This is the first part of a series looking at the structure of the Carthaginian army. Although Carthage has an (unfair!) reputation for being a country of “peaceful merchants who tended to avoid wars,”1 Carthage was, I will argue, without question the second greatest military power the Mediterranean produced – eclipsed only by Rome. If we do not realize this, it is merely because Carthage had the misfortune to fight Rome ‘in the first round,’ as it were.
Carthage is, in particular, the only military power that ever manages to seriously challenge Rome on an even footing, blow for blow, after the Romans completed the conquest of Italy. The Carthaginian military system pushes Rome to the very brink of defeat twice, in contrast to the Hellenistic great powers, the heirs of Alexander, none of which ever force the Romans to ‘dig deep’ into their forces. Put another way: the Romans put Alexander’s heirs to bed mobilizing against them less than a third of the military force it took for Rome to match Carthage. The Carthaginians inflicted more casualties on the Romans in a single day than all of the successor states (a label which does not include Epirus, so no Pyrrhus here; worth noting the Carthaginians beat him too) managed in pitched battle combined. And they did this more than once; I’d hazard they managed it about seven times.2
So in this series, we are going to lay out the structure of Carthage’s armies (alas, we have very little information as to the structure of their navy), because as we’ll see, the Carthaginian military system was quite complex, drawing soldiers from all over the western Mediterranean.
Now there is an a bit of organizational trickiness here: Carthage drew forces from many different places at many different times. In practice, the Carthaginian military becomes visible to us as early as 480 (with the Battle of Himera) and seems to change significantly between this period and the army visible to us in the first book of Polybius, which fights the First Punic War (254-241) and the Mercenary War (241-237). Then the Carthaginian army undergoes another substantial shift visible to us, in terms of its composition, during the Barcid Conquest of Spain (237-218) such that the Carthaginian army that fights in the Second Punic War (218-201) looks very different again. And then Carthage loses its army and so its military forces from 201 to the end of the Carthaginian state in 146 look different again.
My solution here is to structure this treatment around the largest Carthaginian mobilizations, which were those during the Second Punic War: Carthaginian numbers peaked in 215 with something on the order of 165,000 men under arms.3 We’ll work through the components of that force (operating, as it did, in multiple theaters) and for each component of it, we can then note how – as best we can tell – that specific component changed over time.
I should also note what I am not doing here: this is not a full rundown of Carthage’s military history or the Punic Wars; rather it is an outline of the components of Carthage’s land forces. I think a treatment of the Punic Wars on a similar level to our “Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph” series is probably worth doing, but would be a much larger and more involved series than this, because the Punic Wars are quite long conflicts with many twists and turns and often multiple simultaneous theaters. One day!
But first, as always, raising large armies of mercenaries, subject conscripts, vassal warlords and allies is expensive! If you too want to help me invade Italy with a multi-ethnic army of diverse origins in a doomed effort to stop the Roman Republic, you can help by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
(Bibliography Note: Any bibliography for the lay reader looking to get to grips with Carthage likely has to begin with D. Hoyos, The Carthaginians (2010) which provides a solid foundation on understanding the Carthaginian state and society. A solid overview of Carthaginian military history is provided by J.R. Hall, Carthage at War: Punic Armies c. 814-146 (2023). For specific periods in Carthaginian military history, note J.F. Lazenby, The First Punic War: A Military History (1996), then D. Hoyos, Truceless War (2007) on the Mercenary War and D. Hoyos, Hannibal’s Dynasty (2003) on the Carthaginian conquest of Spain, before going back to J.F. Lazenby for Hannibal’s War (1978) on the Second Punic War. G. Daly, Cannae: The experience of battle in the Second Punic War (2002) has, among other things, one of the better run-downs of the composition of Hannibal’s army. On the Gauls in Carthaginian armies, note L. Baray, Les Celtes d’Hannibal (2019), alas not translated. On the Numidians, a key component of Carthage’s army, see W. Horsted, The Numidians, 300 BC – AD 300 (2021), while on the Spanish warriors who fought for Carthage, see Quesada Sanz, F. Armas de la Antigua Iberia: De Tartesos a Numancia (2010) now available in translation as F. Quesada Sanz, Weapons, Warriors & Battles of Ancient Iberia (2023), trans. E. Clowes and P.S. Harding-Vera. You can also find what little we know about Balaerian slingers in the opening chapters of L. Keppie, Slingers and Sling Bullets in the Roman Civil Wars of the Late Republic, 90-31 BC (2023). Finally, one must note N. Pilkington, The Carthaginian Empire (2019), an often heterodox but equally sometimes persuasive reassessment of what we know of Carthage that is intensely skeptical of our literary source tradition and an essential read (for agreement and disagreement) if one is intending to get knee-deep in the scholarship.)
A Brief Chronology
First, before we get into the details, we should lay out the basic chronology of Carthaginian military history, because as we’re going to see, not only does Carthage draw upon a bunch of different sources of military manpower, those sources themselves change over time in their composition and role within the Carthaginian system.
Now we should start with some background here on the nature of Carthage and its control over its core territory in North Africa. Carthage was a Phoenician colony, founded in North Africa (in modern day Tunisia). The population was thus likely a mix of local Libyan peoples, Phoenician settlers and even other maritime peoples (Aegeans, e.g. Greeks). The Carthaginians themselves maintained a clear ideology of being Phoenicians, using a Punic language, worshiping Punic gods and making a clear connection to their mother-city of Tyre, however some modern DNA research has suggested the actual population of Phoenician colonies might have been more genetically diverse than we have generally supposed. Of course, not every resident of Carthage was likely to be a citizen and certainly the impression we get is that some Phoenician ancestry was a requirement for full citizenship.
Carthage was hardly the only such colony in North Africa (Utica, Thapsus (in North Africa), Leptis, Leptiminus, etc. were all such colonies), but there was also a substantial local Libyan population and at least initially Carthage was subordinate to those peoples; we’re told that quite Carthage’s first few centuries after its founding (mid-eighth century) paid tribute to the locals, a relationship that inverted quite dramatically as Carthage became stronger. Carthage seems to begin projecting power overseas seriously in the mid-to-late-500s, though we cannot always see this early process as well as we’d like. By c. 500, Carthage seems to control Sardinia and the western coast of Sicily. Some sign of Carthage’s expanding control in North Africa comes when they are able to block Dorieus (a Spartan prince) from creating a Greek colony in North Africa and then shortly thereafter also destroy his effort to found a colony in western Sicily, between 515 and 510 or so. Unfortunately, we’re not really well informed at all about the armies they used to do this
Instead, Carthaginian armies first start to become really visible to us in the context of the running contest between Carthage and Syracuse for control over the rest of Sicily, which kicks off in the 480s. From the 480s to the 270s, Carthage fights a series of wars with the Greeks on Sicily, the latter generally organized around the largest and strongest Greek city there, Syracuse. There is a tendency for students to be surprised that Carthage – given its apparent power in the third century – is unable to overcome (or be overcome by) Syracuse, but it is worth remembering that Syracuse is a really big polis, on the same scale as Athens or Sparta. Recall that from 415 to 413, the Athenians throw the lion’s share of their military, at the height of their power at Syracuse and lose effectively all of it for their trouble, so Syracuse – at least when well led and organized – is a fairly major power (in as much as any power other than the Achaemenids can be major) in this period.
In any case, the first Carthaginian-Greek war in Sicily begins in the 480s and ends with the Battle of Himera in 480. They’re then back at it from 409 to 405, then again from 398 to 396, then again from 383 to 381 (?), then again from 368 to 367, then again 345 to 341 and again from 311 to 306 and then finally from 278 to 276, Pyrrhus of Epirus shows up to campaign against Carthage on behalf of the Greeks. On the one hand, at any given time in these wars, territorial control often swings wildly between Carthage and Syracuse, but on the other hand zooming out, over the long-term relatively little changes and the whole thing resembles a stalemate: Carthage controls the west of the island, Syracuse the east and the settlements in the middle either manage in the fracture-zone between the powers or submit to one or the other.
Alongside the early phases of this running warfare on Sicily, Carthage is steadily subduing the area around it in North Africa, reducing the Libyan and Phoenician settlements in what is today Tunisia to semi-autonomous subjects. Those communities remained internally self-governing, but were in practice ruled by Carthage and we’ll talk about that relationship in the next post in the series. We can’t fully see this process clearly but by c. 400, Carthage clearly seems to have control over most of its immediate surroundings. Carthage also began interacting quite early with the Numidians, the Berber peoples to the west (generally divided into two kingdoms, Massaesylii and Massylii) sometimes recruiting them and sometimes fighting them. Certainly by the start of the third century if not earlier, Carthage is the dominant power in this relationship.
The Carthaginians are also clearly active in trade in Spain, though it is unclear to what degree the Phoenician settlements there fall under Carthaginian political control and when.
Thus even by c. 480, Carthage is one of the major imperial powers in the western Mediterranean, though hardly the only ‘major player’ and remains so, steadily growing in size and influence over the next several centuries. By c. 300, the Carthaginians have secured control over western Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia, have some small footholds in Spain and most importantly have secured control over most of what is today Tunisia (what the Romans would just call ‘Africa’) and have a dominant if frequently shifting position relative to the Numidians.
That set the stage for the major wars of the third century. Carthage was in a strong position in Sicily after the end of their war with Agathocles (in 306), leading to the Sicilians to appeal to Pyrrhus in the 270s. Pyrrhus, arriving in 278 was able to win significant victories and pin the Carthaginians back to their last major coastal base in Lilybaeum, but was unable to take it (being unable to break Carthaginian naval control) and subsequently forced out in 276 once his support among the Sicilian Greeks ebbed, suffering a nasty naval defeat on his way out for his trouble.
That left Carthage in a dominant position in Sicily (but still facing a potent foe in Syracuse) when in 264 a group of mercenaries (the Mamertines) leftover from Agathocles’ war who had seized Messina – under pressure from Syracuse – appealed to both Rome and Carthage for help. That led to a four(-ish) way war in which two of the sides (the Mamertines and Syracuse) rapidly found themselves rendered irrelevant. The result was the First Punic War (264-241) between Rome and Carthage, fundamentally a war for control over Sicily, although the Romans did invade North Africa (unsuccessfully) in 256.
Carthage loses the war, with Rome consolidating control over Sicily, only to be immediately beset by a new war, the Mercenary War (241-237), when a mutiny by Carthage’s unpaid mercenaries from the end of the First Punic War set off a general revolt of its subjects in North Africa. The Carthaginians win this war, particularly with the leadership of Hamilcar Barca, who is then too politically influential to be left in Carthage, so he is packed off with an army to go do stuff in Spain. The ‘stuff’ he does in Spain from 237 to his death in 228 is to subdue nearly the entire Mediterranean coast up to the Ebro River, with that task then completed by first his son-in-law, Hasdrubal the Fair and then Hamilcar’s eldest son Hannibal.
That sets the stage for ’round two’ with Rome, the Second Punic War (218-201), an absolutely massive war waged across Italy, Spain and Africa, which represents the peak military output of either Rome or Carthage (although the First Punic War, with its massive fleets, probably roughly matches it). Utterly defeated in 201, Carthage is shorn of its overseas empire and much of its more distant African holdings, essentially reduced to ‘merely’ controlling northern Tunisia. However, rapid Carthaginian economic recovery leads Rome to instigate a third war with Carthage, the Third Punic War (149-146). Unlike the previous two wars, this is not an even contest: Carthage by this point is much smaller and weaker a power than Rome. Determined Carthaginian resistance prolongs the war, but Rome is eventually able to seize the city and destroy the Carthaginian state in 146.
Now, one thing worth noting at the end of this brief, potted history is for nearly all of this period, we have only Greek sources (Romans, writing in Latin, only really come in with the Punic Wars and even then our earliest Roman sources – Fabius Pictor – are lost, so we get him processed through a Greek – Polybius). One of the features of the history we do have of Carthage that I suspect results from this is that Carthage seems to lose a lot. But it is, at least until 264, a strange sort of losing: Carthage shows up in our sources losing major battles but then one moves forward a few decades and Carthage’s empire is larger and more prosperous. And then Carthage loses another major battle and yet somehow, a few decades later Carthage is even more powerful.
So either Carthage is the world champion at failing upwards or there is something going on with our sources. And it isn’t hard to really guess what: our key source for Carthaginian history before 264 is Diodorus Siculus, that is, ‘Diodorus the Sicilian,’ a Sicilian Greek writing in the first century B.C. who thus very obviously has a side in Carthage’s long wars with the Sicilian Greeks. Even if Diodorus is doing his best to give us a straight story, which battles are his sources likely to remember or commemorate most prominently: the Time They Really Walloped the Carthaginians or perhaps smaller engagements that they lost? Thus while we cannot know for certain, I find that I suspect Carthage’s battle-record pre-264 is likely rather better than our sources suggest.
Post-264, it seems worth noting that while Carthage loses more often than they win against the Romans, they still manage to deliver Rome some pretty stunning defeats. The notion that Carthaginians are ‘peaceful merchants’ or just ‘unmilitary’ thus seems to be almost entirely empty, a nearly pure product of later stereotypes about ‘unmanly easterners’ rather than a conclusion justified by the evidence. At the very least, by the time Rome was ready to fight Carthage, the Carthaginians very much knew how to throw a punch – indeed, they would punch Rome far harder than any other foe.
That still provides some three hundred years where Carthage is a meaningful military power where we can see their military activities, so as you might imagine, the shape of the Carthaginian army changes a lot over that period.
Component Parts
The next thing we ought to do, to get an overall sense of the system, then, is to lay out the scale of Carthaginian forces at the height of the Second Punic War, representing the largest land mobilization that Carthage ever produced. The size of the mobilization is staggering, as is the diversity of how it was raised: like most imperial powers, Carthage’s army was a diverse medley of soldiers drawn from basically everywhere that Carthaginian power reached. The way these soldiers were incorporated into Carthage’s armies was in turn a product of what their relationship to the Carthaginian state was – citizens, subjects, vassals, allies, mercenary employees.
Our sources, most particularly Polybius, provide us enough detail to get a pretty decent accounting of Carthage’s ‘peak’ mobilization, which comes in 215. Hannibal, of course, had a Carthaginian field army at that time in Italy – he had won the Battle of Cannae (216) the year before – but there were also Carthaginian armies in Spain, Sardinia and Africa, along with an active fleet. Carthage alone of the Mediterranean powers of the era seems to have been able to match Rome’s capacity for multi-theater warfare: whereas Hellenistic kingdoms could really only have one primary theater of war at a time, both Rome and Carthage could wage multiple parallel campaigns simultaneously and did so.
So let’s break down the evidence for what we have.
We can begin with Hannibal’s army in Italy, which Polybius tells us (3.114.5) consisted of 40,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry for the Battle of Cannae (216). We can actually work backwards with just a little bit of guessing to break down this army into its unit composition: Hannibal crosses the Alps with 12,000 Africans, 8,000 Iberians, and 6,000 cavalry, taking some losses in the subsequent battles but also absorbing around 9,000 Gallic infantry and 5,000 Gallic cavalry. Figuring for attrition, the composition of Hannibal’s army at Cannae has to look at least something like around 10,000 African infantry, 6,000 Iberian infantry, around 8,000 mixed ‘lights’ (North African lonchophoroi, which means ‘javelin-men’ not ‘pikemen’ as it is sometimes mistranslated) and Balearian slingers and 16,000 Gallic infantry to make the total. Of the cavalry we might suspect around 5,000 of it was Gallic cavalry and the rest split roughly evenly between Numidian cavalry from Africa and Iberian cavalry (both of which we’re told Hannibal has).
We then need to modify that force for Hannibal’s losses at Cannae: he lost 4,000 Gauls, 1,500 Iberians and 200 cavalry, but was reinforced late in the year (Polyb. 3.117.6; Livy 23.13.7) with 4,000 more Numidian cavalry and 40 elephants. That leaves Hannibal in 215 with an army of roughly 50,000: 10,000 African infantry, 12,000 Gallic infantry, 4,500 Iberian infantry, 8,000 mixed ‘lights’ (lonchophoroi and Balearian slingers), around 5,000 Gallic cavalry and perhaps 10,000 other cavalry, of which we might guess that maybe 2/3rds were Numidian and 1/3rd Iberian.
At the same time in Italy there is a second Carthaginian army operating in Bruttium (modern Calabria; Hannibal is operating out of modern Apulia) under the command of Hanno with 17,000 infantry composed mostly of Roman socii that have defected to Hannibal, along with 1,200 cavalry, mostly Spanish and Numidian (Livy 24.15.2).
The thing is Hannibal does not have Carthage’s largest army. One of the mistakes students make in assessing the Second Punic War is focusing – as most modern treatments do – almost entirely on Hannibal. But for Carthage, getting reinforcements to Hannibal is very hard – Rome at this point has a strong navy so they can’t easily sail to Italy – but the war is also very active in Spain. Carthage had come to control the Mediterranean coast of Spain as a result of the conquests of Hamilcar Barca (we’ll discuss this more when we get to these guys in a couple of weeks) and Rome was seeking to tear that part of the empire away.
Carthage had three generals operating in Spain by 215 – Hasdrubal and Mago Barca (Hannibal’s brothers) and Hasdrubal Gisco. Livy reports the combined strength of all three at 60,000 (Livy 23.49) and once again with some careful tracking through Livy and Polybius we can basically break this force down to roughly 24,000 African infantry (a mix of Hannibal’s troops left behind and reinforcements brought by Mago), a touch less than 2,000 African cavalry, and the remainder – about 34,000 – mostly Iberian troops along with some small units of Gauls (300 from Liguria) and Balearian slingers (500). We can be fairly ‘rough’ with these numbers because we’re dealing with ‘paper strengths’ that are going to be off to some degree in any case – the point here is a rough approximation of an estimate, because our sources aren’t going to get better than that.
In addition, there was a Carthaginian army dispatched to Sardinia to try to retake it, a force Livy reports as being roughly the same size as the reinforcements Mago brought to Spain, which would mean 12,000 infantry and 1,500 cavalry, probably nearly all African (Livy 23.23.12).
Finally, Carthage maintained a force still in Africa. Hannibal had, at the war’s outset, transferred to Africa some 13,850 Iberian infantry, 870 Balearian slingers and 1,200 Iberian cavalry, while redeploying some 4,000 Metagonians (from what is today eastern Morocco) to Carthage as well.
Taking all of that together we can estimate very roughly (with some rounding) that Carthage has, under arms, in 215:
- 50,000 African infantry
- 17,000 Italian socii
- 12,000 Gallic infantry
- 52,000 Iberian infantry
- 10,000 various ‘lights’ (including at least 1,370 Balearian slingers)
- 21,000 cavalry of which probably roughly
- 5,000 are Gallic cavalry
- 5,000 are Iberian cavalry
- 11,000 are African and Numidian cavalry (with the Numidians probably the larger share)
For a total of roughly 162,000 men under arms. Notably missing from this total are any Carthaginian citizen troops, but for reasons I’ll get to below, I do think there probably were some in North Africa. For comparison, the peak mobilizations of the major successor states (the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms) are probably around 80,000 men. Carthage is doubling that mobilization and very nearly matching Rome’s own maximum mobilization (around 185,000 men).4
Carthaginian Citizen Soldiers
Now you may have noticed something a little odd for the Carthaginian army implied by the figures above: there aren’t any Carthaginians in it. And that tends to be one of the core things that folks ‘know’ about Carthaginian armies, which is that these were ‘mercenary’ armies, where Carthaginians only served as officers. That is, after all, more or less directly what Polybius tells us and historians ancient and modern tend to take Polybius at his word. And while Polybius is being more than a little sneaky with his description of Carthaginian armies as mercenary in nature, the idea that Carthaginians didn’t serve in quantity in Carthaginian armies is at least half true, but with important geographical and chronological limitations.
Here, we are interested in the Carthaginian citizens themselves. And we begin with the first exception to the idea that Carthaginian citizens didn’t fight, the chronological one: Carthaginian citizen armies are actually very common everywhere (that is, both at home and abroad) in the fifth and fourth century. Diodorus (11.22.2) reports ‘Phoenicians’ in the Carthaginian army for the Battle of Himera (480) which are likely Carthaginian citizen soldiers we hear of Carthaginian citizen soldiers in later Carthaginian expeditions to Sicily in 409 too. As late as 339, at the Battle of the Crimissus, the Carthaginian army includes, according to Diodorus, a Sacred Band of Carthaginian citizens several thousand strong (Diod. Sic. 16.80.4) which seems to be a picked force from a larger body of Carthaginian citizens, given that he describes its members as distinguished even among the citizens for valor, reputation and wealth.
Now in most treatments the next thing that will get said is that in the third century – when both the First (264-241) and Second (218-201) Punic Wars occur – the Carthaginians changed this policy and citizens stopped serving except as officers. But I think that perhaps misses what is really happening here and the reason has to do with the perspective of our sources: we have no Carthaginian sources or even North African sources. What we have are the reports primarily of Romans (who fought Carthage), Greeks on Sicily (who fought Carthage) and mainland Greeks like Polybius, who relied on the other two. My point is not necessarily that these sources are hostile to Carthage (though they are), but rather that their focus is directed. We are seeing Carthage like one would see a statute in a dark room lit entirely from one side: only half the statute will be illuminated.
Our sources are very interested in the armies that Carthage sends against Syracuse and Rome and almost entirely uninterested – or uninformed! – about the forces that Carthage might muster in other places. We only see Carthaginian North Africa clearly in brief snippets: when a Greek or Roman tries to invade it (310, 256, 204and 149) or in the context of a major revolt like the Mercenary War (241-237) which draws our sources attention.
But what do we see whenever the action shifts to North Africa? Citizen soldiers in Carthage’s armies. While Diodorus inserts into his narrative a line about how the Carthaginians were unprepared for fighting when Agathocles (tyrant of Syracuse) lands his army in Africa in 310, they quickly manage to put together a citizen soldier army – Diodorus says of some 40,000 soldiers, but Diodorus’ numbers here are often useless (Diod. Sic. 20.10.5-6). We don’t hear anything about citizen soldiers during Rome’s unsuccessful invasion in 256 (during the First Punic War), but when Carthage’s expeditionary army (returned from Sicily at the war’s end) revolts in 241, Carthage immediately raises a citizen army to put down the revolt and succeeds in doing so (Polyb. 1.73.1-2). Likewise, when P. Cornelius Scipio soon-to-be-Africanus lands in North Africa in 204, the Carthaginians raise citizen forces (alongside all of their other troops) to try to stop him and Carthaginian citizens formed a major part of Hannibal’s army at Zama (202; Polyb. 15.11.2-4), including both infantry and cavalry.
And of course, when Rome returned for the final act in the Third Punic War (149-146), Carthage – largely shorn of its empire – responded by mobilizing a citizen force to defend the city, alongside freed slaves (App. Pun. 93-5) and resisted fairly stoutly.
In short, with the exception of M. Atillius Regulus’ invasion of 256, every time Carthaginian Africa is ‘illuminated’ for us we see Carthaginian citizen forces. Now our sources often present these forces as basically ‘scratch’ forces, raised in a panic, but while the Carthaginians sometimes lose the battles that result, these armies are not a ‘rabble’ by any means. Carthaginian citizen forces were evidently sufficient to defeat their own mercenaries and the Libyan revolt in 241. At Zama (202), the Carthaginian citizens form the second rank of Hannibal’s army and while Polybius is quick to lean into stereotypes calling them cowards (for not reinforcing the first battle line, composed of mercenary troops), in practice what he actually describes is that the Carthaginian citizen line is able to throw the Roman hastati back and is only forced to retreat by the advance of Scipio’s second line of principes (Polyb. 15.13.5-8).
My suspicion is thus that Carthaginian citizen soldiers may have never fully gone away, but rather they may have been confined largely to operations in North Africa. It makes a degree of sense that the Carthaginians might want to wage their imperial wars almost entirely with auxiliary troops recruited from their dependencies (or paid for as mercenaries), with Carthaginian citizens serving only as generals and officers, while reserving their citizen soldiers for operations closer to home. And there must have been more of such operations than we are aware of. Remember: Carthaginian armies really only become fully visible to us as they interact with Greek and Roman armies, but obviously Carthage must have accomplished the subjugation of much of North Africa, must have managed to subordinate (if not subdue) the Numidians, must have been able to hold that control through military strength (for our sources are very clear that Carthaginian control was often resented) and finally must have been able to also deter the Saharan, Berber and Lybian peoples on their borders.
In short, there is almost certainly quite a lot of Carthaginian campaigning in Africa which we can’t see clearly and it is possible that Carthaginian citizen soldiers continued to be active in these operations throughout. In that case, Carthage may well have kept its citizenry in some degree of readiness for war, which may explain why substantial bodies of Carthaginian citizen soldiers seem to be available and militarily effective so quickly when Carthage’s core territory in Africa is threatened. That said, short of some very convenient (and very unlikely) Punic inscriptions showing up, this remains merely a hypothesis; our sources offer no hint of this and indeed Polybius states the opposite, that the Carthaginian citizenry was broadly demilitarized.
Carthaginian Arms and Tactics
Of course, if Carthaginian citizens did sometimes fight, that raises a key question: how did Carthaginian citizens fight? With what arms and tactics?
The first answer is that our evidence is infuriatingly limited here. After all, Carthaginian citizen soldiers do most of their fighting visible to us relatively early where our main sources are writers like Diodorus, who – because he is writing a universal history covering everything from the earliest mythology (he includes the Fall of Troy) down to his own day (mid-first century B.C.) – rarely gives a lot of details. Normally we might supplement this with visual evidence in artwork or equipment deposited in graves, but there is very, very little of this. That point has sometimes been taken to reflect Carthage’s ‘unmilitary’ character, but it is worth noting that prior to 146, we have similarly little archaeological or representational evidence of the Roman Republic’s armies and no one accuses the Romans of being ‘unmilitary’ in character.
What evidence we do have suggests that the Carthaginians largely fought as heavy infantrymen in a manner not too different from Greek hoplites. Now I want to caveat that immediately to say this doesn’t mean they fought as hoplites – it is certainly possible but by no means necessarily or certain that the Carthaginians might have adopted weapons or tactics from the Greeks. The Levant had its own infantry traditions on which the Carthaginians might have drawn which included heavy armor and large shields. At the same time, as noted, it seems like Phoenician colonies drew in a lot of Aegean (read: Greek) settlers, so it would hardly be shocking of the Carthaginians did adopt Greek armaments.
However, I want to pause for a moment to draw one point of important clarification: at no point did any Carthaginian or any soldier in Carthaginian service that we know of, fight in a Macedonian-style pike phalanx. The idea that the Carthaginians adopted this style of fighting is based entirely on old mistranslation of lonchophoroi as ‘pikemen’ when in fact the lonche is a light spear and these are light infantry javelin-men fighting in support of African heavy infantry. We’ll talk more about them next week.
We have a few small engravings (small engraved impression seals called ‘scarabs’) from Carthage and Phoenician settlements in Sardinia, which depict soldiers and they show men with large apparently circular shields and spears.5 Numidian royal monuments, which may be drawing on Carthaginian material culture (it would have been high status) feature large round shields as a design motif and one intriguing monument, a statue base excavated in Rome, has been supposed by Ann Kuttner to possibly be a Numidian comission showing Numidian arms (or perhaps the captured arms of Carthaginians?) and shows a large round shield of the same type seen on their royal monumnets, alongside tube-and-yoke cuirasses (two of which are set up as trophies) and plumed helmets of the pilos/konos type (a kind of Hellenistic Greek helmet).6 And our literary sources regularly describe the Carthaginians as forming heavy infantry battle lines (using the word φάλαγξ, phalanx, to describe them) and report Carthaginians as wearing helmets and armor, with large shields and spears.7
On that basis, both Gregory Daly and Joshua Hall (both op. cit.) conclude that the Carthaginians must have fought rather a lot like Greek hoplites and I think this is both basically correct and probably the best we can do. By the Punic Wars, we have hints that Carthaginian troops (both citizen and subject from North Africa) may also be adopting Italic equipment, which I’ll get into more in the next post: by the end of the Second Punic War and certainly by the Third Punic War, Carthaginian soldiers may have looked actually quite ‘Roman’ in their kit.
All of that said, as is obvious from the forces Carthage arrayed for the Punic Wars, Carthaginian armies included far more than just citizen soldiers – indeed, many Carthaginian armies evidently included few if any Carthaginian citizens outside of the officer corps. So to better understand Carthage’s armies, we are going to have to branch out to think about their other forces, which we’ll begin to do next week.
- J.H. Thiel, A History of Roman Sea-Power Before the Second Punic War (1954), 334. To say that this reputation runs afoul of our sources would be an exercise in staggering understatement. Instead, it seems extraordinarily clear to me that Carthage’s reputation for being peaceful and un-military derives almost entirely from orientalist stereotypes about quiescent ‘Easterners.’
- Calculating the combined Roman losses from the River Aous, Cynoscephalae, Thermopylae, Magnesia, Callinicus and Pydna is necessarily a bit of guesswork (Aous has no reported casualty figure for the Romans, for instance), but the heaviest losses of the bunch were almost certainly Callinicus (2,200 lost, including captured), with the rest all likely below 1,000 a piece. If we generously assume 15,000 Roman losses for all of them together, individual Carthaginian victories at Drepana (249), Trebia (218), Trasimene (217), Cannae (216), the Upper Baetis (211) all meet or exceed that figure. Catastrophic Roman fleet losses to storms in 255 and 253 along with the combined Carthaginian-victory-plus-storm at Phintias (249) also well exceed those figures. The Battle of the Bagradas River (255) comes in just short of our 15,000 figure, but given how generous that is to the heirs of Alexander, we probably ought to include it. So we might argue that fighting the Carthaginians inflicted more casualties on the Romans in a day than fighting the Hellenistic kingdoms did on at least seven occasions; nine if we count storms. Of course Roman losses to disease and other sorts of attrition in both wars would have been higher, but this considers only battle deaths.
- That is double the peak mobilization of any other ancient Mediterranean state not called ‘Rome.’
- For more on maximum mobilization figures, see of course, Michael J. Taylor, Soldiers & Silver: Mobilizing Resources in the Age of Roman Conquest (2020).
- Hall, op. cit., 29, fn. 15.
- See W. Horsted, The Numidians 300 BC -AD 300 (2021). Osprey volumes of this sort vary wildly in quality, but Horsted’s is quite good and one of the few sustained efforts at reconstructing Numidian warfare in detail.
- E.g. Plut. Tim. 27-8.
I know you said that you won’t be really going into the Carthaginian navy much here, but I would think that at least another plausible notion for where a lot of the Carthaginian citizenry manpower is going is into the fleet. Oar powered warships are enormously crew intensive, and the Carthaginians had a lot of ships. All those ships require rowers, and those rowers have to come from somewhere.
Didn’t everyone except the Greeks use enslaved people for that?
Actually no. Galley slaves were a medieval phenomenon. There’s no evidence for them in the Ancient world and there are at least a couple of major powers (Rhodes, Athens) we know for sure employed citizen-sailors just as their land armies employed citizen-soldiers. (I think Rome treated sailors as lower status than soldiers and was willing to use freemen and non-citizens as rowers, but not slaves, but I’m not an expert. Maybe our pedant host can weigh in.)
Ah, thank you!
Rowers mostly came from the “urban poor” of the Republic. These were men couldn’t afford light infantry kit, so definitely low-status. Slaves were occasionally used as rowers – as a remarkable emergency measure, i.e. after massive losses during the 2nd Punic War.
Generally no, not in the ancient period. Greeks, Achaemenids, Phoenicians, Romans, and Carthaginians all used free rowers. It wasn’t always a prestigious job, often the poorest citizens since it didn’t require armour or weapons, but not slaves.
Galley slaves were used in the renaissance and early modern Mediterranean, by French, various Italian states, Ottomans, etc. Hollywood, for whatever reason, really likes ancient galley slaves eg in Ben Hur.
Ben Hur shows why ancient fleets didn’t use slave rowers: galleys need to keep moving, and having all your slaves panic guarantees getting rammed. By the renaissance fighting styles and galley construction had changed sufficiently for slaves to be more practical.
Possibly of relevance: ancient warships up to the trireme used corresponding (up to three) banks of one-person oars. Renaissance galleys of a similar size used one bank of three-person oars.
(Ancient warships of “4” or above did use multiple-person oars, e.g. the 4 itself was 2+2, and some renaissance galleys used what they called the alla sensile system, where each rower had a separate oar.)
IIRC, galley slaves were more of an early modern thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galley_slave
Personally, if I were heading into battle I would prefer not to be in the same boat as people with good reason to want the other side to win.
While slaves in warfare do seem to have had mixed results, I don’t think it universally holds true that they’ll have wanted their masters’ opponents to win unless they are extremely motivated in resentment. Not if the opposing side is neither likely to relent in assaulting their position or provide them with any more freedom as war captives.
Depending on who’s fighting who, the slaves could potentially reasonably expect to be freed. The Barbary States took a lot of white Christians as slaves on their raids, and the British were opposed to white Christian slavery before they were opposed to slavery in general, and they shared this with a lot of European powers even well before galleys became obsolete.
The Christian slaves freed at Lepanto outnumbered the casualties (among them Cervantes, who was wounded and later did four years as a Barbary slave).
But as always in history the record is mixed. The Venetians mixed free and slave (the slaves shackled) at the oars and armed the slaves with swords to defend themselves against boarders.
“Personally, if I were heading into battle I would prefer not to be in the same boat as people with good reason to want the other side to win.”
While this makes sense in general, it makes somewhat less sense for galleys since, well, you’re literally in the same boat. Even if the slaves hate you, they’ll drown too if your ship gets rammed.
Yeah but sometimes you get boarded instead, and your slaves would very much like you to lose a boarding action.
I believe the opposite is true. More or less everyone preferred free rowers unless they were really short of manpower, presumably because the extra 10% of effort you could get out of free rowers was tactically vital
OGH has mentioned in the past that ancient warships were optimized for speed over range, and that they generally had to beach the ships every night so that the crews could eat/sleep/do their business/etc.
If that’s the kind of ship you’ve got to work with, enslaved rowers seem like an obviously bad idea.
Massively over-simplifying, ancient galley warfare is about ramming the other ship. Speed, acceleration, rapid turns. Your rowers need to be healthy and also well trained. Search for videos of “trireme Olympias” for the modern reconstruction in action, and think about how much coordination is needed to keep 85 oars per side from bashing each other at speed. Manacles, chains, and guards as seen in Ben Hur would all be dead weight that slows you down.
Renaissance galley warfare is about boarding and fighting hand to hand, and shooting with an ever-increasing number of guns. You don’t need to be fast and agile. Prisoners and slaves are enough to make the ship move, they’re cheaper, and can’t vote against you afterwards.
I’m sure the Carthaginian navy will be examined in more detail as this series progresses. Until then maybe listen to the US Naval History podcast with Bret about ancient naval warfare:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ancient-naval-warfare-galleys-strategy-tactics-more/id1532555765?i=1000629891482
carthago erigenda est
I’d generally expect they’d try to get their rowers from the classes and subjects too poor to afford the gear of heavy infantry and keep their wealthier citizens as heavy infantry.
Given that popular imagination likes to reuse tropes between Romans and the British, surely the Carthaginians should map onto being those dastardly Puns.
I think both Wilhelm II and Mussolini, speaking from a classical pro-Roman perspective that portrayed Carthage as a despotic dominant naval power, liked to compare Britain to Carthage.
IIRC the French did that as well, as both the 18th cent Ancien Regime and Revolutionary France would compare themselves to the Romans (as a dominant continental land power), then “the Perfidious Albion” shall be their Carthage.
To be horribly offensive: no, France corresponds to Syracuse. Come on, they even have the alternation of republics and empires thing.
I’ve read that some ultra-right-wing, Russian-imperialist propaganda today identifies Russia with Rome and America with Carthage, as well.
I think Russia identifying with Rome has been a thing for centuries.
@mopman43: Yes; after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, Moscow began to identify itself as “the Third Rome.”
Of all the nations, I would not credit the British with successfully fighting off the tide of Puns conquering their literature.
Please eventually do a Triumph/Twilight style for Carthage. I love learning about the more peripheral peoples in the Roman world (Carthage, Balkan peoples/states, Celtic peoples). The more unusual the better.
Thank you for being so detailed about your sources. Its very nice to be able to follow up on these to learn more.
Did history for all of high school (that’s all of middle and high school, for many of you). Never learned about Carthage as the focus of a lesson, it was always about their interaction with Rome. That’s why I really appreciate this new series.
If, as postulated here, Carthaginian citizen soldiers mostly served in Africa and especially around Tunisia; and, because those areas were mostly pacified during the 4th and early 3rd Century BC, active military presence there diminished afterwards; then surely it follows that there’s a decrease in Carthaginian citizen soldiery in the period that follows? I get that this entry tries to go against this view, but doesn’t this reasoning rather confirm the traditional, consensus view (in direction at least, if not in extent) rather than refute it?
An “active” military presence means there is enough fighting, involving sufficient numbers, for somebody to think it worth writing down. The absence of such could mean that the Carthaginians don’t have as many troops in the area as before, but it could also mean that the locals have learnt that open revolt against Carthage won’t succeed. The absence of Carthaginian citizen soldiers overseas would therefore be because they’re needed to hold down the area immediately around Carthage itself.
It would probably depend on what you mean by “decrease.” Does “decrease” mean that the average number of Carthaginian citizen soldiers deployed on campaign is less? Or does “decrease” mean that the city abandons the martial traditions of the citizenry and discards their personal arms and armor?
In the former case, yes, most places that pacify a large empire “decrease” their military presence compared to what they were fielding while that empire was being won.
In the latter case, not necessarily, because we see the Carthaginian citizen soldiers being reasonably effective (i.e. capable of at least contesting the field with Roman legions rather than shattering as many other armies in the Mediterranean did) right on up through the Punic Wars and up to the end of the Carthaginian state.
So is the ‘Carthaginian Trader’ idea, the notion that one major source of Carthaginian hegemony was that they were simply better than anyone at moving urban-manufactured goods into tribal markets, false in your opinion?
‘Carthaginian Trader’ and Carthaginians being good at war are not mutually exclusive. Vikings were also successful traders and merchants.
Or the British Empire, whose economic and military success was something of a package deal. The British had an increasingly industrialized metropole that could import cheap resources and export goods into the large ‘captive markets’ of the imperial periphery, and some of their highest-profile conquests (in India) were openly the result of their mercantile class building up enough firepower that they were able to overpower the governments of the subcontinent.
Were they “unwarlike” because their imperial policies and strength revolved in large part around trade? I don’t think it would be accurate to say so.
By the time the Romans rolled along, Carthage had a substantial North African hinterland with large agricultural estates to draw upon, which to me suggests that at least some of those “traders” over several generations had become a similar kind of landlord-aristocrat as would be sitting in the Senate in Rome.
Long time since I read the primary sources, but my impression is that they don’t define the Carthaginians as traders, but rather as sly and “wily” (yes the parallelism is pretty obvious). Which seems just an instance of Russel declination: I’m resourceful, you’re smart, he’s wily.
Given how late our sources are, however, it is unclear how much they are back-projecting the personal qualities of Hannibal to much earlier Carthaginians. Diodorus oft talks about Carthaginian commanders being sly and somewhat tricksters, but he shows precious few instances of this behavior. If anything, there are instances of Carthaginians leaving money on the table to make a point (eg auctioning war captives as slaves instead of sending them back for a much higher ransom). The ones he does mention read frankly more as instances of the Greeks being terribly overconfident than the Carthaginians being particularly deft. Stuff like “evacuate your commander if they are using him as hostage” and “if the notoriously brutal Greek tyrant with a penchant for crucifixions promises to let you withdraw for a large ransom, have a contingency plan for when he tries to renege the promise”. If anything, the impression is that the Greeks were the ones trying (and failing) to be underhanded, and Carthaginian wile mostly consisted of being aware of this fact.
It was probably just Hannibal’s very personal style and generic xenophobia that created the image of the wily Carthaginian, and we modern somewhat incorrectly deduced that they must have been shrewd merchants by juxtaposing categories that in the ancient world were not necessarily connected.
yeah much as I enjoy Hannibal Barca so much, really do want to focus on all the earlier wars someday for Carthage and the Greeks, pre most famous Persia confrontation. Cause they must of had alot of fights over a long, long time.
Still Hannibal!!!! my man, alas.
The Athenians also became reluctant to use citizen hoplites for expeditions after they lost the Ionian War. The orators of the fourth century BCE start to propose sending a few hundred citizens along with foreigners to show they are serious, whereas the Athenian army in the fifth century BCE seems to have been almost all citizens and possibly some metics.
Michael Taylor has another paper “Generals and Judges” in Libyan Studies which argues that the Carthaginian constitution made generals and civil magistrates two distinct career paths (whereas a Roman consul could preside over reforms at home and conquer a new city).
Although I would think that a consul, given a term of office of only one year, would often not really have time to ram through reforms and conquer much territory, unless he worked very fast.
Yes, but consul was only one step. You’d then retire to the Senate where you could do all sorts of stuff (and possibly get elected to other magistracies)
You’d probably conquer some new territory while consul, and then use the prestige you gained from that to leverage that into getting something else done when your term is up.
I remember reading that article by M. Taylor, our good host shared it back in 2023 in a Fireside. Quite illuminating on the incentives between Carthaginians generals and Roman consuls.
What I wouldn’t give for Bret Devereaux to appear on Jesse Alexander’s “Real Time History” for a Punic Wars series. Wouldn’t it be glorious?
Jesse: “I’m Jesse Alexander…”
Bret: “…and I’m Bret Devereaux!”
Jesse: “And this is a production of Real Time History…”
Bret: “…the only history channel that drinks at every mention of Clausewitz!”
He did appear in Patrick Wyman’s Tides of History discussing the militaries of Rome and Carthage of the Punic Wars era!
https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/episode/5629-rome-carthage-and-the-punic-wars-interview-with-dr-bret-devereaux/
While this would very well be true with a written statute, I think you meant “statue” here?
I do know our dear professor specializes in republican Rome, but the Sassanids certainly challenged the romans (even if the romans did tend to come out on top) as did the huns, vandals, goths…
This *is* pedantry but that is the name of the blog after all.
I do know our dear professor specializes in republican Rome, but the Sassanids certainly challenged the romans (even if the romans did tend to come out on top) as did the huns, vandals, goths…
I was wondering about that myself (especially as someone who has more than a bit of fondness/fascination with the Persians), but I think, in fairness, that his point about “only military power to beat the Romans”) is meant to modify his earlier point about the Mediterranean word (the phrasing is a bit ambiguous, I agree).
Germanic peoples and Huns certainly aren’t part of the Mediterranean world, and Persia isn’t Mediterranean geographically (though it’s sometimes included in the greater Mediterranean in a climate/ecological sense).
I get the impression that there’s an unstated qualifier of referring to a particular time and place in Roman history.
The Ottomans also did okay.
Don’t count, they were rightful Kayser-i-Rûm after all.
Yeah, the Romans did fine in a bunch of their other civil wars too. Alternatively, if changing the state religion militarily constitutes making a new country, Constantine the Great ended the Roman Empire and so the Romans never fought the Ottomans.
I do wonder just from the way you described it if the Carthaginians might not have had an army similar to the early American army? That is, having an elite Citizen lead army whose main job was to garrison and defend their core territories while forming a cohesive core for expeditionary units and a way to rapidly expand their armies with mercenaries/levies/allied troops without losing cohesion? Allowing them to have the best of both worlds where the elite heavy infantry are often enough to “hold down the fort” in Africa and discipline raiders without constant fighting before then becoming officers for other allied forces as a strategic multiplier?
So Hannibal absorbs around 9,000 Gallic infantry but then ends up with 16,000 at Cannae? Where did the other 7,000 come from, or is that “9,000” supposed to be “19,000” or something?
Assuming no errors, I would take it as meaning that his initial expeditionary force acquired Gallic allies prior to/in the process of crossing the Alps, and then by the time Cannae came around (which was about two years after the crossing) had acquired further reinforcements from Cisalpine Gaul, which was one of the first areas of Italia to join his side (being the first region of the peninsula he entered and only having been subjugated by Rome within living memory).
Thank you for that post and for starting that series!
“Via Wikipedia, a rough map of Carthage’s territorial control at the beginning of the First Punic War, though I’d argue this probably overstates Carthaginian control in Spain somewhat (New Carthage isn’t even founded yet!)”
Given that the original name of Carthage in its own language apparently translates as “New City”, wouldn’t “New Carthage”, then, mean “New New City”?
“Figuring for attrition, the composition of Hannibal’s army at Cannae has to look at least something like around 10,000 African infantry, 6,000 Iberian infantry, around 8,000 mixed ‘lights’ (North African lonchophoroi, which means ‘javelin-men’ not ‘pikemen’ as it is sometimes mistranslated) and Balearian slingers and 16,000 Gallic infantry to make the total.”
Having read about Balearian slingers in that period elsewhere before, I’ve been wondering for a while: How and why did the people of the Balearic Islands of all places got themselves such a reputation for being a lot into and very good at slinging slings of all things? And why them and not someone else from somewhere else?
“In addition, there was a Carthaginian army dispatched to Sardinia to try to retake it, a force Livy reports as being roughly the same size as the reinforcements Mago brought to Spain, which would mean 12,000 infantry and 1,500 cavalry, probably nearly all African (Livy 23.23.12).”
I probably shouldn’t second-guess the military decisions of ancient decision-makers who presumably knew more about ancient warfare than I ever will, but, well, was that wise? Did sending troops to Sardinia get the Carthaginians any closer to winning the war? And if they *would* have somehow won the war, wouldn’t they probably have gotten Sardinia back as a result anyway? That is, was that a kind of “Cardorna and Trieste”-thing?
Looking at that map, I would think it a lot easier for Carthage to support an army in Italy if they first controlled Sardinia. A war between Rome and Carthage is pretty obviously going to hinge on control of the western Mediterranean sea routes, and I gather the Carthaginians did not do well in this regard.
Thank you, fair point.
For the Balearic slingers, I would propose that it would be the kind of thing that might originate in a local skirmish-based warfare of its own populace, and then once it becomes established it kind of iterates itself until it’s something highly developed. Then, once it becomes established as a marketable specialty for foreign military powers, they develop traditions that even more deeply establish it.
It seems to me that it’s always the case with certain groups of people that their traditions of arms and tactics arise from a combination of material conditions and martial tradition with a bit of selection pressure for what works and, depending on their relationships, what becomes incentivized for their component status in a larger army.
It’s like the question of why Italic peoples seem to have not developed a home grown archery tradition. Or why, say, Medieval England (with subordinate Wales) had more of a tradition of longbow use than continental armies did. Sometimes it’s just kind of the way things shake out.
“Given that the original name of Carthage in its own language apparently translates as “New City”, wouldn’t “New Carthage”, then, mean “New New City”?”
You know what’s even funnier? “New Carthage” would eventually become Spanish Cartagena, and the Spanish would found several colonial cities in Central and South America which they would name “New Cartagena” i.e. New New New City.
That probably should be added to the Wikipedia List of tautological place names. (Which does point out that “Cartagena contains a district named Urbanización Nueva Cartagena, literally city new new new city.”)
>I probably shouldn’t second-guess the military decisions of ancient decision-makers who presumably knew more about ancient warfare than I ever will, but, well, was that wise? Did sending troops to Sardinia get the Carthaginians any closer to winning the war?
Sardinia had a large Carthaginian population that’d been annexed by Rome three years after the end of the 1st war.
This population, alongside sympathetic native Sardinians, heard of Hannibals victories, and becoming inspired, revolted against the Romans. Then asked for Carthaginian aid in their revolt (not that hard to get a single ship past the Romans and to Carthage, tbh).
I imagine it would’ve been a bit difficult for the Carthaginian ruling council to go ‘No, can’t be bothered, sorry.’
You don’t wage a war to correct the injustice of the previous war and Rome’s aggression after it only to tell your own people (under hopefully temporary Roman administration), who just took up arms in support of your effort, ‘Actually, screw you.’
“the only military power that ever manages to seriously challenge Rome on an even footing, blow for blow, after the Romans completed the conquest of Italy.”
*Angry sassanian empire noises*
Is any information available on Carthage’s population and the breakdown between citizens, subjects and slaves? I suspect that the citizens might have been rather limited in number hence the reliance on subjects, allies and mercenaries.
Out of interest, when did the famous slingers in Carthaginian employ become Balearian rather than Balearic?
Balearian vs. Balearic is just a spelling difference.
As for Carthaginian population – that is its own messy topic, but our evidence is very limited and we have functionally no means to distinguish by social class.
“it seems extraordinarily clear to me that Carthage’s reputation for being peaceful and un-military derives almost entirely from orientalist stereotypes about quiescent ‘Easterners.’”
It seems to me that those maps show Carthage was west of Rome. And that it ruled territories comparable in area to those of Rome, which suggests they had done just as much conquering.
Admittedly, “fighting” and “conquering” are not the same thing. But perhaps everyone is just responding to the lack of Carthaginian citizen-soldiers in our sources?
Well, what counts as “Eastern” or “Western” isn’t just a strictly geographic matter. Carthage was in North Africa, which, I think, has traditionally been seen as *culturally* part of “the East” by Medieval and Modern Europeans. And it had been originally founded by people from what is now Lebanon.
(Very tangentially related: https://xkcd.com/503/ )
It’s not just about lack of citizen-soldiers. One of Bret’s articles, “Strategy and Cost: Carthaginian Naval Strategy in the First Punic War Reappraised”, he’s for example arguing against a consensus that Carthage’s naval commitment was half-hearted and that’s why Rome eventually won (turns out Carthage invests about the same amount of resources into its fleet, it just has to maintain a baseline mobilisation all the time since it’s a maritime empire, and thus can’t “spike” its fleet manpower the way Rome can). In the opening of that article, he lists a few quotes that are frankly absurdly bigoted.
Also, Bret might be polite in calling it only “orientalist stereotypes”. I’ll not blame anyone about feeling icky that this culture speaking a Semitic language is derided as being cunning merchants but bad warriors.
Also, Bret might be polite in calling it only “orientalist stereotypes”. I’ll not blame anyone about feeling icky that this culture speaking a Semitic language is derided as being cunning merchants but bad warriors.
I don’t think anyone is at risk of conflating Carthaginians with Jews, considering that they’re the religious/cultural/linguistic descendants of some of the big “villains” of the Old Testament.
Carthaginians and ancient Jews are very close, structurally; part of the Bible is the story of a confederation of Semitic villages and city-states struggling to develop into the sort of culturally-unified state that can set borders and negotiate with neighboring empires (it doesn’t really work). The initial Carthaginian pantheon *is* the pantheon of that first Jewish confederation, which didn’t fully whittle down to a single god until after the whole area was conquered (an episode related in the Bible and in Carthage’s founding myth).
Jewish history places Sidon and Tyre fully within the original territory of one of their original tribes, prior to the founding of Carthage. For modern historians, the direct relationship is clear and so are the ways the two groups grew distinct from one another; for ‘race-science’ orientalists, Carthaginians are basically Jews (and therefore basically Babylonians (and therefore basically Mongols)).
>for ‘race-science’ orientalists, Carthaginians are basically Jews (and therefore basically Babylonians (and therefore basically Mongols)).
Ehhh… it really depends on where you look. E.g. Hermann Göring greatly admired Hannibal, and Joachim Fernau (German WW2 propagandist turned popculture ‘historian’ after the war) outright casts the Carthaginians as heroes against the villainous Romans.
Which isn’t particularly surprising, since parallels between Carthage’s position after the 1st Punic- and Germany’s position after the 1st world war aren’t particularly difficult to draw up, and indeed, very explicitly were drawn up.
The Nazis had kind of a weird relationship with earlier versions of racism, asserting “Aryanness” was something historians could infer in historical figures based in part on the fact that those historical figures demonstrated skill in warfare and rulership. Like the “if it quacks like a duck” test but for the ‘master’ race. They also though entire ancient peoples could be Aryan without modern people knowing because they had been surrounded by people who didn’t know what an Aryan was.
So some Nazis thought Hannibal was a White guy from Europe who happened to work for Africans, and some Nazis thought Carthage was a White ethnostate founded by unrecognized Aryans who were driven out of their homeland by dastardly Easterners, and no one has ever really known the line between what Göring said he believed and what he actually believed anyway.
I did know about their likely common origins, yes! I more meant that subjectively, the authors of the Old Testament *perceived themselves* as very distinct and opposed to Phoenician (and by extension, Carthaginian) culture, so if you’re someone who has only a hazy knowledge of the ancient Near East that’s influenced by the Bible, then you probably will think of Phoenicians and their culture as very different from Jews. I would bet many/most Americans, even if they’re not Christian or Jewish, are in that boat, because we live in such a Christian influenced culture (though that’s changing).
>So some Nazis thought Hannibal was a White guy from Europe who happened to work for Africans, and some Nazis thought Carthage was a White ethnostate founded by unrecognized Aryans who were driven out of their homeland by dastardly Easterners,
Maybe, but the aforementioned pophistory author literally complains that an extant bust of Hannibal can’t be accurate since it doesn’t have any semitic features. I highly doubt he was under any illusions concerning the Carthaginians, or Hannibal’s, cultural and linguistic background.
That’s a fair counterargument – I formulated my statement that circuitously because yes, it’s not clear-cut antisemitism and I’d for certain not accuse any of those historians that Bret is criticising for being avowed antisemites. It just shocked me when on reflection I noticed just how close the argument gets to what we’d all agree is an antisemitic stereotype.
But I will freely grant that the stereotyping of “cunning merchants but bad warriors” can also be read as being the Fremen Mirage or even misogynistic. This is one of those overlapping points of bigotry where it can be hard to tell these things apart, although it’s easy to agree that it’s bad.
There’s a theory that blood libel started with Romans remapping things they’d made up to justify fighting Carthage onto Jews during the Revolts. The 1980s Satanic Panic shows that if you remove open references to Jews and Jewish practices from blood libel, the result is remarkably like Classical Anti-Carthaginianism.
Carthage was a Phoenician colony, so their culture was from the eastern end of the Mediterranean.
Also, regarding the issue of Carthage being west of Rome: Bigotry has a funny habit of defying logic and using what look like clearly defined labels in very fluid ways. “Eastern” is basically only defined as “not Western”, where “Western” is “my cultural in-group as a white European, excluding whatever people I currently disagree with”. So “Eastern” can in the same breath mean “Person from a place that nowadays is Muslim”, “Person who is born in the same country as me but has the wrong skin colour” or even “Russian”.
As example of how clearly nonsensical it can quickly become, Benjamin Franklin’s definition of “White” in map form: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/pgu52c/race_of_europeans_according_to_benjamin_franklin/
In this case, what Bret is hinting at is the bigotry of Orientalism, in which continental Europe defined itself in opposition to the areas where Islam is the majority religion, but in classic fluid bigot fashion applies its negative stereotypes not only to the religion, but also to the ethnicity and geography (sort of “These people follow a bad/weak/wrong religion and/because they’re a bad/weak/wrong race and/because they’re coming from a morally corrupting/weakening/unsuitable place”). And that fluidity allows the stereotype to end up being back-projected onto a city-state empire whose time frame of existence does not overlap with Islam at all.
Here’s what Franklin actually wrote:
>>That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.
I’m not convinced he was serious. I think some people he knew had views kind of like this, and he was making fun of them. Swedes are swarthy? Germans are swarthy, except for the ones we’re descended from?
Orientalism was not about the Islamic world or limited to areas of Islamic majority or leadership.
I find your military expeditionary/core split theory very believable; it has a lot analogues throughout history.
A Polybius-ski history of the Ukraine war might talk about the Wagner Group and Kadyrov’s Chechens and the DPR and LPR forces a significant amount, for many periods maybe more than any specific discussion of the Muscovites.
I’d bet the Indian experience of the British Empire was similar; yeah Britain had their Redcoats, but you were more likely to fight other Indians led by British EIC officers. (And in the WWI and WWII the Commonwealth pulled its weight, and even though they were transitioning towards their independence they fought under British command.)
Even America has multiple “tiers” of military, even if ours aren’t recruited from abroad. A German or Russian or Korean or Vietnamese or Iraqi or Iranian history would probably center the Army and the Navy a lot more than, say, the National Guard and the Coast Guard.
I’m sure Polybius would have loved talking about the Great Mercenary Revolt of 2023!
Anyone hear read “The Dead Past” by Asimov?
A long time ago. Oops, we destroyed privacy.
Yes. I assume the connection is that the hero was trying to prove the Carthaginians did not sacrifice their children?
Wait, when did Hannibal receive a reinforcement of elephants? I don’t recall ever reading about Hannibal’s elephants after his initial battles with the Romans in Italy. They all died except maybe one following the battle of the Trebbia, right? He didn’t have any during his long stay in southern Italy as far as I’m aware.
I guess Peter Connolly was wrong when he illustrated a Carthaginian citizen soldier with a pike in his book on Hannibal and the enemies of Rome book from the later 1970s? He wouldn’t normally have been a fellow who would fall for a mistranslation. Or mistranslate himself.
I wonder if later Carthiginian arms resemble Roman ones because they were both copying Celt-Iberian kit?
The Romans only copy a sword and a dagger from Spain – not armor or shields. And the sword actually represents a relatively small change – the Romans seem to have shifted from using the Italic variant of the La Tene I sword to using the Celtiberian variant of the La Tene I sword. Quite modest, all things considered.
Meanwhile, the Carthaginians actually – as we’ll get to – have very little contact with Celtiberians. Carthage’s Spanish troops are with just one notable exception coastal Iberians, who have different kit.
>Although Carthage has an (unfair!) reputation for being a country of “peaceful merchants who tended to avoid wars,”
I’ve been saying this is reputation is nonsense for *checks various forum posts* over a decade!
Finally I can point at a supporting source.
I’m not sure how much, if any, actual evidence there is for this, but pretty much every set of ancient wargaming rules I’ve seen assumes some small quantity of Punic heavy cavalry (sometimes called “Carthaginian Noble Cavalry” or the like) in pretty much every Carthaginian army, including Hannibal’s. (By “small quantity” I mean a few hundred Carthaginians brigaded with thousands of Spaniards and Gauls.) Again, I don’t know how much actual evidence there is for this.
“it is certainly possible but by no means necessarily or certain”
-> “necessary or certain” (or possibly “necessarily certain”)
“we’re told that quite Carthage’s first few centuries after its founding (mid-eighth century) paid tribute to the locals”
I’m not quite sure what wording was intended here (possibly “during Carthage’s first few centuries…it paid tribute”), but as it is, the sentence is grammatically wrong.
> Saharan, Berber and Lybian peoples
A strange wording mixing three different overlapping categories — a purely geographic one, a large ethnolinguistic one — everyone native to North Africa and Sahara west of Egypt was Berber, but it’s a large and diverse grouping — and a historical exonym for a certain, more narrowly geographically defined part of those people —as if they were homogeneous. Better to reformulate this, imo.
“everyone native to North Africa and Sahara west of Egypt was Berber”
Not true now and less true then.
Southern part of modern Libya is settled by Teda people, whose language affiliations are southward – more closely to Daza people in Sahel and less closely to Kanur and such people further in Nigeria. Who are classified as “Saharan languages” officially.
West of Chad, Sahara is in 2nd millennium AD settled by Tuareg people who are clearly branch of Berbers, extending to Sahel.
But the Tuaregs have traditions of having migrated to their present homeland from North, probably from foothills of Atlas. And that migration is guessed to have happened in 4th…5th century AD.
If so, then in 3rd century BC, the people of Western Sahara as far as the foothills of Atlas might have been southern affiliated people.
“a nearly pure product of later stereotypes about ‘unmanly easterners’”
(looks at map) Ah, yes. “Easterners”
Tell me, what geopolitical direction would you call Dutch colonists in Indonesia?
…capitalist?
I’m looking forward to this, as I find the general subject of these kinds of multicultural armies, the idea of how one draws upon various demographics in the absence of something like a standing professional force, and the general idea of how a core demographic can exert such dominance.
It’s the kind of thing that highlights the paradox of Carthage being such an accomplished and interesting society that, due to the quirks of history, leaves is very little first hand evidence.