This is the second part (I) of our series looking at the structure of the Carthaginian army. As we discussed last time, while Carthage has an unfair reputation for being an ‘un-military’ society, its military system was one of the highest performing in the ancient Mediterranean, able to produce vast and effective armies waging war on multiple fronts for prolonged periods.
Last time we surveyed the components of that military and then took a closer look at the role of Carthaginian citizen soldiers. What we noted was that Carthaginian citizen soldiers formed an important part of Carthage’s armies early in its history, and in its last decade, but at its height were generally not include in ‘expeditionary’ Carthaginian armies. I supposed that this is because Carthaginian citizen soldiers had their service restricted to Carthage’s North African homeland – because almost every time we gain visibility into Carthage’s wars there, we see citizen soldiers – but the evidence for this is extremely limited. What matters for us is that by the third century, Carthaginian citizens no longer make up a significant amount of Carthage’s military force outside of North Africa (though a handful still serve as officers).
That of course leads to the question: if Carthaginians weren’t the bedrock foundation of Carthage’s armies, who was? And this week, we’ll get to that answer, looking at the forces Carthage drew from North Africa. Our sources term them mercenaries, but we have more than enough reason to doubt that.
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).
Conscripting Africans
Returning briefly to our schematic of the Carthaginian army in 215, the second largest single component of Carthage’s roughly 160,000 men under arms in that year were 50,000 African infantry, joined by at least 11,000 African and Numidian cavalry. We’ll discuss the Numidians next week for reasons that will be clear then. But it is clear that the backbone of Carthage’s armies were these African infantrymen.
Our Latin sources (like Livy) term these fellows Afri, ‘Africans,’ while our Greek sources, like Diodorus and Polybius, will call generally them λίβυες, ‘Libyans,’ though we ought to be clear here that most of these men are coming from what today is Tunisia, rather than Libya. At the end of the First Punic War, Polybius notes that these men made up the largest part of Carthage’s army, returning in defeat from Sicily (Polyb. 1.67.7) and as noted above they are present in substantial numbers in Carthage’s armies in the Second Punic War. It is hardly the first time for these fellows, though: North Africans are reported in Carthage’s armies from the Battle of Himera on forward.
I should note, I am going to pretty consistently call these fellows from here on in ‘Africans’ or ‘North Africans.’ First off, it is very clear that when our Greek sources say λίβυες, they mean the same thing as our Latin sources saying Afri (indeed, often in cases where Livy is just straight up translating passages of Polybius with only modest embroidering, the equivalence is clear); these are just two different languages’ terms for the same people. But I think ‘Africans’ may be more helpful here for the modern reader for two reasons: first, most of Carthage’s African infantry does not come from the territory of the modern country of Libya; most of them come from what today is Tunisia, so one doesn’t want to give the incorrect sense that these troops are ‘Libyan’ in the modern sense of the country of Libya (some of them are, but most are not). Second, I think ‘African’ also gives a sense of the wider notion of these fellows as primarily being from Africa – some are indigenous Berbers, some are Phoenician settlers, some are of mixed heritage and – to go by recent DNA studies – some are likely settlers of Aegean extraction, who have substantially adopted Punic (=Phoenician) culture. So they’re all Africans in the sense that they live in Africa (both in the modern sense of the continent and the ancient sense of the region around Carthage), but a relatively diverse group.
Our reception of these troops is, alas, I think quite badly bent by Polybius who – in driving some of his own arguments – allows some critical misconceptions to fester in his writing. Polybius, as a source, is usually relatively trustworthy, but while Polybius will almost never lie to you, he will often allow you to believe things that aren’t strictly speaking true – Polybius is a master of ‘lying with the truth,’ as it were and this is one case.
We’ve actually discussed this before, but to recap briefly: Polybius describes Carthage’s African troops as μισθοφόροι, misthophoroi, which has a broad meaning (‘wage-bearing, wage-receiving’) and a narrow meaning (‘mercenary’) and here, as in a few other places, Polybius is happy to be technically correct with the first meaning and then let the reader assume the second meaning (which is wrong). That’s because Polybius seems to be – we don’t have all of his work, but this seems to be a thread of it – arguing for the superiority of citizen soldiers over mercenaries in an effort to get the Greeks of his own day to reform their own militaries to rely more on the former than the latter. Carthage thus provides an opportunity for Polybius to drive his ‘mercenaries are bad’ argument and he does so, fudging the terminology as necessary.
Because Polybius is generally so trusted, that has led generations of scholars to carelessly assume that Carthage’s armies – and their North African components – were mercenary in nature, but that assumption is broadly wrong.1
Instead, Diodorus Siculus gives us a remarkable picture of Carthaginian recruitment in the early 400s, describing Carthaginian musters in 410 and 406. In 410 (Diod. Sic. 13.44.6), the Carthaginian muster has three phases: first there is mercenary recruitment in Spain – signaled by the word ξενολογεῖν, xenologein ‘to recruit foreigners.’ Then Carthaginian citizens are mustered with καταγράφειν, katagraphein, ‘to write down, register, record.’ If that seems an odd way to muster someone, it has the same basic meaning and etymology as our own ‘conscript’ which comes from con+scriptus, ‘to write together.’2 We actually use the same idioms, we’ve just forgotten that we do: someone who is conscripted is written down (in a list of soldiers), someone who ‘enrolls’ or is ‘enrolled’ in the military is being added to the roll (list) of names. So we would say Carthaginian soldiers here are being enrolled. Finally, Carthage’s North African subjects are mustered with ἐπιλέγειν, epilegein, ‘picked out, called by name.’
That last word is striking, because that isn’t a process of taking volunteers: the North African troops are being picked, in this case by Carthage’s generals. In the muster of 406 (Diod. Sic. 13.80.1-4), Diodorus shifts his vocabulary a bit and this time it is the Africans who are katagraphein‘d into the army, this time explicitly by Carthaginian generals who head out into non-Carthaginian North African subject communities to conscript soldiers. In short these soldiers are paid conscripts, serving (as we’ll see) long terms, their recruitment presumably part of the deal Carthage imposed on subject North African communities.
I should note that older scholarship3 often supposed that perhaps this system was later superceded, that Carthage may have stopped conscripting Africans and instead imposed harsher taxes and started hiring mercenaries. This would make Polybius right, but the problem is that no source says this and as noted before, it isn’t necessary either: Polybius is generally slippery with the term misthophoros. As a result, modern scholars tend to reject this argument and instead view Carthage’s African infantry in the third century (that is, during the Punic and Mercenary Wars) as paid conscripts rather than volunteer mercenaries.4 And I think that is probably correct, that these are troops levied from Carthage’s North African dependencies – probably with a mix of incentives and compulsion – who are then paid for their continued service and loyalty.
In terms of the makeup of these communities, they were clearly a mix: some of these are Phoenician colonial foundations, while others were indigenous Libyan towns, whose population would have been broadly Berber. In terms of the incoming settlers, recent genetic work has suggested that Phoenician colonization drew very widely, with Punic settlements often showing a lot of Sicilian and Aegean (read: Greek) population in the mix too and actually very little Punic ancestry. That latter point puts me a bit on guard, because our sources are very clear that they understand a lot of these populations to be Phoenician (=Punic) by culture and descent and to have cultural and familial ties back to the Levant and Syria and the material culture archaeology seems to confirm this. More work is clearly going to be necessary here: the c. 200 remains analyzed in the above-linked study is a big sample size for this kind of work, but could easily be thrown off by something as simple as different burial practices. That said, we know there was mixing between the indigenous Berber and settler-colonial populations and our sources sometimes pick out specific groups as being ‘Liby-Phoenician’ (λιβυφοίνικες in Greek; libyphoenices in Latin), ethnically blended groups mixing Phoenician and Berber heritage.
Terms of Service
Naturally, given our sources, we don’t have a great window into what the ‘terms’ of this military service were, but there are a few things we can sketch out. First, it seems like Carthage equips these soldiers out of its own stores. Appian (Pun. 80) gives the startlingly figure that prior to the Third Punic War (so Carthage has already been stripped of most of its empire by this point!), Carthage turned out 200,000 military panoplies (that is, sets of equipment); the number is surely exaggerated, but even a tenth of that number would imply large state armories in Carthage for maintaining its armies which – given that Carthaginian citizens don’t really serve outside of Africa – must be intended for this African ‘backbone’ force. It may also explain why, when Carthaginian citizens do serve, they seem indistinguishable from Carthage’s African levies (e.g. Plut. Tim. 27.5): they’re being equipped out of the same armories. So if you want to know what these guys carried, you can largely lean on the previous post for our evidence for Carthaginian citizen troops.
Mostly, this means that Carthage’s African troops served as heavy infantry, like Carthaginian citizens did. That’s certainly how Hannibal uses them: they are his heaviest infantry and form the backbone of his army. It also explains why they could loot Roman heavy infantry equipment and eventually reequip along those lines without a serious change in how they fought (Polyb. 3.114.1; Livy 22.46.4). Beyond that, it is almost impossible to give much detail to their equipment. Plutarch describes the Carthaginian battle line in 341 as having leukaspides, ‘white aspides,’ implying their shields were akin to the Greek aspis (round, dished) which fits with some of the very limited representational evidence we have, but perhaps with covers in hide rather than bronze (Plut. Tim. 27.4; 28.1). Later, Appian describes the Carthaginians during the Third Punic War as having thureoi (= the Roman scutum), so they may have switched to the Gallic/Roman oval shield at some point (App. Pun. 93). But on both cases these writers are not anything like eyewitnesses and give few details, so they could also both be wrong.
Soldiers from Libya also had a reputation as highly capable skirmish troops using javelins and we see hints of this too. Hannibal has a group of soldiers whose origin is never clarified, Polybius refers to as lonchophoroi (λογχοφόροι), lonche-bearers. This term has caused no end of problems, because W.R. Paton translates it as ‘pikemen’ (frustratingly un-fixed in the revised Paton, Walbank and Habicht (2010-2012) translation) leading a range of modern writers, especially popular ones, to misunderstand and imagine these fellows as Hellenistic-style sarisa infantry. But the lonche (λόγχη) is not a sarisa; the Greeks use this word very broadly to describe non-Greek spears, but most often to indicate kinds of dual-purpose thrusting-and-throwing weapons used by lighter infantry and cavalry. Arrian uses the word of the spears wielded by the Tyrians – fellow Phoenicians! – fighting Alexander at Tyre (Arr. Anab. 2.23.5) and Appian reports the Carthaginians preparing lonche for the Third Punic War (App. Pun. 93).
So these aren’t pikes – Carthage never utilized a Hellenistic-style pike formation – but rather a lighter dual-use spear. And let me just repeat that because I encounter this misconception all the time, so for the folks in the back: Carthage never utilized a Hellenistic-style pike formation and indeed, Carthage’s own tradition of close-order heavy infantry may also not have been a direct imitation or development from the Greek hoplite tradition either (the Greeks were hardly the only culture to stumble on the idea of ‘close-order infantry with spears and round shields‘). And indeed, if one looks even a little closely, the lonchophoroi are clearly a light infantry formation, generally deployed in a mixed group with Hannibal’s other elite light infantry, his Balearian slingers. We also get a reference to “light armed Balearians and Africans” at the Battle of Baecula with a different Carthaginian army, suggesting this sort of light infantry pairing may have been something of a standard (Livy 27.18.7).
So while most African infantry in Carthaginian service served as armored heavy infantry fighting in close-order, a small subset served as elite light infantry using lighter spears and often deployed alongside slingers. In this sense, the lonchophoroi may have filled a very similar role to Rome’s own velites: an integrated light-infantry javelin force that might scout or screen the main heavy infantry force. Hannibal’s combined force of Balearians and lonchophoroi at Trebia was 8,000, compared to probably something like 12,000 African ‘heavies,’ so there might have been something like 2 or 3 African ‘heavies’ for each light lonchophoros, which is quite similar to the Roman legion’s ratio of 2.5 heavy infantrymen (hastati, principes, triarii) to each veles.
Once recruited and equipped, these fellows evidently stayed in service for some time, perhaps for the duration of the campaign for which they were raised. They were probably gathered in Carthage itself to be marshaled and equipped. Notably, Polybius tells us that the families and possessions of the Carthaginian army returning from Sicily were initially waiting in Carthage itself (Polyb. 1.66), so it seems like these troops might leave their families in Carthage while out on campaign.
It’s also clear these soldiers were paid, though we don’t know the pay rates. What we do know, again from Polybius, is that like other mercenaries, most of their pay – their misthos (wages) as distinct from their sitos/sitonion/sitometria (maintenance pay) – seems to have been due at discharge, at the end of a campaign. That was, indeed, the problem that Carthage slammed into at the end of the First Punic War which led to the Mercenary War: the war being over, the arrears of their army suddenly came due at a moment when Carthage itself was basically bankrupt. That in turn might explain the willingness of African communities to put up with this conscription regime: at the end of each campaign, their men would normally come back with a whole bunch of cash in their pockets, essentially allowing each individual community to ‘recapture’ part of their tribute as it re-entered the community as settled misthos. That in turn, as Dexter Hoyos notes, might well have exacerbated the revolt against Carthage after the First Punic War: not only were the African troops incensed at not getting paid, but their home communities also felt cheated out of this economic bargain.5
What is clear is that African heavy infantry, supported probably in most cases by light infantry lonchophoroi were the backbone of Carthaginian armies. Even when Carthaginian armies are composed primarily of Iberian or Gallic auxiliaries, allies or mercenaries, they are constructed around an African ‘backbone,’ providing generals a reliable and loyal army component as the core of their army.
In battle, the Africans are often deployed in reserved positions. Hannibal tends (at both Trebia and Cannae) to put his Africans on the flanks, where their heavier formation provided strong structure to his army, but also where they avoided the brunt of the casualties. We’re told that Hannibal’s losses at Trasimene were concentrated among his Gallic troops (Polyb. 3.85.5) and at Cannae he evidently exposes his Gauls and Iberians and most of his losses (70%!) at that battle were taken by his Gallic troops, with the rest of the losses concentrated among his Iberians (Polyb. 3.117.6). At the Metaurus, Hasdrubal aims to win by attacking with his Iberian troops, holding his Africans in reserve and with his Gauls deployed simply to hold a hill on his left, suggesting both a lack of trust in his Gallic troops, but also a desire to avoid losses among his Africans (Livy 27.48, but see Lazenby (1978)). At Zama, Hannibal places his Iberians, Gauls and Ligurians (along with his skirmishers and elephants) in the front line, fresh African and Carthaginian troops in the second line and his own veterans in the final line (Polyb. 15.11; Livy 30.33). There’s a pretty clear pattern here in which Carthaginian generals aim to expend their Gauls first, their Iberians second and their Africans last.6
Carthage’s African troops are also frequently decisive, one way or the other. They are the heaviest infantry component in Carthage’s armies; our sources lead us to understand that they are as heavily equipped as any other kind of heavy infantry (hoplite, legionary, phalangite) in the Mediterranean at the time. Looking at our army figures from last time, we can also see that they are present in significant numbers in basically every Carthaginian field force during the Second Punic War. Polybius likewise reports that Africans made up the largest component of Carthage’s army at the end of the First Punic War, alongside Iberians, Gauls, Ligurians, Balearians and some Greeks (1.66.7).
It is hard to precisely assess the combat performance of these African troops, because they’re always deployed in mixed units. Certainly, as noted before, during Carthage’s Sicilian Wars, they seem to often be defeated by Greek hoplites, but equally – as noted – Carthage in that narrative seems to almost relentlessly ‘fail upward’ suggesting that perhaps Carthaginian (and thus African) military performance may have been somewhat better than our Greek sources let on. During the First Punic War, the Romans win nearly all of the open field engagements, but we never get a really detailed account of any of these battles, so it is hard to know what components of the Carthaginian army broke first.
During the Second Punic War, however, we do get some detailed battle narratives and what we see is that Carthage’s African infantry appear to be able to hold their own against Roman heavy infantry – quite clearly the best available at the time – pretty well. When Carthaginian armies are defeated, the Africans are generally the last to break; when they win, the Africans are often the key elements doing envelopment or holding key positions. On balance, then, I would say Carthage’s North African troops appear to be quite capable heavy infantry.
What Carthage doesn’t seem to have had was enough of them. We noted last time that at Carthage’s peak mobilization in 215, they had about 50,000 African infantry under arms. Michael Taylor in Soldiers & Silver (2020) looks more broadly at reported Carthaginian armies and estimated populations and concludes (and I think this is probably right) that this figure, around 50,000, probably represented the maximum sustainable mobilization from the North African population available to Carthage. That’s not bad – it’s far more than any Greek polis could manage – but hardly enough to rumble with alliances of Greek states (as in Sicily) or the major powers of the Mediterranean (like Pyrrhus or Rome in the Third Century) and so it would have to be supplemented.
And supplemented it was! And we’ll get to how in the next installment when we look at what we might term Carthaginian ‘vassals.’
- As pointed out, I must note, by most modern Carthage scholars, including including Water Ameling, Dexter Hoyos, and A.C. Fariselli, inter alia. This is a case where the specialists on Carthage have long known that Polybius was fudging the issue, but that knowledge has been slow to filter out into older scholarship, which is a particular problem because some of those older works, e.g. Griffith, The Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World (1935), remain crucial reference works.
- scriptus from scribo, scribere, scripsi, scriptus, ‘to write.’
- Griffith, op. cit. and Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius (1957)
- This view is expressed in particular by Hoyos, Truceless War (2007) and Loreto, La grande insurrezione libica contro Cartagine (1995).
- Hoyos (2007).
- I should note that the ‘Gallic cannon [javelin?] fodder’ view has been challenged most recently by L. Baray, Les Celtes d’Hannibal (2019), but I don’t find his effort to displace this vision convincing. There seems to be a pretty clear pattern wherein Carthaginian generals are willing to risk their Gallic troops first whenever possible.
“If you too want to help me invade Italy with a multi-ethnic army of diverse origins”
I’d say that this would rather undermine NATO, but I guess that ship has sailed…
Plus Italy might just block the strait of Messana and cut the world;’s supply of Olive oil, forcing out blog author to back out pretty quickly, but messing up the world’s cooking for a good while.
well from my understanding the Gallic forces were the new forces for the armies recruitment at that time, the folks that they were least used to and thus the less trusted and experienced under that General command.
You did mention previously that mercenary recruitment in that sense is usually wide but not deep right??
Even if merc in the sense of allied state fighting for sake of temp alliance and all.
Course Hannibal. Mad lad.
but yeah the contrast between Carthage with their strong but not as numerous core versus their allied forces compared to Rome and its allied cities and territory is probabbly the biggest killer.
The joke of Rome always up to gather another Army is a whole thing.
anyway this was fun, thank you.
That would actually be fascinating if the Carthaginians could actually have a (semi) centralized armory for equipping their troops. That’s the sort of thing that doesn’t seem to happen all that much in the ancient world.
I do find it interesting to break down some of the dynamics whereby a subjugated people can be induced to provide something like military service with mechanisms other than something like occupation with garrisons. Things like control of the arms supply, the prospect that the ruling power might take up their own arms again to force the issue, and some of the positive financial incentives.
The idea that the families of conscripted soldiers might reside in Carthage stands out to me. I wonder how their livelihood might have been secure; is the state subsidizing them, or are the deployed troops arranging for some of their salary to go home? Is it a necessity for them to seek employment as something like agricultural labourers or domestic servants, in a manner that is still preferable to their well-being than remaining back with their homes while a key member is abroad? What might their social status have been?
Frankly, from my years of organizing, most people today don’t have any faith in anarchy; the best a voter normally hopes for is to choose how to be ruled, a stable lack of rule seems impossible even for those who want that for themselves. I would expect this sense holds at least as well for past people.
In the present, the science of detaching people from experience-based understandings is well established (and advancing more rapidly than ever), but an ancient person would know about being raided and being exploited and not much else.
I… don’t see how that relates to the thing I said.
A subjugated people don’t necessarily need to be “induced to provide” whatever the overlord is asking for, both because they cannot believe in better alternatives and because they don’t need to be threatened with hypothetical worse alternatives when they are intimately familiar with actual worse alternatives.
Does that make more sense?
“I do find it interesting to break down some of the dynamics whereby a subjugated people can be induced to provide something like military service with mechanisms other than something like occupation with garrisons.”
AIUI, most societies would have a bunch of peasants, with a layer of Big Men atop them, who would generally arbitrate justice, administer the area, collect taxes/ tribute/ rent and recruit troops for the Bigger Man who ruled them. Conquest tended to mean either a new Bigger Man or his now fulfilling the same tasks for an Even Bigger Man.
Not always, but usually. Of course, the role of Even Bigger Man could be taken by a monastery, East India Company, or Roman Republic.
At some point that still requires a process by which the new hierarchy becomes effectively extractive or commanding with apparently minimal intrusion.
You’re already living under an extractive regime, there might be changes to the terms but they might not even be negative. (your local big independent big man might actually require *more* conscripts to defend against the big man the next town over than the big state does, for instance)
Yes? The point is once you get above the Big Men to the Bigger Men, then day-to-day it’s basically irrelevant to the peasantry, because they rarely deal with the Bigger Men in the first place.
One question that I’m interested in hearing the answer to from future articles in this series is a sense of comparative state policy. That is:
– Why was Carthage clearly better at mobilizing military power than the Hellenistic states? The Ptolemaics clearly had the problem that mobilizing Egyptians risked rebellions (as did indeed happen); why did Carthage not similarly fear mass rebellion by their African subjects (many of whom seemed clearly to dislike them)? The Seleucids likely had population and resources on par with Carthage, but failed to muster commensurate forces or put up similar resistance at Magnesia.
– Why was Rome better at mobilizing military power than Carthage (and indeed, basically every power in Antiquity)?
Well, Carthage did have the Mercenary War, so they’re not without rebellion troubles of their own.
Well, if we use Rome as our point of comparison (which was done in the series of the Dilectus and the Soccii), I believe the main difference lies in the respect and importance imparted by the Carthaginian state on its troops.
For one, the Africans are apparently armed at state expense as heavy infantry, in a manner not dissimilar to the Carthaginian citizen soldiers (best known for its Sacred Band), and given the way they are handled with care by the generals in the battles, one thinks that this made service bearable as the likelihood of living to the end of the service and improving one’s condition was more plausible to the average african soldier.
Contrast that with the apparent disregard that the Hellenistic kingdoms had of its non-greek soldiers and the difference becomes glaring, more so when the wealth of the Seleucids and Ptolomies should have enabled them to copy the Carthaginian model if they had the inclination to do so instead of “overpaying” to maintain their ethnic hierarchy.
When it comes to the tribal or royal forces, I suspect that the marriage of the generals to these particular groups (mentioned previously in the Imperator series) was an application of soft power to involve the Numidians and Iberians into the politics and economy of the greater Mediterranean, mediated of course through the families of the grooms.
This is not that implausible, to use a distant analogy, some chinese dynasties used interrmarriage between the women of the imperial clan with the chieftans of the steppe as a way to solidify loyalties with those peoples. If we also add the need to channel the ambitions of the younger notables of the tribes or the nobility of the kingdoms, then sending troops to serve with a distinguished power as paid allies sounds a reasonable deal.
It may be semantics, but I feel as though this is a question that is better phrased with “how” than “why”. “How” gets at observable mechanics and institutions, “why” gets at places of motive and planning that are largely unknowable.
Hellenistic states were, for complex historical reasons, built on imposing a foreign ruling class over the whole of their new territory, making that the recruitment basis for the spine of their armies, and categorically excluding the subject populace in most respects. Carthage, apparently, did not.
Rome created an arrangement of nominal alliance with what were otherwise peer states while directing their foreign policy, and distributing seized territory to their own people in a manner that could support their particular tactical model. It also maintained incentives for that nominal alliance by fairly generous terms for distribution of loot, and similar things.
Why were these the respective actions? Probably not really anything to base a speculation on, beyond “it might have seemed like the best idea at the time”.
The relentless intermarriage probably made a difference, but a common feature of countries that ‘outperform’ military expectations is a relatively flat income inequality. The barbarian invasions were hard to deal with because the Gini Coefficient of a tribe that’s been driven off of (or abandoned) it’s homeland is subsequently very low. Similarly a Mongol with wealth denominated in live animals can only be a few times richer than another Mongol, until conquest monetizes their economy.
Given the cost of iron gear, the Carthaginian state armories described above represent a government assistance program on par with or greater than the Roman land redistribution practices. The Hellenistic empires do nothing of the sort, and even seem to exist in reverse, deliberately funneling wealth away from all classes to reduce the price of agricultural labor while going so far as to bring people in from outside their empire to spend money on for warfare in preference to spending the money back to the locals.
“Why was Rome better at mobilizing military power than Carthage (and indeed, basically every power in Antiquity)?”
I hear there’s a certain historian currently writing a book on this very question.
With regards to Carthage “failing upwards to victory,” I see a slight similarity with the French in the Hundred Years War. The English won basically all of the major battles until 1450, but France held the upper hand for most of the period. When the French lost an army (Sluys, Auberoche, Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt, Verneuil), they raised another one. When the English lost an army (Pontvallain, Patay, Formigny, Castillon), they disintegrated. The French wore the English down via sieges, Fabian tactics, and forcing them to keep paying for an army. Eventually, the English finances broke and the French picked up the pieces.
To draw this comparison out a bit more because I hit send too early, I could see the Carthaginians using superior financial and population resources to stretch the Greeks to their breaking point even if they weren’t winning the big battles. The Carthaginians also seem to be much more politically stable, while the Syracusans were notorious even among the Greeks for fighting each other on the regular.
>The Carthaginians also seem to be much more politically stable
Really bad habit of executing their generals, though…
I genuinely believe that Carthaginian generals being aware that failure carried a high risk of execution at home, which is a concern Roman generals didn’t have to deal with, led to performance issues that in turn impacted the success rate of Carthaginian armies and thus became a factor in Carthage’s eventual defeat.
It would seem to give their generals a reason to be risk-averse. Hard to lose a battle if you don’t fight any.
Hanno (commander of the Messana garrison) was executed for withdrawing rather than starting a war with the Romans, so… no, actually.
@Rezo
It would seem to me that the infamous urban legend about the fall of China’s Qin Dynasty would apply. The story may or may not be precisely true- I wouldn’t know- but it’s illustrative of an underlying problem. Supposedly, the Legalist Qin government adopted extremely harsh punishments for every infraction, so that everyone would be afraid to disobey in any way. Until one day an army unit marching through difficult terrain to reinforce a remote garrison, well behind schedule after the last round of rainstorms and mudslides, found itself having the following conversation between two officers:
“So, what’s the penalty for being late to your duty post?”
“Death by torture, captain, you know this.”
“And what’s the penalty for rebellion?”
“Uh, also death by torture…?”
“Well, guess what? We’re late.”
Supposedly, this was the origin of the first of a series of revolts that brought down the dynasty in the end. Again, the story might be apocryphal- but it illustrates the point, as does an English criminal saying from the days of the execution-happy ‘Bloody Code:’
“Might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.”
To bring the discussion back to Carthage, if a general fully expects to be executed for fighting a battle and losing badly, but also for retreating from an impossible position, it’s something of a tossup which of the two bad options they will choose. They may, rationally or irrationally, be more worried about being executed for losing than for retreating, or the other way around. When all is said and done, it’s just a bad plan to try to “make your generals better,” or really to make any other group of professionals in any trade ‘better,’ by threatening them with horrendous consequences for failure. Many of them will actively perform worse and in practice the ones who do perform better will not compensate.
The Caroline War is I think a particularly good example here: A lot of popular histories tends to skip directly from the Edwardian phase to the Henrician one without bothering to explain why Henry had to start basically from scratch again.
My own guess would be that it’s a similar position to early Sparta or even Rome itself: Carthage starts out beating up on the less well-organized and equipped polities around itself, expanding its territory and subduing the smaller tribes. And then it’s a large democratic polity, easily capable of waging wars on multiple fronts. So when it goes up against other top-tier armies like Rome or Syracuse it tends to lose, but even while losing those battles it’s still beating up tribal polities on its other fronts, expanding its territory and its tribute base.
Looking at that map gives the impression the Carthaginians won against the Africans and Iberians, drew against the Greeks, and lost against the Romans.
My own guess would be that it’s a similar position to early Sparta or even Rome itself:
From what you’re describing, maybe another example would be early-modern Russia?
I think you may have mixed up East and West in your caption for the map showing Carthage’s African and Spanish territory, unless I am misunderstanding what you would consider the western half. A very interesting article! Can’t wait to learn more. Curious about one thing, which is, when adopting Roman style equipment, did they drop the spear in favour of the sword? Do we have any evidence of this at all?
If Carthage equipped its African soldier at its own expense, how did it decide who was a lonchophoroi and who was a heavy? I imagine there were not a lot of takers for light equipment when being a better protected heavy was available. Rome solved this by requiring soldiers to pay for their own equipment, so the less wealthy would be velites because they could not afford better armour, but with a state-funded armory this is not possible.
I doubt we have any evidence, but I can see 2 ways of doing it:
1: Age/experience “if you are under 21 or in your first 2 campaigns, you get the javelins” (as per velites in Rome)
2: Location “the recruits we draw from x, y and z communities are javelinmen, otherwise heaviest” (maybe hillmen vs farming/urban communities)
It could also be that a family (or other category) can only receive one set of heavy equipment. This is also sort of how the velites worked, just with equipment provided out of the family’s own storage.
I think there are more considerations at work there. As a skirmisher, you might not be as well protected by armour and shield, but you are pretty well protected by distance. Not being expected to actually come into contact with the enemy might have been pretty inviting by itself.
In the map legend, “western” must be intended to be “eastern”.
I was confused for a bit by the ratio of light to heavy infantry being two or three to one given the 3:2 ratio in the text until I read it more closely and realized you meant excluding the Balearan slingers (and assuming the Balearans were somewhere between a quarter and a half the total light infantry)
The mention of Polybius’ statement of Hannibal’s troops rearming themselves with Roman equipment brings up a potentially interesting subject for the (probably rather distant) future: the imitation legionaries of the Late Hellenistic era.
He’s sort of covered that in the Phalanx Twlight series, basically saying, it’s unclear if anyone ever truly tried to recreate the legions. It seems likely people did arm and equip troops like Romans, but how much, and how organised that ever was, we don’t know, but there’s no real evidence of it being large scale. If there is new stuff on that now I have no idea.
It does seem to me that the Africans would also have been the most difficult to replace when on campaign in Europe.
So this might have been yet another reason to deploy them where they would be less likely to be chewed up in case of disaster.
“our sources lead us to understand that they are as heavily equipped as any other kind of heavy infantry (hoplite, legionary, phalangite) in the Mediterranean at the time”
Haven’t you been arguing that the legionary is better armored than the other heavy infantry of the period, which is a fair portion of his success?
There are differences relative to each other among the heavy infantry. Hoplites might be the best armoured, or at least heaviest in weight of armour; and phalangites have the lightest armour with just a helmet and linothrax.
However the average phalangite is still far better protected than your average Celtic or Celto-Iberian tribesman with his thickest tunic and a reinforced leather hat, or the average Greek thureophoroi, or the average Successor state non-Hellene infantryman. The differences between the types of heavy infantry exist, but the African infantry being “heavy” is in itself enough to make them a more serious opponent.
I think I recall Bret in the past making points that something like the Gallic elites would actually have comparable mail to the typical Roman soldier. The difference then being in the distribution of that kind of armour between an elite and a typical soldier.
The way you describe Carthage fighting, with three distinct lines, seems very similar to the Roman triple axis. Generally the description of pre-modern armies is that everything is sort of in the same line, pushing forward together. How common was fighting with distinct lines and intervals between them in the ancient Med?
I think the Battle of Zama is generally agree to have been atypical of Carthaginian order of battle in any event and specifically Hannibal attempting to arrange his forces in a fashion to mirror Rome.
The term “African” here is a bit misleading. Yes, the Romans and Greeks used the term to describe the North Africans but they distinguished them sharply from the “Aethiopians – literally “burned face”. The sub-saharan Africans.
Whereas today “African” tends to mean sub-Saharan.
(Genetically, North Africans group with Europeans and Indians and Middle Easterners if you are interested)
I don’t know if there is a good modern term for that distinction, but I wanted to flag it.
FFS, there’s two whole paragraphs and a map explaining what “African” meant to period writers and why Bret is using the term. I don’t find it misleading at all.
I read those sections. But they didn’t make the distinction between “Africans” – read, Berbers, Libyans and what it – and “Ethiopians” – read, sub-Saharan Africans.
That is, Devereaux’s good on saying what the Romans meant by African but not on what they didn’t mean.
And that’s not a dig at him! Like I say, I don’t think our modern language necessarily has equivalent words or terms. I just wanted to make that point.
“African” seemingly only means “Sub-Saharan Africans” to Americans where the term has historically been used to culturally other America’s darker skinned citizen population.
I think the term is perfectly cromulent when describing the very diverse communities of the continent which include various shades of skin color, ethnicity, cultural origin etc.
My point was about ancient vs current usages. That is, the phrase “African Army” conjures up something like Shaka’s troops today, not the soldiers of Carthage. While the Romans would have called Shaka’s troops “Ethiopian”. That was my only point.
After reading a couple of paragraphs in which someone explains that “Hannibal’s African army” means “NORTH African troops, still geographically from Africa as opposed to Europe, but not Bantu from south of the Sahara,” if you’re still visualizing Bantus when you read the words “Hannibal’s African Army,” that frankly says a lot more about you the reader than it does about the text you’ve read.
“(Genetically, North Africans group with Europeans and Indians and Middle Easterners if you are interested)”
What a curious remark.
…oh, it’s you. Population genetics is a thing. And was used by Devereaux in the piece. It’s one of the ways that we can know who was where when
Genetically, everyone outside of Africa groups together, with a somewhat more distinct branch grouping Central/East Asia and the native populations of the Americas, and then we have like twelve distinct genetic groups in Africa proper.
Agreed. That’s k-means clustering. It depends on how many ‘buckets’ you choose. If you choose 2, it is Africans + Everyone Else (I’m more similar to a Native American than to an African, etc).
That said, five major groups do tend to emerge, across the literature: Africans, Caucasians, East Asians, Pacific Islander and Native Americans. “Caucasians” enfolds North Africans, Indians, Europeans and Middle Easterners.
But I don’t think it has much relevance here, beyond the manner in which it’s already been brought up to describe the demographic dynamics of Carthaginian territory.
“Indians” don’t particularly group with Middle Easterners or Europeans at all.
South Asians draw their ancestry from a couple of different pools. It’s been a while since I looked it up, but IIRC about 15% of our ancestry (on average) is shared with Europeans, about 35% with Middle Easterners and then about 50% (on average) isn’t closely related to any of the other major racial groups in the world (i.e. it’s derived from people who broke away from other groups and settled South Asia a very long time ago). It’s going to depend on the specific ethnicity though. That’s part of why the 19th c “scientific racists” were so puzzled about where to fit us in the (extremely problematic) four- or five-race model.
This isn’t the place to get into the details of genetic similarity, but I suggest that you look up “k-means clustering”. Basically, if you divide humanity into 5 according to genetic similarity, Indians cluster with Europeans, always, long before they cluster with East Asians or Africans.
Technically, the form of conscript (the verb) suggests that it must be a back-formation from conscription, no? (Or else it would be “conscribe”.)
It’s a passive/perfective form. The conscribe would be the person who conscribes (writes people down) while the conscript is the person who is being conscribed (is being written down).
I think this is a case where the passive/perfective Latin form has been back-formed into its own infinitive in English. There are a bunch of verbs in English that were coined in this manner, but I don’t remember them off the top of my head right now.
“The conscribe” is a hypothetical noun. There is no such English word.
There is a noun conscript, and there is a verb conscript, and they are pronounced differently. I’m willing to believe that the noun comes more or less directly from Latin; as you note, the passive form is appropriate.
The verb refers to drafting someone into the army, not to being drafted into the army, and it is malformed if analyzed as a borrowing from Latin. It must derive from the correctly-formed noun conscription.
It cannot derive from the English noun conscript, because — although a derivation from noun ‘X’ to verb ‘make [something] into an X’ is available — in that case it would be pronounced the same way the noun is.
“Conscribe” *is*, or at least until recently *was*, a real English word synonymous with “conscript.” Verbs, to be clear. The relative loss of ‘to conscribe’ is most likely the result of the Latin Grammar movement in English grammar study and teaching, where a lot of actual English speech practices were deprecated to try to make English better fit rules of Classical Latin grammar. You may have heard some bull***t about, i.e, split infinitives etc.
I’m curious why the Gauls were willing to continually ally themselves with Hannibal, given that he pretty clearly viewed them as expendable.
They probably didn’t like the Romans very much.
Hannibal also promised loot and plunder. The Gauls liked loot and plunder. It’s not like they didn’t loot and plunder on their own, too. Looting and plundering together with Hannibal just gave the opportunity for exceptionally high quality loot and plunder.
But also, they didn’t like the Romans much at all. If Silius Italicus isn’t lying, Gaius Flaminius scalped a gallic chieftain he defeated and used it as decoration for his helmet until Hannibal defeated him at Trasimene, with Hannibal’s Gauls being all too happy to, erm, express their displeasure with Gaius Flaminius.
Now, Silius Italicus probably was lying, because damn, but it nevertheless expresses the… not particularly positive relationship Rome had with the Gauls.
When there are two sides in a war, and one is hiring allies while the other isn’t, all of the buyable allies tend to end up on the same side.
I think “expendable” might not be the best way to look at it, from Hannibal’s perspective and theirs.
In warfare like this, there’s always going to be somebody in the more vulnerable position. It’s an occupational hazard, and presumably part of the culture that keeps bringing these people to war is trying to cultivate both a readiness to accept that risk and a sense of shame for failing in it.
Nevertheless, it seems apparent from many sources that such vulnerable wings tend to be where an army breaks first, often upon immediate contact with the enemy, rather than actually be expended. Sometimes the army with that otherwise holds together and wins (which might mean it accounted for that vulnerability in a way that they can recover from), sometimes it’s ruinous. Inability to be certain how such a wing will encounter the enemy is part of the general uncertainty of such war.
In Hannibal’s case, I would suspect it would come down to a combination of what kinds of promises he made them, how much he might convince them that being part of an army that included his other troops would minimize their risks, and some of his magnetic personality. The latter seems to have been integral to Cannae, if Polybius is to be believed that Hannibal placed himself in the vulnerable Gallic centre. Although that’s at least a case where the likely plan as everybody understood it didn’t conceive of the Gauls in the most vulnerable position as being expendable so much as “the only way we can win is with a baited trap, we just have to make sure the bait neither dies nor runs”. Being bait might not be an attractive prospect, but one might carry it through with the promise that things going right will afford a tremendous victory.
If you look at the losses in the battles, the gauls wouldn’t have taken that many losses at Trasimene (Around 2,000 losses, so around 10%, maybe less), which is around what those normal hoplite battles were said to experience. Cannae would be higher, (around 1/5 based on quickly looking up estimates), but that still is still somewhat higher then a typical battle, not ridiculously high, unprecedented losses. We hear about different military branches taking different losses in other wars (tanks vs. infantry, quiet sections vs. active sections, air force vs. army, etc.), and different branches don’t typically get demoralized, Hannibal’s soldiers might view different loss rates as just how things work.
Gauls are also placed in the center typically, oin other armies this is where stronger forces seem to get placed a lot (Romans putting themselves in the center vs. other italians on sides for infantry, hellenistic battles often have Phalax in center and lighter infantry to the sides), so Hannibal may be selling it as “you are the best soldiers, fight in the middle.”
When fighting, Gauls at Trebia are a small part of a similar sized army to Rome, with Hannibal setting up advantages for his army. They by themselves close t evenly match Roman numbers at Trasimene. At Cannae, >~20,000 Gauls : Spanish infantry is less then Romans have but still a full sized army, so to soldier in a battle line it would still feel like a deep block of infantry. So likely in battle the Guals would see themselves as having advantages or fighting an even battle, which avoids them running away, and afterwords might hear about higher losses but also that they just won big victories, keeping things together. (I haven’t looked up the less famous Hannibal battles to see if this applies, though after the big three the fighters may have gotten used to being in the army and trusting Hannibal, so placements don’t matter as much.)
I think it’s possible that the Gauls in Hannibal’s army had, by this time, developed a familiarity with how Romans fought, and that the centre was the most dangerous place to be in opposition to them. And at Cannae, I suspect they would have known that their position was vulnerable, because they needed to know that the plan was to fall back in good order before the Romans in a manner that would let the Romans think they were being pushed back. Selling it to them as a position of strength might have been counterproductive, because it might have motivated them to stand their ground.
Certainly, the reverse crescent described by Polybius would have entailed exposed flanks that would have been apparent to some soldiers adjacent to them.
I think the only way Cannae makes sense is if the Gallic soldiers knew they were taking a big risk (but a calculated one), and were not only willing and able to do so, but maintain their composure while performing a tricky manoeuvre while under very intense pressure.
Again, helped to not feel like Hannibal was callously laying them out to succeed or be destroyed by putting himself in that position as well. He needed to manage the movement, but also to assure them that he was sharing the risk he was asking of them.
“someone who ‘enrolls’ or is ‘enrolled’ in the military is being added to the roll (list) of names.”
Same with enlist? Roughly, to get listed?
Alas! Then the late great Peter Connolly was wrong to depict the Carthaginian citizen levy as pikemen in his Hannibal and the Enemies of Rome” book; plus again in “Greece and Rome At War”. That’s a shame, since he is otherwise so reliable and even Our Host normally speaks well of him.
Yes, an unusual mistake of him, borne out of the fact that Connolly was generally reliant on classicists to do his translations for him and unwilling to gainsay their judgements in any case.