These were thy merchants in all sorts of things, in blue clothes, and broidered work, and in chests of rich apparel, bound with cords, and made of cedar, among thy merchandise. The ships of Tarshish did sing of thee in thy market: and thou wast replenished, and made very glorious in the midst of the seas. Thy rowers have brought thee into great waters….

 

Young Hannibal grew up as the eldest son of one of the leading men of Carthage, and he inherited a fierce pride in his ancestry and the city, the Queen of the Mediterranean.

Nearly three hundred years before he was born Carthage had established her dominance over the central and western Mediterranean. In the eastern basin of the sea, like the Phoenicians before them, they had yielded before the pressure of the seafaring Greeks. As the struggle for land (largely on the Greek part) and trade (largely on the Carthaginian) had developed in the central Mediterranean there had been more or less incessant warfare between the Carthaginians and the Greeks. These battles on land and sea centred on and around the rich island of Sicily. The importance of this great island was clear enough to the ancients with their eyes fixed only upon this sea, but for the modern visitor, who observes its largely worked-out barrenness, it requires some imagination to realise that Sicily, to the land-hungry Greeks especially, had everything to commend it. There was good vine-growing country and ample regions for pasturage as well as for agriculture; there was all-important water, and there were harbours for a seafaring people, trees for fuel and boat-building, and craggy uplands for goats and even sheep. As well as the vine, the hardy olive flourished—that stone-fruit with its pulpy flesh which lies at the heart of all Mediterranean civilisation.

The result of centuries of warfare was that the Greeks controlled most of the eastern coast of Sicily, nearest to their homeland, while the Carthaginians had retreated largely to the west and north. They were not eager for the acquisition of land, having enough in the area around Carthage, but harbours, repair depots and trading posts were essential for maintaining their contacts with Sardinia and then—looking westwards—as staging-posts to the Balearic islands and, beyond them, their ‘secret’ and immeasurably rich territory in Spain.

The two marine contestants for the dominance of this sea and the harbours around it had almost, after much bloodshed, reached an unspoken truce when a newcomer upon the scene set the clock back by two or three hundred years—thus introducing a third party into a power-game that had almost been resolved into an agreed draw. This newcomer was Rome, the relatively little-known state to the north of Italy, which had been steadily consolidating its gains on the mainland while Carthage and the Greek states snapped and fought around the bone of Sicily and the sea-routes to the south. Neither the Greeks nor the Carthaginians had paid a great deal of attention to the Romans until this dour and tough land-based power arrived at the very gates of Sicily. Confronting both of them across the narrow Strait of Messina, Rome was now evidently interested in the rich island to the south. Such knowledge as the Greeks and Carthaginians had of this Latin power cannot have been comforting, but at the same time scarcely threatening. Carthage had concluded two treaties with Rome in the 6th and 4th centuries B.C., both designed to assure the Romans that they had no intentions against the mainland of Italy while the Romans, for their part, agreed to accept Carthaginian influence in Sicily. But as Roman interests expanded and the whole of southern Italy came under their sway, it became clear that they would not stop there.

It was the Carthaginians who were always prepared, whenever possible, to reach an accommodation with these powerful new neighbours who—so long as they had been content with the land—seemed no threat to them. It was Rome which was the military and expansionist power. The Carthaginians, as they had shown in previous centuries during their struggles with the Greeks, were often prepared to back down, provided that their vital concerns were not endangered. The wars which followed between Carthage and Rome, wars of exceptional scope covering the whole Mediterranean sea, were always triggered off by Rome. The Carthaginians had no territorial designs on Europe; they wished only to be left in peace in their North African territory, to conduct their manufacturing and trading. As a race they were few in number—with the result that, when they became involved in a large-scale war, the armies that they fielded had necessarily to be composed largely of mercenaries. Carthaginian-generalled, and with an elite of Carthaginian officers and troops, these armies comprised the many races that came within the sway of their sea-empire. (Some points of similarity can be found between the military systems of the British and Carthaginian empires.) Infantry came from Libya and all the other areas of North Africa while Numidian tribesmen provided what was later to become, under Hannibal, Carthage’s greatest arm, the superb cavalry which astonished the world.

In the years following Hannibal’s birth, his father Hamilcar had fought doggedly and with great skill to preserve the remnants of the Carthaginian garrisons in western Sicily. That he was finally unsuccessful was because the Romans had been quick to learn an all-important lesson—to succeed in the Mediterranean theatre it is essential to have command of the sea. In the early stages of this great war the Carthaginians, with centuries of experience behind them, had found little difficulty in trouncing the Romans in naval engagements and in harrying their coastline. But one of the Roman qualities which would greatly assist them to their successful imperial role was an ability to learn from mistakes. Taking as a model, so it is said, a Carthaginian warship that had run aground and been captured intact, the Romans built in a short space of time a fleet of a hundred and twenty ships. Before very long they had become so adept at handling them that they mastered their enemies at sea. The decisive battle took place off western Sicily—decisive because it rendered untenable the hold that Hamilcar Barca still had upon the last of the Carthaginian bases in the island. 

 

 

 

II

 

LOOKING WESTWARD

 

For seven years Hamilcar had conducted a brilliant campaign out of his great mountain-fortress of Mount Eryx in western Sicily. The decisive defeat of the Carthaginian fleet finally induced the government to sue for peace.