The Fall of Carthage Read Online Free PDF Page A

These bickered with each other and with the various smaller kingdoms, cities and leagues of cities which appeared in Greece and Asia Minor. The Greek communities which occupied most of Sicily and southern Italy - known as Magna Graecia - and were dotted around the coasts of Spain and southern Gaul, notably the great city of Massilia (Marseilles), were culturally part of the Hellenic world, but politically divided. Spain was occupied by the Iberians in the south, Celtiberians of mixed Spanish and Gallic stock in the north and the Lusitanians in the west. Gaul and northern Italy were populated by the people known to the Greeks as Celtoi and the Romans as Galli. All of these peoples were essentially tribal, although the level of unity within a tribe, the power of its leaders, and the strength of individual tribes fluctuated. Some peoples were developing settlements which already resembled classical city states. The Ligurians of north-western Italy were much more fragmented socially, with few leaders able to control more than the warriors of their own small village. In all of these peoples a leader's status depended primarily on his martial prowess. Raiding and small-scale warfare were endemic; battles less common, but by no means unknown. 1
    At the beginning of the third century Carthage was undisputedly the greatest power in the western Mediterranean. The Romans first really came to prominence, at least in the eyes of the literate Greek world, following their stubborn resistance to and eventual victory over Pyrrhus in 280-275. Yet they remained entirely an Italian power and it is fitting that we should look first at Carthage.
    Carthage
    Phoenician merchant ships, initially powered solely by oars, were a familiar sight throughout the Mediterranean world from the beginning of the last millennium BC . A Semitic people, whose great cities of Tyre and Sidon lay on the coast of what is now Lebanon, the Phoenicians established trading settlements throughout the Mediterranean. There is archaeological evidence for their presence in Spain from the eighth century BC , but it is probable that they were active in the area earlier than this, for this was clearly Tartessus, the Tarshish of the Old Testament, a source of great mineral wealth. Carthage was not the first Punic settlement in Africa - Utica was certainly older - but it seems from the beginning to have had a special importance. Myth later told of Elissa (Phoenician Elishat) or Dido who fled from Tyre after her brother, King Pygmalion, had killed her husband, and in 814 she founded Carthage. Granted as much land as an ox-hide could cover by the Libyans, Elissa cut the hide into thin strips and so was able to claim far more ground than anticipated, in an early display of that deviousness which the Romans and Greeks considered a Punic trait. Subsequently Elissa chose to burn herself on a funeral pyre rather than marry the Libyan King Hierbos, an act which protected her people and maintained faith with her dead husband. 2
    Whether there is any slight trace of the truth in this story is impossible to say, for foundation myths were common in the Graeco-Roman world and frequently fabricated. We do not know what the Carthaginians themselves said of the origins of their city. Excavation has yet to reveal any traces of occupation before the very end of the eighth century BC . It is clear that Carthage maintained a close link with Tyre throughout its history. Annually an expedition was sent to sacrifice at the Temple of Melquart ('The Lord of the City') at Tyre, a connection that was preserved even after Carthage grew in power and began to found colonies of its own. Culturally the city remained distinctively Phoenician in language and culture, the adoption of some Greek and Libyan customs not changing its essential nature. In at least one aspect of religious practice the Carthaginians were more conservative than the people of Tyre. They continued the ghastly Moloch sacrifices of infants which