27

Liberation in the South

The Roman embassy was led by Gaius Fabricius… to whom Pyrrhus was privately disposed to be kind, and so he tried to persuade him to accept gold… But Fabricius refused… and so on the next day, wanting to terrify him as he had never seen an elephant, Pyrrhus ordered the biggest of his beasts to be set just behind them while they conversed, with only a curtain drawn across. When a signal was given, the curtain was drawn and the elephant suddenly raised its trunk, held it over Fabricius’ head and let out a terrifying, harsh cry. But Fabricius turned round calmly and said to Pyrrhus with a smile: ‘Yesterday, your gold did not sway me; today, this beast of yours does not sway me, either.’

Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus 20

Rome’s attack on the city-state of Tarentum turned out to be a military milestone. In self-defence, the men of Tarentum appealed for help to a Greek adventurer across the Adriatic Sea, for the third time in recent history. In the late 330s they had turned to Alexander the Great’s brother-in-law and in 302 to an adventurous Spartan king. Now they appealed to King Pyrrhus in Epirus in north-western Greece. In spring 280 he crossed into south Italy and confronted the Romans for the first time with troops who had been trained in the world-conquering tactics of Alexander the Great. He also brought another of Alexander’s novelties: war-elephants. No Italian had ever seen an elephant before. Pyrrhus’ herd were real ‘Indians’, direct descendants of Alexander’s, and he had taken them over in Macedon.

Through Tarentum – the child of Sparta – Rome and the Hellenistic world thus met face to face. But King Pyrrhus was also a throwback; he was the last great rival of Homer’s heroes in Greek history. Like Alexander, he matched himself with Achilles, his ancestor, and set off to fight a new Trojan War against the Romans of ‘Trojan’ descent. Pyrrhus shone in the front line of battle in his silver armour and crowned helmet (silver armour was later copied, a classical allusion, for the great fighter of the Italian Renaissance, the duke of Urbino, in the fifteenth century). He enjoyed single combat and claimed that once, with a single swipe, he hacked a savage Mamertine mercenary in half. But he was not just a lout. He wrote a book on tactics and a book of memoirs and was later admired for his siegecraft and diplomacy. Nowadays, the Carthaginian general Hannibal is remembered as the famous user of war-elephants. In fact, Pyrrhus used them in far more settings, including Italy, throughout his career. In the West, he, not Hannibal, is the true ‘elephant-king’.

When Pyrrhus reached Italy in 280 BC, he was already thirty-nine, seven years older than Alexander at his death. Discontented non-Greek peoples in southern Italy started to join him and, after a bloody victory against Roman troops near Tarentum’s colony, Heraclea, he even dashed north towards Rome and sent a trusted Greek diplomat, Cineas, to offer terms to the Roman Senate. It was a great meeting. The elderly Cineas had once studied with the master-orator, Demosthenes. For the first time Roman senators heard a real Athens-trained speaker, but, in order to understand him, they surely had to have an interpreter as very few of them knew a word of Greek. In turn, Cineas was struck by his majestic audience (the Senate, he thought, was a council of kings). He was refused bluntly, but he is also said to have reported that the Roman people were like a many-headed monster whose numbers would keep on being replenished.¹ Many such comments were attributed later to Cineas by Romans who liked this connection with Greece, but if this one is true, Cineas, pupil of Demosthenes, was a shrewder judge of Roman manpower than of the Roman constitution.

After this refusal Pyrrhus won a second hard victory in 279 in Apulia, in which his elephants played a major role. Only when a Roman foot soldier hacked the trunk off one are the Romans said to have realized that ‘the beasts were mortal’.² Nonetheless, they stillterrified the enemy cavalry. The Romans are said to have mounted long spears on wagons to poke them away and to have tried to throw fire against the beasts from a height. Once again, the casualties on both sides were very heavy: ‘another such victory,’ Pyrrhus is said to have remarked, ‘and we shall be lost’³ (whence our saying, ‘a Pyrrhic victory’).

In 278 BC Pyrrhus faced a choice: either to turn back to Macedon where recent events gave him a new hope of the throne, or else to turn to Sicily, in keeping with his recent marriage to a Syracusan of dynastic family. While continuing to protect Tarentum, he chose to go south into Sicily. In Italy, he had been promising ‘freedom’ from Rome to the Greek cities, although they were wary about accepting it. In Sicily, he now promised ‘freedom’ from the Carthaginians, perhaps with a new joint Sicilian–south Italian kingdom of his own in mind. For three years he showed no more of a commitment to real freedom than any true Hellenistic king and failed in his hopes. On his return journey to Italy he lost several of his war-elephants and although he won a third victory against Rome at Beneventum in 275, it was another bloody encounter, with heavy losses on his own side. In this victory, too, the elephants played a big part, until a mother-elephant ran riot to protect its calf (the pair of them are perhaps commemorated in art on a contemporary plate found in Campania). The Romans are said to have terrified the elephants by setting pigs among them, squealing because the Romans had covered them in fat and set them on fire. So Pyrrhus left a garrison at Tarentum and withdrew back to Greece. He ended up fighting first in Macedon, then in Sparta and Argos. In Macedon, he replenished his elephants by a victory over the king, Antigonus, and then took them down to southern Greece. While his elephants blocked the gates of Argos in 272 BC, he was stunned by a roof-tile (thrown by the mother of an Argive opponent) and was decapitated. His head was brought to the king of Macedon who rebuked its bearer, his son, and wept with a truly Homeric sense of his past losses. It was a typical show of sympathy between Hellenistic princes. Pyrrhus’ head and body were buried, but his big toe survived, a sign (men said) of its divine quality.

When Pyrrhus left Sicily, he is said to have described it as the ‘future wrestling-ground for Rome and Carthage’.⁴ At first, Rome and Carthage had reasserted their old alliance in the face of the new invader. Within fifteen years they would be locked in war, as Pyrrhus had predicted. On and off it was to last for more than sixty years.

After Pyrrhus had left, Rome first received a remarkable new approach, from Ptolemy II, king of Egypt. Rome’s victory had impressed him, perhaps because he had helped Pyrrhus in Epirus when the war began. Now he made a friendship, sealed with splendid gifts. As Rome was becoming more intertwined with affairs in the wider Greek world, events in the West increasingly interested Greek historians. The elderly Greek Hieronymus of Cardia, a hardened veteran of Alexander’s Successors, digressed on the early history of Rome in his major work on the wars of Alexander’s followers. He included Pyrrhus, his western battles and his death, presumably basing them on Pyrrhus’ memoirs. In Athens, the exiled Sicilian Timaeus also wrote on Pyrrhus and claimed that the two cities of Rome and Carthage had been founded in the same year (which he calculated as 814/3). He was completely wrong, but the claim arose from an awareness that their twin histories were about to collide, at the expense of the old Greek West.

The Romans followed up Pyrrhus’ departure by bringing the remaining Greek cities in the south of Italy into line. In 277 the town of Locri had struck silver coins on which ‘Good Faith’ (the Roman fides) was shown crowning the seated figure of Rome. In return, Locri would expect Roman trust and protection. In fact, the days of a free ‘Great Greece’ in south Italy were to be over. In 273, a colony was settled at ‘Patstum’, transforming the once Greek site. In 272 the Romans retook control of troublesome Tarentum. In 264 they found a pretext for a further step. Some barbarian Mamertine soldiers had seized the Greek town of Messina on the Sicilian straits, and then, very artfully, appealed to Carthage (who sent a garrison) and to Rome’s ‘good faith’: they appealed for help from Rome against the many enemies, especially the Syracusan Greeks, whom they had made in Sicily. Despite misgivings in the Senate, the Romans accepted the Mamertine appeal and crossed into Sicily for the first time.

This momentous act of aggression brought them an important ally and an even greater enemy. The ally was the Sicilian Greek Hiero, who had recently established himself as king of Syracuse. At first Hiero spoke the necessary truth: ‘the Romans’, he said, ‘were publicizing the words “good faith”, but they certainly should not shield murderers like the Mamertines who totally despised “good faith” and were utterly godless’. By starting a war to help them, the Romans were ‘showing the world that they used “pity for those in danger” as a cover for their own greed’. In truth, ‘they desired all Sicily’.⁵ The rights, or wrongs, of this crucial war, the ‘First Punic War’, have never been better put. Within a year, however, Hiero changed sides to Rome and stayed loyal to her for nearly fifty years. He could show his Roman visitors a level of royal luxury which they were certainly not supposed to covet. Its crowning glory was a pleasure-boat, called the Syracusan, which Hiero sent to his allies, the Ptolemies in Egypt. On the Nile, the Ptolemies’ royal cruisers resembled floating palaces, but Hiero excelled them with a gigantic show-boat on three levels. It contained a gymnasium, green gardens, stables, and mosaic floors which illustrated the whole of Homer’s Iliad. It could only be winched down to the sea by a special invention of the great Archimedes, the king’s retained Greek engineer.

By invading Sicily, Rome gained a new enemy, Carthage. Carthage had long had designs on all of Sicily, but since her failed armadas against the Sicilian Greeks in 480 (and again in 410 BC) she had not pressed them. Meanwhile she had continued to develop economically and politically in north Africa. She had a long-standing presence in southern Spain, an area which was very rich in metals; she had developed an increasingly strong presence in her north African hinterland where the richer Carthaginians farmed estates with slaves; as before she continued to control north-western Sicily and metal-rich Sardinia too. For troops, she relied heavily on the mercenaries whom she hired in north Africa with her surplus riches: she pursued a real ‘privatization’ of warfare. But mercenaries were always a possible source of trouble and might well prefer their individual generals to the Carthaginian state. The Carthaginians’ constitution had evolved a series of councils and magistracies which served as checks and balances against a coup by any one individual, even if backed by hired troops. Aristotle, even, had admired the system. By the 260s many of Carthage’s leading citizens were educated men. One of them wrote an excellent long work on agriculture (Romans later translated it from Punic into Latin). Another described (surely correctly) the amazing journey of Hanno the Carthaginian and his fleet (perhaps c. 400 BC) out into the Atlantic, down the west coast of Africa and on past Senegal. Here was an adventure beyond any Roman’s horizon, including a meeting with a tribe of hairy ‘women’ near the African shore whom Hanno’s men named ‘gorillas’ (the origin of our name for the animal).⁶

Lying near to Greek Sicily, Carthage had always had a big Greek community too. Her rich households were famous for their fine carpets, their gold and their luxury, but they were also open to Greek design. They displayed ornamental Greek sculptures for owners who sometimes had a Greek education: it is not surprising that in the next generation the young Hannibal had a Greek tutor and was attended on his march by a Greek historian. Carthaginian ‘cruelty’ and ‘treachery’ were legendary among her enemies, at times unfairly. However, Greeks did also observe, correctly, that Carthaginians preserved the old Levantine practice of child-sacrifice to the gods, especially in times of crisis. The archaeology of Carthaginian burial grounds supports their observation, although it is probably only a Greek elaboration that music was played while the small children were being killed so as to drown the cries of their mothers.⁷

The First Punic War developed from Rome’s illegal entry into Sicily and lasted from 264 to 241. It was the longest continuous war in classical history. In Carthage, Rome’s wolf-children met a worthy match, and both sides were innovative. After watching Pyrrhus in Sicily the Carthaginians had added a new weapon to their army: the forest elephant, which was still native along parts of north Africa (including, as Aristotle knew, Morocco). As the First Punic War centred on Sicily, the Romans, too, were obliged to take a bold step: they built their first major fleet. It relied on the help of Greek and south Italian allies (and a captured Carthaginian warship, it was said, as a model), and when built it owed much to coastal Italians’ command and experience. In 256, therefore, Roman generals were already confident enough to risk the four days’ journey over open sea and invade Carthage’s north African territory. But the venture failed, partly because the Carthaginians had a Spartan expert as their military adviser. Rome’s general was the famous Marcus Regulus whom Carthage captured, but it is only a legend, propagated by his descendants, that his captors sent him back to negotiate at Rome where he advised against any concessions and then went back to Carthage for a heroic inevitable death. Actually, Regulus was killed locally and his widow tortured two Carthaginian prisoners in revenge.⁸

The long war had important economic consequences. In Sicily and Carthage, Roman armies took slaves by the ten thousand, more than they ever took in Italy. They even enslaved the entire population of luxurious Greek Acragas (Agrigento). Many of these captives were then sold, but as Acragas was soon repopulated, fellow Greeks had probably ransomed the city’s former citizens in order to save them. However, many of Acragas’ other slaves were surely taken back to Italy, as were many of the captives from Carthage, to be the booty of rich Romans. Most of these slaves had already worked on the land and so they would farm for Romans too. They increased Rome’s ability to send so many free soldiers (otherwise essential farm-workers) so regularly overseas. Already slave-users, the richer Romans were certainly now a slave-society.

By contrast, Carthage lost the war after a big Roman naval victory in 242/1 and was fined a huge sum. She was obliged to evacuate Sicily (after five hundred years on parts of it) and was left to fight a bitter war back in Africa against the foreign African mercenaries on whom her army depended. Crushing peace-terms usually encourage revenge, all the more so when the Romans then coolly seized the valuable Carthaginian dependency of Sardinia in the 230s while Carthage’s mercenary war was ending. In response, members of one prominent Carthaginian family, the Barcids, set off for Spain with troops and war-elephants to recover some of Carthage’s lost prestige and no doubt to see how far success might go. On leaving, the father is said to have made his nine-year-old son take an oath at an altar ‘never to be a friend to the Romans’.⁹ So much for Carthaginian ‘perfidy’: the son, Hannibal, never betrayed what his father made him swear.

For nearly twenty years (from 237 to 219) this Carthaginian force engaged in conquests in southern Spain. Two new towns were founded there, a New Carthage (now Cartagena) and a Fair Cliff (perhaps modern Alicante). In 226, however, a Roman delegation arrived and bluntly told the Carthaginian commander ‘not to cross the river Ebro’ which lay on the route north-eastwards from Spain to the Pyrenees and ultimately, therefore, in the direction of Italy. But just as in Sicily in 264, the Romans now followed up their agreement by accepting an appeal from the far ‘Carthaginian’ side of the Ebro. Here, a turbulent faction in the non-Greek city of Saguntum called on their ‘good faith’ against pro-Carthaginian enemies. The Romans accepted the appeal and caused no end of spin and whitewash by later Roman historians who were concerned to put an unjust Rome in the right. From Hannibal’s perspective, Rome’s behaviour was an unlicensed interference in territory which was his. It was made in order to support a group who had harassed good friends of Carthage inside a city which was not rightfully Rome’s at all. So he set about besieging Saguntum.

Rome was not exactly free for a big new battle. She had been having serious problems with turbulent Gallic tribesmen in north Italy and in 219 was far from secure on that front. She was also concerned with an intervention she was making across the Adriatic into Greece. However, these distractions did not make her hesitate in the West. A few cautionary voices were sounded in the Senate, but, in response to Hannibal’s siege of Saguntum, Roman ambassadors were sent to Carthage. They could not speak Punic but one of them was competent in the other language of Carthage’s senators, Greek. ‘We bring you peace or war,’ said Fabius (who was from a Greek-speaking family), and he formed a fold in his toga with one hand; ‘choose which you prefer.’¹⁰ From the Carthaginians’ perspective, what business was it of the Romans if one of their generals in Spain attacked a city on behalf of pro-Carthaginian friends while he was not bound by any contrary treaty? So the Carthaginians told the envoy to choose instead. Fabius smoothed out the fold in his toga and shook out war.