This was the city that, legend had it, Dido had built and her treacherous lover, Aeneas, had abandoned. Her dying curse of unceasing enmity between Carthage and Rome was approaching its fulfillment.
THE CARTHAGINIANS RECEIVED a bad press from ancient historians. There was sarcastic talk of Punica fides, “Punic good faith,” meaning sharp dealing and betrayal. Plutarch, writing in the second century A.D. but following some much older source, claims:
[They] are a hard and gloomy people, submissive to their rulers and harsh to their subjects, running to extremes of cowardice in times of fear and of cruelty in times of anger; they keep obstinately to their decisions, are austere, and care little for amusement or the graces of life.
There is hardly any surviving evidence for this harsh judgment—with one colossal exception, their religious practices, to which (like other Semitic peoples) they were fiercely attached. There were many temples, shrines, and sacred enclosures, or tophets, in Carthage. The city’s most popular deities in a numerous pantheon were Baal Hammon, Lord of the Altars of Incense, and his wife, Tanit, Face of Baal. Tanit’s name suggests that she was subordinate to her husband, but in fact she was more than his equal. Once the Carthaginians had acquired their North African lands, they felt the need for a guarantor of life and fertility and looked to Tanit, as their mother goddess, to fill that role.
Various ancient texts report a dark side to Punic worship. The Bible has it that the Phoenicians sacrificed small children. A king of Judah desecrated one of their holy places “so that no one could sacrifice his son or daughter as a burnt offering,” and the prophet Jeremiah quotes the Jewish God as saying, “They have built altars for Baal in order to burn their children in the fire as sacrifices. I never commanded them to do this; it never even entered my mind.”
The Greek Diodorus Siculus, not the most reliable of historians, has left a celebrated description of a Carthaginian attempt to placate an angry Baal. He equated Baal not with the chief Greek god, Zeus, but with his terrifying father, Cronos, who ate up his own progeny:
In their anxiety to make amends for their omission, [the Carthaginians] chose two hundred of the noblest children and sacrificed them publicly…. In the city there was a bronze statue of Cronos, extending its hands, palms up and sloping toward the ground. Each child was placed on it, rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.
According to Plutarch, parents saved their own infants by replacing them with street children, whom they purchased, and loud music was played at the place of sacrifice to drown out the victims’ screams.
Modern scholars were unsure what to make of these exotic holocausts. Were they invented by hostile propagandists? If there was any truth in the stories, perhaps animal sacrifices were substituted at some point for human beings (as in the legend of Abraham and Isaac). Then, in the 1920s, a tophet was unearthed containing the burned remains of young children. For a time, it was argued that this was merely a cemetery for dead newborn and stillborn infants, offered postmortem to appease the gods. Further investigation, however, revealed the remains of children up to four years old, and inscriptions made the nature of the sacrifice explicit. Thus, one father wrote: “It was to the lady Tanit and to Baal Hammon that Bomilcar son of Hanno, grandson of Milkiathon, vowed this son of his own flesh. Bless him you!”
A NATION WITH a small territory will necessarily have a small population, and so it proved with Carthage. The geographer Strabo claimed a total number of 700,000 inhabitants, but that is conceivable only if it encompassed the entire countryside and the other townships that made up the Carthaginian estate. There were surely never more than 200,000 people of pure Phoenician descent living outside the city walls. At the time of its greatest prosperity in the early third century, the city probably housed about 400,000 souls, including slaves and resident aliens.
For a nation with international and imperial responsibilities, Carthage did not have enough citizens to stock its armies. To fight its wars, it routinely recruited mercenaries, from among African tribesmen and, farther afield, from Spain and Gaul. This practice brought with it certain dangers, for mercenaries are motivated by pay rather than by patriotism and have been known to turn on their defenseless employers if they have a grievance. Sea, not land, being the Punic element, citizens, perhaps of the poorer sort, apparently helped to man its ships.
It was unusual for non-Greek states to have an established constitution, but Carthage and Rome were exceptions to the rule. To the Hellenic mind, this meant they were not altogether barbarians—that is to say, incomprehensible foreigners whose speech was pilloried as sounding like “bar bar”—and, at least in this regard, were allowed to become honorary members of the club of civilized nations. The philosopher Aristotle was a connoisseur of constitutions and found that the Carthaginians had “an excellent form of government.” He went on, “The superiority of their constitution is proved by the fact that the common people remain loyal to it. They have never had any revolution worth speaking of, and have never been under the rule of a popular dictator”—unlike many if not most Hellenic states, he might have added.
The Punic and Roman constitutions were in some ways similar, for they were both “mixed”—that is, they contained elements of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. It is unlikely that Carthage (pace Dido) was ever ruled by a king or queen, but at various times one leading family or clan dominated the government. In the third century, there were two chief officials, the sufets; this is the same word as the Hebrew shophet, usually translated as “judge,” as in the Book of Judges. So we may infer that sufets exercised a judicial as well as an executive role. Like Roman consuls, they were elected by an assembly of the People, held office for only a year, and probably shared power with one other colleague. Candidates for office had to be wellborn and wealthy.
A Council of Elders drawn from the upper class advised the sufets on the full range of political and administrative issues; there were several hundred members, and a standing committee of thirty dealt with pressing business and, as is the way with such groups, probably managed the council’s agenda. If council and sufets agreed on a course of action, there was no need for it to be submitted to the assembly. So far, so conventional. More constitutionally innovative was a special panel of 104 members of the Council of Elders. Called the Court of the Hundred and Four Judges, it controlled justice and the law courts and, like the Spartan ephors, looked after state security and supervised the activities of officials. It had something in common with a Ministry of the Interior in a police state.
Unlike Roman consuls, the sufets had no military duties. There was a separate post of general to which anybody could be elected. Carthage’s characteristic mode was one of peaceful commerce. When wars did occur, they were usually fought a long way from home and regarded as short-term upheavals best handled by short-term appointees. In times of peace, sufets could simultaneously serve as generals, too, but if Carthage was at war the door was opened wider to attract proven military ability.
Self-confidence was an essential qualification for Punic generals, for theirs was a dangerous job. Failure on the battlefield was completely unacceptable to the authorities, and often led to instant crucifixion. Success also brought negative consequences, for the home government feared that victorious commanders would return to Carthage with their mercenaries and seize power.