CHAPTER SIX
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NEW POLITICS
Destruction
THE LONG SIEGE, and final destruction, of Carthage in 146 BCE was gruesome even by ancient standards, with atrocities reported on both sides. The losers could be as spectacularly cruel as the victors. On one occasion, the Carthaginians were supposed to have paraded Roman prisoners on the city walls, flayed them alive and dismembered them in full view of their comrades.
Carthage lay on the Mediterranean coast near modern Tunis and was defended by a massive circuit of walls almost 20 miles in perimeter (the walls of Rome constructed after the invasion of the Gauls were well under half that length). It was only when Scipio Aemilianus had cut the town off from the sea, and so from its access to supplies, that after two years of siege operations the Romans managed to starve the enemy into submission and storm the place. The one surviving ancient description of these final moments includes plenty of lurid exaggeration but also a shrewd sense of how difficult it must have been to destroy a city as solidly built as Carthage – and a few probably realistic glimpses of the carnage that went with defeat. In the assault, the Roman soldiers fought their way up streets lined with multistorey buildings; they jumped from rooftop to rooftop, throwing the occupants down on to the pavements and toppling and setting fire to the structures as they went, until the debris they had made blocked their path. The rubbish clearers followed, opening up a space for the next wave of assault by blasting their way through the mixture of building material and human remains, in which it was said that the legs of the dying could be seen visibly writhing above the debris, their heads and bodies buried beneath. The bones that archaeologists have found in these layers of destruction, not to mention the thousands of deadly stone and clay sling bullets that have been unearthed, suggest that this description may not be as wide of the mark as we might hope.
There was the usual rush for plunder, and not just precious gold and silver. Aemilianus made sure that the famous agricultural encyclopaedia by the Carthaginian Mago was rescued from the flames; back in Rome, the senate gave a committee of Roman linguists the unenviable task of translating into Latin its twenty-eight volumes on everything from how to preserve pomegranates to how to choose bullocks. There were mythical resonances too. Aemilianus’ rueful quotation from Homer as he watched the destruction had its poignant side. But it was also a boast. Rome was now claiming its place in the cycle of great powers and great conflicts that started with the Trojan War. Carthage, meanwhile, was supposed to have ended as it had begun, with a man abandoning his lover in favour of Rome. One story told that, just as Virgil’s hero Aeneas deserted Dido as the city was being built, so amid its destruction Hasdrubal, the Carthaginian commander, finally went over to the Romans, leaving his wife behind. She is supposed to have denounced him when, like Dido, she threw herself onto a funeral pyre.
Almost as devastating, a few months later, was the sack of Corinth, nearly 1,000 miles from Carthage, and the richest city in Greece. It had made a fortune from its prime trading position, with harbours on each side of the narrow strip of land separating the Peloponnese from the rest of Greece. Under the command of Lucius Mummius Achaicus, as he was later known from his victory over these ‘Achaeans’, the Roman legions took the place apart, looted its fabulous works of art, enslaved the people and set it ablaze. This was such a vast conflagration that the mixture of molten metal it produced was supposed to be the origin of a prized, and extremely expensive, material known as Corinthian bronze. Ancient experts did not believe a word of this particular story, but the image of the intense heat of the destruction melting first the precious bronze, then the silver and finally the gold, until they all streamed together, is a powerful one – and a vivid example of the close link in Roman imagination between art and conquest.
Mummius was a very different type from the Homer-loving Aemilianus, and he has gone down in history almost as a caricature of the uncultured Roman philistine. Polybius, who arrived at Corinth shortly after the Greek defeat, was shocked to see Roman soldiers using the backs of precious paintings as gaming boards, presumably with the nod of their commanding officer. And a joke was still circulating almost seven centuries later about how, when he was overseeing the shipment of the valuable antiques back home, Mummius told the captains that if any piece was damaged they would have to replace it with a new one. He was, in other words, so laughably boorish that he was unaware that a ‘new-for-old deal’ was inappropriate for such valuable antiques.
But this story was, like so many, double edged. At least one stern Roman commentator took a stance reminiscent of Cato in suggesting that it would have been better for Rome if more people had followed Mummius and kept their distance from Greek luxury. Perhaps a tradition of austerity ran in Mummius’ family, for his great-great-grandson was the notoriously parsimonious and no-nonsense emperor Galba, who ruled for a few months in 68–69 CE after the downfall of the extravagant Nero. But whatever his views really were, Mummius disposed of the Corinthian spoils with care. Some were dedicated in temples in Greece, combining a show of piety with a subtle warning to the other Greeks. Many were put on display in Rome or presented to towns in Italy. Evidence for this is still emerging. In Pompeii in the precinct of the Temple of Apollo, just off the Forum, a statue plinth was cleaned in 2002, and under a later plaster coating was discovered an inscription in Oscan, the local language, proclaiming that whatever once stood on top of it had been a gift of ‘L Mummis L kusul’, or ‘Lucius Mummius, son of Lucius, consul’. It must have been some choice object from Corinth.
Why, within the space of a few months, the Romans took such brutal measures against these two grand and famous cities has been debated ever since. After Africanus’ victory at the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE, at the end of the war with Hannibal, Carthage had agreed to Rome’s demands. Fifty years later, it had just paid off the last instalment of the vast cash indemnity the Romans had imposed. Was this final campaign of destruction simply an act of Roman vengeance, carried out on some trumped-up excuse? Or did the Romans have a legitimate fear of resurgent Carthaginian power, whether economic or military? Cato was the most vociferous enemy of Carthage, notoriously, tediously but ultimately persuasively ending every speech he made with the words ‘Carthage must be destroyed’ (‘Carthago delenda est’, in the still familiar Latin phrase). One of his stunts in the senate was letting a bunch of deliciously ripe Carthaginian figs drop from his toga. He then explained that they had come from a city only three days’ journey away. This was a wilful underestimate of the distance between Carthage and Rome (just under five days would have been the quickest journey), but it was a powerful symbol of the dangerous proximity, and agricultural wealth, of a potential rival – and intended to provoke suspicion of the old enemy.
Corinth must have played a rather different role in Roman calculations. It had been one of several Greek cities to ignore some rather half-hearted and not very clear instructions that Rome had given in the 140s BCE trying to restrict alliances in the Greek world, and it had pursued its own agenda in regional politics. Worse still, the Corinthians had rudely sent packing a delegation of Roman envoys. No other place in Greece came in for the same treatment. Was Corinth being punished as an exemplary case for a public act of disobedience, even though it had been on a relatively trivial scale? Or was there a real suspicion that it could become an alternative power base in the eastern Mediterranean? Or, as Polybius insinuates at the end of his Histories, were the Romans starting to resort to extermination for its own sake?
Whatever motivations lay behind the violence of 146 BCE, the events of that year were soon seen as a turning point. In one way, they marked the acme of Roman military success. Rome had now annihilated its richest, oldest and most powerful rivals in the Mediterranean world. As Virgil presented it more than a hundred years later in the Aeneid, Mummius, by conquering Corinth, had at last avenged the defeat of Aeneas’ Trojans by the Greeks in the Trojan War. But in another way, the events of 146 BCE were seen as the beginning of the collapse of the Republic and as the herald of a century of civil wars, mass murder and assassinations that led to the return of autocratic rule. Fear of the enemy, so this argument went, had been good for Rome; without any significant external threat, ‘the path of virtue was abandoned for that of corruption’. Sallust was particularly eloquent on the theme. In his other surviving essay, on a war against the North African king Jugurtha at the end of the second century BCE, he reflects on the dire consequences of the destruction of Carthage: from the greed of all sections of Roman society (‘every man for himself’), through the breakdown of consensus between rich and poor, to the concentration of power in the hands of a very few men. These all pointed to the end of the Republican system. Sallust was an acute observer of Roman power, but the collapse of the Republic was, as we shall see, not quite so easily explained.