The World

Egypt gained Cyrene; and Euergetes and Berenice had six children during their first seven years of marriage, a rare oasis of wholesomeness in this murderous family. The Ptolemies were committed to winning Mediterranean hegemony, which in the east meant competing with their cousins and rivals, the Seleukos family that still ruled from Syria to Iran. Once he was king, Euergetes, energetic and charismatic, saw an opportunity: his sister was married to King Antiochos II, but his sudden death put both of them in danger from his rapacious brothers. Euergetes sailed up to Antioch, the Seleucid capital, rushing into the palace moments too late. His sister and her child had just been murdered, but he managed to secure the Mediterranean seaboard from Thrace to Libya. At his zenith, Euergetes received a request for help from a city state that was his neighbour in Africa: Carthage asked for a loan to fund a war against an Italian city state.

The two seemed evenly matched, but Carthage, capital of a Mediterranean trading empire, would surely win. Its forces were commanded by a young general, Hamilcar Barca, whose family would dominate Carthage for the next fifty years. Hamilcar was already the father of three daughters, but before he left Carthage for the front, his eldest son was born: Hannibal.

AFRICAN LIGHTNING AND HUMAN SACRIFICE: BARCA OF CARTHAGE

The Barcas had their origins in the mother city Tyre (Lebanon): Hamilcar’s family called themselves the ‘Tyrian house of the ancient Barcas’, though Barca also meant Lightning. Established, according to its foundation myth, in 814 BC by Dido, a Phoenician princess driven out of Tyre by her brother Pygmalion, Carthage – Qart-Hadasht (New City) – was a city of temples and palaces with two harbours, all guarded by huge walls, with a population of 700,000 and several million subjects in its Tunisian hinterland.

These Phoenician settlers – they called themselves ‘Canani’, Canaan-ites – initially paid tribute to the rulers of Numidia, a kingdom of Berbers, a name derived from the Greek word barbarian, though they called themselves Mazigh-en. Berbers and Phoenicians initially intermarried. But ultimately the Carthaginians forced the Berbers to pay tribute, hired their superb horsemen – they rode without bit, saddle or stirrups – and enslaved those who resisted.

Carthage had grown into the metropolis of a trading empire: its shekels were the favoured Mediterranean currency. Its shipbuilders and their Greek rivals developed the trireme and larger quinquereme warships – rowed by three and five banks of oars – that dominated the Mediterranean. As sailors they were sophisticated enough to voyage into the Atlantic, sailing down to west Africa where they captured three African women who were flayed, their skins displayed long afterwards in the Temple of Tanit. In Africa, they encountered huge apes that they called ‘gorillas’, a Carthaginian word.

Carthaginians worshipped Baal Hammon and his wife Tanit in temples where, like their Tyrian cousins, they made animal and, in times of crisis, human sacrifices at the special altar, the tophet, where human bones, usually of children, have been discovered. As they challenged, and traded with, their Greek rivals, they syncretized their god Melqart, legendary first king of Tyre, with Hercules, son of Zeus and a human mother, bridging the human and divine. Speaking Phoenician (which had much in common with Hebrew and Arabic), along with Greek and Numidian, they did not eat pork, circumcised their children and dressed in robes and sported earrings. Carthage was a semi-democratic republic controlled by a balance of aristocratic families and a popular assembly of all male citizens.^* Deploying African elephants, Numidian cavalry, Spanish, Celtic, Greek and Italian infantry and fleets of quinqueremes, all officered by aristocrats, the Carthaginians, funded by their productive slave-powered farms and mines and by trading, had expanded into Spain, Malta, Sardinia and Sicily.

On his deathbed, Alexander the Great was planning to destroy Carthage, which then formed an alliance against his successors with a city state, Rome, that was consuming the Italian peninsula. It was an alliance that did not last. The Romans expanded into Sicily, which the Carthaginians regarded as their own. In 264 BC, what started as a minor proxy war escalated into a war between the Italian and African republics.

The Romans possessed plentiful manpower but no fleet; the Carthaginians depended on mercenaries but had the best fleet in the Great Sea. Yet technology never remains a monopoly for long. Copying a captured Carthaginian ship, Rome built its first fleet. Both sides were frequently defeated on land and sea as the action moved from Sicily to Africa and back to Sicily where Hamilcar harassed Roman positions and raided Italy, confident in victory. Then a Roman fleet defeated the Carthaginians at sea. Carthage was astonished.