"Carthago Conservanda Est: Carthage in the Roman imagination, memory, and identity after 146 BCE" by Maarten Schmaal

 Carthago Conservanda Est

Carthage in the Roman imagination, memory, and identity after 146 BCE

by Maarten Schmaal

Maarten Schmaal is a graduate student in the Classical, Medieval, and Early Modern Studies research master program at the University of Groningen. He specializes in ancient Mediterranean history, with a particular focus on the contact points between imperialism and identity formation in the Greek and Roman worlds. He graduated with a BA in History from the University of Groningen in 2020, with a thesis on imperialist strategies in pre-Roman Tarentum. Currently he is involved in an upcoming research project on comparative analyses of ancient Mediterranean colonial strategies. In his spare time he is an avid science fiction reader. Maarten is owned by a cat and two bunnies.

“[When he had given the order for firing the town] he immediately turned round and grasped me by the hand and said: "O Polybius, it is a grand thing, but, I know not how, I feel a terror and dread, lest someone should one day give the same order about my own native city."”¹

In 146 BCE Roman forces under Scipio Aemilianus captured and utterly destroyed the city of Carthage, bringing a definitive end to a series of three epic wars that would define the Mediterranean balance of power for centuries. With the Roman army was the Greek historian Polybius, a hostage and by this point close confidant of Scipio. The quote above is part of Polybius’ first-hand account of the fall of Carthage and is intended to show Scipio’s reflections on the event, while also hinting at some form of intertwined fate between Carthage and Rome. Polybius’ Scipio is exemplary for Roman attitudes toward its destroyed Punic enemy in the period after its destruction. Carthage had been destroyed, but was immediately reborn in the Roman collective consciousness. The wars had taken a toll on the Roman people, and one way they dealt with this was by giving Carthage a special place in their memory, incorporating it in their identity as a lieu de mémoire by imaging the wars with Carthage as a defining, foundational struggle. In this paper it will be examined how Carthage developed in the Roman imagination after the destruction of the city.

Republican Rome: Carthage as harrowed land

In book 20 of the Punic Wars, Appian describes events taking place immediately after Scipio’s destruction of Carthage. A senatorial deputation was sent to Carthage right after the destruction of the city and decreed the following:²

“The Senate sent ten of the noblest of their own number as deputies to arrange the affairs of Africa in conjunction with Scipio, to the advantage of Rome. They decreed that if anything was still left of Carthage, Scipio should obliterate it and that nobody should be allowed to live there. Direful threats were levelled against any who should disobey and chiefly against the rebuilding of Byrsa or Megara, but it was not forbidden to go upon the ground.”

While it is not forbidden to pass through the site, it is strongly forbidden to settle it. As Serge Lancel puts it, “it was forbidden to inhabit, but not to visit as a tourist.”³ This is also a strictly secular decree – there is no reference to divine retribution should the decree be violated, punishment is strictly earthly. Later Romans reinterpreted this decree as including a magical curse, placed by the gods and predicting divine punishment to anyone defying the gods and settling the site.

The first instance of this is the attempted founding of a new colony at Carthage by Caius Gracchus around 122 BCE.⁴ Plutarch writes the following on this in his Life of Caius Gracchus:⁵

“In Africa, moreover, in connection with the planting of a colony on the site of Carthage, to which colony Caius gave the name Junonia (that is to say, in Greek, Heraea), there are said to have been many prohibitory signs from the gods. For the leading standard was caught by a gust of wind, and though the bearer clung to it with all his might, it was broken into pieces; the sacrificial victims lying on the altars were scattered by a hurricane and dispersed beyond the boundary-marks in the plan of the city, and the boundary-marks themselves were set upon by wolves, who tore them up and carried them a long way off.”

Plutarch clearly describes divine intervention, even explicitly mentioning that these signs came from the gods. Nature itself turns against the colonization of the site, whether through extreme weather or exceptionally determined (or perhaps playful) wolves. This marks a transition from a purely worldly, legalistic ‘curse’ as described by Appian to a ‘curse’ from the gods themselves, who actively intervene to maintain the barrenness of the site of Carthage. While it is entirely possible that this story originated as a political rumour to discredit Gracchus (as Richard Miles argues),⁶ it was nonetheless influential and Plutarch’s writings show it eventually entered the Roman imagination as either truth or divine myth, not political scheming.

*

However, by the first century CE, in typical pragmatic Roman fashion, it was already acceptable to bend the rules of ritual and religion. In 44 BCE Octavian, the later emperor Augustus, refounded Carthage at the behest of his adoptive father, Julius Caesar.⁷ Again in book 20 of the Punic Wars, Appian writes the following:⁸

“Returning to Rome not long after, and while making a distribution of lands to the poor, he [= Caesar] arranged to send some of them to Carthage and some to Corinth. But he was assassinated shortly afterward by his enemies in the Roman Senate, and his son Augustus, finding this memorandum, built the present Carthage, not on the site of the old one, but very near it, in order to avoid the ancient curse.”

Octavian refounds Carthage right next to the site of the destroyed city, thereby avoiding the curse. It is notable however that Octavian merely bends the rules – he still does not feel comfortable simply ignoring the curse. This shows that while the physical anchor of Roman memories of Carthage declined in relevance (and would continue to decline as the new city grew and prospered), it was still of importance.

From the very moment of Carthage’s destruction the site of the city became a physical anchor for collective Roman memories of the titanic struggle between the two cities. Symbolic action in the form of legal decrees, symbolic cursing, and possibly ploughing of the land – not salting, as has already been decisively proven by the 1980s⁹ – was immediately taken to cement the site’s role as a lieu de mémoire of the Roman struggle to break out of the Italian peninsula. Already the Punic Wars were perceived as a defining moment in Roman history. However, while events like the Battle of Cannae formed national traumas the city of Carthage had not yet properly entered the Roman identity itself. With time, the significance of the physical site diminished. Attempts at refounding the city shortly after its destruction, by Gracchus in the second half of the second century BCE, were seen to have failed due to the curse and divine intervention, but a century later it was already possible to bend the rules sufficiently to be able to found a colony at least close by. It seems likely that the politics and infighting of the turbulent first century BCE somewhat overshadowed the importance of the Punic Wars and Carthage in the Roman imagination. When Rome stabilized again under Augustus, however, this changed, even though the significance of the physical site would never return.

The early Principate: the idea of Carthage

By the time Augustus was firmly entrenched as emperor, a few decades before the start of the Common Era, Roman Carthage (as founded by the emperor when he was still called Octavian) had become a blossoming city.¹⁰ It stands to reason that this was an important reason for the diminishing of the importance of the physical site of Carthage as an anchor for collective memories – after all, that anchor had by now been thoroughly paved over. Paradoxically, this allowed (ancient, Punic) Carthage to become even more important to the Roman imagination and identity. No longer being tied to a lieu de mémoire, the idea of Carthage, rather than the site, started to take precedence. This change is most clearly visible in Virgil’s Aeneid and cemented further in Silius Italicus’ Punica. The Punic Wars have been described in works written in the period during which Carthage was still a physical lieu de mémoire of course, including poetry, but those writings lack the engrained incorporation of fate, inevitability, and identity that is so clearly visible in the Aeneid and Punica.¹¹ Instead they limit themselves to some stereotyping as well as historical reporting, clearly subservient to the physical site in its cultural relevance.

The epic poem the Aeneid was written between 30 and 19 BCE and immediately became wildly popular in Roman society, even before it was finished in its entirety.¹² It tells the story of Aeneas, a Trojan hero who escapes the capture of the city and sets off on a divinely-led search for a new home. Eventually he encounters Dido, queen of Carthage, with whom he has an affair (considered a binding marriage by Dido). Aeneas is exhorted by the gods to move on, however – Carthage is neither his destiny nor his final destination. He departs, leaving a heartbroken and furious Dido behind to commit suicide in her grief.¹³

A section in which Virgil is particularly clear about the inevitability and fatefulness of Roman-Carthaginian conflict is found in book 4. Aeneas has left Dido behind to travel to Italy, and the heartbroken Carthaginian queen exclaims the following:¹⁴

“This dying word is flowing from my heart

with my spilt blood. And—O ye Tyrians! I

sting with your hatred all his seed and tribe

forevermore. This is the offering

my ashes ask. Betwixt our nations twain,

No Iove! No truce or amity! Arise,

Out of my dust, unknown Avenger, rise!

To harry and lay waste with sword and flame

those Dardan settlers, and to vex them sore,

to-day, to-morrow, and as long as power

is thine to use! My dying curse arrays

shore against shore and the opposing seas

in shock of arms with arms. May living foes

pass down from sire to son insatiate war!”

Virgil describes how Dido curses not just Aeneas, but the entirety of the group of ‘Dardan settlers’ that he belongs to, i.e. the ancestors of the Romans. She turns a personal conflict between her and Aeneas into a conflict between their peoples. Dido and Aeneas thus become personifications of the Carthaginians and the Romans respectively. Aeneas betrayal and Dido’s grief consequently make future conflict between Rome and Carthage inevitable and everlasting – until one utterly destroys the other, as would eventually happen in 146 BCE.

An epic poem like the Aeneid is in a fundamental form of cultural narrative. It adds values, emotions, and morals to a fictionalized historical account. This kind of narrativation is key to the construction of identity since it incorporates shared culture into a shared history, thus anchoring that culture in collective memories.¹⁵ Here, Virgil anchors the conflict between Rome and Carthage in Roman identity by appealing to a sense of fate and inevitability. The Punic Wars, already in the past for Virgil and his contemporaries, were the endpoint of a teleology that started before Rome was even founded, intricately woven into the development of Roman culture and identity. In the Aeneid, to be Roman was to be, or have been, in conflict with Carthage.

*

This incorporation of Carthage into the Roman identity is also visible in the works of one of Virgil’s contemporaries, Livy. Livy was a historian, not a poet like Virgil, who wrote a history of Rome from the founding of the city to his own times. Like Virgil’s Aeneid, this chronologically massive scope meant it could incorporate collective memories into shared history, thus strengthening the Roman identity. Perhaps even more interesting, however, is the way in which the Carthaginians were embedded in Livy’s discourse. Carthaginians had become everything the Romans were not – treacherous, unreliable, dishonest, impious, irreligious. In doing so the opposite values were ascribed to the Romans. In short, Livy used this kind of discourse to construct the Roman identity beyond just incorporating collective memories. The earlier destruction of Carthage was key for this, since othering a Carthage that was still a powerful and credible threat would have been much more difficult than a Carthage that only exists, and can be moulded, in Roman collective memory.¹⁶ A section in which Livy voices the widespread othering of Carthaginians in a very casual manner is found in book 24, when describing Hannibal:¹⁷

“These admirable qualities of the man were equalled by his monstrous vices: 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.”

Of particular interest are the words “his perfidy worse than Punic.” Livy implies, in a single sentence, that to be Punic (Carthaginian) was an insult, and that his audience already knew that that is what it meant to be Punic. He offers no further explanation for why this was the case, suggesting that this was an expression that was already thoroughly embedded in Roman discourse. Clearly it was an idiom that was common and understood among a Roman audience. The fact that the man being accused of being perfidy exceeding that of the Carthaginians was himself a Carthaginian is at first sight paradoxical, until seen in this light. Livy knew that to be Carthaginian was to be perfidious (in the Roman mind, anyway), so he shows here that Hannibal was worse than even his fellow Carthaginians.¹⁸ In other words, Carthage had firmly entered the Romans’ cultural memory, which is linked to a group’s (in this case the Romans) identity through “concretion of identity.”¹⁹ It functions as storage for shared values, understanding, and history from which one can draw to feel part of and define their social group. In this case a Roman past that was perceived as being fundamentally tied to Carthage proved a fertile breeding ground for othering, strengthening the Roman identity.

*

Silius Italicus’ Punica is another piece of epic poetry in the vein of the Aeneid. It is the longest extant piece of Latin poetry, coming in at 17 books, and was written between 80 and 98 CE.²⁰ The epic chronicles the Punic Wars, drawing largely from Livy’s historical account of the wars. Silius’ great inspiration for the poetic side of things was none other than Virgil.²¹ It should therefore come as no surprise that the Punica continue the themes set out by Virgil and Livy. Silius explicitly presents the Punic Wars as a continuation of the events in the Aeneid, especially with Hannibal taking up the sword against Rome and swearing an oath to Dido that involves “enact[ing] again the doom of Troy.”²² Later, in book 2, he “made a secret libation of blood, and swore to fight against the Aeneadae [= the descendants of Aeneas] from his youth up.”²³ Additionally, in book 7 the Roman commander who would eventually defeat Hannibal at Zama, Scipio Africanus, is referred to as the “offspring of stolen love.”²⁴ All of these passages clearly refer to the Trojan/Aenean ancestry of the Romans as presented in the Aeneid. In fact, the case could be made (as for instance Randall Ganiban does) that Hannibal is the avenger that Dido calls for in the fragment of book 4 of the Aeneid analysed earlier in this chapter.²⁵

Like Virgil and Livy, Silius also engages in othering of the Carthaginians. This is mostly in the form of the same Punica fides, or ‘Carthaginian trustworthiness,’ that Livy and Virgil describe. Carthaginians are construed as being disloyal, deceitful, and dishonest – everything the Romans, according to all three authors, are the opposite of. Silius even extends this to Carthaginian military training: in book 3 he states that Carthage’s soldiers were “readily trained to deceive.”²⁶ This deceitfulness is linked by Silius to the Carthaginian’s bilingualism, often speaking Punic as well as some other language like Latin. He seems to see bilingualism as a sign that Carthaginians had, as is said, a forked tongue.²⁷ That the Romans themselves saw being fluent in Greek (alongside their native Latin) as a sign of intellectualism and being cultured seems paradoxical, but Erich Gruen argues that this is explained by the Greek language’s special place in Roman culture.²⁸ As such, speaking Greek and Latin was not necessarily equated with bilingualism, and by extension deceitfulness, but speaking Punic and Latin was.

Silius mythologizes the struggle between Rome and Carthage as something that was meant to be, an inevitable conflict the roots of which lay in the events described in the Aeneid. In a sense, the Punica is quite directly a sequel to Virgil’s magnum opus. It not only describes the next conflict between Carthage and Rome, after that between Dido and Aeneas, it also identifies some of its characters with those hinted at in the Aeneid, most notably Silius’ Hannibal being Virgil’s avenger of Dido. It also further endorses the othering and Punica fides in the Aeneid. Carthaginians are still the opposite of everything that is Roman, with a particular focus on their supposed treachery.

Roman writing during the early Principate shows that while the physical site of Carthage became relatively unimportant in the Roman imagination and identity, the idea of Carthage reached new heights. The Punic Wars gained a more distant and mythical quality now that the physical lieu de mémoire had been resettled and quite literally paved over. Negative qualities were ascribed to the Carthaginians now more than ever. The deceitfulness of Carthaginians that is such a common literary trope in this period did not exist when Carthage was still an independent state, and only sparingly emerged in the century after its destruction.²⁹ Only with the resettlement of Carthage and the accession of Augustus did it become a common sentiment. Carthage emerged fully as a foil against which the Romans imagined and identified themselves. They perceived themselves as everything that was opposite of how they described the Carthaginians. This had not been possible when Carthage was still around, since it is hard to other a powerful nation that has a strong voice, but now that that voice was gone and buried the Romans incorporated Carthage into their own founding myths and identity.

Conclusion

When Carthage was destroyed by Roman forces in 146 BCE the victors wasted no time in ascribing significant importance to the event. Laws with a semi-ritualistic character were issued, stories about curses written, legends about salting the land formed. Regardless of the truth of any claims about divine intervention and the actual reasons for the failing of Gracchus’ attempts at recolonization, it is clear that these were important stories for the Romans. The barrenness of the site of what was formerly Carthage formed an important lieu de mémoire for the greatest series of wars that Rome had so far been involved in. Carthage, at this point, was dead – it was merely the memories of the war and the city that once stood that were kept alive. Carthage had, by all accounts, no longer a voice. This changed when the site was resettled by Augustus and the physical lieu de mémoire lost importance and disappeared. Carthage came alive again. Roman writers like Virgil, Livy, and later Silius Italicus ascribed a voice to Carthage, bringing characters like Dido and Hannibal to life. This voice was Roman, which was possible since the actual voice of Carthage had been silenced in 146 BCE. This also allowed the Romans to thoroughly ‘other’ the Carthaginians. They were characterized as deceitful, treacherous, disloyal, and more – everything opposite of the values the Romans ascribed to themselves. By combining history with foundation myths these stereotypes entered the Roman identity. To be Roman was to be opposite to Carthaginian.

The role of Carthage was twofold, each corresponding to a period of history. Right after the destruction, when the memory of the wars was freshest, the physical site was an important lieu de mémoire. Its role was mainly in collective memory, still quite detached from Roman identity. When time and political developments diminished the importance of the physical site the idea of Carthage became the dominant factor. This change allowed epics to be written, Carthage to be revived in the Roman imagination, and for the city to become an integral part of the Roman identity through myth-building, othering, and stereotyping. Both parts were essential in the Roman treatment of post-destruction Carthage and show an evolution in both Roman collective memory and Roman identity.

Seeing the Roman treatment of Carthage as a series of separate episodes, as so many historians have done up until now, does not allow for an understanding of the process that ties these episodes together. The diminishing of the importance of the physical site of Carthage was an essential step to clear the way for the idea of Carthage become an integral part of Roman identity. A diachronic approach to identity and collective memory such as the one taken in this paper can form the glue that ties seemingly separate historical episodes together.

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1^ Polyb. 39.5; Polybius, Histories, trans. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh (New York: Macmillan, 1889).

2^ App. Pun. 20.135; Appian, The foreign wars, trans. Horace White (New York: Macmillan, 1899).

3^ Serge Lancel, Carthage: A history, trans. Antonia Nevill (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 429.

4^ Richard Miles, Carthage must be destroyed: The rise and fall of an ancient Mediterranean civilization (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 354-55.

5^ Plut. Vit. C. Gracch. 11.1; Plutarch, Plutarch’s lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919), 221-22.

6^ Miles, Carthage, 355.

7^ Roald Doctor, Ridha Boussoffara, and Pieter ter Keurs, eds., Carthage: Fact and myth (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2015), 93.

8^ App. Pun. 20.136; Appian, The foreign wars, trans. Horace White (New York: Macmillan, 1899).

9^ R.T. Ridley, “To be taken with a pinch of salt: The destruction of Carthage,” Classical Philology 81, no. 2 (April 1986): 140-46; Susan T. Stevens, “A legend of the destruction of Carthage,” Classical Philology 83, no. 1 (January 1988): 39-41.

10^ Doctor, Carthage: Fact and myth, 93-96.

11^ Elena Giusti, Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid: Staging the enemy under Augustus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 22-87.

12^ Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Michael Oakley (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2002), IX; Nicholas Horsfall, A companion to the study of Virgil (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 18.

13^ Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Michael Oakley, XLI – L.

14^ Verg. Aen. 4.616-629; Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Theodore C. Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910).

15^ Siegfried J. Schmidt, “Memory and remembrance: A constructivist approach,” in Cultural memory studies: An international and interdisciplinary handbook, eds. Astrid Errl and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 193-94.

16^ Erich S. Gruen, Rethinking the other in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 139.

17^ Livy, Per. 21.4.9; Livy, Books XXI-XXII with an English translation, trans. B.O. Foster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1929).

18^ John H. Starks Jr., “Fides Aeneia: The transference of Punic stereotypes in the Aeneid,” in The Classical Journal 94, no. 3 (February – March 1999): 257-58.

19^ Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka, “Collective memory and cultural identity,” in New German Critique 65 (1995): 130.

20^ Raymond D. Marks, “Silius Italicus,” in A companion to ancient epic, ed. John Miles Foley (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 528.

21^ Marks, “Silius Italicus,” 529-31.

22^ Sil. Pun. 1.114-119; Silius Italicus, Punica, books 1-8, trans. J.D. Duff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), 13.

23^ Sil. Pun. 2.427-428; Silius Italicus, Punica, books 1-8, 91.

24^ Sil. Pun. 7.487-488; Silius Italicus, Punica, books 1-8, 371.

25^ Randall T. Ganiban, “Virgil’s Dido and the heroism of Hannibal in Silius’ Punica,” in Brill's Companion to Silius Italicus, ed. Antony Augoustakis (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 81; 85.

26^ Sil. Pun. 3.235-237; Silius Italicus, Punica, books 1-8, 131.

27^ Gruen, Rethinking the other in Antiquity, 129.

28^ Gruen, Rethinking the other in Antiquity, 129-32.

29^ Gruen, Rethinking the other in Antiquity, 131-40.