In Barbary

Close on eight-and-twenty centuries ago (in 846 B.C. according to one historian) a young Phenician princess fled from her native country, Sidon, after abetting her brother in the murder of her husband, and, putting half the length of the Mediterranean between her and her pursuers, beached her purple-sailed galley on the shores of Africa, not far from the promontory which to-day we call Cape Bon. Her given name was Elissa, so tradition tells us, but she is better known as Dido—“the fugitive”—and from her day down to this a girl who indulges in capers of which her family do not approve is said to be cutting up didos.

Now it should be clearly understood that this region was already in a fairly civilized state when Dido landed on its coast, for Phenician adventurers, sailing westward in quest of the Hesperides, had established themselves there nearly four centuries earlier and had founded cities—Cambē, on the very site afterward occupied by Carthage; Outih, or Utica; Hadrumetum, later known as Sousse; Hippo Zarytus, the modern Bizerta; and Thines, which to-day we know as Tunis. So the fugitive princess and her followers, instead of being pioneers in an unknown land, found themselves hospitably received by settlers of their own race and by their ruler, King Iarbas, who quickly became a suitor for the young widow’s hand.

But she had had enough of matrimony, and, denying his pleadings to share his throne, she set about building a kingdom of her own. She chose for the site of her future capital a low hill beside the sea-shore, looking down upon a little sheltered bay, and guilefully induced its Berber owners to sell her as much land as could be covered by the hide of a bull. Thereupon—and for the sake of her reputation the less said about the ethics of the transaction the better—she proceeded to cut the hide into a long and narrow strip, as sometimes, for amusement, one strives to see how long a paring can be obtained from an apple. With the lengthy strand of rawhide thus ingeniously obtained, she inclosed an area of sufficient size on which to build her city, which, it is to be assumed, was in the beginning a mere collection of wattle-and-daub huts. At first the settlement was known as Byrsa (the name means bull’s hide), but later it took the name of Carthage, or Karthadasht, “the New City” in the Phenician tongue.

So much for the legendary version, which Virgil gave to the world in the Æneid and which has been so expanded and embroidered in the centuries which have intervened that even the men of science have been unable to determine with any certainty where the fable ends and history begins.

We have grown so accustomed to referring to the inhabitants of the city traditionally founded by Dido as Carthaginians or Phenicians that it is difficult to realize that the name by which they called themselves was neither of these, but Canaanite—a lowlander, a man of the plains. The Greeks gave the country at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, from which these people came the name of Phœnike, the Land of Purple—so called, no doubt, from the purple dyes for which the Tyrians were famous; the Romans in their turn corrupted the name into Pœni; yet well into the Christian era the farmers of Libya, which roughly corresponded to the Tunisia of to-day, were wont to speak of themselves as being of the land of Canaan.⁠[1]

The Carthaginians, be it understood, never fought if they could help it. Essentially a commercial-minded, luxury-loving people, they had no lust for empire, save that of the sea, mastery of which insured them control of the ports and markets which were necessary to their commercial supremacy. But as the city grew in wealth, power, and population, territorial expansion became imperative, and they pressed forward gradually until they occupied, more or less completely, a territory roughly corresponding to modern Tunisia plus the Algerian department of Constantine. This gradual expansion of Carthage’s sphere of influence was effected not so much by the sword, however, as by treaty with the warlike native tribes, from which she recruited her armies of mercenaries. Even in Carthage itself, whose inhabitants at one period numbered close to three quarters of a million, but a small minority of the population was of pure Phenician stock, the bulk of the people consisting of the native Libyans with a sprinkling of half-castes, negro slaves, and traders of all races. The Carthaginians might be said, indeed, to have occupied a position somewhat analogous to that held by the French in the Tunisia of to-day.

The government of Carthage was a pure oligarchy, in which none save the old Punic families had any voice. All powers of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, were vested in the Council of One Hundred, whose decrees were carried out by officials known as “suffetes.” As these offices were for sale, the oligarchy eventually degenerated into a plutocracy, corrupt, vulgar, arrogant, and heartless, in which political dominance was exercised by one or another of the great families, as was the case in medieval Italy.

Save in the single field of agriculture, which they developed scientifically and with remarkable success, the Carthaginians have to their credit no achievements in science, literature, or art, even their architecture showing the effect of Greek and Egyptian influence. As has been said, they were first, last, and always traders, money-makers, possessing to an exceptional degree that Semitic aptitude for business and banking which has made the Jews the financiers of the world.

The religion of the Carthaginians was characterized by cruelty and lust. The state religion, the established church, as it were, was based on the worship of the deity called Eschmoun, identified by the Romans with their god of healing, Æsculapius, whose chief sanctuary was within a vast inclosure, half-temple and half-fortress, on the brow of the Byrsa Hill, from which an imposing flight of marble steps led down into the city. But there were other gods as well, the most venerated being Hammon and Tanith. That fear of their anger and faith in their power—they could hardly have inspired affection—was deeply implanted in the hearts of the common people is indicated by the fact that, whereas the worship of Eschmoun virtually ended with Punic Carthage, the other two not only survived the destruction of the city by the Romans, but, under the names of Saturn and Ceres, their cult was adopted, developed, and disseminated by the conquerors.

They were always dark and terrible, these gods of Carthage, worshiped with bestial and bloody rites which had their beginnings in the very dawn of time. Of his priests Hammon demanded the sacrifice of their manhood; of her priestesses Tanith required the sacrifice of their chastity. Though there can be little doubt that both had temples within the confines of the city itself, the principal sanctuary of Hammon was set in the saddle formed by the twin peaks of Bou-Kornein, which are clearly visible some miles to the southward, beyond the lagoon of El Bahira. It was in this macabre setting, consisting in all probability of little more than a sacred grove within an inclosure, that there took place the awfulest rites of all, the human sacrifices. Here the victims of Baal, who comprised not only slaves and prisoners of war but children of the most aristocratic families in Carthage—usually girls of marriageable age—were laid naked upon the brazen arms of the god to be roasted alive, their bodies dropping thence into a fiery furnace. Though we know that the worship of Hammon and Tanith was characterized by rituals so hideous and obscene as to stagger the imagination, their details—and it is well that it is so—can only be conjectured. Small wonder that the superstitious Arabs shun the slopes of Bou-Kornein after nightfall, asserting that the lonely spot is cursed with the evil deeds which were performed there, and that with the coming of darkness can be heard the shrieks of tortured men and maidens, can be seen the dull glow of the fires on the altar of the unclean god.

The Carthaginians first came into armed collision with their historic enemies, the Romans, 264 years before the Crucifixion. For nearly two centuries Carthage had been undisputed Mistress of the Mediterranean, dominant in the East and so supreme in the West that her ambassadors told the Romans that they might not even wash their hands in the sea without her permission. Her empire stretched from end to end of the Middle Sea: North Africa was fringed with her outposts and trading-stations; the south of Spain owed her fealty; her rule was accepted in Sardinia, the west of Sicily, Malta, the Balearic Islands.

But she was as an idol of brass with feet of clay; the foundations of her supremacy were rotten, for they rested upon her sea-power only. And history has shown, over and over again, that no nation can endure unless it can make its might felt upon the land. The Carthaginians, as has been said, were not a fighting race, so that when Carthage needed troops she had to recruit them from the warlike and barbarous Berber tribes which surrounded her. It is said that when Hamilcar Barca landed in Spain at the beginning of the Second Punic War he had not a single Carthaginian soldier in the ranks of his army, the officers of his general staff alone being Carthaginians. And, as Carthage discovered to her cost, it is not safe for a nation to trust to the very uncertain loyalty of a mercenary army.

In 264 B.C. began the series of tragic events known to history as the three Punic wars, which lasted 120 years, cost millions of lives, and terminated with the capture and destruction of Carthage by the younger Scipio, who left not one stone of the famous city resting on another.

As I have already remarked, Carthage’s supremacy rested on her sea-power, and her sea-power, in turn, rested on her vast armada of triremes—galleys with three banks of oars, each manned by ten soldiers and 130 rowers, the latter being slaves who never left the benches to which they were chained. It has been estimated that the average length of a trireme was about 130 feet, or approximately that of a small destroyer. The naval tactics of the Carthaginians, be it understood, consisted in sinking the enemy by ramming, not in boarding and hand-to-hand fighting. Now they turned their attention to the development of a much larger class of fighting ship, the quinquereme, its five banks of oars manned by 300 rowers, and each carrying about twenty marines. The Romans improved on this, however, for they not only copied the quinqueremes, but they fitted them with gangways which could be lowered upon contact with an enemy vessel, so as to permit the complement of 120 legionaries which each Roman war craft carried to gain access to the adversary’s decks. Relying on this combatant superiority of six to one, they endeavored always to get alongside and board the enemy by means of the “flying-bridges”; with the Romans, as with Nelson and John Paul Jones, it was always, “Broadside to broadside! Boarders up and away!”

The first sea-battle under these new conditions was fought off Lipara in 260 B.C. and ended in complete disaster for the Romans, their admiral and his entire squadron being captured. But shortly thereafter the fortunes of war were reversed, for in a second encounter, near Palermo, fifty Carthaginian vessels were captured or sunk. Four years later, off Agrigentum, was fought one of the greatest sea-battles of all time, in which upward of three hundred thousand men were engaged and in which nearly a hundred Carthaginian galleys, together with a like number of Roman, went down. Though the Carthaginian fleet was only temporarily put out of action, the Romans were enabled to bring their transports in safety across the narrow seas and to effect a landing on the eastern side of Cape Bon, their army under Marcus Attilius Regulus capturing Tunis and menacing Carthage itself. But the Carthaginians summoned to their aid the renowned Spartan general, Xanthippus, thanks to whose brilliant leadership the invaders were all but exterminated, Regulus himself being taken prisoner.

The Romans having been repulsed, the Carthaginians now carried the war into Sicily. The long series of reverses suffered by the Africans in this campaign, which lasted nine years, were somewhat alleviated by the genius of Hamilcar Barca, then a youth in his early twenties, who, had he been adequately supported, might have made by sea that attack on Rome which his son, Hannibal, was forced to attempt a quarter of a century later by the long and perilous overland route through Spain and across the Alps. But after the great Roman sea-victory at Ægusa the Carthaginians instructed Hamilcar to make peace on the best terms he could obtain. And onerous indeed were these terms. By them Carthage was compelled to evacuate Sicily, Sardinia, and Malta and to pay an indemnity of thirty-two hundred talents—about six millions of dollars. Thus ended, in 241 B.C., the First Punic War, which had dragged along for three-and-twenty years, greatly to the disadvantage of Carthage. She had lost the most important of her insular possessions; the Mediterranean was no longer a Carthaginian lake, a mare clausum; and her prestige as a naval power had been irretrievably shattered.

They were always poor losers, the Carthaginians, and so, despite the brilliant generalship of Hamilcar, when he returned to Carthage he was deprived of his command, which was given to his bitterest rival, Hanno. But, knowing the temper of his people, it is to be presumed that the famous leader did not complain, for he doubtless considered himself lucky to escape crucifixion, the fate usually awarded to defeated generals according to the pleasant custom of the Carthaginians. Their ingratitude quickly brought its own reward, however, for, within a few months after the disastrous end of her struggle with Rome, Carthage was called upon to suppress the revolt of her mercenary and barbarian allies. This bloody business, which lasted from 240 to 237 B.C., was precipitated by Hanno’s refusal to give the returned troops their pay, which was greatly in arrears. The conflict which followed was known as the War of the Mercenaries, or as the Truceless War, for no quarter was asked or given.

The mutinous mercenaries were now joined by hordes of barbarians from the hinterland, who saw in Carthage’s enfeebled condition an opportunity to overwhelm and loot the richest and most luxurious city in the world. From every quarter of North Africa they came, drawn by the prospects of rapine and plunder as buzzards are attracted by a dying animal. An unforgettable picture of the assembling of these Barbarian hordes has been given us by Flaubert in his “Salammbô”:

Because of the stubbornness and incapacity of Hanno, disaster followed on disaster. Tunis was taken by the mutineers, and Carthage was threatened. At length the situation became so critical that Hanno was superseded and the command restored to Hamilcar, who, enlisting the aid of the Numidian sheikhs, drove the mercenaries back into the mountains to the east of Bou-Kornein, eventually hemming them in a narrow pass known as the Defile of the Hatchet. Here forty thousand of them were trapped like wolves, encircled by a ring of unrelenting steel. When their food was exhausted they warded off starvation for a time by eating their dead and their prisoners. But even cannibalism could not save them, and in the end the mutineers, too weak to offer further resistance, were trampled by the ponderous feet of Hamilcar’s war-elephants until all that remained of them was chunks of bloody pulp.

In the very nature of things, a peace made after so inconclusive a struggle as the First Punic War could not endure, for the Carthaginians still despised the Romans and thought only of obtaining revenge. Thus it came about that only three years after the conclusion of hostilities an expeditionary force under Hamilcar Barca landed in Spain with the avowed purpose of checking Roman penetration of the peninsula and of building up there an empire which should more than compensate Carthage for the insular territories which she had lost.

In nine years Hamilcar brought under Carthaginian rule all the country south of the Tagus; then—229 B.C.—he fell in battle. He was succeeded by his son-in-law, Hasdrubal, who continued the course of conquest until, eight years after the death of Hamilcar, he met his own end by the knife of an assassin. Thereupon the command passed to Hamilcar’s son, Hannibal, then only twenty-six years of age. I doubt not that when the youngster was advanced to the supreme command the graybeards of the general staff shook their heads dismally, and said, “Too young; too young,” and prophesied failure and disaster. For how could they have dreamed that, when history should grant him the justice of perspective, this youthful Carthaginian would be recognized as one of the greatest captains of all time? For, in the whole history of the world, there have been only two other men—Alexander the Great and Napoleon—who approached him in military and administrative genius.

As a boy of nine, before the altar of the gods, Hannibal had taken an oath of undying hatred for Rome. And this oath he now proceeded to fulfil. Just as Sherman broke the heart of the Confederacy by his March to the Sea, so Hannibal determined to smash the power of Rome by carrying the war into the enemy’s territory, by sweeping across Italy itself. So audacious a plan of campaign depended for its success upon the rapidity with which it was executed. The Romans must be paralyzed by the speed of his advance. They must know of his coming only when they heard the trample of his elephants and saw the sun glinting on his spear-heads. What he planned was, in short, a great raid through Spain and Gaul and so down the whole length of the Italian peninsula, capturing Rome itself, if that were possible, and, if it were not, joining hands with Carthage across the narrow seas.

Intrusting the command of the troops he left in occupation of Spain to his brother, Hannibal left New Carthage (Carthagena), which had been founded by his father some years before, and, late in the May of 218 B.C., set out with an army of ninety thousand men and a great number of elephants, on one of the most daring enterprises recorded in military history. Crossing the Pyrenees, and evading the Roman army which had been set to watch the mouth of the Rhone, he made friends with the Gauls and pressed on unhindered to the foot of the Alps. Though the savage Alpine winter, with its deep snow and bitter cold, was already at hand, though the barbarians hung on his flanks like ravening wolves, and though his losses in men and animals from exposure were enormous, he crossed into Italy by the Pass of the Great St. Bernard, as it is known to-day, cutting his way through the snow-drifts and splitting the rocks which impeded the passage of his wagon-trains with vinegar, for, be it remembered, he had to make his own roads as he advanced. In the words of Napoleon, “Hannibal forced the Alps; I turned them.”

Smashing Scipio on the Ticinus and Sempronius on the Trebua, he went into winter quarters on the Upper Po, where he contracted the ophthalmia which cost him an eye. In the following spring he resumed his southward march, annihilating the army with which the consul Flaminius sought to check him. Rome he did not venture to attack, deeming his decimated force too weak to justify the venture, and therein he committed his fatal error. But at Cannæ, on the second of August, 216 B.C., he turned suddenly upon Quintus Fabius Maximus, who had closed in upon his rear, and out of a Roman army numbering seventy-six thousand men, seventy thousand perished in the awful slaughter. Again the road to Rome was open to Hannibal, but without the reinforcements which he had asked from Carthage, he did not dare to attack, though he once stood within three miles of the city’s walls. For thirteen years he held his ground in southern Italy, winning victories of which he was too weak to take advantage and straining his eyes seaward in quest of the troop-laden galleys which never came.

But, while Hannibal was being kept at bay near Capua, the arms of Rome had not been idle elsewhere. Under Publius Scipio—who in later years was destined to gain imperishable fame as Scipio Africanus—a Roman army had invaded Spain and, defeating the small Carthaginian force which garrisoned the peninsula, had undone all the work that Hamilcar, Hasdrubal, and Hannibal had accomplished.

Crossing over into Africa, Scipio sought to form an alliance with Syphax, king of the Massæsylians, whose capital was Cirta, the modern Constantine. But, thanks to the influence of his beautiful Carthaginian wife, Sophonisba, daughter of Hasdrubal Giscon (whom Scipio had defeated in Spain), Syphax remained faithful to Carthage. Sophonisba’s marriage to Syphax, however, cost Carthage the allegiance of another great Numidian chieftain, Masinissa, to whom she had been betrothed. Piqued by this rejection, the haughty Berber deserted Carthage, for which he had always fought, and became the stanch ally of Rome. Yet how strangely does history reverse itself! For some years later, when the kingdom of Syphax, who had been defeated and had died in captivity, had been given to Masinissa by the Romans, and that chieftain came riding into his new capital, Cirta, in triumph, there was the widowed Sophonisba, beautiful as ever, awaiting him at the entrance to the citadel. The lovely creature threw herself at the feet of the conqueror and begged with tears in her eyes that she be not handed over to her hereditary enemies, the Romans. So he married her, for he loved her still and doubted not that she would be safe under his protection. But when Scipio heard of it he bitterly upbraided Masinissa for having betrayed his Roman allies by marrying a Carthaginian. More, he demanded Sophonisba’s surrender, for he wanted her to grace his triumph when he returned to Rome. Whereupon Masinissa, who dared not keep her yet would not give her up to the Romans, escaped the dilemma by sending her poison. By drinking it Sophonisba saved herself from dishonor and degradation, her husband from humiliation, and the Roman Republic from an embarrassing situation.

But I am getting ahead of my story. So let us go back to the autumn of 206 B.C., when Scipio, having returned to Italy, persuaded the Senate to let him carry the war into Italy, the dwindling forces of Hannibal, who had been callously abandoned by Carthage, still being held at bay near Capua. Landing near Utica, Scipio was joined by his new ally, Masinissa, their combined forces making a night attack upon the camps of Hasdrubal and Syphax and burning them both. Two decisive battles followed. Syphax, as has already been mentioned, was utterly defeated and taken prisoner and his kingdom handed over to his rival, Masinissa. The Carthaginians, their capital invested, sued for peace. The terms imposed by Scipio were amazing in their moderation: Spain, already lost, and the Balearic Islands were to be formally ceded to Rome; the transfer of Syphax’s kingdom to Masinissa was to be recognized; all vessels of war, save ten, were to be surrendered; and an indemnity of five thousand talents—not far from ten millions of dollars—was to be paid the conquerors. These terms, which deprived Carthage of her battle-fleet and her remaining overseas possessions and exacted a huge indemnity, are strongly reminiscent of those which were imposed two thousand years later at Versailles upon the Germans.

The envoys of Carthage formally accepted the terms and an armistice was declared while they were being ratified by the two governments. Then, too late, Carthage repented her desertion of the one man who might have saved her and recalled Hannibal from Italy. When the hero of a hundred battles landed at Leptis with the remnant of his ever-victorious army, the hopes of the mercurial Carthaginians revived. The terms of peace which they had just accepted were brazenly repudiated. Hannibal, though disheartened and disillusioned, did his best to save a cause which was already lost and which did not deserve saving. Gathering an army consisting mainly of raw levies and undisciplined mercenaries, he met Scipio in battle at Zama, five days’ march to the west of Carthage, in the spring of 202 B.C. But Hannibal’s green troops were unable to withstand the assault of the Roman shock-battalions, and his defeat—the first he had ever known—was utter and complete. With a handful of followers he escaped to Carthage and advised the Council of One Hundred to make the best terms it could with the thoroughly exasperated Romans.

The conditions now imposed by the victors were far more humiliating than the original ones. In addition to the former demands the Carthaginians were required to pay an annual tribute of two hundred talents for a period of fifty years; they were not to wage war outside of Africa; and in Africa they were not to make war without the permission of Rome, or of Rome’s allies, and then only within Carthaginian territory. By the acceptance of these terms, which left the once haughty Mistress of the Seas little more than a Roman protectorate, there ended in 201 B.C., after seventeen years’ duration, the Second Punic War.

Just as, centuries later, the Allies believed that they had permanently crippled Germany by the terms imposed on her at Versailles, so the Romans congratulated themselves on having crushed their rival forever. But their gratulations were premature. Relieved of the burden of maintaining great military and naval establishments, free to devote themselves to the profitable pursuits of peace, the Carthaginians proceeded to come back with a rapidity which amazed and alarmed the Romans. Under the wise administration of Hannibal, Carthage set its house in order, reorganized its finances, suppressed its political abuses, and paid off in less than half the allotted time the enormous war indemnity which had been imposed upon it.

Ere long the anxiety of the Romans turned to something not far removed from panic. Though Hannibal had scrupulously observed the terms of peace, with such a man at liberty, Rome could not sleep o’ nights and the Senate peremptorily demanded his surrender. Carthage was powerless to refuse the demand; so Hannibal, who had no illusions as to the fate his malignant and unchivalrous enemies, smarting from their long series of defeats at his hands, had in store for him, fled from the city which he had served so long and brilliantly and to whose arms he had brought imperishable fame. At first the illustrious fugitive sought refuge on the Kerkenna Islands, off the eastern coast of Tunisia, near the modern Sfax; but, when the long arm of Rome reached out to pluck him thence, he again sought safety in flight, this time to Asia Minor, where he found a welcome at the court of King Prusias of Bithynia. But even there he was not safe from the hatred of Rome, and in 183 B.C., rather than bring disaster on those who had befriended him, the great captain died in exile by his own hand.

Though Rome and Carthage remained outwardly at peace for fifty years, Carthage, in spite of the numerous restrictions with which her rival sought to cripple her, so waxed in prosperity and wealth that the Roman leaders, despairing of wresting from her commercial supremacy, determined on her destruction. This ruthless decision was inspired by both jealousy and fear, and, in some measure at least, by the eloquence of the celebrated orator Marcus Cato, who, as chairman of a commission sent to Carthage to settle a boundary question, had been so impressed by what he saw there that thenceforward he devoted himself to inflaming the passions of his countrymen against Carthage. It is said that after his return from Africa he never failed to conclude a speech with the impassioned declaration, “Delenda est Carthago!”—“Carthage must be wiped out!”

History has shown that, when one power has determined to attack another, it has never been found difficult to invent a plausible pretext. In this instance, however, no pretext was necessary; in deliberately forcing war upon a people with whom she was at peace, and who wished to remain at peace, Rome was scourged by the lashes of those terrible sisters, Hatred, Jealousy, and Fear. No demands, no ultimatum, no declaration of war preceded the outbreak of hostilities, the news that the Roman fleet was approaching being the first intimation the Carthaginians had that they were again to undergo the horrors of war. The expedition landed unopposed at Utica in 149 B.C., where the Roman commander was waited upon by peace commissioners sent by Carthage to learn the city’s fate. They were informed that peace terms would not even be discussed until the complete disarmament of the city had been effected. Whereupon all military and naval stores, all arms and armor, whether owned privately or by the state, even the insignificant remnant of the once all-powerful fleet, were surrendered.

Now that the city was apparently helpless, and even a semblance of resistance was out of the question, the Roman commander informed the Carthaginian envoys of the brutal sentence which had been passed by the Senate and which he had been ordered to carry out. Carthage was to be utterly destroyed! But the Romans had made one serious miscalculation; they had failed to take into account the fighting spirit which can be aroused in the most unwarlike of peoples, as in the most timid of animals, when driven to desperation. In fact, the Roman ultimatum had precisely the opposite effect to that which was intended, for, instead of paralyzing the Carthaginians with fear, it fanned their smoldering resentment into a fierce flame of heroism; it inspired them with a determination to sell their city and their lives at a price which would stagger Rome.

Now it must be kept in mind that, though the Carthaginians had surrendered their arms and engines of war, there remained intact the remarkable system of defenses which made Carthage the most strongly fortified city of its time. The city, whose population at this period numbered something over seven hundred thousand, was built upon a fan-shaped peninsula surrounded on three sides by water, the handle of the fan corresponding to the narrow isthmus, barely three miles in width, which afforded communication with the mainland. The sea-front, naturally precipitous, was rendered virtually impregnable by massive ramparts, while across the neck of the isthmus, so as to afford protection by an attack from land, ran a tremendous wall, thirty-three feet in thickness and forty-five feet high, broken at frequent intervals by lofty towers from which a withering cross-fire could be brought to bear upon besiegers.

That they had surrendered their catapults—the heavy artillery of the ancients—did not weaken the determination of the Carthaginians to defend their beloved city to the bitter end. With beams obtained by tearing down public buildings, they hastily constructed new engines of war; to provide the ropes for these, the women (since this was before the vogue of the boyish bob) sacrificed their hair; for ammunition they tore up the great stones which paved the Forum. So, when the Romans jauntily advanced to take possession of a presumably defenseless city, they found the Carthaginians prepared for a last desperate stand, a hopeless but heroic defense whose epic story was destined to reverberate down the endless corridors of time.

The Roman commander, belatedly realizing how formidable had become the undertaking on which he had embarked so confidently, sat down before the city walls. For two long years the siege dragged on, the occasional attacks delivered by the Romans doing more harm to the besiegers than to the besieged. But Rome’s determination to end for good and all the threat offered by her great rival never wavered, and in 147 B.C. she intrusted the command of her armies in Africa to her most brilliant general, Scipio Africanus the Younger, then only thirty-seven. Scipio was quick to realize that his most powerful ally in the taking of the city was famine. Up to this time the Carthaginians had succeeded in obtaining supplies both by sea and by land, but Scipio now proceeded to build across the neck of the isthmus a great fortification which effectually cut off the city’s communications on the land side. His next step was to block the entrance to the commercial and military harbors by throwing across the entrance to the little bay on which they opened a gigantic jetty of hewn stones, thus making impossible relief from the sea. Then, the enemy completely hemmed in, he sat himself down and waited with such patience as he could summon for famine to do its ghastly work. So passed the terrible winter of 147-6 B.C. When, early in the spring, Scipio renewed his attacks, he was confronted by an enemy gaunt with hunger and decimated by disease but indomitable still.

Every stronghold, no matter how formidable its defenses, has its weak point, and Carthage’s, as Scipio discovered, was at the entrance to its harbors. This, he decided, must be his immediate objective; here he determined to deliver his grand assault. So, utilizing the jetty which he had built, he poured his storm-battalions of seasoned legionaries upon the breakwater and so by the harbor-mouth into the edge of the city itself. Hurling his troops forward in the mass formations for which the Romans were famous, gaining ground foot by foot and then only by sheer weight of numbers, he slowly drove the defenders back upon the Cothon, or military harbor. This also he stormed, and that night his weary legionaries bivouacked in the Forum, within the innermost of the city’s triple walls.

From the Forum to the foot of the precipitous Byrsa Hill, from the brow of which the citadel frowned down upon the city, is barely a quarter of a mile, yet so desperate was the house-to-house fighting in the maze of narrow alleys and crowded, high-walled buildings which formed the lower town, so frenzied the resistance of the Carthaginians, that it took the Romans six terrible days to cover that short distance.

Street fighting is always a savage business; in this labyrinth of lanes and passages and culs-de-sac it was terrible beyond description. Quarter was neither asked nor given. Women and children were slaughtered as remorselessly as the men. The streets were carpeted with dead and dying; their entrances were barricaded with cadavers; the pavements were slippery with blood; the waters of the harbor and the bay beyond were reddened by the sanguinary torrent which descended from the city’s gutters. Huge paving-stones, hurled by the improvised Carthaginian catapults, crashed into the Roman ranks, crushing their victims into masses of reeking, quivering flesh which resembled nothing human. War-elephants, trumpeting with rage and fear, tore through the teeming thoroughfares, trampling the soldiers underfoot or dashing their brains out against the walls of the buildings. From the housetops disheveled, wild-eyed women poured molten pitch upon the attackers, who shrieked in agony as the flesh was scalded from their bones. Other women, armed with knives, slipped from their hiding-places as the storming-columns passed to cut the throats of the wounded and to hideously mutilate them. Men fought breast to breast with swords and daggers and battle-axes and spears, and when these were shattered they used their naked hands, gouging their enemies’ eyeballs from their sockets, tearing out their throats, even biting each other to death like famished wolves.

Hanging low over the stricken city was a dark pall of dust and smoke, beneath which the grim specters of lust and hatred went about their dreadful work. Women were raped in the presence of their dying husbands. Children were transfixed with spears or torn asunder before their mothers’ eyes. The priests were murdered on their own altars and sobbed out their lives at the feet of their gods. Houses were sacked and set aflame. The barbarian allies of the Romans, with their braided hair and painted bodies, flitted through the inferno, intent on loot and rapine, like creatures escaped from the Pit.

The din of battle was terrific; the deep-throated roar of the charging legionaries, the answering war-cries of the defenders, the shrieks and groans of the wounded, the shrill imprecations of frenzied women, the wailing of terrified children, the trumpeting of the war-elephants, the clash and clang of metal, the thunderous concussion of the catapult stones, the twang of bowstrings, the whine of arrows, the sickening plunk as they sank in human flesh—all these combined to make a hurricane of horrors, a very hell of sound.

Then, at last, came a pause in the slaughter, but not until the proudest city in the world had been transformed into a shambles, a human abattoir. Hasdrubal, the Carthaginian commander, agreed to surrender on the sole condition that the lives of the survivors should be spared. Scipio accepted, and fifty thousand half-naked, starving wretches—all that were left alive out of the city’s seven hundred thousand—emerged from the citadel to claim such mercy as the blood-drunk victors might show. They were sent to Rome in chains and sold in the market-place as slaves. But nine hundred fighting-men, deserters to whom Scipio sternly refused amnesty, barricaded themselves in the great temple and, setting it on fire, perished in the flames. With them died Hasdrubal’s wife and children, Hasdrubal himself, a prisoner of the Romans, being an eye-witness of their heroic end.

The work of Scipio was accomplished, and he returned to Rome. When consulted by the Senate as to the future of Carthage he declined to express an opinion, though he is said to have opposed the wanton destruction of what remained of the city. But the Romans closed their ears to the counsels of moderation and reason. Too proud to admit it, they knew in their hearts that fear would haunt them as long as one stone of Carthage remained upon another. It was decreed, therefore, that the city should be razed to the ground, the ruins plowed under, and a solemn curse laid upon any one who should venture to build upon or cultivate the site. Ten commissioners were appointed to execute the decree. But they were forestalled in this final act of spite and hatred, in their craving to wreak vengeance on a corpse, for when the residents of the suburb of Megara learned that the obliteration of the city had been determined upon they themselves set the torch to what remained. The conflagration raged for seventeen days, and when at last it died for want of something further to consume the once-proud Empress of the Seas lay in ashes. Cato’s demand had been complied with. Carthago deleta est.

But the site of Carthage was too important to remain unoccupied for long, or to be permitted to fall into other and perhaps hostile hands, and, within less than a quarter of a century of its destruction by Scipio, Caius Gracchus was despatched with six thousand settlers to establish there a Roman colony. The project failed to meet with success, however—perhaps the curse of Rome was still in working order—and, though Julius Cæsar, sleeping on the Byrsa for a night after the battle of Thapsus, dreamed of rebuilding the city, the work was not undertaken until Augustus had ascended the imperial throne.

Then arose upon the Punic ruins a great metropolis which took rank as the third city in the Roman Empire, rivaling in her opulence and glory Antioch, Alexandria, even Rome herself. The new Carthage was richer, more beautiful, more luxurious than the old, the repository of the arts of Greece and the sciences of Rome, and the cradle of early Christianity. Whereas the Phenicians had sought merely to produce an effect of massive weight, the architecture of the Roman city was characterized by beauty of outline and an almost unequaled wealth of sculptural detail and richness of decoration. During the second century A.D., Carthage, its material prosperity now greater than ever, was the scene of the persecution and martyrdom of thousands of Christians, even women of the noblest birth, such as Perpetua and Felicitas, being devoured in its amphitheater by the lions.

Notwithstanding the immense importance of Carthage, the Romans, curiously enough, made but little attempt to expand their African frontiers, their trans-Mediterranean territory at this period consisting of little more than that portion of the modern Tunisia which lies to the east of a line drawn from Tabarca to Sfax. This formed the Provincia Africa, and it was from this little triangle of land that the whole of the vast continent took its name.

But the haughty spirit and iron will of the Romans were broken by Alaric the Goth, who sacked Rome in 410, so that the empire was already tottering to its fall when the terrible Genseric, deformed in body and in mind, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar with his barbarian hordes, swept like a cyclone along the northern shore of Africa, took Carthage in 439, and made it a Vandal stronghold. But the African empire which the Vandals had built in a day perished in a night; for less than a century later, in 533 to be exact, the barbarians were defeated and Carthage occupied by a Byzantine army under the leadership of the famous soldier Belisarius—or Beli-tzar, the White Prince, to give him his proper name. Within three months of his landing Belisarius was able to send word to his master Justinian, at Constantinople, that the Provincia Africa was once more a part of the empire of Rome.

For a hundred years the Greek emperors kept a precarious hold on what is now Tunisia; then the flood of Arab conquest broke upon the shores of North Africa, Roman civilization was swept away along with Christianity, the priests were murdered on their own altars, the crescent replaced the cross above such towns as were permitted to remain standing, and Carthage was stormed by Hassan, who laid the afflicted city in ruins for a second time, everything that was left above ground being carried away to be used in the reconstruction and adornment of Tunis, Kairouan, and other Arab cities. Thenceforward Carthage was to be but a quarry for Arab and European builders, the Genoese sailors boasting that they never returned from an African voyage without a ballast of Carthaginian marbles, great quantities of which, it is said, were utilized in the construction of the cathedral of Pisa. Only once more does Carthage make its bow to history, when Louis IX of France, leading the Last Crusade, died from the plague while encamped upon its site.

For upward of twelve hundred years Tunisia suffered under Arab barbarity and misrule, and the shores of the Western Mediterranean from Arab depredations. Then the troop-laden transports of a regenerated France dropped anchor off La Goulette, and the harassed, war-torn country entered on a new era of civilization and prosperity under the tricolor.

All this is history, of course, and to my readers doubtless already familiar, but I offer no apologies for repeating it here, because, without the background of the Punic Wars, of the Roman, Vandal, and Byzantine occupations, and the Moslem conquest, it is impossible to realize the tremendous significance of that sun-drenched hill-slope, littered with heaps of débris and dotted with excavation mounds, strewn with the rubble of crumbling walls and shattered marbles, where the Mistress of the Mediterranean once sat enthroned in her pomp of pride and power.