Classical Stereotypes

Because all native Carthaginian literature was lost in the aftermath of the city’s eradication, the main sources on Carthaginian history and society have been the works of Greek and Roman authors. Crucially, these classical authors were almost universally more interested in recounting the strange or scandalous behaviors of the Carthaginians than in depicting them as a rounded, complex civilization. Particularly following the destruction of the city, the Carthaginians became more of an agglomeration of vices than an actual people, a collection of stereotypes whose main purpose was to serve as a foil to Roman virtue.

This section is thus devoted to the “classical” image of Carthage. It begins by charting the history of the ancient city according to Greek and Roman authors, paying particular emphasis to how stereotypes regarding Carthaginian greed, cruelty, and perfidy shaped these narratives, producing a vocabulary for speaking about Carthage that would survive beyond the end of antiquity and into the modern age.

Punic Faith: Carthaginian Cunning and Deceit

Any consideration of Carthaginian stereotypes must begin with their supposed cunning and deceitfulness, traits universally associated with Carthage both during antiquity and beyond. We need look no further than the term “Punic faith” to see how tightly linked notions of deception and trickery were to the Carthaginian identity, and how the Carthaginians were considered the archetypal double-dealers.  This prejudice dates back to the time of Homer, aimed in that early period against the Phoenicians, the population from which the Carthaginians would emerge. In the Odyssey, we find repeated references to the Phoenician proclivity for dishonesty and untrustworthiness.  In one episode, Odysseus is invited into the home of a Phoenician captain—“a man of Phoenicia, well versed in guile, a greedy knave, who had already wrought much evil among men”—whose true motive was to sell Odysseus into slavery.  In another the Phoenician nursemaid of Eumaeus is goaded by her countrymen into abducting the child in her charge and selling him off.  In both of these stories, the Phoenicians are associated with terms such as “cunning,” “wily,” “beguile,” and “lying counsel,” emphasizing their crafty and duplicitous nature.  In a third episode, in which Odysseus finds himself traveling with Phoenician sailors, there is a pointed reference to the fact that they do not cheat and rob him—making clear what would normally have been expected of such characters. To encounter an honest group of Phoenicians was, in the Homeric world, a remarkable event.

This alleged propensity toward dishonesty would in turn distinguish the Carthaginians. Cicero, for instance, claimed that duplicity was a racial inheritance from the Carthaginians’ forebears:

All the records and histories of past ages have established for us the tradition that the Phoenicians are the most treacherous of nations. The Carthaginians, their offshoots, proved by … their repeated violation and infringement of treaties, that they had not degenerated from their forefathers.

Their penchant for “infringement of treaties,” indeed for breaking their word at the first opportunity, was one of the accusations most frequently levied against the Carthaginians. The Roman historian Livy, for instance, related an anecdote in which the Carthaginians had promised a group of Roman soldiers their freedom if they surrendered: “This pledge Hannibal observed with true Punic reverence,” the writer sarcastically observed, “and threw them all into chains.”  Similarly, the Greek historian Appian reported that one senator Publius Cornelius, advocating a harsh peace to conclude the Second Punic War, had exclaimed, “What treaty, what oath, have they not trampled under foot? … As long as we treat with them they will violate the treaties.”

Ancient writers laid particular emphasis on Carthage’s proclivity for deception on the battlefield, which put the Carthaginians in violation of the conventions of warfare and, perhaps more importantly, made them guilty of unmanly cowardice. The first-century poet Silius Italicus described the Carthaginian army as one composed not of strong, physically imposing men, but of small and nimble tricksters: “Light of limb were they, and the glory of lofty stature was denied them; but they were readily taught to deceive, and never slow to lay secret traps for the enemy.”  Valerius Maximus, a later Roman historian, attributed Hannibal’s victory at Cannae to his numerous tricks and machinations, most notably in having four hundred of his troops pretend to defect and then hamstring the unsuspecting Romans. “Such was Punic bravery,” Valerius concluded, “equipped with tricks and treacheries and deceit.” Yet it was no match, in the end, for the manly valor of the Romans, who were true to their word and had no need for cowardly tricks. “Punic cunning, infamous the world over,” according to Valerius, “was outwitted by Roman prudence.”

Cruelty

Cruelty was another quintessential facet of the stereotypical Carthaginian character, a penchant for bloodshed that, like duplicity, was a subversion of the norms of civilized behavior. In Appian, the same senator who railed against Carthaginian perfidy called them “the most cruel people in the world” and asked “what pity, therefore, or what moderation is due from others to these Carthaginians, who have never exercised moderation or clemency towards anyone?”  Livy similarly described them as “ruthless and barbarous by nature and custom” and “unacquainted with any civilized laws and organization.”  Classical histories are suffused with gruesome accounts of Carthaginian atrocities. At the fittingly named Battle of the Saw, the Greek historian Polybius wrote, the Carthaginians deceived the leaders of their opponents with promises of a truce, imprisoned them, and then hacked the remaining forty thousand troops to pieces.  Silius described in vivid terms the tortures inflicted on the assassin of the Carthaginian governor of Spain: “fire and white-hot steel, scourges that cut the body to ribbons with a rain of blows past counting.”  Another Greek author, Diodorus Siculus, devoted an entire section of his history to detailing the horrors of the Carthaginian massacre of the town of Silenus, which by the end of the day was “filled with blood and corpses,” sixteen thousand in total. Elsewhere in his work he claimed that the Carthaginians had crucified the entire Micatani tribe.  Nor did these barbarians inflict their cruelties only on outsiders; they allegedly crucified their own generals for failures and defeats.

The story of Marcus Atilius Regulus deserves special mention here, both for the way in which it contrasted Carthaginian cruelty with Roman virtue as well as for the enormous influence it had on the image of Carthage in later centuries. Regulus was a Roman consul during the First Punic War who, after besting the Carthaginians in several battles, was finally defeated and captured around 250 BC. The Carthaginians coerced Regulus into returning to Rome to negotiate either a prisoner exchange or a peace treaty, extracting from him a vow that he would return to Carthage whether or not his mission was successful. Once in Rome, he railed against any agreement with the Carthaginians and urged the Senate to continue the war. Finally, despite the pleadings of his wife and friends, and knowing exactly what grisly fate awaited him, he remained true to his word and returned to Carthage, where the furious Carthaginians promptly tortured him to death. Most historians now regard the story as apocryphal, particularly given that our best source on the period, Polybius, did not mention it.  But such doubts do not seem to have plagued ancient authors, who endlessly repeated and elaborated on the story. Valerius, for instance, vividly described the tortures Carthage had inflicted on Regulus, imagining that they cut off his eyelids and forced him into an iron maiden-like device, in which he died after days of agony.  The appeal of the story of Regulus lay not just in the brutality of the Carthaginians and their supposed ingenuity at devising new methods of torture, but in the contrast with Regulus’s courage and fidelity to his word even at the cost of his own life.

The Carthaginians allegedly took their savagery to the point of sacrilege, routinely violating taboos barring cannibalism and corpse desecration. As Hannibal was planning his famous crossing over the Alps, some among the Carthaginians raised concerns regarding the difficulties of the passage, particularly in regards to feeding the army. According to legend, one of his lieutenants advised that they would have to accustom the army to eating dead bodies—presumably offered less as a practical suggestion than as a reason not to attempt the crossing at all. Classical historians ran with the story, however, as it proved the Carthaginians’ utter inhumanity. Polybius maintained that Hannibal was favorably inclined toward the lieutenant’s proposal, but did not think he could get the others to go through with it. The Greek historian Cassius Dio claimed that the only reason Hannibal did not enact the plan was that he was afraid that his soldiers would eventually start eating each other. Livy asserted that the Carthaginians fully implemented the idea, not only eating dead bodies during their crossing but also constructing bridges and causeways out of them.  Diodorus, for his part, stated that corpse mutilation was common practice among the Carthaginians.  Allegations of human sacrifice, particularly child sacrifice, similarly allowed the Greeks and Romans to relegate their Punic foes to the level of beasts or monsters.

The Carthaginians were so barbarous and inhumane that, according to some ancient authors, their actions angered the gods themselves. According to Diodorus, on one occasion when the Carthaginians were about to immolate some of their captives as a sacrifice, the pyre was suddenly struck by a violent wind, causing the fire to spread to the Punic camp and kill many of the Carthaginians.  Appian recorded that in Publius Cornelius’s speech, the senator asserted that Carthage’s defeat in the Second Punic War was divine punishment for its impiety and savagery, and that “all men will rejoice” at its ultimate downfall.  Valerius proclaimed that as punishment for the Carthaginian torture of Regulus, “the immortal gods … extract[ed] just vengeance … by the destruction of their city in the Third Punic War.”  Taken to its conclusion, viewing the Carthaginians as barbarians implied that they were enemies of humanity whose destruction was and inevitable, a facet we will see in British-Carthaginian comparisons during the French Revolution.

Greed

The second major strand of Punic stereotypes was an association with commercial wealth and a variety of acquisitive passions, including ambition, lechery, and avarice. On the whole, these vices were alluded to less frequently than the charges of brutality or inhumanity just surveyed, perhaps because they were less rhetorically potent at the time. However, the notion of Punic greed in particular would play a fundamental role in future perceptions of Carthage, and so will be discussed here at some length.

Like notions of perfidy, the Carthaginian reputation for wealth was to a degree inherited from the Phoenicians, and we can read in Homer several passages on luxury goods of Phoenician origin.  Of Carthage, we find descriptions that it “ha[s] an abundance of gold and silver” or was “the wealthiest city in the world.”  However, even these relative neutral descriptions could serve to mark the Carthaginians as different, particularly from the Romans: Plutarch and Polybius both noted that although Scipio Aemilianus was of only a modest background, the conqueror of opulent Carthage refused to be tempted by the riches and took nothing for himself.

 

Not only was Carthage fabulously wealthy, according to the ancient writers; it was deplorably attached to its money and would do anything for more. Aristotle, while generally sympathetic towards the Carthaginian political system, nonetheless faulted it for “mak[ing] wealth more honored than worth, and render[ing] the whole state avaricious.”  Polybius similarly claimed that at Carthage “nothing which results in profit is regarded as disgraceful,” and stated that it was common practice for Carthaginian officials to accept bribes.  Cicero maintained that Carthaginians’ duplicity was not an in-born trait but had arisen because of their commercial activity, which had fostered in them a fatal combination of “the love of gain [and] the love of cheating,” on which he blamed the ultimate downfall of Carthage.  Avarice, indeed, was frequently depicted as the root of many of the unseemly or immoral acts committed by the Carthaginians. In the Iliad, the Phoenicians are driven to lying by the possibility of selling people into slavery to “get a vast price.” Likewise in the Aeneid, Pygmalion murdered his sister Dido’s husband while in a temple in order to seize his wealth. Diodorus alleged that greed had rendered the Carthaginians impious and miserly in their offerings to the gods.

Carthage’s greed did not simply manifest itself in terms of attachment to money, however, and for the Greeks and Romans it extended to an unreasonable lust for exclusive territorial control. In the treaty concluded with Rome in 509 BC, for instance, the Carthaginians allegedly forbade the Romans from sailing anywhere west of Carthage.  Similarly, as tensions were rising between Rome and Carthage just before the outbreak of the First Punic War, the Carthaginians were said to have proclaimed that they would prevent Roman ships from sailing in the Mediterranean and would not allow the Romans “even to wash their hands in the sea.”  This particular episode would prove highly influential for the image of Carthage in later centuries, resonating amongst French writers for the parallel they saw in apparent Britain’s apparent desire to monopolize world commerce.

Perhaps the best example of the lengths the Carthaginians would allegedly go to ensure their monopoly comes from a story related by the Greek geographer Strabo. The Carthaginians had discovered an archipelago of islands that were particularly rich in tin; however, they were jealous of their discovery and kept the islands’ location secret so that no one else could obtain the tin. One day, according to Strabo, as a Carthaginian ship was sailing towards the islands, a Roman ship secretly trailed behind the Carthaginians in order to discover the route. Upon noticing that he was being followed, the Carthaginian captain ran his ship into the shoals, preferring to kill his entire crew rather than let the Romans benefit from the tin isles. The captain, however, survived, and the Carthaginians rewarded his decision by reimbursing him for the cargo he had lost.  So greedy were the Carthaginians, that they would rather sacrifice their own goods and people than share their sources of wealth with foreign nations.

Hannibal

The classical stereotype of Carthage is encapsulated in the Greek and Roman texts’ portrayal of the best-known Carthaginian of all, Hannibal Barca. The most notorious of his countrymen and the most dangerous general Rome ever faced, many authors used him as an emblem of the vices of his entire civilization. He was described as constantly trafficking in lies and ruses, betraying and slaughtering his former allies, forcing captured relatives to fight one another, and putting entire cities to the sword.  Even Polybius, who attempted to provide some measure of balance in his depiction of Hannibal’s character, concluded “at any rate, among the Carthaginians he was notorious for his love of money and among the Romans for his cruelty.”  However, it was Livy’s description of Hannibal’s “monstrous vices” that was the most influential for future views of the Punic general and his entire people: “his cruelty was inhuman, his perfidy worse than Punic; he had no regard for truth, and none for sanctity, no fear of the gods, no reverence for an oath, no religious scruple.”  This litany of faults ascended to the status of historical fact, endlessly repeated by later writers as proof of the wickedness of all Carthaginians. Finally, as if to cement this understanding of Hannibal in particular and Carthage more broadly as opposed to everything Rome stood for, one of the most repeated details of Hannibal’s life was the oath he was said to have sworn when he was just a boy vowing to be the eternal enemy of Rome—Silius rendered it, “I shall pursue the Romans with fire and sword and enact again the doom of Troy.”  Mortal enemy of Roman civilization, antithesis of Roman virtue—to the classical mind, Carthage’s greatest son was exemplary of his country, and its portrayal of him would become the enduring picture of Carthage as a whole.