Early Modern Receptions

This section considers how writers in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries received this “classical inheritance,” often accepting the ancient view of Carthage uncritically but also showing a growing interest in the commercial aspect of Carthage. As it had been in antiquity, Carthage remained a symbol shaped by the interests and agendas of non-Carthaginian writers.

The first French writer we will consider is Jean Bodin, who in many ways represented the continuation of the classical views of Carthaginians as barbarians. Bodin, a sixteenth-century scholar who wrote on a variety of political and theological subjects, displayed a particular interest in history and how it could be used to understand the present. Indeed, his first book was the Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, an “instruction manual” devoted to explaining how to properly read and understand historical sources.  He displayed and argued for a keen awareness of the limitations of written sources, particularly due to biases and prejudices of their authors. He warned against using classical source uncritically, using the representation of the Punic Wars as a principal example, highlighting the propensity of both sides of the conflict to emphasize their own virtues and highlight their enemies’ faults.

Yet despite his own caveats, he accepted the Greek and Roman views of Carthage with little second thought. He claimed that the Carthaginians were unparalleled in guile and cruelty, crediting them with the invention of various methods of torture, including eye-gouging, limb mutilation, burning, and impaling.  They were governed by uncontrollable passion, so driven to jealousy that they preferred death to losing the affections of women.  To Niccolò Machiavelli’s claim that no man is capable of being entirely wicked, Bodin offered a single counterexample: Hannibal. In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli had remarked upon the case of Giampaolo Baglioni, who, despite having committed incest and murder as the tyrant of Perugia, refused to attack an undefended Pope Julius II. Bodin’s response was the essence of brevity, hoc Annibal non fecisset—“Hannibal would not have done so,” that is, that Hannibal would not have even hesitated to kill the Pope.

We can understand the contradiction between Bodin’s methodological caution and his rather uncritical acceptance of anti-Carthaginian stereotypes as reflecting, at least in part, the sheer power of the ancient stereotypes in shaping perceptions of the ancient city. Perhaps more important, though, was that the received picture of Carthage served the larger purpose of Bodin’s work, which was to develop a schematic understanding of history and human society. Much of the book was devoted to elucidating an environmental explanation for historical developments, explaining how climate and geography shaped the character and behaviors of the peoples of the world. Following the work of Ptolemy and other ancient geographers, Bodin divided the world into three zones of cold, hot, and mild, each of which gave rise to entirely different traits. Those from the north were warlike and simple, those from the south wily and weak, and those from the middle region (in which much of France coincidentally lay) represented a happy medium between these two extremes. This division of qualities was not mere happenstance, but was part of God’s plan, for “if He had given foxlike cunning to men as wild as bulls or great strength and endurance to Carthaginians, they might use His gifts for destruction.”  Bodin was thus interested in the Carthaginians as archetypes of the peoples of the south, to which end he employed the traditional Greco-Roman view.

Crucially, though, there was one major Carthaginian stereotype that Bodin neglected to mention: their reputation for wealth and greed. There are two possible interpretations of this omission. One is that commercial matters were not Bodin’s principal concern, that he was more interested in the more visceral characteristic of the Carthaginians. This theory is somewhat undermined by the fact that Method did talk about commerce, albeit not in economic terms but as a discussion of human sociability. Indeed, it was in his sympathetic understanding of commerce that Bodin differed notably from ancient authors, and he criticized the ancient Greek and Roman thinkers for their anti-commercial stance.  Thus, the second possibility is that when Bodin neglected to reference Carthaginian greed, it was precisely commerce that he had in mind—that he did not want to taint commercial activity by linking it with Carthage.

Whatever the explanation for Bodin’s omission, writers were becoming increasingly attentive to Carthage’s commercial side and, as will be discussed in detail in the next chapter, began bringing it to bear in contemporary debates over the value of commerce. Occasionally, writers could set aside the accumulated negative associations with Carthage and employ it as a positive emblem of commercial power. Antoine de Montchrétien, in his praises of Dutch commercial power and exhortations for France to follow their lead, compared the wealth and power of the United Provinces to that of Carthage.  Although little more than a passing historical reference, this marked the beginnings of a new positive attitude towards both Carthage and commerce, one that would find some notable proponents in the eighteenth century.

Much more frequently, though, the growing interest in commerce served to reinforce preexisting negative views of Carthage, with greed and self-interest becoming for some writers the defining Punic vices. The seventeenth-century author Charles de Saint-Évremond is emblematic of this shift. Like Bodin, Saint-Évremond was interested in considering the “national qualities” of various peoples. His particular focus was on the Romans, and in his work he used the Carthaginians as the foils to classical virtues. He extolled Roman self-sacrifice and fortitude in danger, noting how the wealthy freed their slaves in order to have them fight for the community. To this he contrasted the selfish dissensions among the Carthaginians, notably in the behavior of the Carthaginian senator Hanno who, opposing Hannibal’s requests for more men and money because of a personal rivalry with the general, showed himself “more jealous of the honor of his own sentiments than in the good of the state.”  Similarly, he contrasted Roman integrity and moderation with examples of the “natural perfidy” of the Carthaginians, who had a habit of betraying their allies and inflicting cruelty on the weak.

However, the primary distinction Saint-Évremond saw between the Romans and Carthaginians lay in their levels of wealth and commercial activity. He stated the matter plainly: “Carthage was established upon commerce, and Rome was founded upon arms.”  This fundamental difference explained the great disparity in the characteristics of the two peoples. In Rome, an “ambitious poverty” made the citizenry brave, firm, and willing to endure misfortune for the sake of glory.  In contrast, the Carthaginians drew in the “riches … [of] the commerce of the entire world,” and so became accustomed to an easy life devoted to their own interests: “At Carthage, they always sought peace at the smallest difficulty that threatened them … in order to return to commerce.”  Rome, which valued valor and sacrifice, was thus destined to win, while Carthage, which enshrined the “virtue of their self-interest” was doomed to be destroyed.

Moreover, because Carthage’s deficiencies were not inborn but were the result of commerce and riches, they could afflict any nation. Indeed, a large part of Saint-Évremond’s story was describing how Roman virtue was corrupted by money, which bred greed and self-interest: “Integrity became rarer every day; justice was almost entirely forgotten; the desire to enrich oneself was the primary passion, and notable persons applied their industry to appropriate that which did not belong to them.”  Like Hanno in the Carthaginian senate, the Romans began putting their own private interests ahead of the common good, leading to strife, civil war, and ultimately the collapse of the republic. Carthaginian vices were thus not consequences of the natural environment, as they had been in Bodin; instead, they were products of the economic environment, the consequences of excessive wealth and an overly developed commercial spirit.

By the eighteenth century, the link between Carthage and commerce was fully formed, with many writers considering greed and self-interest to be the defining characteristics of the ancient Punic people. We can find this is in Charles Rollin’s thirteen-volume Ancient History, published between 1730 and 1738. This book was quite popular, going through numerous editions and read both in France and abroad—indeed, Voltaire praised it as “the best compilation that has ever been made in any language.”  The work included the standard negative stereotypes, censuring Carthage for engaging in the “basest frauds and the most perfidious actions,” wholeheartedly accepting the term “Punic faith” as an accurate descriptor of their national character, and emphasizing their supposed propensity towards cruelty.  “Carthage was destroyed,” he declared, “because its avarice, perfidy, and cruelty, had attained their utmost height.”  Yet Rollin differed from ancient authors in offering a condemnation of Rome as well, proclaiming “Rome will have the same fate,” destroyed by God himself to “give the world a great lesson” regarding luxury, ambition, and injustice.  Though Rollin was grimly fascinated by Punic child sacrifice, devoting seven pages to discussing it, he noted that it was not just the Carthaginians who engaged in human sacrifice, but also the Gauls, Scythians, and even Greeks and Romans.  Rollin’s history was to a large extent intended as a moral lesson to demonstrate human capacity for sin and iniquity, and while Carthage served as one notable example, it was not the only one.

There was, however, one trait he considered as defining the Carthaginian spirit, and that was their devotion to commerce. In a section devoted entirely to the subject, he asserted, “Strictly speaking, commerce was the occupation of Carthage, the specific object of its industry, its particular and predominant characteristic.” Unlike Saint-Évremond, Rollin saw certain benefits in the Carthaginians’ mercantile inclinations: it promoted an ethic of diligence and hard work that, shared throughout the population, was the fount of considerable strength. Indeed, commerce was “the source of all the power, conquests, credit, and glory of the Carthaginians,” and it was Carthage’s commercial power that had enabled it to contend against the Romans for so long.

Yet commerce had also profoundly perverted Carthage’s people and society. Carthaginian education, for instance, was devoted entirely to creating future merchants, focused on teaching simple mathematics with which to balance accounts. The Carthaginians were thus entirely uninterested in eloquence, poetry, history, or philosophy; in fact, Rollin claimed, at points the Carthaginian state actually banned the teaching of these subjects.  Like Saint-Évremond, Rollin considered commercial self-interest as the root of the Carthaginians’ other faults, that “the excessive desire to amass wealth, and the inordinate love of gain, was among them a regular source of injustices and wicked actions.”  With money occupying the highest position of honor and the pursuit of wealth considered the greatest virtue, Carthage was materially rich but culturally and ethically bankrupt:

The Carthaginians were … occupied entirely in their commerce, driven by the desire of gain, esteeming nothing but riches, and directing all their talents as well as their glory in amassing them, without well knowing the ultimate purpose, and without knowing how to use them in a noble and worthy manner.

In this sense, Rollin viewed money as the root of all of Carthage’s other evils, and the source of its ultimate doom.