Anthony Everitt - The Rise of Rome

If the Carthaginians knew they could not vanquish their opponents, they were no walkover. They were greatly assisted by the poor quality of the Roman commanders. The city’s triple defenses, its high walls, and its fortified towers presented the besiegers with a very considerable challenge. Two years of hard but inconclusive fighting ensued. From the Roman perspective, the only bright spots were the valor and presence of mind of Scipio Aemilianus, who at this point in his career was a military tribune in his mid-thirties. Among other things, he arranged the defection of Carthage’s Numidian cavalry.

The two very old men who were largely responsible for the war, Cato and Masinissa, died before its outcome was known. They shared a high opinion of young Scipio. Despite his dislike of the Scipio clan and his destruction of the grandfather Africanus’s career, Cato recognized talent when he saw it. He campaigned successfully for Scipio’s election as consul and army commander, despite the fact that he was officially too young to hold the post. Giving the lie to his pretended ignorance of all things Greek, Cato quoted the Odyssey:

The Numidian monarch, anxious to protect his hard-won kingdom, decided that it should be divided among three of his sons. Wiser than King Lear, he knew that he would need external guarantees. So in his will he charged Scipio with the disposal of his territories and powers.

Now that Scipio had consular imperium , he tightened the discipline of his troops and in lieu of training launched some exploratory assaults on the walls. He completely blockaded the city by building vast fortifications on the isthmus that connected it to the mainland and a mole across the harbor entrance. Once that was done, the fall of Carthage was only a matter of time. Food grew short and the Punic commander-in-chief, Hasdrubal, seized autocratic powers.

Before the final assault, Scipio conducted an evocatio , as Camillus had done before the sack of Veii, luring the Punic divinities to desert their temples and migrate to new homes in Rome. Carthage was now a godless community on which any kind of misery could be inflicted. Then the legions marched from the Roman mole along the twin harbors and up the narrow streets leading to the city’s high place, the Byrsa. Scipio fired and demolished houses to make space for the advancing infantry. The grim, methodical fighting went on day and night for nearly a week. Some men were detailed as street cleaners, sweeping away rubbish, corpses, and even the wounded. Suppliants walked out of the Byrsa and asked Scipio for the lives of the survivors. The consul agreed, and fifty thousand exhausted and famished men, women, and children emerged, their ultimate destinies to be determined at slave auctions.

Only nine hundred or so Roman deserters remained, who could not expect forgiveness and had no choice but to make a last stand. They occupied the Temple of Aesculapius, the god of healing, which was built on a highly defensible rocky outcrop. They were joined by Hasdrubal and his family.

Hasdrubal could see that his position was hopeless and slipped across the Roman lines. Scipio accepted his surrender, despite the fact that he had committed atrocities and had tortured to death some prisoners of war, and showed him to the deserters. When they saw him, they asked for silence and hurled insults at him. They then set the temple on fire. Hasdrubal’s wife was made of sterner stuff than her husband. After reproaching him, she killed her children, threw them onto the flames, and plunged in after them. The deserters, too, burned themselves to death.

Now that resistance was over and the war won, Scipio surveyed the scene and, like Marcellus at Syracuse, burst into tears. The long, proud history of Carthage was at an end. He stayed wrapt in thought for a long time, reflecting on the mutability of fortune. He thought of the rise and fall of great cities and empires—Troy, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, and, most recently, the dominions of Alexander. Did a similar fate in some future age await Rome?

He turned to a friend who was with him, the historian Polybius, and, as educated Romans tended to do in moments of high emotion, quoted some lines from Homer. They appear in the Iliad and are spoken by Hector, Troy’s leading soldier, on the eve of his death:

This outburst of fine feeling did not deter the victorious general from razing the city to the ground and uttering a solemn curse that where Carthage once stood should forever be pasture for sheep.

THE ROMANS HAD behaved very badly toward Carthage. They had, in truth, no real justification for the Third Punic War, and even less for the city’s annihilation. As we have seen, they liked speaking sarcastically of Punica fides , but their own reputation for fair and honest dealing took many knocks in the second century. They must have felt uneasy about what they had done. So it is no accident that they began to rewrite the legendary past, in an attempt to retrieve their good name.

The early histories of Rome were written in Greek. In the opening chapters of this book, I showed how the Romans linked themselves to the myths and legends of the Greeks. In this way, they acquired Hellenic credentials and proved that they were not barbarians beyond the pale of civilized life. Of course, in reality they had no connection that we know of with Trojans and (if it ever took place) the Trojan War.

Cato was the first to write a history of Rome in Latin: this was Origines (Origins), a substantial prose work of seven books that have, unfortunately, been lost. From what is known of it and the fragments that survive, it was a massive exercise in collective self-justification. The man who willfully advocated the destruction of Carthage highlighted the typical Roman virtues of valor, obedience to law, honesty, and respect for the family, the state, and the gods.

Two books were devoted to the beginnings of the peoples of Italy, perhaps to assert Rome’s national integrity and right to leadership. The early centuries were described in only one book, while the two wars with Carthage were allocated one book each, and finally two books covered the first half of the second century down to the fateful year 149. This emphasis on the recent past no doubt reflected reader interest, but it also gave the author an opportunity to explain, excuse, and celebrate Rome’s genocidal victory. He presented a dossier of seven alleged breaches by Carthage of its obligations to Rome. We may surmise that the Punic version of events received little notice.

Rome’s first epic poets, Gnaeus Naevius and Quintus Ennius, from Calabria, also focused on the Punic Wars. Their poems have been lost, but we know that they interwove historical events with the legends of Greece and made much of Rome’s genetic link to Troy. In Naevius’s Bellum Punicum ( Punic War ), one or two fragments reveal Venus, Rome’s traditional protectress, begging her father, Jupiter, to calm a storm that threatens to destroy Aeneas’s fleet. We can just detect, offstage, the malign presence of Juno, for it appears that one hundred and fifty years later Virgil, in his masterpiece the Aeneid , which we have in full, lifted the entire episode from Naevius. Virgil blames the storm on the Queen of Heaven, and so, no doubt, did his predecessor. The earlier version probably also has Aeneas being blown off course onto Dido’s shore. Their tragic relationship sets the stage for the struggles between their descendants.