The Fall of Carthage Read Online Free PDF

were killed and burned in honour of Ba'al Hammon and his consort Tank, a practice which had been abandoned at Tyre by the time Carthage was established. The Tophet of Salammbo, the

    cult site where this ritual occurred, is the oldest structure yet discovered by archaeology at Carthage and the excavations have shown that the practice continued until 146. Disturbingly, the proportion of sacrifices where a lamb or other animal was substituted for the child decreased rather than increased over the centuries. Similar tophets have been discovered at other Carthaginian foundations, but rarely if ever on sites founded directly by the Phoenicians. Religion was closely controlled by the state at Carthage and its senior magistrates combined a political and religious function. 3
    Carthaginian overseas foundations remained primarily trading centres, like their Phoenician predecessors, but from the sixth century onwards they came into direct competition with the Greek colonies which began to spring up. The main driving force behind Greek colonization was the shortage of good, cultivatable land to meet the demand of an expanding population. The colonies they established were replicas of the city states or polei s of Greece itself, communities in which status was normally dependent on ownership of land. Competition between rivals both eager to exploit territories for their own benefit developed into open conflict, primarily for the control of Sicily. Numbers favoured the Greek colonists, for Carthaginian settlements were always small in size, but the Greeks were handicapped by their political disunity. An especially ferocious tone was added to the conflict by the strong religious differences between the two sides, and it was common for shrines and temples to be desecrated. This attitude softened slightly as the Carthaginian state began to accept certain Greek deities. The worship of Demeter and Kore (Persephone) was formally introduced to Carthage in 396, an act of propitiation after the destruction of one of their temples in Sicily had been followed by a devastating plague amongst the Punic army there.
    The fortunes of both sides fluctuated during the long contest for Sicily. In 480 the Greeks won a great victory at Himera, an achievement which happily coincided with the defeat of Xerxes' invasion of Greece at Salamis in the same year and Plataea in 479, and was a cause of much satisfaction throughout the Hellenic world. Despite such failures, the Carthaginians persevered and Greeks increasingly were forced to accept the leadership of tyrants, notably Dionysius and Agathocles, or mercenary captains, of whom Pyrrhus was one of the last, to continue the struggle. In 310, Agathocles, the tyrant of Syracuse, landed a force at Cape Bon in North Africa and posed a direct threat to the Carthaginian homeland. This produced a panic and political upheaval at Carthage. Agathocles defeated a much larger Carthaginian army, drawing troops away from the Punic expeditionary force. Ultimately, he was incapable of storming Carthage itself and could not raise enough of its Libyan subjects in revolt to weaken it fatally. Abandoning his army, Agathocles returned to Syracuse from which he dominated much of Sicily until his death in 289. Pyrrhus' intervention on the island initially checked the Carthage's reviving power, but failed to achieve any long-term results when his allies turned against him and the Carthaginians defeated his fleet in 276. By the time of the war with Rome, Carthage was clear master of all of the southern and western parts of Sicily. 4
    In the fifth century Carthagian power in Africa itself had steadily increased, perhaps in part encouraged by the failures in Sicily. The city had ceased to pay the subsidies levied by the local Libyan rulers and had come to control all the other Phoenician towns in the area, notably Hadrumen-tum and Utica. In the middle of the century Carthaginian fleets mounted great exploratory voyages along the North