Carthage Must Be Destroyed (40 page)

Faced with the necessity of continued appeal both at home and abroad, therefore, Hannibal could not rely solely upon new battlefield tactics to sustain the Carthaginian war effort. The term ‘propaganda’, with its apparent emphasis on the production and dissemination of a strictly controlled message, often appears out of place in the context of the ancient world, where distance and the lack of effective transport and communication systems worked against such techniques’ effective deployment.
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Nevertheless, despite such limitations, later, retrospective, accounts demonstrate a remarkable consistency in their presentation of the general, and all were based in part upon stories already in circulation at the time of the Second Punic War.
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During that period, a body of stories developed around Hannibal which had been produced by individuals who were broadly sympathetic to his cause, or who at least saw him as a viable or necessary bulwark against the growing power of Rome. Although there was no central ‘Ministry of Information’ directly overseeing this artistic output, the uniformity which one finds in the way that Hannibal and his campaign against Rome were represented by his supporters suggests a studied Carthaginian interest in image and opinion.

It was Alexander the Great who had first developed this aspect of ancient warfare, as he travelled across the lands of the East not only with his well-trained armies but also with a coterie of special advisers, writers and intellectuals. Although a number of their accounts of his campaigns were written up after his death, many of the stories with which Alexander was associated, particularly in regard to the divine favour shown to him by his heroic ancestors Heracles and Achilles, were circulated while hostilities were still ongoing, as a way of encouraging friends and potential allies and demoralizing enemies.
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For Hannibal, the support of the Greek cities in Magna Graecia was particularly essential if his expedition was to be successful. The long and arduous march to Italy, as well as the fierce resistance that the Romans would undoubtedly put up, meant that reinforcements, supplies and bases would be sorely needed on the peninsula. He thus gathered around himself a small group of trusted confidants, including Sosylus of Sparta, his old teacher, and the Sicilian Greek Silenus of Caleacte, who both ‘lived with him as long as fortune allowed’.
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Polybius, who was generally disparaging towards Hannibal’s historians, nevertheless respected Silenus, whose work he may have used as a source for Hannibal’s campaigns in Spain.
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A number of Roman writers certainly rated Silenus, and used his work extensively. Indeed, the famous Roman writer and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero was moved to comment that Silenus was a ‘thoroughly reliable authority on Hannibal’s life and achievements’.
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That Greeks should be such close associates of Hannibal is unsurprising when one considers the long-standing and close contacts between Carthage and the Greek world, particularly in Sicily. From the end of the fourth century BC considerable numbers of Greek mercenaries had fought in the armies of Carthage,
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and there were close cultural connections. Members of the Carthaginian elite had long been educated in Greek literature, and Hamilcar had ensured that Greek tutors carefully educated Hannibal, to the extent that he had been able to write several books in the language.
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Hannibal’s knowledge of Greek was recognized by later historians as one of his great strengths. According to Cassius Dio, ‘He [Hannibal] was able to manage matters . . . because in addition to his natural capacity he was versed in much Punic learning common to his country, and likewise in much Greek learning.’
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Little of Sosylus’ work has survived beyond an account of an unidentified naval defeat which the Massilians and their Roman allies had inflicted on the Carthaginian fleet.
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Yet even this brief fragment appears to show an anti-Roman inclination, for Sosylus gives all the credit for the victory to the Massilians. Moreover, by justifying the defeat in terms of Massilian tactical genius, Sosylus may also have hoped to deflect any criticism of Carthaginian tactics.
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There is therefore a dismissive reaction to Sosylus by Polybius, who describes his work as nothing more than ‘the common gossip of a barber’s shop’. Sosylus and a fellow historian, Chaereas, appear to have stirred Polybius’ indignation by reporting that, after the fall of Saguntum, the Roman Senate had long debated and procrastinated over potential courses of action, even allowing their young sons to attend the session if they swore not to divulge what had taken place there.
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The reported episode once again reveals Sosylus’ pro-Hannibalic stance, for it is clearly designed to demonstrate that some Roman senators were deeply unsure of the rectitude of their position with regard to Saguntum.

We know far more about Silenus, who was very much part of a long Sicilian Greek literary tradition that stretched back past Timaeus to the Syracusan historians of the fourth century BC. In addition to his work on Hannibal, Silenus also wrote a four-volume study of his home island, in which nuggets of topographical and encyclopedic information seem to have been interspersed throughout the text.
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In his account of Hannibal’s great journey to Italy and his subsequent campaigns there, Silenus appears to have used a similar style, with descriptive vignettes of places interspersed with accounts of the events that took place. As in Timaeus’ history, the heroic figure of Heracles also featured prominently in Silenus’ work, a reflection most probably of the importance of the god/hero to the Hannibalic image. In this Hannibal imitated the Molossian king Pyrrhus, whose policies while campaigning in Italy and Sicily proved somewhat prototypical for Hannibal’s own. Pyrrhus, like Hannibal, also wrote several works, and members of his entourage recorded his campaigns as they travelled.
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Like Alexander the Great before him, and Hannibal after, Pyrrhus, through a judicious mix of legend, speeches, pageantry and iconography, had successfully promoted himself as the saviour of western Hellas against Rome.
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Within that ideological programme, the image of Achilles had proved central, for it recast the conflict as a further episode in the Trojan War. On Sicily, however, Pyrrhus had identified himself with Heracles, as one of several heroic figures through whom he had attempted to mobilize the Sicilian Greeks against the Carthaginians.
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Hannibal’s appropriation of the Heraclean image thus had a long history, but within a Carthaginian context that image was rather different, perhaps more potent, for Hannibal could appeal both to the salvific qualities of Heracles, as contained within the Greek tradition, and to his syncretistic qualities and associations with Melqart within the alternative, central-Mediterranean tradition.

Silenus therefore presented Heracles–Melqart as companion and guide to Hannibal and his army on the long journey that the god/hero had himself undertaken with the cattle of Geryon.
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The similarities between Silenus’ account and the work of Timaeus was not lost on Polybius, who criticized the former for suggesting that some unnamed god or hero had actually aided Hannibal, and the latter for bringing accounts of dreams and other superstitious nonsense into his work.
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Silenus’ work was, however, in many respects an explicit rejection of the Timaean position. The Heracles that appeared in Silenus’ narrative, as on Hannibal’s coinage, was not the Greek colonial adventurer, but the product of an equally old Sicilian tradition, the syncretistic figure of Heracles–Melqart. This strong emphasis on Hannibal’s close association with the god was clearly designed to present the Carthaginian leader as the saviour of the old West, with its long history of cultural interaction between its Greek, Punic and indigenous populations. That history was now under terminal threat from a dangerous interloper, Rome. Silenus thus turned on its head the old Timaean thesis, which had used the wanderings of Heracles through the West as a vehicle for promoting a Greek–Roman cultural and ethnic axis against Carthage. Hannibal was presented as the champion of a central-Mediterranean world that had existed
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Rome had taken the stage, and whose passing was now increasingly regretted in diverse quarters.

Among the western-Greek intelligentsia, the Timaean view had never completely held sway. One important dissenting voice had been another Sicilian Greek, from Acragas, Philinus, who had written a history of the First Punic War that was sympathetic to Carthage. Indeed, Philinus was well respected by his peers, and his work was used by a number of later scholars, including Polybius.
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One of Philinus’ main themes, which appeared in a number of later Greek writers, was that it was the Romans’ acquisitiveness and greed that had led to their assistance to the Mamertines and the subsequent outbreak of hostilities with Carthage, rather than any noble desire to protect the underdog. Indeed, this may have been a commonly held view among Sicilian Greeks, who must have looked with some cynicism towards the intentions of both the Carthaginians and the Romans. Diodorus reports that Hiero, king of Syracuse, said that by coming to the help of the Mamertines ‘it would be clear to all of mankind that they [the Romans] were using pity for the endangered as a cloak for their own advantage.’
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One identifiable theme in Philinus’ history is the focus on those Greeks who had fought on the Carthaginian side in the First Punic War, which might be seen as an implicit rejection of the ethnic divisions propagated by Timaeus.
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Many western Greeks may now have looked back with a certain nostalgia to the days when it was they who had vied for supremacy of the central Mediterranean with Carthage. Now the cities of Magna Graecia had been firmly under Roman control for over half a century. Moreover, the decades after the end of the first conflict between Carthage and Rome had definitely shown that there was to be no renaissance of Greek Sicily. Hiero’s Syracuse was both prosperous and powerful, but, although it was nominally an independent sovereign realm, it was in reality little more than a Roman client state. And, after years of relatively light Roman government, in which Sicilian cities were effectively left to their own devices in the western section of the island, 227 BC saw the strengthening of Roman control with the appointment of two new praetorships, senior senatorial posts, with special authority over the islands of Sicily and Sardinia.
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Polybius’ trenchant criticism of Rome’s annexation of Sardinia from the Carthaginians (an act which, as we have seen, he described as being ‘contrary to all justice’ and for which the Romans had no ‘reasonable pretext or cause’) demonstrates that it was not well received by some in the Greek community, who must have seen it as a sign of Roman intentions to take the whole of the central Mediterranean under direct control.
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Even in Syracuse (supposedly a staunch Roman ally), the subsequent realignment of Hiero’s successor Hieronymous with the Carthaginians demonstrates a good deal of disillusionment with Rome among Sicilian Greeks.
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Silenus’ portrayal of Heracles–Melqart as Hannibal’s divine companion was thus designed to send out a message to the western Greeks that it was the Carthaginian commander who represented their last opportunity to restore their diminished freedoms.
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The influence of Sicily on the Hannibalic propaganda campaign can also be seen in that campaign’s strongly euhemeristic tenor. During the late fourth century BC the philosophical tradition of euhemerism –which maintained that gods were deified human beings, and that mythology was based on traditional accounts of real people and events –had developed on the island. The figure of Heracles had played an important role in that development, not only through his ability to transcend the boundary between humanity and divinity, but also as a powerful syncretistic figure who, through his long-standing association with Melqart and Sicilian deities, brought the diverse constituencies on the island together.
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Indeed the euhemeristic emphasis on the permeability between the temporal and the celestial worlds would surely have been attractive to Punic as well as Greek populations, particularly in relation to the religious rites connected with Melqart. Euhemerism had thrived in the Hellenistic world, where Alexander and his successors had worked hard to blur the boundaries between the temporal and the celestial in their efforts to prove a heavenly sanction for their rule.

Now Hannibal’s journey from Spain to Italy was connected with what appears to have been a euhemeristic account of Heracles’ journey with the cattle of Geryon. Such euhemeristic treatments of the hero’s tenth labour and return to Greece exist in two later Greek texts, of which one and perhaps both can be connected with an earlier Sicilian Greek tradition.
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In the fuller of these two accounts, which appears in the work of the Greek teacher of rhetoric Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who worked in Rome during the last decades of the first century BC, Heracles was transformed from Greek superhero into ‘the greatest commander of his age’.
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At one point Dionysius suggests that Heracles’ main aim was the subjugation of the peninsula; however, as the story unfolds it is clear that the aim is in fact the liberation of its inhabitants from tyranny:
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