Carthage Must Be Destroyed (33 page)

Moreover, after the first year of the war any chance that the Romans might have accepted some kind of territorial division of Sicily had completely disappeared. The Syracusans, who had been relatively content to maintain a strategic stand-off, had now been replaced by an uncompromising, expansionist enemy who demanded nothing less than the total retreat of the Carthaginians from the island. The latter, despite their initial advantage particularly in terms of sea power, had simply been unable to adapt to this new challenge.

In other ways, the First Punic War was less of a departure from the past than later Greek and Roman historians, aware as they were that it was merely the first of a sequence of clashes between Carthage and Rome, presented it. Telling local testimony has been recently provided by a series of bronze tablets which came to scholarly attention in rather murky circumstances in the early 1980s.
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All the inscriptions are connected to the inland Sicilian town of Entella, situated around 19 kilometres from modern Corleone. Although the script is Greek, the names of the citizens recorded on the tablets as a result of brutal turmoil during the Sicilian wars were clearly of Italian origin. In 404 the original male inhabitants of the city had been slaughtered by a group of Campanian mercenaries in the employ of the Carthaginians, who had then taken the city for themselves. The citizens of Entella mentioned on the tablets were their descendants. The tablets themselves record a series of decrees in which those who had helped the Entellans in their darkest hour were recognized and granted honorary citizenship of the city for themselves and their children. The decrees themselves were probably issued over a period of just thirty-six days sometime in the later stages of the First Punic War, to mark the refoundation of Entella after a disastrous interlude. Earlier in the conflict, the Entellans had allied themselves against the Carthaginians, who had subsequently attacked and captured the city. Many of its citizens, both male and female, had again been made captive or deported.

Among those honoured for helping the Entellans were a number of neighbouring cities which had provided military support, grain, refuge and, in some cases, ransoms for captives. There were also individuals such as a Mamertine and even a Roman official, Tiberius Claudius of Antium. It is noticeable that, even though Rome was soon to become the dominant power on the island, the tablets artfully construct a picture of this small Sicilian town as an independent city state making its own decisions and honouring its friends (among whom the Roman official is given no particular precedence). Indeed, the text suggests that we are in fact merely witnessing the fallout from the latest episode of the conflicts that had flared up on the island over the previous two centuries, with Entella having to deal with the usual brutal consequences of having to take sides in the war between two great powers. Little did the Entellans know that this episode marked the start of centuries of exclusively Roman domination.

Despite having been charged with negotiating Carthage’s surrender, Hamilcar Barca emerged from the end of the disastrous conflict with his reputation not merely intact but enhanced.
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In an early sign of his political astuteness, he had sent the governor of Lilybaeum, Gisco, to discuss terms with the Roman consul Lutatius, thereby distancing himself from Carthage’s capitulation.
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Hamilcar was reportedly furious that the Carthaginian Council had surrendered in such meek fashion.
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In fact the Council had, by its actions, probably saved him from further defeat and the steady diminution of his already overblown reputation as a military commander. Hamilcar’s own actions, although undoubtedly publicly impressive, had done little to help the Carthaginian war effort, and there is little indication that he would have been a saviour if he had been given more time. But, while he skilfully avoided association with a surrender which seemed to many Carthaginians overly swift, he would not be able so adeptly to avoid the chaos that followed in its wake.

The greatest problem facing the Carthaginian government at this time was what to do with its army in Sicily. A catastrophic defeat in Sicily might have excused Carthage of its financial obligations to these men, but the fairly orderly end to the First Punic War had paradoxically put Carthage in a very dangerous situation. Its Sicilian army was more or less intact, and one of the terms of the peace was that Carthage should evacuate all its forces from Sicily. Carthage was faced with the threat of a large mercenary army returning to North Africa, and demanding to be paid.

The economic situation could not have been bleaker. At a time when revenues had been cut by the loss of Sicily and disruption in Sardinia, Carthage was expected not only to pay off the mercenaries, but also to meet the huge war reparations owed to Rome. The amount owed to the mercenaries has been the subject of much scholarly speculation, but the ancient sources are clear that the arrears were substantial, and may have amounted to as much as 4,368 talents or 26 million drachmas –an astronomical sum, which the Carthaginians could not pay easily.
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The best option open to the Carthaginians was to evacuate the mercenaries in a piecemeal fashion and thereby perhaps avoid negotiating a collective pay deal. Their erstwhile commander, Hamilcar Barca, washed his hands of the problem by resigning his command and quickly leaving the island. In fact the policy of shipping the mercenaries in smaller groups seemed at first to be successful. It was nevertheless soon undone by allowing the troops then to recongregate in Carthage, where they quickly began to misbehave.

Unwilling to pay the whole sum owed, the Carthaginian authorities stalled for time by paying a small proportion of what was due in order to persuade the mercenary captains to take their troops, camp followers and baggage train to the town of Sicca, a good distance from Carthage, where they should wait to receive the balance. This was a disastrous mistake. At Sicca, the troops, with time on their hands, calculated the exorbitant sums that they thought were owed them.

In Sicily, their generals, in order to maintain morale, had promised rewards that now, in defeat, could simply not be delivered. The Carthaginian envoys who arrived to negotiate the necessary pay cut, led by Hanno, were understandably given a very hostile reception when their intentions became clear, and the argument that the Carthaginians themselves were suffering under the heavy financial exactions placed on them by Rome was not received with much sympathy.
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Furthermore, the folly of not sticking to the original plan of dealing with the mercenaries in smaller groups soon became apparent when negotiations were hampered by serious communication problems.

Polybius, who is the main source for this conflict, explains that the Carthaginian practice of hiring troops of many different nationalities was ‘well calculated to prevent them from combining rapidly in acts of insubordination or disrespect to their [Carthaginian] officers’.
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However, this inability to communicate with one another was a serious setback in this situation. As Polybius recounts:

It was at this juncture that the rebels, sensing the weakness of their employer’s position, marched en masse to the town of Tunes near Carthage itself, and there tried to increase the back pay that they were owed by adding on the cost of their equipment, horses and backdated corn rations, as well as recompense for those of their number who had been killed in service.

Now that 20,000 disgruntled mercenaries were camped just a few kilometres away from their capital city, the Carthaginians understood that they had made two major blunders. First, they should never have mustered such a large group of mercenaries in one place, when they had no citizen force to oppose them. Second, they should have held on to the wives and children of the mercenaries, to serve as hostages for their menfolk’s good behaviour and as potential bargaining chips in the pay negotiations. Despite the growing mistrust between the mercenaries and the Carthaginians, both sides now sought some kind of compromise solution, and indeed the former’s exaggerated claims may have been an opening ploy to obtain the best deal possible.
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In an attempt to retrieve the situation, the Carthaginian authorities sent food and other supplies to the mercenary camp, and envoys from the Council of Elders promised to meet all the mercenaries’ demands if it was in their power to do so. It was agreed between the parties that Gisco, late of Lilybaeum, the Carthaginian commander who had successfully evacuated the mercenaries to North Africa, should negotiate with them, on the grounds that they had some trust in him.

Gisco brought money with him, and started to pay the mercenaries off. Perhaps in an effort to create divisions within the ranks of the rebels, he paid off each ethnic group separately.
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Among the mercenaries, however, there were runaway slaves and army deserters who proved to be very difficult to deal with, because they feared retribution from the Romans. The punishment for runaway slaves under Roman law was harsh in the extreme: torture and then usually crucifixion. Many may have hoped to start a new life in Punic Sicily as soldier settlers, but the Carthaginian ejection from the island had put an end to such aspirations.
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Among these men was a Campanian runaway slave called Spendius, who did all in his power to persuade the rebels to reject the settlement. Others equally feared a deal being done with the Carthaginians, but for different reasons. Mathos, a Libyan, had taken a leading part in the disturbance and feared that, once the mercenaries had disbanded and returned to their homelands, Carthage would seek revenge on those whose home was Africa. It did not take him long to convince the majority of the Libyans in the camp that peace would not serve their future interests. Spendius and Mathos, in order to further their aim of wrecking any pay deal, called a number of meetings and, using the excuse that not all due payments had yet been made, stirred up the assembled mercenaries. Polybius relates how anyone who stood up to oppose Spendius and Mathos found himself under attack from a hail of stones thrown by their supporters.

Unsurprisingly, the argument went their way. Spendius and Mathos were appointed generals of the mercenary force, and immediately ordered the seizure of Gisco and his staff. The commanders were further able to consolidate their authority by using the funds that Gisco had brought, to meet the arrears themselves.
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To prepare themselves for the confrontation with Carthage that lay ahead, the rebels began to cast around for allies. They did not have to look very far.

In order to fund their war effort, the Carthaginians had placed harsh exactions on their subject Libyan populations. Hard-pressed farmers were forced to hand over half their crop yields to Carthage. In the towns, taxation had been doubled without exemptions, even for the poor. Carthaginian governors were expected to strip the Libyan people of whatever they could get their hands on to meet burgeoning war costs. In order to tap into the resulting discontent, the rebels sent envoys to the Libyan towns to stir up unrest. The Libyans needed little encouragement to join the revolt. Polybius reported that such was their enthusiasm that Libyan women were willing to donate all their jewellery to the mercenaries’ war fund. He estimated that around 70,000 Libyans came to join the mercenaries, increasing the number of troops available to Spendius and Mathos by threefold.
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Although the Libyan rebellion gave the uprising ethnic overtones, this was far more than the clash of one ethnic group against another. It is striking, for instance, that at no time did the rebels try to induce the many slaves who lived and worked in Punic North Africa to revolt.
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The newly strengthened rebel army was made up of many different peoples. As well as Libyans, there were Ligurians, Iberians, Balearic islanders, Gauls and what Polybius terms as ‘mixhellenes’, a name more usually associated with Hellenized Thracian and Scythian peoples from the Black Sea region.
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In this context the term probably refers to Campanians and inhabitants of Magna Graecia, some of whom were runaway slaves or deserters from the Roman army.

When one surveys the coinage that the rebels produced, it becomes clear that this was anything but an undisciplined rabble, for what the Carthaginians were really confronted with was a decapitated version of their own Sicilian army. The money that Gisco had brought with him was not simply distributed among the rebels, but was restruck into new coinage. By overstriking Carthaginian coinage with their own motifs, the rebel leadership sent out a bold statement of intent. What had started as a dispute over wages had become a full-blown rebellion which sought to throw off the Carthaginian yoke. The rebel forces were paid under their own authority with their own money, silver coinage that carried the Greek legend
LIBUWN
(‘[coin] of the Libyans’).
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The eclecticism of the motifs used on the coinage shows that the Greek superscription ‘of the Libyans’ was not meant to refer to one particular ethnic group, but acted rather as an expedient umbrella for the diverse constituencies that made up the rebel force.