Hey folks! Fireside this week; next week we’ll be back to seperating out the components of Carthaginian armies, looking at the real backbone of those armies, which are Carthage’s North African subjects.
But for this week’s musing, I wanted to talk a bit about how different historians approach our craft when the evidence is both limited and hostile and Carthage provides a good opportunity to do so. As we noted last week, the evidence for Carthage – its armies, politics, society, all of it – is quite difficult. The literary evidence that we have for Carthage is both very limited (relatively few ancient authors say much about them) and also quite hostile: Carthage’s history was written by its enemies. We know that pro-Carthaginian histories (notably that of Philinus of Agrigentum) existed, but their work does not survive to us. So for any given event or institution, we often only have one source (or at least one real source in cases where we have Polybius and several other authors whose source is also Polybius) and so not only is that source is almost invariably hostile to Carthage, we have no reliable other source against which to compare.
Now in other situations where this is the case – for instance in Greek treatments of the Achaemenids – we have a backup option, which is that we may have archaeology or shorter, more fragmented sources (epigraphy, papyri, temple records) against which to ‘check’ our literary tradition. But here, Carthage gives us very little as well. We have some inscriptions from Carthage, but they’re very few and quite short and limited. Likewise, archaeology has certainly confirmed the presence of Carthage and its Punic material culture, but it struggles to answer a lot of the questions we have.
So we have sources, which are to some degree unreliable, but which we are generally unable to ‘check’ with other kinds of evidence, but those sources are all we have. What is a historian to do?
In practice, there tend to be two responses and Carthage is also convenient as a demonstration here because those approaches can be neatly summed up in the English-language scholars who exemplify them: Dexter Hoyos and Nathan Pilkington.
The first approach – employed by Dexter Hoyos, I’d argue – is to assume that the sources are basically accurate unless you have reason to suppose otherwise. So assuming what Diodorus is saying is not absurd, we assume it happened and often even when what Herodotus or Diodorus is saying seems a bit ‘out there’ (like the size of the armies at the Battle of Himera (480)), we assume the event probably occurred, if perhaps in a more reasonable way (the armies being smaller, for instance). Implausible things (the Carthaginians attacking Syracuse in 480 in coordination with the Achaemenid invasion of Greece) can be discarded, but if there isn’t a good reason to doubt something, then we do not doubt it.
This approach is often married to a ‘positivist’ historical approach, which aims to establish objective facts in so far as they can be nailed down (and less interested what it views as interpretation). At its worst, it can be ‘under-theorized’ – that is, failing to think critically or analytically enough about sources or cause-and-effect and just presenting facts – though I would hardly level that accusation at Hoyos, who is well aware his sources are not always to be trusted.
The alternative, of course is the reverse: rather than assuming the sources are trustworthy, unless proven otherwise, the sources are assumed to be untrustworthy unless confirmed by some other sort of evidence or reasoning. This is, I think, fairly close to Nathan Pilkington’s approach in The Carthaginian Empire (2019). To return to the question of the Battle of Himera (480), Nathan Pilkington, well, questions the existence of the Battle of Himera and indeed contends that there may not have been a meaningful Carthaginian presence on Sicily at all in the early fifth century, because our only evidence that there was are these motivated, untrustworthy Greek writers.
There is a risk, in this kind of approach, for the resulting history to be, in a way, over-theorized. After all, if the sources are untrustworthy, they must be replaced by something. Ideally, they might be replaced by archaeology (this is Pilkington’s preference) and that can be valuable, but as we’ve discussed time and again, archaeology often cannot answer our most important questions. The first danger is that over-theorizing: the ‘blank spaces’ created by discounting the sources are in turn filled with theoretical frameworks, how it ‘must have been,’ which risk ending up as houses of cards: it is one thing to build a theory which fits the available evidence, but another thing to build a theory into the absence of such evidence (Pilkington, I should note, largely avoids this pitfall). But the alternative danger is the ‘council of despair’ – that despite having sources which comment on a period, the historian essentially throws up their hands and declares that nothing can really be known (or at least very little) – whole chunks of history consigned to dark ages created entirely by critique. Naturally, the positivist-inclined historians will rebel against this determination to declare that nothing can be known when there is evidence right there.
For my part, I think readers can guess that I am closer to the Hoyos end of this spectrum than the Pilkington. My tolerance for yawning uncertainty is fairly low, which is why I steadfastly refuse to work on basically anything in the Roman world before 264 when Polybius at last lets me put at least one foot firmly on the ground. But once there, my tendency is to assume the sources are broadly right unless I have a good reason to suppose they’re not. That isn’t to say Pilkington’s book is bad – I don’t think it is, even though I often disagree with it – I think it is valuable precisely because it overturns a bunch of apple carts. It is good and useful to send historians holding the consensus view scrambling to defend it – more often than not they succeed, but the result is a stronger, more clearly reasoned position.
But I think there is a real risk in attempting to read ‘against the current’ of one’s sources, which can become a sort of motivated reasoning. To take another example, I find N.L. Overtoom’s effort in Reign of Arrows (2020) to reframe Antiochus III’s victory over the Parthians as something closer to defeat or at least a clever feint and retreat by the Parthians, when the sources – admittedly, fragmentary and difficult – seem quite clear that they understand Antiochus III to have won a great victory and also we see Parthia brought back under Seleucid control (albeit not for very long) after the campaign. It’s an effort to take a theoretical construct (Parthian feigned flight as both a tactical and operational principle) and apply it against the sources. This, I think, we cannot do unless we have some really good reason to do so (like some clear evidence that Parthia’s position remained strong afterwards; they were vassalized, so evidently it didn’t).
But sometimes some suspicion about the sources is warranted. As I noted in last week’s post, there is an odd pattern in our sources where – up until Polybius kicks in and we have more reliable sources – Carthage seems to only ever lose battles and yet somehow Carthaginian power seems to keep expanding. One is left wondering not if the Greek victories over Carthaginian armies are fake (I don’t think they are) but rather if some Carthaginian victories have perhaps been forgotten or de-emphasized in the retelling.
In either case, there is no sure solution here. Momentum has been building for a while for scholars to be more skeptical – in some cases, extremely skeptical – of our Greek language sources when they discuss non-Greek cultures, especially ones (Persians, Parthians, Phoenicians) they view largely as enemies, an approach which has value if just to act as a ‘check’ on the rest of us (and often more than that). On the other hand, there is a strong pressure towards positivism in publication: no one wants an introductory textbook that just says, “we don’t know” on every page and folks buying books also want to be told what was, rather than what could not be known. I suspect as a result the skeptical approach will remain a strong undercurrent in the scholarship, while major publications continue to be dominated by works of a somewhat more loosely positivist bent.
On to recommendations:
Starting on a bit of a pop-culture note, I really enjoyed Peter Raleigh’s take over at The Long Library on Martin Scorsese’s criminal characters particularly in the context of Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). Peter’s essays on film are always a treat – even though he often picks movies rather more obscure than what I tend to watch – but this is a particularly incisive look at the way Scorsese paints his criminal characters (both protagonists and villains) and how his entire body of work really explores the kind of person and the kind of thinking that leads to that sort of criminality. A particularly good read for reminding you that however charismatic some of these characters (in movies other than Killers of the Flower Moon) are, the point of these movies is almost invariably that their behavior is both socially destructive and also self-destructive.
Meanwhile, on the historical side, I’ve recommended Partial Historians before, but let me do so again, as they have just now gotten to the Gallic sack of Rome (390) and so are starting to move into a period where our sources start to be on slightly firmer ground (though hardly very firm ground even at this point). For those who missed previous recommendations, Partial Historians is a podcast with two historians (Dr. Fiona Radford and Dr. Peta Greenfield) who are moving through the history of Rome on a year-by-year basis, comparing and contrasting the sources we have for each year as they go. It’s a great way to get a sense, especially for these early years (though they are now beginning to move into what we’d call the Middle Republic – historians differ somewhat on the exact start-date for that) how tricky the sources can be. Give it a listen!
And over at Astroclassical Musings, Oliver Clarke, curatorial assistant at the Ashmolean Museum, had as his ‘coin of the week’ a fascinating Punic coin with a pegasus design on its obverse. It’s a wonderful coin and Clarke uses it as a jumping off point for a fascinating discussion of the size of the coin, where the images come from and even the modern history of how the Ashmolean ended up with this particular coin. In particular, he argues that the coin may reflect an effort by Carthage to communicate its claim to control of Sicily, having a coin with Tanit on one side – the chief goddess of Carthage – and the Sicilian Pegasus on the other.
For this week’s book review, I’ll be a bit late to the party and recommend P. Wyman, The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World, 1490-1530 (2021). We’ve touched on the topic of the ‘Great Divergence’ – or as I tend to frame it, the ‘Why Europe?’ question – and The Verge serves as a remarkably readable introduction to the answers to that question. The book is organized not as a dry discussion of these factors, but as a series of nine biographical sketches – a mix of powerful leaders and ‘smaller’ people living within those changes – which serve to illustrate the key factors which Wyman sees as responsible for setting Europe on the path to reshaping the world. The result is a narrative that is engaging to read and strongly grounded, complete with the literary flourish of short passages at the beginnings and ends of the chapters that adopt an almost historical-fiction vividness, attempting to describe the feeling that a figure has of being in a given moment.
The four major shifts that Wyman sees as responsible for the Great Divergence are the specific strain of capitalism that Europe developed, the (re)emergence of states in Europe (albeit very much not yet the powerful modern administrative states of later centuries), the military revolution and finally the printing press, leading to the more rapid dissemination of ideas outside of a narrow elite. This multi-factor approach is well suited for the structure – each chapter focused on a specific person can feature a focus on different elements or blends of these four factors. It also does a good job of reflecting current scholarly consensus in a way that I think is helpful for someone looking to start understanding early modern Europe, providing a platform from which to look at more focused scholarly treatments of specific elements of these factors.
I am, of course, not without my quibbles. While the military revolution is very clearly part of Wyman’s narrative, it is somewhat less prominent than I’d have it. For instance early statements that there wasn’t a clear reason why European ships led exploration and economic predation (piracy and raiding) – Wyman prefers to focus on the economic culture that created the raiding-trading-exploring naval entrepreneurs, which is absolutely a major factor here – struck me as a bit off. The European shipbuilding tradition really did have an edge by the 1500s in producing ocean-going multipurpose vessels that could fight effectively with cannon; there’s a reason that even at vast logistical distance, local fleets of dhows, junks, atakebune and so on found they couldn’t ever quite prohibit European warships from plying their waters, even when they wanted to (a factor that is especially strong in the Indian Ocean, where local shipbuilding traditions were not well set up to exploit gunpowder artillery). From a military perspective, my advice for someone finishing The Verge would be to make T. Andrade, The Gunpowder Age (2016) their next stop, not because they disagree (they don’t), but because the emphasis is different.
That said, Wyman also succeeds in bringing home the cost of this massive change and how disorienting and distressing it was in the moment. What we look back on as the ‘rise of Europe’ at the time felt like conditions in Europe spiraling violently out of control, culminating (outside of the chronology of Wyman’s book, but frequently mentioned) in the 16th and 17th century Wars of Religion (which were as much about politics and economics as religion). And of course the ‘rise of Europe’ in much of the rest of the world took the form of sudden exposure to a rapacious, often cruel and callous system of exploitation, a process that is really only starting as Wyman’s book ends, but which he discusses very clearly. In short then, this is a great book for someone looking to initially get their feet on the ground in addressing the ‘Why Europe?’ question – and an excellent jumping off point (with notes! and bibliography!) for further study of the question.
I’m curious, is there a particular reason why our archeological findings in the Carthaginian Empire are so poor? Is it just that we haven’t explored those regions as much and there is probably more to find, or is there actually less stuff left behind?
Because of Romans’ salt, of course.
Part of it was that the European (specifically, the French) colonizers engaged in a process of deliberate erasure and obfuscation of the Carthaginian heritage of the region in favor of promoting its “Romanness” (and the artifacts and sites that supported that idea) as a justification for their exploitative imperialist and (in Algeria) settler-colonialist regime.
In some cases, Carthaginian and ancient Berber findings were mislabelled or outright destroyed in pursuit of evidence for the region’s Roman past.
That seems a fine way for the French to strengthen the Italian claim to Tunisia. Do you have proof they wanted to do that?
Italy didn’t exist as a cohesive state until the 1860s. The French almost certainly weren’t worried about an Italian claim to Tunisia until the very late 1800s at the earliest, and possibly as late as 1922 or so with the rise of Mussolini.
By this time, they’d dominated North Africa for something like 50-80 years, and had a very strong self-concept of legitimizing themselves through links to the Romans.
I’d bet good money that more archaeologists have picked over Italy than Tunisia. So the archaeological record there should be better.
I have a mostly unrelated question, though linked to the area of how we deal with evidence and speculation. Basically, you’ve talked here before about the average population density in a square mile, and how some areas with higher urbanisation or especially good farmland might have more. But something I’m curious about is whether we have a good idea of what population density might be reasonable for different terrains? After all, if an area is heavily mountainous, boggy, desert, etc, it’s likely to have less farmland and less population. But it’s really hard to find people talking about this as opposed to comparing whole regions or countries (or what would become countries).
Great distinction between “believe by default” vs. “doubt by default”.
One statement caught my attention:
“Implausible things (the Carthaginians attacking Syracuse in 480 in coordination with the Achaemenid invasion of Greece) can be discarded”.
Why is it implausible?
Perhaps there isn’t much credibility to the Achaemenids being able to establish diplomacy so far from their borders, and having terms to offer Carthage that would incentivize a coordinated effort.
Even communicating over that distance was expensive and unreliable at the time, and coordinating operations practically impossible. Just imagine the chain of events:
Persia is planning to attack Greece, and somehow Carthage learns of it. How? They’re not going to have an embassy in Persia, and there’s no good reason for Persia to tell them. That leaves rumor, which would likely take the form of people noticing the army being gathered and then merchants spreading those news as they set sail to other ports. Which means by the time the news arrives in Carthage, the invasion is probably already underway.
But even if not, Carthage would now have to send a letter to the Achaemenid king to suggest “Hey, how about we attack together?”. Which means sending a ship to carry that letter. Or even better, several ships because there is always the chance of the first ship getting lost in a storm. And then the letter arrives like a month later, and the Achemaemenid king has to go “Sure, why not. How about Tuesday?” and send that back, and *then* wait for yet another ambassador to show up to deliver Carthage’s answer. By that time, the Persian army will have gotten bored and sacked Antwerp.
Not to mention of course that there’s not only a language barrier between these people, but also a calender barrier. The same year is given a different count in the two places, and the switchover point might at different times, and of course it gets worse with the months. So even assuming the above exchange were to take place, there’s a good chance the attacks don’t end up simultaneously but a year apart.
And there was also nothing to gain from wasting that many resources and that much elite manpower on exchanging these letters to coordinate. Syracuse interfering during a Persian invasion of mainland Greece was unlikely, and vice versa. There’s no strategic coordination between those regions, so there’s not strategic reserve that gets depleted or tied up by a joint invasion.
So it’s more sensible to assume that the Greek writer is wrong there. Especially because it’s understandable human behaviour to go “Both those evil foreign Others are attacking Us at the same time. They must be in cahoots!”
Carthagwe was in constant contact with Tyre, Tyre and Sidon furnished the ships to support Xerxes’ invasion and the invasion itself would have taken months to prepare and move from inland Asia to the Hellespont. So one can imagine the Carthaginians knowing that Xerxes is going to invade and roughly when, and thinking they might take advantage of it. Not diplomatic coordination, just opportunism.
Language is not a barrier (Aramaic was the common language). Time yes – it would take roughly two months to transmit a message.
Opportunistic (or even synchronized) attacks based on knowledge of other players movements isn’t Coordination, though, coordination involves cooperation. And the specific detail under fire is that they had purposefully gone into it together.
Compare :
1. A knows B will attack C at X (date), so A attacks D at X.
2. A and B arrange to attack C and D at X.
In 1, B doesn’t need to know anything about A’s intentions, and might not even know that D exists. That’s not coordination, though the action is coordinated. Semantics, sure, but this is the pedanty blog, haha.
Basically, opportunism is a plausible explanation for the Battle of Himera, coordination not so much.
But there’s another distinction to be made, between doubting the presence of coordination, versus Pilkington going so far as to deny that the Battle of Himera ever happened, simply because Greek sources are biased/unreliable. It seems these two things are being conflated.
With regard to Partial Historians, how many episodes does it take to get good? I’ve had it recommended to me often by people I trust so I listened to the first episode and did not like it at all, very little information was being conveyed and there was a lot of laughing by the hosts at jokes that weren’t funny to me. But it’s not uncommon for podcasts to get off to a rough start and then get good so I’m wondering if there’s a certain point at which it gets good.
They’re at their best when they have multiple sources to compare/contrast. For a lot of stuff they just have Livy which is a lot less interesting.
The discussion of Carthaginian expansion leads me wonder if perhaps Greek commentators didn’t entirely understand its foundation, as they also had a hard time understanding Rome, more than it was from a stance of innate hostility.
To me, Punic logistics & strategy were far superior to their Greek counterparts. So while Carthage may have been losing signature battles, that simply may not have mattered in the long run if they were driving out enemy armies from key areas and capturing towns here and there. This also could fit with a model where Carthage has the deep resources to sustain wars or sieges longer than any opponent until Rome, and then only after many years. Carthage could also afford (or even profit) from aggressive raiding to drive cities into submission, allowing expansion that doesn’t result in many open battles.
I’d suggest something else at work as well, the Carthagenians seem to have largely stalemated against the Western Greeks while doing very well for themselves elsewhere. It could very well be that for whatever reason they can’t or don’t want to put the effort into cracking Magna Graecia and that gets recorded in the Greek sources, while military successes are plentiful “off camera.”
Similarly, we don’t exactly see the Persians at their best in the Greek sources.
Makes sense to me. Greek and Roman writers themselves may have had few sources. They might not think through the implications of the large-but-vaguely-understood Carthaginian empire/alliance network.
Ehhh… the thing is, when Carthage went directly up against a major polis (Syracuse), it was a mutual struggle for a century before managing to firmly establish itself as the dominant power. We may question Greek narratives, but Syracuse’s continued existence (as well as that of other Sicilian cities of variable allegiance!) is pretty firmly established.
Carthage’s major iberian conquests meanwhile, occur mostly after the 1st punic war.
Which leaves dabbling in Corsica, Sardinia, and of course Africa itself.
I’d very much lean towards Carthaginian high-end military capacity, including logistics, being a relatively young phenomenon. Something that Syracuse in the late 300s and Pyrrhus had to deal with (but one notes that Pyrrhus, with his abysmal logistical base, made it a fight, and Syracuse remained independent). Carthage wasn’t this great, ancient power – it was an old *city*, and if we were to hellenise terms, would’ve been a high-end polis for up to 250 years (~ 550- before 300) but at the time Rome was slowly expanding its power over Italy, Carthage did exactly the same thing in Africa.
Then by the late 300s, Carthage seems to be basically done with its African neighbourhood and more or less firmly established itself on Sardinia and Corsica, and the balance of power shifts, Carthage now has its hands free to really move its resources around, and Syracuse goes from near-peer competitor to screwed, although Pyrrhus’ existence and then the Roman/Carthaginian conflict manage to extend its independence for a bit.
Now, Carthage still got there, whereas Syracuse didn’t. It still managed to operate in two major theatres (Africa and Sicily) plus two then-minor ones (Sardinia and Iberia) whereas Syracuse didn’t. So it *was* superior.
But it was a struggle, and I’d argue that Carthage in the first half of the 300s wasn’t *far* superior. Just a bit. Similar to how Rome was superior to the Samnites, fighting in multiple theatres, but it was still a struggle.
That is a reasonable interpretation as well, but I might suggest that Carthage’s ability to sustain operations at all was a rather significant point. Athens’s invasion of Syracuse was completely crushed, while Carthage kept the fight going (intermittently) for two centuries, while not so overstretched they were unable to maintain their position in Libya, nor unable to act elsewhere. I will grant their Logistics in 400 were likely significantly less-developed than 300, but they were potentially still ahead of most opponents in 400 already.
As a comparison, I was thinking of the impressive, yet slowly-fading army of Pyrrus. Despite his many talents, network of allies and experienced soldiers, Pyrrus could barely hang on in a similar environment for more than a few years. Persia, despite its vast resources, struggled to place and maintain powerful forces into the field in Greece.
“As I noted in last week’s post, there is an odd pattern in our sources where – up until Polybius kicks in and we have more reliable sources – Carthage seems to only ever lose battles and yet somehow Carthaginian power seems to keep expanding.”
I don’t think this is necessarily a contradiction. Our sources are wealthy, literate, and above all MILITARY men. This means they’ll naturally emphasize military victories. You see this in any profession–get a carpenter, a plumber, and an electrician to do an inspection of a newly constructed house and you can see this in action. The issue is, military power isn’t the only source of power. Rome herself is an example of this: Roman influence extended far beyond her boarders due to what can be termed the soft power of Rome. Negotiating, standardizing currency, creating a language that other peoples can use to communicate effectively, strategic marriages or assassinations, that sort of thing. Even fashion can be weaponized if you do it right.
While I agree that it’s unlikely that any civilization constantly getting its collective butt kicked in battle would have a lot of soft power (Rome could speak softly because she carried an awfully big stick), it wouldn’t take a lot of victories to prop up enough soft power to sway people to turn to your banner. The victories could fly under the radar of our sources if they were of the “I’ll help you against your neighbor if you help me over here” variety. This would be particularly true if the Carthaginians focused on smaller Big Men, folks that would have some power but not enough to warrant entry in history books of the time (the equivalent of local knights or minor barons).
Do you have any more specific examples of this kind of Roman soft power?
Surely the two key things are: lucre and nice things, that is: (1) trade, offering the ability to make money; and (2) goods, from prestige items like jewelry/fashion, to good wine.
A practical example: a few Finnish grave from Roman imperial era, richly festooned with burial goods, include Roman wine ladles. This shows that two thousand kilometrs from the border of the empire, a local magnate would have as a prized possession an artifact that was supposed to be used to drink wine, which was not grown anywhere near. In fact, most likely, any wine imported to Finland would most likely be badly spoiled, so the whole point of having such an artifact for drinking wine was likely the prestige of wine-drinking. As nobody else in the vicinity but the Romans cultivated wine, this was essentially prestige of the empire.
Second: the coins of barbarian monarchs, even centuries after the dissolution of the Western empire, carry ever cruder copies of the Roman ruler portraits. Sometimes, they carry “writing” that is purely decorative, made by analphabets for analphabets. The Roman style of coin carried prestige.
Third: the business of swords. Finland has hundreds of Germanic swords found in burials. Mostly, those swords were manufactured in Germanic smitihies near the imperial border, often made from Roman prefabricated forms. This demonstrates the strength of trade networks that tied Roman world with the European backwaters.
would have as a prized possession an artifact that was supposed to be used to drink wine, which was not grown anywhere near. In fact, most likely, any wine imported to Finland would most likely be badly spoiled, so the whole point of having such an artifact for drinking wine was likely the prestige of wine-drinking.
@FinnishReader,
Did they grow other types of fruit for fruit wines? Either then, or for that matter, now? E.g. apples, pears, cherries etc.?
Wine can keep for many years. Many varieties are *better* when they’re a few years old.
And drinking old wine long predates refrigeration. Source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10xsx7/when_did_the_vintage_of_a_wine_gain_importance/
I think evidence of the travel of Roman goods does not necessarily imply Roman cultural or political influence. Carthage being able to provide access to purple dye does not by itself account for their dominance of surrounding territories and distant islands in the absence of any other supporting evidence.
Existence of trade goods would not imply influence, but existence of luxury goods that
1) are consciously placed in a big man’s grave
2) relate to the cultural practices completely foreign to the area
are signs of cultural influence. They show that it was fashionable for a local hegemon to drink wine (or mead, for that matter) with ladle. This is the core of soft power: your prestige makes it prestigious for barbarians out of your direct political reach to imitate you.
I think that is begging the question of these being luxury goods specifically because they are Roman rather than because they were luxurious. Are distant Gauls drinking with Roman ladles because they are specifically Roman, or because they’re convenient, look good, and Rome are the ones manufacturing them in bulk and/or out of fine materials or craftsmanship?
And even if it was because of the prestigious character of Rome, that still begs the question of Rome being able to leverage that prestige in a manner comparable to its military power, as has been asserted as an alternative mechanism of Carthaginian hegemony.
Well, considering that wine is, even today, an import, the drinking of wine was an extremely expensive thing to do. The ladle was part of the cultural package, both imported from Rome. (The Roman Empire and wine-growing were co-extensive in Western Europe. And @Hector, Finland doesn’t have much of a tradition of fruit wines.) Considering that wine is an aquired taste, and that imported wines were of such bad quality that until modern period, it was typical in Northern Europe to spice them for better taste, I would say that using wine and wine ladles, is a very typical example of prestige good that is prestigious mainly because it is expensive and demonstrates class. (This was the case for wine here until 1990s or so.)
I would think it is clear that in Finland, any Roman cultural impact was so indirect that there was no way it could translate to political influence. However, closer to the limes, there is clear evidence that this was the case. Romans used various honorary titles as a way to integrate barbarians into their system, and continued this for centuries after the fall of Western Rome. Considering that every Western monarch was, for centuries, depicted wearing Roman court dress, regardless of their political stance towards (the Eastern) empire, this shows very well the lasting influence of Roman soft power.
And here, the soft power is not the same as the power to command. It is more about the prestige, legitimacy and the power of persuasion.
Alcoholic beverages have merits besides the flavour to motivate their import.
Were Romans using these honorary titles to integrate people into their systems outside of the territory that they had established institutional control over through their military activities?
Reference to later European monarch titles is irrelevant. That Rome had a major cultural prestige is not in question. The thing that I am challenging is that Rome was capable of wielding soft power in a manner comparable to military power in the absence of that, such as can be attributed as a possibility for Carthage having hegemony over neighbouring peoples.
I may be confused, but why would the Finns not have been able to use their Roman-made wine ladles to drink beverages other than wine?
“Sometimes, they carry “writing” that is purely decorative, made by analphabets for analphabets. The Roman style of coin carried prestige.”
Now I’m really curious what their fake letters look like. Got any links?
I was writing from memory, but a quick search gives numerous links, like https://doi.org/10.1484/M.WSA-EB.5.138049
@Finnish Reader,
Thanks for the context! As you indicate, I guess wine ladles could also be used for mead?
On the topic of “cultural soft power”, a similar (premodern) example I was thinking of is the spread of some aspects of Islamic culture historically, beyond the zone where Islam itself as a religion spread, and beyond the zone where Islamic powers were able to conquer territory. I lived for several years in the East African country of Madagascar, and it was interesting to see how the culture there had incorporated certain aspects of Islamic culture, even though they had never converted to Islam or been incorporated into Islamic polities. The days of the week are named after the Arabic numerals (“ahad”, “ithnayn”, etc.); some ethnic groups have the fashion of referring to men and women as “Father of X” or “Mother of Y” instead of by their names; certain clans abstain from pork and scaleless fish; Arabic writing was picked up to a small extent on the east coast although it was restricted to high-value sources like “magical” writings, historical archives etc.. It’s an interesting example, to me, of how “soft power” could spread even in a place that was geographically marginal enough that there was no real “hard power” or even religious/ideological power to back it up.
In addition to what others are talking about, I invite you to consider what such evidence would look like. A lot of it isn’t going to show up in the records because the records are written by wealthy military men, for wealthy military men. Caeser isn’t going to write about the towns he convinced to surrender, because that doesn’t look good back home. “The Art of War” explains this–and remember, that book wasn’t written as a guide for generals, but as a guide for how princes should judge generals. Obviously Sun Tsu was not Roman, but the same biases apply: People of the past under-valued effective non-combat methods for dealing with problems so much that “Maybe don’t fire the guy who won a war without killing half his troops, he’s actually one of your best generals” was a thing someone had to say.
It’s also worth noting that there was at least one invasion of Roman territory by a group looking to get under Roman dominion. They FOUGHT ROME because they wanted to BECOME ROMAN (they fought because Rome didn’t want to take in a bunch of aggressive foreigners at that time). This is rather strong evidence that Rome had applied some serious soft power–people don’t risk their lives to join you if they don’t think you’re worth joining, and people don’t think foreign nations are worth joining if some groundwork hasn’t been laid by diplomats. In today’s world Meso- and South Americans fleeing the chaos of their own countries aren’t going to Haiti. They’re coming to the USA. Because the USA used to have a tremendous amount of soft power (in the form of culture, leading the Status Quo Coalition, economic power, etc).
One example of an exercise in soft power–one that Rome wasn’t exactly thrilled with–was intermarrying between peoples on opposite sides of barriers. Think soldiers marrying native women along Hadrian’s Wall. This is an exercise of soft power because it introduced the native peoples of an area to the less aggressive aspects of Roman life. Exposure usually resulted in them adopting at least some of those aspects, and this could over time lead to the people wanting to join the empire, or at least being able to get some aid from imperial citizens (who were, after a few generations, relatives). As the families intermarry the line between “Rome” and “Not Rome” is going to get rather fuzzy. While that means the influence of the barbarians extended into Rome, it also means that Roman influence extended into barbarian territories. You’re not going to see a lot of this in the writing, because it’s not big men cutting each other to pieces on the battlefield. But there’s archeological evidence.
I’m more familiar with the Middle Ages, and there are a few examples of such soft power there. The most obvious is Pope Gregory the Great excommunicating the Holy Roman Emperor–soft power because it was not a military action–but there are plenty of others. Fostering kids with each other, for example. Marrying people off to build/cement alliances. Banking wasn’t insignificant (see the Templars). Nor was trade (see the Teutonic Order and amber). Excommunication wasn’t really something the Romans could do, but the rest was.
One thing that does spring to mind is adoption. Rome had rather interesting laws regarding who could be adopted and what it meant (the whole pater familiaris thing), which they occasionally used for political maneuvering. But again, outside of emperors, who’s going to record this? Maybe a few major examples, but the minor ones that lay the foundations for the major ones will go unnoticed by our sources.
That’s not to say that there’s no evidence–Rome had pretty good diplomats, and cultures that encountered Rome rapidly adopted Roman customs, which provides ample evidence for Roman exertion of soft power. I’m merely pointing out that the nature of our sources is going to limit the visibility of non-military power to some extent.
One example of an exercise in soft power–one that Rome wasn’t exactly thrilled with–was intermarrying between peoples on opposite sides of barriers.
Sometimes (in othr contexts) a culture could have so much prestige and soft power that people claimed intermarriage where it didn’t exist! I’m thinking, again, of areas on the margin of Islamic civilization: people and groups would often claim to be partially of Arab or Middle Eastern descent, even though when there’s no genealogical or genetic evidence that they actually were.
Here’s a thought – could it be that the Carthaginians, like the British Empire, were better at winning wars than they were at winning battles? (I.E. They were generally good at strategy, logistics and economics – better than their local rivals, at least – right up until they crashed into the Roman Republic).
The British Empire was bad at winning battles?
Of course it’s difficult to generalise over the whole period. The navy was always the senior service and while not totally invincible was still world-beating overall: defeats were rare, and major defeats unknown until the Second World War. The army, the poor relation of the services, did go through a period of mediocrity relative to other European armies during the mid-19th century, and in the Crimean War it was exposed as pretty backward. But of course, for most of the period of the empire’s dominance, the army wasn’t fighting European opponents.
I think the impression comes mainly from various high-profile defeats that the army suffered (Isandlwana, Spion Kop, Kabul, Khartoum, etc.) which come to mind quickly whereas some of the victories are much more obscure. But these victories are memorable precisely because they were both surprising and unusual. Isandlwana was a fiasco, but the British won every major battle in the war thereafter, and other than Rorke’s Drift nobody has heard of any of them.
It may also be in part because of one of the curiosities of the British (or at least English) psyche that tends to prefer stories of scrappy underdogs, and enjoys moaning about things that go wrong. Winning a battle against all the odds, when vastly outnumbered (as at Rorke’s Drift), is something to be celebrated as showing plucky spirit. A significant defeat is taken as a moral lesson to chew over, debate who’s to blame, talk about the cost of hubris, etc. But if you win because you’re just obviously better, or have more men, that’s just a matter of course, scarcely worthy of remark. And especially these days, celebrating victories in the cause of colonialism is generally seen as, at the least, in bad taste.
This wasn’t always the case in contemporary discourse, as of course if you’re following a campaign in the papers every day the immediacy will lend importance and pride that doesn’t necessarily last. Omdurman, a great victory on paper, is relatively obscure now and when it is remembered is treated as something of an embarrassment, but it was celebrated at the time. The Opium Wars were in military terms a glorious success, but you won’t win many friends if you talk them up now.
And some of the battles that do get remembered get distorted in the telling. Going back a bit before the empire proper, Agincourt is remembered as a heroic victory against overwhelming odds, which… is debatable at best. But a story of Henry V and an a host of elite professional soldiers walking up to a slightly larger French force and defeating it in a fairly predictable fashion doesn’t make for a good story or a particularly sympathetic protagonist, so over the centuries it’s been spun into a few hundred starving peasant archers mowing down thousands of arrogant French knights.
“The navy was always the senior service and while not totally invincible was still world-beating overall: defeats were rare, and major defeats unknown until the Second World War.”
After the Spanish Armada, anyway–which is more or less the start of the British Empire, so this serves more to pin down the timeframe than as a counter-argument. Can’t really count that one as a British victory; Poseidon gets credit for that one if anyone does.
The American heavy frigates gave England some pretty good thrashings in the War of 1812. Not major defeats, because the entire war was more or less an afterthought and appendix to the wars being fought in Europe, but a string of defeats against the Brits does bring a certain amount of pride to my Yankee heart (had to do with the oak we had available to us). In all honestly the Indiamen lost nearly Mauritius were of more material significance than the entire American campaign, though a quick succession of losses to what amounted to a third-rate regional power had a significant moral impact.
A lot of their success was about bottling up the opposition, though, which is more strategy than tactics. If your enemy can’t get to the battlefield, they can’t win by definition. And the Brits were really, really good at blockading.
White oak is nice, but surely the displacement of the ships (per Wiki, 2200 tons for USS Constitution, 1080 for the Pallas class to which HMS Java (former Renommée) belonged) had more to do with it.
I’d argue the interesting story here is about revisions to the classification system failing to reflect technological progress: the “heavy frigates” should have been assigned to the same bucket as older/smaller ships of the line, in particular 64-gun two-deckers. Notably, both kinds had 24-pounders as their heavy long guns. (74-gun two-deckers, the mainstay of fleets in this era, carried 32- or 36-pounders.)
Naval architects and statesmen had already written down that the whole point for secondary powers to build such ships was that they could in a pinch stand in the line of battle, where they would be required to fight (and required to not lose too quickly to) 74-gun 3rd rates. However, because they had only one proper gundeck, they were classified as 5th rates, as frigates (definitionally “ships not fit to stand in the line of battle”), the same as these ex-French ships displacing half as much, and with 18- or indeed 12-pounders as their heaviest guns.
The British Empire really begins with Cromwell and the reforms to the tax system that gave Britain the cash-flow to finance a navy and all the industrial underpinnings. before then naval strength had been come and go. The British home army was small by continental standards, but the same cash-flow allowed it to expand rapidly by hire – and there was also the substantial Indian armies, which provided much of the muscle for conquests east of Suez.
If going as far back as Cromwell, throw the Nine Years’ War in there as well.
@Isator Levi “If going as far back as Cromwell, throw the Nine Years’ War in there as well.”
Which one?
Both seem like they contribute to the point.
There is a rather entertaining account of the Mauritius Campaign in Storm and Conquest, which rather leaves an impression that the British Eastern Empire was conquered by people who did not quite realise that their career prospects might be damaged by their deaths.
But the campaign also demonstrates another point: Most European countries in peacetime had a reserve fleet which was several times the size of the active fleet. In the event of war, there would not be enough trained seamen to man it. They needed to gain experience after mobilization… which was not possible if the fleet was blockaded into its own harbours. The British could therefore rely on much better trained crews, which was just as well for a fleet which was always desperate for numbers and tended to build smaller ships than its adversaries.
On Mauritius, of course, the French ships that got that far had had time to train their people. IIRC they took ~ 6 British frigates, 4 of them in a single engagement.
The American experience was similar, in that the US Navy was so small that it was easy to man with experienced people, and American ships were a lot larger than their opposite numbers. But the price for that was a Navy too small to defend the country’s coasts or shipping.
IIRC, the victorious American frigates were all 24-pounder frigates fighting 18-pounder frigates half their size. The defeated American frigates had been fighting near-equals – but two of the three had been trying to escape the blockade, and their crews presumably had had little opportunity to familiarize themselves with their ship.
Incidentally, in Before the Ironclad D. K. Brown gives some figures for 1793-1815:
Enemy ships taken or destroyed at sea 92 battleships, 172 frigates.
Enemy ships taken or destroyed in port: 57 battleships, 36 frigates
British ships taken or destroyed (all at sea): 5 battleships, 16 frigates.
The British lost a lot more ships to the sea.
The War of the Spanish Succession. The Peninsular War. The Waterloo Campaign. The conquest of India. Are these not all within the scope of the British Empire?
“Slightly larger” understates the disparity at Agincourt. Michael Livingston in “Bloody Crowns” suggests “between two and four to one at the time the battle began” He also notes that “Henry’s men were tired and hungry, many of them suffering from dysentery.”
Our host’s comment about how the Carthaginians keep losing the battles in the sources but keep expanding their power has some parallel in how the Hundred Year’s War often gets portrayed. There is often much emphasis on English victories (e.g. Crecy, Agincourt, Poitiers) and it is often almost overlooked that France won the war.
Which brings up the point that someone else brought up–the French consistently lost the big battles, but in the periods in-between said battles they tended to just slowly erode English control by retaking a castle here and a town there until by the end of it the English only held Calais.
I would evaluate the Hundred Years’ War less in those terms than in the fact that the major English victories tended to have the decisive strategic outcome of “the English army that was constantly on the run was not completely wiped out”, which contributed to securing territory that they already held but didn’t necessarily diminish the French capacity to make war. I don’t think the French quite consistently gained back territory, but the factors that kept the war drawn out eventually brought things to a point where it was possible for the French crown to carry out major military reforms that allowed them to have more consistent victories. That being the major contributor towards driving the English out of everywhere but Calais.
Even then, sometimes it was just arbitrary shit happening. The English may well have leveraged something like Agincourt into final victory had it not been for Henry V just dying from rapid onset of illness.
> the French consistently lost the big battles
Only really the ones that the English care to remember. The actual scoreline was a lot closer to balanced.
>[A]n introductory textbook that just says, “we don’t know” on every page
History according to Sargent Schultz:
– I know nothing
– I see nothing
– as a matter of fact, I’m not even here
> That isn’t to say [X] is bad – I don’t think it is, even though I often disagree with it
The ability to hold such a view is fast becoming my favourite definition for maturity, at least in the context of participating in an intellectual debate.
Another slight tangent, what’s our host’ opinion about Agrippa? I’ve seen Historia Civilis praise him to high heavens while I don’t hear a peep from any other sources, including this blog! I need to ascertain what’s actually up with him.
Oh, and also Labienus
It strikes me as strange that you’re using “positivist” to describe a school of thought that wants to read more into the sources than they can fully justify, since in other contexts positivism is strongly associated with the slogan “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. I feel like in other disciplines the positivist side would be the one who is most likely to say “we just don’t know!”
I would not really use Wittgenstein’s adage that lightly. It might not quite mean what you take it to mean. If you actually read Wittgestein’s Tractatus, you will note that he can be read to point out to an entire different realm of experience with that quote. The quote is not just about methodology of science, but about the limits of that methodology to capture something that cannot completely be put to words. If this reading is correct, Wittgenstein is actually making a strong criticism of the positivist approach.
You’ve somehow mixed the two sides being presented?
The positivist side is being said to align to agreeing with the sources as reality (or near-to, at least), as opposed to those whom disbelieve the sources and invent their own “reasonable reality”, or say that the sources don’t count and no one knows anything.
He seemed to be saying that while some of the non-positivists were inventing their own “reasonable reality”, others were asserting that we simply don’t know what happened in that era. It’s the latter that sounded like the correct positivist take to me.
Well, now, that opens up a whole can of worms? Is history, should history, be considered a science? Historians themselves have disagreed on this. If not, if history is a kind of literary criticism, then positivism doesn’t enter into it.
If it is a science, then positivism could apply, but there are still ways to argue against it. To oversimplify quite a bit, positivism is the doctrine that independent observations are the only reliable evidence. Not all fields of science can full uphold that standard. In archaeology, for instance, all we can observe directly are the artifacts, any other conclusion we come to is inference. Most scholars would agree that still qualifies as at least a form of positivism.
In history, when the only source is someone who themselves didn’t observe what they are describing, I would argue that a strictly positivistic standard isn’t available. In this case, the strict positivist would declare that we don’t know anything, and leave it at that. People being what they are, this satisfies no one, and so we end up looking for a way to arrive at conclusions that at least seem probable. So second best is Hoyos approach–someone claiming that they heard that someone else observed something is the best we have, so we use it. Better yet if we can check this with converging evidence from other sources.
It should be “counsel of despair.” “Council of Despair” sounds like something Denethor would convente.
“Convene” not “convente.”
Nah, would be from a Stephen Donaldson book.
An example of this tension between trusting bad sources and doubting them radically is the Levant after the battle at the Yarmuk in 642 CE. You can read history texts that basically repeat the sources written by Islamic historians two centuries later. And then you have the radical approach by Patricia Crone and others who doubt that the Prophet lived in Mekka, that the Quran existed before the 690s and that the Saracen invaders called themselves Muslims. It is hard to prove Patricia Crone wrong, since the contemporaneous sources are truly sparse, and in the archaeology the new rulers perfectly mimicked the Roman and Sassanid empires – they continued to mint coins with the faces of the former and long dead emperors and shahs. But it is also impossible to prove she was right..
Should have been 636 CE.
“As I noted in last week’s post, there is an odd pattern in our sources where – up until Polybius kicks in and we have more reliable sources – Carthage seems to only ever lose battles and yet somehow Carthaginian power seems to keep expanding.”
OTOH, to judge from those maps, Carthaginian power tends to keep expanding away from the Greek and Roman powers it is accused of losing battles to. So we might get something like that if Carthage made a few failed attempts to conquer Syracuse, and Syracuse did not make any attempts to conquer Carthage. Then again, Syracuse might have diplomatically redefined their unsuccessful attacks on Carthage as successful defences against it.
I mean, Syracuse did have a go at conquering Carthage. Agathocles 310- 307 BC. Actually kind of reminiscent of Hannibal’s campaign, in that he dabbled with campaigning around Carthage and worked to make local allies out of the Libyans and Numidians. All while Syracuse was itself besieged by Carthage. Also kind of resembling the 2nd Punic war in that both sides were simultaneously invading the other and themselves being invaded.
Upon further consideration, I’m starting to suspect that Agathocles might’ve been an inspiration for Hannibal. Albeit both of them lost…
Hello,
About musing around, a video of a hoplite experiment, something of a follow up of both your last Hoplites’ wars serie and Front Line dynamics: a reconstitution of 2×200 Hoplites rushing at each other and the dynamics of collapse of one formation.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VerlSW1iPJ8
It’s in French but English subtitles seems available.
An article should be published soon on the results but the video is worth seeing!
It really is! Thanks for the link. 🙂
“Carthage seems to only ever lose battles and yet somehow Carthaginian power seems to keep expanding. One is left wondering not if the Greek victories over Carthaginian armies are fake (I don’t think they are) but rather if some Carthaginian victories have perhaps been forgotten or de-emphasized in the retelling.”
Even when we get Polybius on the First Punic War, I believe that the source is eliding some Carthaginian successes either on purpose or by accident.
To take just one example: In 1:36, Polybius tells us that the Romans encountered the Carthaginian fleet at Cape Hermaeum and routed them, capturing 114 of the 200 Carthaginian ships. No details on this battle are given, just its result.
After this victory, the Roman fleet is devastated by storms again while crossing back to Italy, losing 284 of their 364 ships, and only 80 survivors. The Carthaginians are elated, and they again get ready another fleet of 200 ships for further naval operations.
So the Carthaginians have 200 ships, they lose 114 in battle, and then they have a fleet of 200 ships again, as if by magic?
To put these numbers into context: The maximum Carthaginian fleet size we see in Polybius is the 350 ships they bring to Cape Ecnomus. They had 130 ships at the Battle of Mylae, 130 ships at the Battle of Drepana, and around 250 ships at the Battle of the Aegates. So this 200 ship fleet is at the larger end of Carthaginian naval capacity, not the absolute maximum but certainly its a substantial commitment.
What could be going on here? Well I don’t know. Maybe the Battle of Hermaeum was less one-sided than Polybius relates, maybe the Romans took battle losses that they later attributed to the storm, maybe more of the Carthaginian fleet escaped than Polybius’s sources admit. There’s many possibilities. But I strongly suspect there are things going on in the naval aspects of the First Punic War that the historical sources aren’t capturing or telling us about.
I thought – though I cannot remember the source for this idea, so take it with a salary’s-worth of salt – that in the First Punic War era Carthage essentially built Lego warships*? As in, they kept stocks of ship parts and could put one together astonishingly quickly. Given warships of the era had a relatively short lifespan, they could have just been putting the next 20 years’ planned replacements in the water all at once.
*This connects to Polybius’ suggestion that Roman naval power was patterned off a quinquereme captured at Messina; it’s a lot easier to create blueprints from an object if it still has the parts labelled…
They might also have simply had several fleets operating in different areas and transferring ships between them.
Ships could be built quickly (they were very lightly built). Skilled rowers were a different problem – and ships needed lots of them (a trireme 180, maybe 250).
@Eric, short version is that galley fleets are really cheap and quick to build.
Recommend listening to Bret talk about galley warfare and Rome vs Carthage in this podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ancient-naval-warfare-galleys-strategy-tactics-more/id1532555765?i=1000629891482