The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (6 page)

When at last the smoke from Alexander’s dying empire cleared away–and it was to take the best part of twenty years–three major powers emerged from the ashes. One was the old Kingdom of Macedonia, no longer master of western Asia but still dominating northern Greece and a considerable force throughout the Greek world. The second was the empire built up by Alexander’s general Seleucus–formerly leader of the Shield-Bearers, his own personal guard of honour–who, beginning in Babylonia, soon imposed his authority over Mesopotamia and Syria until his domains extended from his capital at Antioch to the eastern end of the Persian Gulf. The line of Seleucid kings that he established was to continue for nearly four centuries, until it was eventually wiped out by Rome in 72
AD
.

The third power was Egypt, where in 305
BC
Alexander’s oldest friend, a soldier-historian named Ptolemy, proclaimed himself king. He proved a remarkable success. Ruling from Alexander’s new foundation of Alexandria–home of the greatest library in the ancient world, a city in which the large Jewish community would regularly read the Torah not in Hebrew but in Greek–and from another city which he himself founded called Ptolemais in Upper Egypt, this bluff Macedonian assumed the character–as well as the power–of the ancient pharaohs, and during a forty-year reign extended his dominions to Palestine and southern Syria, Cyprus, Asia Minor and the Cyclades. He also engendered a line of no less than fifteen rulers of Egypt: a remarkable number for a single dynasty, but more remarkable still by reason of the fact that almost every one of them married his own sister, half-sister or niece. It was Ptolemy XIV, coming to the throne in 47
BC
, who took as his bride his twenty-one-year-old sister, Cleopatra.

Greek the Ptolemies may have been; the world they lived in, however, at least where later generations were concerned, was Roman. The time has now come to retrace our steps a century or two and to inquire how it was that a small and inconsequential Italian town made itself, in a remarkably short space of time, master of the civilised world.

CHAPTER III

Rome: The Republic

The rise of Rome was due, more than anything else, to the character and qualities of the Romans themselves. They were a simple, straightforward, law-abiding people with a strong sense of family values, willing to accept discipline when required to do so–as they certainly had been in 510
BC
when they expelled the Tarquins, that line of Etruscan kings who had ruled them for the previous century,
¹⁴
and established a republic of their own. Their city, they claimed, predated the Etruscans by many centuries; it had originally been founded by the Trojan prince Aeneas, who had made his way to Italy after the Greeks’ destruction of his city. Rome was thus the successor to ancient Troy.

In 280
BC
, an ambitious ruler of a Hellenistic state in northwestern Greece, King Pyrrhus of Epirus, landed with an army estimated at 20,000 at Tarentum (the modern Taranto). The Roman army met him near Heraclea, where it was narrowly beaten, Pyrrhus’s losses being almost as great as the Romans’: thus the concept of a Pyrrhic victory was born. For the next five years the King continued to make trouble, but with less and less success; finally, in 275
BC
, having lost some two-thirds of his army, he returned to Epirus. Rome, a still obscure republic in central Italy, had defeated a Hellenistic king. The subsequent triumphal procession in the capital featured Pyrrhus’s captured elephants–the first to make their appearance in Italy.
¹⁵

But Rome’s greatest enemy was Carthage, originally a colony of the Phoenicians, which occupied part of the site of the modern city of Tunis. The Carthaginians were a thorn in the Roman flesh for well over a hundred years, from 264 to 146
BC
, during which the Romans were obliged to fight two separate Punic Wars
¹⁶
before they were able to eliminate it forever. It was these two wars that brought Rome to the centre of the Mediterranean stage and–since it soon became clear that Carthage could never be defeated on land alone–made her a leading sea power. The first, which ended in 241
BC
, had one extremely happy result for Rome: the acquisition of the greater part of Sicily, which would henceforth constitute her principal granary. (Corsica and Sardinia were to follow three years later.) She had greater cause for concern, however, during the twenty-three-year interval that elapsed before the beginning of the second, because during that period Carthage succeeded in establishing a whole new empire–this time in Spain.

The Phoenicians had first reached the Iberian peninsula around 1100
BC
, when they founded the port of Cadiz. It was in those days an island and it set the pattern for subsequent Phoenician colonies, all of which tended to be positioned on promontories or offshore islands, often at a river mouth, presumably–since, like all merchants, they were a peaceful lot–in order not to encroach more than necessary on the natives. Of these last the most advanced were the Iberians, a mysterious people whose two languages are, like the Etruscan, not Indo-European and, unlike the Etruscan, continue to baffle us. The Iberians traded enthusiastically with the Phoenicians, with whom they seem to have existed on friendly terms. Some centuries later they were to develop a remarkable civilisation of their own, notable above all for its statuary: the so-called
Dama de Elche
, dating from the fourth century
BC
and now in the Archaeological Museum in Madrid, is one of the most beautiful–and most haunting–ancient sculptures to be seen anywhere.

In about 237
BC
Hamilcar Barca, Carthage’s most distinguished general–or admiral, since he seems to have been equally at home on land and at sea–set off for the Iberian peninsula, taking with him his little son Hannibal, aged nine. Here, over the space of just eight years, he built up all the infrastructure of a prosperous state, with a sizable army to defend it. Accidentally drowned in 229
BC
, he was succeeded by his son-in-law Hasdrubal, who established the permanent capital of Carthaginian Spain at what the Romans called New Carthage and we call Cartagena. He also did much to develop the art of mining: a single mine, Baebelo, was said to produce 300 pounds of silver a day. When Hasdrubal was assassinated by an Iberian slave in 221
BC
, his place was taken by Hannibal, now twenty-six.

Hannibal was to prove the greatest military leader the world had seen since Alexander; indeed, he may well have been one of the greatest of all time. According to tradition, his father had made him swear eternal hatred of Rome; he was determined from the moment of his accession to avenge his country’s defeat of twenty years before, and confident that the new Spanish dominion, with all its vast resources of wealth and manpower, would enable him to do so. He left Spain in the spring of 218
BC
with an army of some 40,000 men, taking the land route along the south coast of France, up the Rhône valley, then east to Briançon and the pass at Mont-Genèvre. His infantry was mostly Spanish, though officered by Carthaginians, his cavalry drawn from Spain and North Africa; it included thirty-seven elephants. His famous crossing of the Alps took place in the early autumn and was followed by two victorious battles in quick succession; by the end of the year he controlled virtually the whole of northern Italy. But then the momentum began to fail. He had counted on a general rising of the Italian cities, uneasy as they were at the growing power of Rome, but he was disappointed; even a third victory in April 217
BC
, when he trapped the Roman army in a defile between Lake Trasimene and the surrounding hills, proved ultimately ineffective. It was no use his marching on Rome; the city possessed formidable defensive walls, and he had no siege engines worth speaking of. He therefore swung round to Apulia and Calabria, where the largely Greek populations had no love for the Romans and might well, he thought, defect to his side.

Once again he was wrong. Instead of the sympathetic allies for which he had hoped, he soon found himself faced by yet another Roman army, far larger and better equipped than his own, which had followed him southward; and on 3 August 216
BC
, at Cannae (beside the Ofanto river, some ten miles southwest of the modern Barletta) battle was joined. The result was another victory for Hannibal, perhaps the greatest of his life, and for the Romans the most devastating defeat in their history. Thanks to his superb generalship, the legionaries found themselves surrounded and were cut to pieces where they stood. By the end of the day over 50,000 of them lay dead on the field. Hannibal’s casualties amounted to just 5,700.

Hannibal had now destroyed all Rome’s fighting forces apart from those kept within the capital for its defence; but he was no nearer his ultimate objective, the destruction of the Republic. His strongest weapon, that magnificent Spanish and North African cavalry–by now strictly equine, since the elephants had all succumbed to the cold and damp–was powerless against the city walls. He was encouraged, on the other hand, by the hope that his brother–another Hasdrubal–might be raising a second army, this time with proper siege engines, and joining him as soon as it was ready. Then, to his surprise, he found in Campania–that province of Italy south of Rome of which Naples is the centre–just that degree of popular support that seemed to be lacking elsewhere in the peninsula. Marching his army across the mountains to Capua, at that time Italy’s second largest city, he established his headquarters there and settled down to wait.

He waited a very long time, for Hasdrubal had problems of his own. The Romans, swift to take advantage of Hannibal’s absence, had within months of his departure invaded Spain, with a force of two legions and some 15,000 allied troops under a young general named Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, who was soon joined by his brother Publius. The immediate consequence of this invasion was a long struggle between Roman and Carthaginian forces, with the local Iberians fighting on both sides; the eventual result was a Roman presence in the peninsula which lasted over six centuries. After the death of the two Scipios in 211
BC
they were replaced by a kinsman, also called Publius, who took Cartagena after a short siege. With the capture of their capital the Carthaginians swiftly lost heart, and by 206
BC
the last of them had left the peninsula.

While there had been a hope of victory over the Romans in Spain, Hasdrubal had had no chance of organising a relief expedition to help his brother. Not until 206
BC
, when he knew he was beaten, could he begin to consider such an enterprise, and when in 205 he in turn led his men across southern France and across the Alps, he was marching to disaster: on the Metaurus river, just outside Ancona, he encountered a Roman army and his force was cut to pieces. Hannibal learned the news only when his brother’s severed head was delivered to his Capuan camp. He remained in Italy for another four years, but he would have been wiser to return; elsewhere in the Mediterranean, young Publius Cornelius Scipio had by now taken the offensive.

In 204
BC
Publius and his army landed on the North African coast at Utica, less than twenty miles west of Carthage, where they routed 20,000 local troops and established a position on the Bay of Tunis threatening the city itself. In the spring of 203 Hannibal, now seriously alarmed, hurried back to Carthage and in the following year led an army of 37,000 men and eighty elephants against the Roman invaders. The two sides eventually met near the village of Zama where, after a long and hard-fought battle, Hannibal suffered the only major defeat of his extraordinary career. It was at Zama, we are told, that the Romans finally discovered how to deal with the Carthaginians’ favourite tactical weapon, their elephants. First a sudden blast of trumpets would terrify them, to the point where their riders lost control; the Romans would then open their ranks, and the panic-stricken animals would charge between them, out of what they thought to be harm’s way. The Roman victory was complete. The Second Punic War was over. Rome’s prize for her victory was Spain. All the carefully built-up Carthaginian military and civil administration had already been dismantled–the Scipios had seen to that–and now it remained only for Carthage formally to cede the peninsula to her conquerors. Hannibal himself–who had narrowly escaped death at Zama–lived on until 183
BC
, when he took poison to avoid being captured by the enemy he so hated. As for the victorious Scipio, he was rewarded with the title of ‘Africanus’, which he richly deserved. He, more than any other of his compatriots, had ensured that it was Rome, not Carthage, which would be mistress of the Mediterranean in the centuries that followed.

But the Punic Wars had had a traumatic effect. They had brought the Roman Republic several times to the brink of disaster and had in all claimed the lives of perhaps two or three hundred thousand of her men. And yet there, across the narrow sea, the city of Carthage still stood–its population of some 750,000 unharmed, industrious and enterprising, recovering from its recent defeat with almost frightening speed: to every patriotic Roman a reminder, a reproach and a continuing threat. Clearly, its survival could not be tolerated.
‘Delenda est Carthago’
(‘Carthage is to be deleted’): these words were spoken by the elder Cato at the end of every speech he made in the Senate until they eventually became a watchword; the only question was how the job was to be done. At last, in 151
BC
, an excuse was found when the Carthaginians presumed to defend their city from the depredations of a local chieftain. Rome treated this very natural reaction as a
casus belli
, and in 149
BC
once again sent out an invading army. This time the Carthaginians surrendered unconditionally–until they heard the Roman peace terms, which were that their city should be utterly destroyed and that its inhabitants should not be permitted to rebuild their homes anywhere within ten miles of the sea. Appalled, they decided after all to resist. The result was a terrible two-year siege, after which, in 146
BC
, the threatened destruction took place, not one stone being left on another. Cato was obeyed: Carthage was deleted.

The Kingdom of Pontus–a hitherto somewhat insignificant state lying along the southern shore of the Black Sea–should have no place in a history of the Mediterranean. Nor would it have had but for its young king Mithridates VI, who for twenty-five years was the principal thorn in the flesh of the Roman Republic. Although by race he and his subjects were Persian, he always liked to think of himself as a Greek, a proud champion of Hellenism who would inspire all the Greek cities to rise up against their Latin oppressors. In 88
BC
he invaded the Roman province of Asia
¹⁷
and engineered a mass uprising which ended in a massacre of some 80,000 Italian residents; then, emboldened by this success, he crossed the Aegean and occupied Athens. Several other Greek cities fell to him in their turn.