Destroy Carthage (8 page)

To the admirers of Heroic Greece, piracy and plunder in
themselves assigned no stigma. Hellas was born a sea-brigand.
What aroused the 'anti-semitic' indignation of many Greeks,
especially the nobility, was the despised commercial instinct of
the Phoenicians and their profitable operations west of Greece
- a march stolen on a race with a geographic head-start.

Eastern Sicily, fertile and close to Greece, was a natural
bridgehead in the westering movement from Hellas. Among
the first Greek settlements there were Naxos (734), at the foot
of Mount Etna, and Syracuse (733), further south.

At about the same time, Messana and Rhegium were founded
either side of the straits of Messina, giving access by sea to
western Italy. The Phocaeans of Ionia, reputedly the best long­distance sailors among the Greeks, pushed on to found Massilia
(Marseilles) and several posts on the Spanish coast. Of these,
the most southerly competed at Tarshish. In Sicily, new Greek colonies followed, in the north at
Himera, in the south at Selinus. The latter, less than a hundred
miles from Carthaginian Africa, raised a serious possibility that
the Phoenicians could lose their western hold on the island.
In such a situation, the Carthaginians were convinced, the
Greeks would dominate the western sea, cut the lanes to
Sardinia and menace Carthage herself.

A concerted attempt to drive the Phoenicians from Sicily
was soon to come. The third decade of the 6th century saw
the Siceliots, as the Sicilian Greeks were known, reinforced by
bands of new Greek settlers from Rhodes and the Dorian port
of Cnidos, in Asia Minor. Under a leader named Pentathlos,
the Rhodians and Cnidians established themselves at Lily-
baeum, in the extreme west of the island, contiguous to the
ultimate Phoenician stronghold of Motya.

At last, having submitted tamely to repeated intrusions, the
Phoenicians resisted. In conjunction with a native tribe of
Sicily, the Elymians, they defied Pentathlos and destroyed
Lilybaeum.

Carthage now adopted a policy of intervention to the north.
Historical sources are still scant, but it seems that some time
following the repulse of Pentathlos a Carthaginian chief called
Malchus (the Greeks may have mistaken the Semitic word
melek,
or king, for a proper name) led a force to Sicily to
strengthen Phoenician positions there. Motya, the seagirt
fortress of the west, was reinforced.

Malchus sailed on to Sardinia. There, Carthage helped to
sustain the Phoenician settlements through a stormy period.
The natives were hostile and Greek pirates prowled the coast.
In 560, the Phocaean Greeks established a strong colony in
Corsica, their fifty-oared warships plundering adjacent Sardinia
and her sea trade.

To beat the pirates, Carthage joined forces with Etruria, the
Italian land facing Corsica, whose ships had also been set upon.
The Etruscans, an assertive, advanced people, were redoubtable
warriors but lacked a large fleet. As a check to Greek expan­sion, the alliance with maritime Carthage was potent.

Sweeping the northern islands, a combined Carthaginian-
Etruscan armada engaged the pirate navy. The Phocaeans, out­numbered, put up a savage fight, their big warships driving the
allies before them. But their losses were crucial. Reduced to 20
vessels, a third of their original number, the Greeks abandoned
Corsica to the Etruscans and soon withdrew from southern
Spain.

Carthage was well served. Direct threat to Sardinia was
averted; Carthaginian monopoly of Tarshish restored. The
wealth from the region was vital to her new role. Leadership
of the western Phoenicians had brought not only economic
and political dominance but a military burden disproportionate
to her population.

Malchus had led a citizen levy, the characteristic army of
ancient states. For defensive purposes, and short campaigns,
the system was adequate, but the demands of overseas com­mitments put it under heavy strain. Economically, it made
better sense to devote revenue in part to hiring troops beyond
the city rather than waste the lives and energies of a special­ized community whose talents were better used creating
wealth.

Military reform is traditionally ascribed to a luminary
named Mago, whose reign or magistracy (it is uncertain when
the early kings of Carthage were replaced by suffetes, or
magistrates) embraced the enlistment of forces from dependent
states and the use of foreign mercenaries.

Carthaginians still held command, while an elite corps of
citizens - known by the Greeks as the Sacred Band - was re­tained to stiffen and inspire the new armies. Equipped and
trained as heavy infantry, in the manner of Greek hoplites, the
Sacred Band complemented the early hired troops, Libyans
and Spaniards, who fought lightly-armed, sometimes as cav­alry.

The system was effective. By Mago's death, Sardinia had been
thoroughly consolidated while the Siceliots accepted Carth­aginian interest in western Sicily. Many Greeks, misrepresented
by a bellicose minority, were content to trade with the
Phoenicians, some even to conduct their businesses in Phoenic­ian colonies. The obverse was also true.

Indeed, when a Spartan prince named Dorieus threatened
to upset the status quo by settling in the far west of Sicily at
the end of the 6th century, he received no encouragement
from the Greek colonies. Shunned by the Siceliots, his followers
were overwhelmed by the Phoenicians, Dorieus killed.

In these circumstances it was not impossible that the western
Mediterranean could have witnessed a gradual merger of
cultures, encouraged by commerce, in which Carthage (in­creasingly exposed to Greek manners, drawn north by the
Etruscan pact) might in time have shed her eastern heritage.
That she became, as it happened, isolationist, a uniquely indi­vidual force, owed much to two early developments. Each was
rooted in the fortunes of eastern Greece.

Here, on the shores of the Aegean, radical changes had come
about in politics. With increasing commercial prosperity, the
old Greek states had acquired a strong middle or trading class
which, independent of the soil, was also independent of aristo­cratic landlords. Enviously, the poorer classes had stirred them­selves to question the yoke of the nobility. Finally, popular
movements had tumbled aristocracies and kingdoms.

In ultimate form, such movements had already produced the
democracies of Athens and some other states. Elsewhere, rev­olution had resulted in a form of government where more or
less popular leaders held power as new autocrats. Terminologically distinguished from the old kings as tyrants - the new
form of rule being a
turannos,
or tyranny - many of these
rulers were enlightened men. Others, prevailing at length,
brought tyranny to disrepute.

Meanwhile, the Siceliots, clinging to customs brought with
them from former times, lagged in development. Until the be­ginning of the 5th century, most Siceliot states were controlled
by the nobility. Then, as a fresh wave of Asiatic Greeks fled
west from the Persians, the situation abruptly changed.

New ideas, introduced by the migrants, who included pas­sionate revolutionaries, threw the Greek cities of Sicily into a
turmoil of instability and violence. From the ferment emerged
a breed of tyrants of the worst kind: egotistic, ruthless, de­structive in their conquests. Among the first, both controlling
cities on the south coast, were Gelon of Gela and Theron of
Acragas.

Gelon, to dominate this baneful partnership, had served his
apprenticeship as lieutenant to another tyrant, Hippocrates.
The training was a thorough one. In alliance with Theron, he
first seized Syracuse, the finest port in eastern Sicily and the
key to communications with the east. Making this his new
capital, and the base for a growing fleet, he then turned his
gaze west.

His ambition frightened not only the Sicilian Phoenicians
but a good many Siceliots. Among the latter was the ruler of
northern Himera, Terillos, a friend of the Carthaginian family
of Mago, the influential Magonids. When Terillos, driven from
his city by Gelon's ally Theron, appealed to Carthage, a major
confrontation seemed probable.

A second eastern development heightened the crisis. The new
century had opened with a situation of cold war between
Athens, a supporter of the Ionian rebels, and Persia's western
bureau at Sardis. In the summer of 490, a year after Gelon
came to power in Sicily, the Persian emperor Darius assembled
one of the largest armadas then seen to impress his might on
Athens and eastern Greece.

Marathon, an Athenian victory against the odds, won time
for Hellas but made a greater invasion inevitable. Xerxes, son
of Darius, prepared to conquer Greece. In 481, enslavement
to Persia seeming imminent, the threatened Greek states asked
Gelon to rally to the motherland. He did not respond. Terillos
had barely been exiled from Himera. Gelon expected trouble
of his own, from Carthage.But if the tyrant was ill-placed to reinforce mainland Greece,
more significant was the knowledge that Greece could not
assist Gelon. How far Carthage was swayed by this is debateable. The later Greek writer Diodorus Siculus claimed an ar­rangement between Persia and Carthage to synchronize their
attacks. Others disputed it. One thing seems certain: the east­ern Phoenicians, who assisted Xerxes's preparations, were un­likely to have kept Carthage in ignorance of his plans. If she
meant to tackle Gelon, now was the moment.

The Carthaginian force entrusted with restoring Terillos was
the strongest yet fielded by the city, and the first whose com­position is detailed. Apart from Libyans and Iberians, it con­tained Sardinians, Corsicans and 'Helisyki,' the last obscure
in origin. A member of the Magonids, Hamilcar, commanded
the expedition.

Greek historians, gross in exaggerating the strength of their
enemies, numbered his force at 300,000. Divided by ten, a more
realistic figure may be obtained. Even then, part of the army,
seemingly its cavalry, was lost when a storm struck the trans­port ships. Rounding the western end of Sicily without inter­ception, the rest of the fleet put in at Panormus (Palermo),
roughly equidistant from pro-Carthaginian Selinus, southwest,
and hostile Himera, some fifty miles east.