Rome’s war against that
infamous Hellenistic condottiere King Pyrrhus of Epirus in 280 to 275 that
finally brought Rome fully into the purview of Hellenistic international
relations. Pyrrhus at the battle of Ausculum.
The Carthaginians had commercial interests in Etruria
(low-cost iron and copper) and had combined with the Etruscans to challenge the
Greeks of Massalia (Latin Massilia, modern Marseilles) in a naval engagement
off Corsica in 535 BC, thereby preventing them from establishing themselves at
Alalia (Aleria) on the east coast of the island. This was also the end of the
Greek dream of tapping into the Iberian copper and silver trade, with the river
the Greeks knew as the Iber (Latin Iberus, modern Ebro) becoming the effective
dividing line between Carthaginian and Greek (i.e. Massiliote) spheres.
Archaeological excavations in a sanctuary at Pyrgi (Santa Severa), the port of
the Etruscan city of Caere, have uncovered three gold plaques inscribed, two in
Etruscan and one in Punic, with a dedication made to the Semitic mother-goddess
Astarte and her Etruscan equivalent, Uni, by the ruler of Caere. They can be
dated early in the fifth century BC.
This evidence gives us the context for the first of three
treaties made between Rome and Carthage before the First Punic War. Dated,
according to Polybios, to the beginning of the Republic and twenty-eight years
before Xerxes’ invasion of Greece (i.e. 508 BC), our Greek historian had
difficulty reading this fascinating document on which he found the date because
of its archaic Latin, which ‘differs from the modern so much that it can only
partially be made out’. To the best of his understanding it said the Romans and
their allies must not sail beyond the Fair Promontory unless forced to do so by
storm or by enemies, and that they must follow certain regulations if they want
to trade in Africa or Sardinia, though not with Carthaginian Sicily, where they
enjoyed equal rights with others. The Carthaginians, for their part, agreed not
to injure any Latin community or to establish a fort in Latin territory.
Polybios tells us that the Fair Promontory, Pulchri Promontorium to the Romans,
was on the African coast, lying ‘immediately to the front of Carthage to the
north’, in other words the modern Cap Farina or Rass Sidi Ali el Mekki, the
western horn flanking the Gulf of Tunis, the eastern one being Cap Bon or Rass
Adder, the ancient Hermaia Promontory.
Polybios says the treaty names praetors but neither a king
nor two consuls, while the spheres of influence defined for both Carthage and
Rome only fit this period (viz. the first years of the Republic) and
Carthaginian interest in the area has been confirmed by the Pyrgi inscriptions.
So the treaty of 508 BC was precisely drawn up to delimit the sphere of
commercial activities of the Romans, who were excluded from trading along the
African coast west of Carthage. More important, the actual conditions of the
treaty give us a vivid glimpse into the way that the Carthaginians tried to
exercise economic control in the western Mediterranean.
In 348 BC the Romans and their allies made a second treaty
with Carthage and its allies, also reported but not dated by Polybios. The
terms of this treaty bound both sides not to harm the friends or allies of
either, and again regulated the circumstances in which the Romans could trade
in Carthaginian territory, but also adds southern Iberia to the original
exclusion zone. The Romans are also prevented from marauding along the North
African coast, implying those Phoenician cities such as Utica was now within
the Carthaginian sphere, and if the Carthaginians capture any city in Latium,
which is not subject to Rome, they may keep the captives and the booty, but
must hand over the city. The advantage in the treaty again seems to lie with
Carthage as the dominant power.
All this time the real enemies of the Carthaginians were the
Greeks, and the real reason for this, as we shall soon discover, is not
difficult to appreciate, namely the island of Sicily. A third and final treaty
reported by Polybios was made at the time of the Pyrrhic War (280-275 BC) and
‘before the Carthaginians had begun their war for Sicily’. This probably places
the signing of the treaty after Pyrrhus’ two victories at Herakleia (280 BC)
and Asculum (279 BC) when the Carthaginians must have feared that the ‘elephant
king’ would cross to Sicily, as he would in the following year when he would
almost drive them out of the island. In the treaty both sides confirmed their
previous agreements, and added that if they should make an alliance against Pyrrhus
each side shall provide help to the other, the Carthaginians especially by sea.
The chief interest of the treaty, from our point of view, is the total lack of
Roman naval forces it implies. This situation continued until the outbreak of
the First Punic War.
So in 279 BC relations between Rome and Carthage (more
friends than rivals) were reasonably good, albeit under a common threat. But
following Pyrrhus’ withdrawal from Italy after his defeat at Malventum (275
BC), the Romans planted two Latin colonies, Cosa and Paestum, on the west coast
of the peninsula (273 BC). Was Rome afraid of Carthaginian seapower? To return
to the third treaty, according to Justin, the Carthaginians despatched one Mago
with 120 ships (Valerius Maximus says 130) to aid the Romans, but the Senate,
while expressing their thanks, rejected the aid, whereupon Mago sailed away to
negotiate with Pyrrhus6 This treaty between Carthage and Rome would thus appear
to have been negotiated after these events; ‘perhaps’, as Lazenby says, ‘after Pyrrhus
had rejected some offer by Mago’. It appears Mago had made his point. The 120
warships could be thrown into either scale.
North from Carthage, across 140km of water, lay the
triangular-shaped island of Sicily, the key to the western Mediterranean as it
commanded the narrow sea between the toe of Italy and the northernmost tip of
the North African coast. Initially, Carthage had not been strong enough nor
even interested in acquiring the island, despite its good harbours and its
fecundity. To quote Thucydides on the pre-Greek settlers of Sicily:
There were also
Phoenicians living all around Sicily. The Phoenicians occupied the headlands
and small islands off the coast and used them as posts for trading with the
Sicels. But when the Greeks began to come in by sea in great numbers, the
Phoenicians abandoned most of their settlements and concentrated on the towns
of Motya, Soleis, and Panormus, where they lived together in the neighbourhood
of the Elymi, partly because they relied on their alliance with the Elymi,
partly because from here the voyage from Sicily to Carthage is shortest.
From his account, despite its brevity, we learn that the
early Phoenician traders in Sicily were not forcibly driven to the western end
of the island by an advancing tide of Greek colonists, as some scholars have
held, but merely abandoned what were no more than trading stations. The value
and accuracy of Thucydides’ passage, in the light of archaeological
discoveries, has become increasingly evident.
However, sometime after 580 BC, Carthage was finally enticed
into what would become troubled waters for it. As we have discussed elsewhere,
the first Carthaginian army to land in Sicily was possibly under a general
named Malchus. Anyway, whatever he did or did not achieve there, for the first
hundred years Carthage was happy to maintain a low-key approach to Sicily, but
the year 480 BC saw its first large-scale attempt at imperial expansion. Gelon,
tyrant of Syracuse, was making moves to unite the island under his military
leadership, and in doing so was menacing the Phoenician inhabitants of the
south and west. Carthage responded, and despatched an expeditionary force under
Hamilcar, son of Hanno, to meet this threat. In fact the Carthaginian armada
was so formidable that contemporaries compared it with the host of Xerxes then
being marshalled in the east. It was to suffer a similar fate. Hamilcar landed
at the Punic city of Panormus (Palermo), only to be resoundingly defeated by
Gelon near Himera on, it is said, the same day as the Persians were licked at
Salamis.
So great was the loss for Carthage at Himera (Hamilcar
himself had died fighting), it seems to go into a decline over the next few
decades. The war was ended by this one blow. Carthage sued for peace, paid a
large indemnity, and in the event, despite consistent rumours of invasions,
left Sicily alone for seventy years. Meantime back home, the ruling Magonid
dynasty was ousted from the executive and the aristocracy seized power.
Relations with sub-Saharan Africa were strengthened, a region known for its
gold-bearing rivers, and, most especially, Carthage fell back on the flat, fertile
seaboard of North Africa, taking over a vast surrounding area for
livestock-raising and fruit groves.
In 409 BC, however, Carthage had recovered enough to
intervene once more in Sicilian affairs. Under Hannibal, grandson of Hamilcar,
a Carthaginian punitive force was successful in capturing Selinous (Selinunte)
while the Greek relieving force was still at the stage of preparation. Next
Hannibal broke into Himera, and having destroyed the city and slaughtered 3,000
Greek captives at the scene of his grandfather’s death, took his army home to
Carthage laden with much booty. The principal foe, Syracuse, was however still
untouched, and three years later, a second Carthaginian expedition, again led
by Hannibal, landed on the island to spread terror anew through the Greek
cities. The Carthaginians, however, soon found themselves dogged by ill
fortune. A ‘plague’ decimated their ranks, even killing Hannibal as his
besieging army lay rotting below the walls of Akragas (Latin Agrigentum, modern
Agrigento). Although his successor, Himilco, son of Hanno, succeeded in
capturing both that wealthy city and Gela and defeating a Syracusan relief
attempt, a return of the pestilence left his command so weakened that in 405 BC
he signed a peace accord with Dionysios of Syracuse. The newly established
tyrant was more than happy for the respite. Equally contented with the outcome,
Himilco sailed back to Carthage with the survivors of his anaemic army.
Seven years later Dionysios felt strong enough to renew
hostilities with Carthage. The war was popular, and the Greeks began it with a
massacre of all the Carthaginians and Phoenicians in their cities. Dionysios
secured Greek Sicily and, the following year, marched on the Punic stronghold
of Motya (Mozia). This well walled offshore island fell with the help of a
formidable array of siege machinery, including recently invented non-torsion
catapults. But this sparked off a new Carthaginian effort, in which Himilco not
only retook Motya but also sacked Messina on the other side of the island and
finally, after a decisive naval victory, drove Dionysios back to face a siege
in Syracuse itself. This expedition, however, also ended in a complete
disease-ridden disaster and the loss of the entire army, which in turn sparked
off a revolt by Carthage’s African subjects.
An agreed frontier was drawn up between the two spheres and
an uneasy truce was to last over the next half century. But by now Sicily was
an obsession. The astonishing seesaw continued when a third major attempt at
its conquest was launched in 341 BC, and once again it ended in disaster and
defeat. Yet despite this, the lack of unity amongst the Sicilian Greeks enabled
Carthage to hold tight the extreme western end of the island. ‘No land was more
productive of tyrants than Sicily’, wrote Justin, and it is generally agreed
amongst modern commentators that the Sicilian tyrannies owed their outmoded
existence at least in part to the need of a strong hand and central control
against the Carthaginians. Nonetheless, after the breakdown in the second
generation of the tyranny established by Dionysios, the Corinthian Timoleon
sought to purge the island of its larger-than-life warlords and their roughneck
private armies, and revive the autonomy of the Greek city states. But though he
was successful in beating the Carthaginians more decisively than they had been
since Gelon’s time, no long-term political stability was achieved for the war
weary island. The liberty Timoleon offered was liberty in the old city-state
style, and Greek Sicily had no longer the vitality to make use of it. Tyranny
reappeared on the island.
In 311 BC Agathokles, whose dream was the complete
unification of Sicily under thef aegis of Syracuse, attacked the last of these
Punic possessions, but was heavily defeated and driven all the way back to
Syracuse, most of the island falling into Carthaginian hands. In an act of
sheer desperation, though others would argue this was true strategic insight,
the tyrant loaded 14,000 troops, mercenaries mostly, onto 60 ships, slipped out
of the harbour, and set course for Africa, hoping by this bold counterstroke to
save the situation. In this he was successful. Having literally burnt his
boats, he defeated a Carthaginian army, conscripted in haste, which stood
against him and thus was able to move at will through the fertile countryside
and the undefended cities. Thence caught on the back foot, Carthage had to
recall troops from Sicily to deal with the invader. However, Agathokles failed
to take well-walled Carthage itself and eventually peace was made in 307 BC,
which left the Carthaginians in control of most of western and southern Sicily.
Although Agathokles’ daring African expedition failed, later it was to
influence the Romans in the Punic wars.
Carthage had one more foe to face before the curtain went up
on the struggle with Rome. In 280 BC the Italian-Greek city of Taras (Latin
Tarentum, modern Taranto), under threat from the Romans, had called in Pyrrhus
of Epeiros, an outstanding mercenary warrior-king, to assist them. His first
bloody victory over Roman troops was near Taras’ colony, Herakleia, after which
he dashed northwards to Rome and sent his trusted diplomat Kineas to extend
terms to the Senate. He offered to restore all prisoners and to end the war, if
the Romans would make peace with Taras, grant autonomy to the Italian Greeks,
and return all territory taken from the Samnites and Lucanians, Oscan peoples
recently conquered by Rome. These terms would have severely limited the spread
of Roman involvement in the south and have created a Tarentine supremacy there.
He was refused bluntly and sent packing by the Senate, and he was said to have
reported to his king that Rome was like a many-headed monster whose armies
would keep on being replenished. If this was true, then Kineas, erstwhile pupil
of the great Athenian orator and democrat Demosthenes, was a shrewd judge of
Roman manpower.
After this refusal Pyrrhus won a second bloody victory at
Asculum, a ferocious two-day engagement, in which his elephants of war played a
major role. Each one carried a tower, or howdah, strapped to its back as a
fighting platform protecting two men armed with javelins. This is our first
reliable reference to the howdah, and Pyrrhus may have invented it. In any
event, only when a heroic (or foolhardy) legionary hacked off the trunk of one
elephant were the Romans said to have realized that ‘the monsters were mortal’.
Nonetheless, they still terrified the enemy cavalry. Once again, the casualties
on both sides were heavy. ‘Another such victory’, Pyrrhus is said to have
remarked, ‘and we shall be lost’, whence our saying ‘a Pyrrhic victory’ for any
success bought at too high a price. As was becoming painfully clear, the Romans
could afford such losses better than Pyrrhus could, as they had much of Italy
from which to recruit, whereas the highly skilled professionals of Pyrrhus’
Macedonian-style phalanx were irreplaceable.
In 278 BC Pyrrhus faced a choice: either to turn to
Macedonia, where recent events gave him hope of the throne there, or else to
Sicily, in keeping with his former marriage to a Syracusan princess, none other
than the daughter of Agathokles, Lanassa. While continuing to protect Taras, he
chose to go south to Sicily where he now promised ‘freedom’ from the
Carthaginians, who had high hopes of winning the whole of the island. For three
years he showed no more commitment to real freedom than any true Hellenistic
king and failed in his hopes. The plans of Carthage were indeed thwarted, the
Carthaginians having been swept out from the island except for the one
stronghold Lilybaeum (Marsala), but the autocratic Pyrrhus overstayed his
welcome, and his Sicilian-Greek supporters, who were no keener to surrender
their freedom to Pyrrhus than to Carthage, turned against him. On his return
voyage to Italy he lost several of his precious elephants when he was soundly
trounced by the Carthaginian navy, losing 70 out of his 110 ships, and he
failed to win the third crucial encounter against the Romans at Malventum. So Pyrrhus
left a substantial garrison at Taras and sailed back across the Adriatic.
In the meantime the status quo in Sicily was restored, and
the Carthaginians and Greeks were once again at each other’s throats, oblivious
to the world around. Pyrrhus’ meteoric career there had prevented it from
becoming a Carthaginian province, and on his departure he is said to have
described the island as the ‘future wrestling-ground for Rome and Carthage’. At
first, Rome and Carthage had reasserted their old alliances in the face of the new
invader. But within a dozen years they would be locked in war, as Pyrrhus
predicted. On and off, it was to last for more than six decades. As for Taras,
its days of freedom were to be over. Three years after Malventum, in 272 BC,
the Romans took control of troublesome Taras, allowing the garrison that Pyrrhus
had left there to withdraw on honourable terms. Definitely crushed, its
territory was confiscated and made ager publicus, state land. The plunder of
Taras, according to the Hadrianic author and poet Florus, was enormous and its
acquisition would be a turning point in the Republic’s history:
So rich a spoil was
gathered from so many wealthy races that Rome could not contain the fruits of
her victory. Scarcely ever did a fairer or more glorious triumph enter the
city. Up to that time the only spoils that you could have seen were the cattle
of the Volsci, the chariots of the Gauls, the broken arms of the Samnites; now
if you looked at the captives they were Molossians, Thessalians, Macedonians
[i.e. soldiers from Pyrrhus’ army who had remained in Taras]
, Bruttians,
Apulians and Lucanians [i.e. Italic peoples and Italian Greeks]; if you look
upon the procession, you saw gold, purple, statues, pictures and all the luxury
of Taras. But upon nothing did the Roman people look with greater pleasure than
upon those huge beasts [i.e. Pyrrhus’ elephants], which they had feared so
much, with towers upon their backs, now following the horses [i.e. Roman
citizen cavalry], which had vanquished them, with their heads bowed low, not
wholly unconscious that they were prisoners.
With the taking and sacking of Taras, continues the baroque
Florus, ‘all Italy enjoyed peace’. Peace, however, would be short lived, as the
Romans soon afterwards occupied Rhegion (Reggio di Calabria) on the straits of
Messina, opposite Sicily. As fate would have it, the rival powers of Rome and
Carthage were now face to face and about to cross swords.
THE ELEPHANT KING
The restless career of Pyrrhus of Epeiros epitomizes the age
of Alexander’s Successors. In spring 280 BC the king crossed into Italy and confronted
the Romans for the first time with first-class professional soldiers who had
been trained in the world-conquering tactics of Alexander the Great. He also
brought another Hellenistic novelty: twenty war elephants.
But Pyrrhus was also a throwback; he was the last great
rival of Homer’s heroes. Like his cousin Alexander, he matched himself with
Achilles, his assumed ancestor, and set off to fight a new Trojan War against
the Romans of ‘Trojan’ descent. The prince shone in the front line of battle in
his ornamented armour and laurelled helmet. Yet he was no tinsel hero. He
revelled in single combat and it is said that once, with a single swipe, he
hacked a savage Mamertine mercenary in half. But he was not just a heroic
hooligan either. He was the most famous general of his day He wrote a treatise
on tactics and a set of personal memoirs, and was later admired for his
siegecraft and diplomacy.
Nowadays, in the public imagination at least, it is Hannibal
who is remembered as the celebrated user of pachyderms, probably first
popularized as such when the embittered satirist Juvenal lampooned him as ‘the
one-eyed commander perched on his gigantic beast!’ As we shall discover later,
this is something of a paradox, since elephants figured only in his earliest
victories, the Tagus (220 BC) and the Trebbia (218 BC), and then, damagingly,
at Zama (202 BC). In point of fact, Pyrrhus deployed them in far more settings,
including the Italian peninsula, throughout his full and eventful career. In
the west, he, not Hannibal, is the true ‘Elephant King’, and it is interesting
to note that the Carthaginian genius classed Pyrrhus as second only to
Alexander in his hierarchy of top-flight generals. A similar sentiment was
expressed by Antigonos Gonatas of Macedon, for when the king was asked who the
best general of his day was, he replied, ‘Pyrrhus, if he lives to be old
enough’ As Justin was to write later, ‘all Greece in admiration of his name and
amazed at his achievements against the Romans and the Carthaginians was
awaiting his return’ And return he did.
After Italy Pyrrhus ended up fighting first in Macedon, then
in Sparta and Argos. In Macedon he replenished his elephants by a victory over
Antigonos Gonatas, and then took them down to the Peloponnese. When Areus was
chosen as king of Sparta, his uncle Kleonymos, who thought he had a better
claim, went off to fight for Taras as a mercenary. Later, having seized Corcyra
for himself, he signed on with the power most likely to help him to higher
things, hence Pyrrhus’ invasion of the Peloponnese during the spring of 272 BC,
but his attempt to place Kleonymos on the throne by force of arms failed. Later
in the same year, while his stampeding elephants blocked the gates at Argos, he
was knocked senseless by a roof-tile, apparently hurled from a housetop by the
mother of an Argive he was trying to kill, and he toppled from his horse. In
the confused street fighting, a soldier of Antigonos dragged him into a doorway
and decapitated him. His head was brought to Antigonos, who was said to have
rebuked its bearer, his son, and wept at the sight of the ashen visage. Pyrrhus’
head and trunk were soon reunited and cremated with full honours.
