Chapter 1: What were the consequences of Hannibal's defeat for Carthage?
Who has words to capture that night's disaster, tell that slaughter? What tears could match our torments now? An ancient city is falling, a power that ruled for ages, now in ruins. Everywhere lie the motionless bodies of the dead, strewn in her streets, her homes and the gods' shrines. All over now.
Devouring fire whipped by the winds goes churning into the rooftops, flames surging over them, scorching blasts raging up the sky. Treasure hauled from burning temples, the sacramental tables, bowls of solid gold, and the holy robes seized from every quarter, the enemy piling high the plunder. Children and trembling mothers rounded up in a long, endless line.
So that was the greatest of all Roman poets, Virgil. And he was writing almost two centuries after Hannibal's great war against the Romans, the subject of this epic series, and a century or so after the final defeat of one of the protagonists in this story, the Mediterranean city of Carthage. And Tom, in that poem, the Aeneid, which is translated there by Robert Fagles,
Virgil is taking us back, isn't he, to the legendary beginnings of Carthage. So shrouded in myth, the story of its foundation by the Phoenician queen Dido. And the colonists from Phoenicia are labouring to build the new city. They're raising the walls, they're building the palaces and temples, the harbours that the Romans will later destroy.
And at this point, this bedraggled group of refugees who've been shipwrecked off the African coast turn up, and these people are Trojans.
They are. So they are, as you say, refugees from the sack of Troy by the Greeks. And the man speaking the lines that you read so powerfully is their leader, a prince called Aeneas, who is the son of Venus, the goddess of love and beauty. And Aeneas in that passage is describing what it had been like to live through the destruction of Troy, to watch its topless towers consumed by fire.
And he is giving this account at a great feast that has been held in his honour by Dido,
because she has fallen in love with Aeneas and we talked about this in the very first episode that we did on Carthage I mean about 400 years ago actually I think it was episode 421 and people who listen to that may remember what happens next after this feast because Aeneas and Dido go out hunting there's a storm they take shelter in a cave and while they're in the cave the earth moves and
And Dido, although not Aeneas, assumes from this point on that they are now man and wife. The problem for Dido is that Aeneas has this destiny that has been plotted out for him by the gods, and specifically by Jupiter, the king of the gods. And this destiny is that Aeneas has to sail to Italy and found a town there that in due course will result in the founding of Rome.
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Chapter 2: How did Virgil's Aeneid relate to the fall of Carthage?
But however bad it was, what mattered was that the Romans, in the wake of Hannibal's war, remembered it as complete devastation. So to quote Simon Hornblower on this, I mean, he's absolutely right. The trauma of Hannibal's lengthy presence, however great or small, the actual damage he wrought will not have been easily forgotten. To that extent, Hannibal's dream may have been a true prophecy.
Perceptions are a kind of reality. I mean, we know that throughout history.
And the Romans, I mean, the damage that the Carthaginians have inflicted is so deeply embedded in the Roman imagination. So the Romans come to talk about the Carthaginians. They use these expressions, punica fides, punica fraus, the idea that the Carthaginians are the embodiments, almost the linguistic embodiments, of cruelty and deceit and infidelity and fraud and all of these kinds of things.
And the Carthaginians come to assume that this almost kind of demonic place in the Roman imagination.
Yeah, I mean, I think if you think about how the British viewed the Germans in the wake of the First World War and even more the Second World War, there is something of that, the way that the Romans view the Carthaginians. And people who've listened to this series may well feel that this is a bit rich because...
The Romans as well have been known to display cruelty and deceit and treachery and so on. But that doesn't really matter because the Romans felt what they felt. And this wasn't just a kind of widespread loathing of the Carthaginians, but something more, a kind of biding fear. that was ultimately irrational.
Well, irrational because the Carthaginians had been completely beaten.
Yeah, completely smashed. It is so clear that the days of Carthage as a great power... are finished because the terms that the Romans had imposed on Carthage in the wake of the defeat of Hannibal had been intended to cripple her forever.
So just to remind listeners of what those terms were, a devastating indemnity, payable in installments over the course of 50 years, designed to kneecap Carthage's economy. The loss of all her overseas territories. Carthage had ruled a great empire, you know, Sicily, Spain, whatever, all gone.
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Chapter 3: What were the terms imposed on Carthage after the Second Punic War?
So he survives. The Roman deserters, of course, are put horribly to death. The Carthaginians who surrendered, they are all enslaved, about 50,000 of them. They're led out, men, women, children, all become slaves. The city is systematically stripped of all its treasures. No respect is shown. The temples of the Carthaginian gods, they are demolished.
Carthage had a rich and venerable literary tradition. All the libraries are emptied and given to the Numidians, who promptly seem to have lost them. The Romans do keep one 28-volume treatise on agriculture, which they have translated into Latin. Because obviously they're thinking, well, we want to take over these lands. And this is the guide to how to, you know, how to make the fields flourish.
So we'll keep that. But otherwise, all the wealth of Punic literature is gone. So we have nothing. We have no histories written by the Carthaginians. And so as so often, you know, in these stories, whether it's the Belgians in the Congo or whatever. Or indeed the Americans in the Great Plains. We only have one side. We only have the Roman side.
The news of Carthage's fall is sent to Rome and the Senate then send back instructions to Scipio Aemilianus that what remained of the city was to be razed to the ground. And that a curse was to be laid on anyone who in the future might try to settle there. So Carthage is to be left abandoned to weeds.
But here's an amazing thing. They don't sew the ruins with salt.
Everyone thinks they did that and they didn't. No, they don't. It was a metaphorical flourish in the Cambridge ancient history, which came out in the 1920s. And it's just spread like wildfire ever since. But there's no reference to that happening in any of the ancient sources at all.
But, you know, they might as well have sowed the fields with salt because the signal that the destruction of this very famous, very ancient, very beautiful city, the signal sent to the world was unmistakable. that the Romans are no longer prepared to brook any rival, any hint of disobedience. And that is a message that is rammed home a few months later.
So people may remember that there's this uprising in Macedon, this pretender to the Macedonian throne has emerged. I mean, he does not last long. He gets crushed. And there's an uprising in Greece, and the Romans deal with that very brutally as well. And the suppression of that uprising...
culminates in the annihilation of a second famous ancient and beautiful city, and that is the destruction of Corinth in Greece, commanding the isthmus that joins the Peloponnese to northern Greece. And I think that anyone in the Mediterranean in 146 BC contemplating the destruction in the same year of Carthage and of Corinth
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Chapter 4: What role did Massinissa play in the decline of Carthage?
For such had been the fate of Troy, once a proud and flourishing city, and of the empires of Assyria, Media and Persia, each in their own day the greatest in the world, and of Macedon, which only recently had blazed with such a brilliance. And then, either deliberately or because he could not help quoting them, Scipio spoke two lines of Homer.
A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish and Priam and his people all be slain. And when Polybius, speaking to him with the freedom he was granted as Scipio's tutor in Greek literature, asked him what he meant by these words, it is said that without any attempt to veil his meaning, Scipio made reference to his own country.
For when he pondered how all things that are mortal must fall, he dreaded how Rome too would fall.
Crikey. Well, thank you very much, Tom. That's a salutary warning and indeed one that sets up beautifully our next series on The Rest Is History, which will be starting on Monday. And that series is the tale of the fall of the Incas. one of the longest and largest contiguous empires in world history that came crashing down at the hands of Francisco Pizarro and his conquistadors.
So on Monday, members of the Rest is History Club will get all six episodes in that mighty series. And if you want to join them, If you want to plunge into the streets of Cuzco and Cajamarca and the jungles of the Amazon and scale the peaks of the Andes with the Spaniards, then you merely have to head to therestishistory.com to sign up and you'll get all six episodes on Monday.
But for now, Tom, what an amazing effort to cover that epic story in three mighty seasons. Thank you so much. And that was Carthage. Bye-bye, everybody. Ave. Equivali. THE END
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