world (made up of all non-Greeks) around it.
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Gelon had in fact been conspicuous for his lack of support for the mainland Greeks when they had appealed for help in their efforts to defend themselves against the Persian invasion in 480. When Greece had first been menaced by the Persian expeditionary force, the mainland Greek cities had sent out messengers in order to enlist support from the wider Hellenic community. Syracuse was one of the first cities to be visited, but Gelon met the call for Greeks to stand shoulder to shoulder against the barbarian threat with an offer which skilfully exposed the snobbery of the Greeks towards their western cousins. He would come to their assistance as long as he could be the commander-in-chief of the Greek forces. This proposal was designed to be unacceptable to those it had been offered to. Gelon went on to express his anger and disappointment at his fellow Greeks’ past refusals to assist him in his struggles against the Carthaginians and the indigenous Sicilians, and in his proposal to liberate Greek trading stations from barbarian hands. Quite simply the Sicilian Greeks had not been treated as proper members of the Hellenic club, and the Greek envoys returned home empty-handed. After rebuffing their pleas, Gelon compounded this lack of pan-Hellenic solidarity by sending an envoy, Cadmus, to Greece with three ships and a large sum of money with instructions to wait for a victor to emerge. If the Persian Great King was victorious, then Cadmus was to give him the money and assurances of Gelon’s loyalty. If the Greeks were victorious, then he was swiftly to bring the money back to Syracuse.
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The fact that the allied Greeks under Athens and Sparta went on to win a series of resounding victories over the Persian invader made it even more important that Himera should be claimed as the equivalent of these great victories. The promotion of Himera and the idea of a ‘western front’ against a Persian-led alliance not only showed that the great tyrant of Syracuse deserved a place on the top table of Greek states, but also provided a convenient explanation for Syracuse’s telling absence from the war effort.
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Carthage could be linked to the Persians through the Phoenicians, who, as vassals of the Persian king, were obliged to provide a large number of levies and ships for the naval armada. Furthermore, the Greek Cypriot city states had recently rebelled and been put under the control of the Cypriot–Phoenician kings of Kition by their Persian overlords.
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Over the next few decades, the Deinomenids, the ruling family of Syracuse, would use the huge wealth that they had accumulated to press their claims for Himera across the Greek world. Magnificent monuments were put up in prominent Greek religious sites such as Delphi and Olympia, and famous poets were commissioned to write paeans celebrating the victory–such as the following lines by Pindar, in praise of Gelon’s brother and successor Theron:

Among the wider Greek community, there were some signs that this extraordinary publicity campaign was successful, for the historian Herodotus believed that Salamis–the famous naval victory that the joint Greek fleet won against a far larger Persian force in September 480–and Himera had taken place on the same day, and the later Athenian scholar Ephorus embraced the idea that the battles had in fact been the result of a wider conspiracy between the Carthaginians and the Persians.
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Yet within the wider Greek intellectual community there was still little enthusiasm for viewing Carthage as a western surrogate for Persia, despite the best efforts of the Syracusans.
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Aristotle dismissed the theory of any collusion between the Carthaginians and the Persians, arguing that, apart from their timing, the two events were unconnected.
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Indeed, in contrast to the opprobrium that Persia’s autocratic monarchy usually attracted, the Carthaginian political constitution was widely admired in Athens.
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Aristotle would include Carthage with Sparta and Crete on the very short list of contemporary city states that he considered had an excellent system of government.
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His comment that it was because of the high quality of their political system that the Carthaginians had never suffered from rebellions and had never been under the rule of a tyrant may have been a sideswipe at the Syracusans, who were likely to have still been peddling the idea of Carthage as the Persia of the West.
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Earlier, Aristotle’s own teacher, the Athenian philosopher Plato, would present the image of an extremely well-ordered state when he referred to the strict laws in Carthage forbidding the drinking of wine for magistrates, jury members, councillors, soldiers and ships’ pilots while on duty, and for slaves at any time. Moreover, all Carthaginians were supposedly banned from imbibing wine during the day, unless in connection with exercise or medicine, while couples who were attempting to procreate were also covered by these restrictions at night.
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In fact, a few decades after Himera, the Athenians would try to broker an alliance with the Carthaginians against Syracuse. Carthaginian trading relations with Greece and the wider Aegean region appear to have strengthened in the interim, with large quantities of Attic fine pottery being transported to Carthage and other Punic towns.
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The fifth-century Athenian poet Hermippus mentioned Carthaginian multicoloured carpets and cushions that were presumably exported to Greece.
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Punic traders were also involved in the shipping of Greek goods to Spain, and of Spanish tuna fish to Greece. Indeed, a recent study of fourth-century BC transport amphora from an excavation in Carthage produced the surprising statistic that over 20 per cent of them hailed from the Ionian Islands–four times more than those from the Levant.
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Further evidence of healthy trading relations comes from the presence of a resident community of Punic merchants operating in mainland Greek and Aegean cities.
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On Sicily itself, Himera had little immediate impact on the cultural and religious synergies that had long existed between different ethic groups on the island. Politically, there was also little change, as Greek city states continued to seek political alliances with Carthage in disputes with their neighbours. However, for influential early-fourth-century Syracusan historians such as Antiochus and Philistus, Himera marked the genesis of a new set of ideas that ignored the complex mix of political allegiances and cultural interactions between Syracusan, Punic and indigenous populations that had for long been a major part of the colonial landscape of the central Mediterranean.
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In its place came a grand narrative that erroneously emphasized inter-ethnic rivalry and the brooding threat that Carthage posed to the very survival of the western Greeks.

It was not until 410 BC that Carthage’s seventy-year sabbatical from Sicilian affairs came to an end, when it was decided to lend help to the city of Segesta in a dispute that had flared up with its Greek neighbour Selinus.
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The reason for this foreign-policy volte-face probably had more to do with increasing concerns over the growing influence of Selinus’ ally Syracuse than it did with solidarity with Segesta. After the death of Gelon in 478, Syracusan power had quickly waned and Sicily had once more become a patchwork of feuding city states and minor warlords.
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Economic and demographic decline had quickly followed, with many mainly Elymian settlements in western and central Sicily contracting greatly in size or even being completely abandoned. However, by 410, after spectacularly repelling an Athenian invasion, Syracuse began to re-emerge as a major power on the island–one that might potentially take advantage of the continuing turmoil in western Sicily.
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Segesta and Selinus were located in the west of the island, close to the Punic cities of Motya, Solus and Panormus, which, although politically independent of Carthage and neither significant markets for Carthaginian goods nor major exporters to the city, were still of great strategic importance to Carthage, being key coordinates on the trade routes that linked the North African metropolis with Italy and Greece.
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The sense of a renewed Syracusan threat may have been the stimulus for the construction of a new system of fortifications at Panormus.
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The Greek cities of Sicily were also important trading partners. Diodorus, taking his information from earlier Sicilian Greek historians, explained that the enormous wealth of the city of Acragas in the late fifth century came in part from supplying olives to the Carthaginians.
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The Carthaginian economic hegemony in the central Mediterranean appears to have been built around the control of foreign trade. Profit was gained not only through Carthage’s own participation in this trade, but also from taxing foreign merchants who wished to operate in markets for which Carthage increasingly provided ‘protection’, such as the Punic cities on Sardinia and Sicily. Moreover, allies could be rewarded by the grant of trading rights in ports over which Carthaginian influence extended.
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Initially, at least, Carthaginian intervention in Sicily was driven by the desire to protect this system.