Collections: Raising Carthaginian Armies, Part I: Finding Carthaginians

This is the first part of a series looking at the structure of the Carthaginian army. Although Carthage has an (unfair!) reputation for being a country of “peaceful merchants who tended to avoid wars,”¹ Carthage was, I will argue, without question the second greatest military power the Mediterranean produced – eclipsed only by Rome. If we do not realize this, it is merely because Carthage had the misfortune to fight Rome ‘in the first round,’ as it were.

Carthage is, in particular, the only military power that ever manages to seriously challenge Rome on an even footing, blow for blow, after the Romans completed the conquest of Italy. The Carthaginian military system pushes Rome to the very brink of defeat twice, in contrast to the Hellenistic great powers, the heirs of Alexander, none of which ever force the Romans to ‘dig deep’ into their forces. Put another way: the Romans put Alexander’s heirs to bed mobilizing against them less than a third of the military force it took for Rome to match Carthage. The Carthaginians inflicted more casualties on the Romans in a single day than all of the successor states (a label which does not include Epirus, so no Pyrrhus here; worth noting the Carthaginians beat him too) managed in pitched battle combined. And they did this more than once; I’d hazard they managed it about seven times.²

So in this series, we are going to lay out the structure of Carthage’s armies (alas, we have very little information as to the structure of their navy), because as we’ll see, the Carthaginian military system was quite complex, drawing soldiers from all over the western Mediterranean.

Now there is an a bit of organizational trickiness here: Carthage drew forces from many different places at many different times. In practice, the Carthaginian military becomes visible to us as early as 480 (with the Battle of Himera) and seems to change significantly between this period and the army visible to us in the first book of Polybius, which fights the First Punic War (254-241) and the Mercenary War (241-237). Then the Carthaginian army undergoes another substantial shift visible to us, in terms of its composition, during the Barcid Conquest of Spain (237-218) such that the Carthaginian army that fights in the Second Punic War (218-201) looks very different again. And then Carthage loses its army and so its military forces from 201 to the end of the Carthaginian state in 146 look different again.

My solution here is to structure this treatment around the largest Carthaginian mobilizations, which were those during the Second Punic War: Carthaginian numbers peaked in 215 with something on the order of 165,000 men under arms.³ We’ll work through the components of that force (operating, as it did, in multiple theaters) and for each component of it, we can then note how – as best we can tell – that specific component changed over time.

I should also note what I am not doing here: this is not a full rundown of Carthage’s military history or the Punic Wars; rather it is an outline of the components of Carthage’s land forces. I think a treatment of the Punic Wars on a similar level to our “Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph” series is probably worth doing, but would be a much larger and more involved series than this, because the Punic Wars are quite long conflicts with many twists and turns and often multiple simultaneous theaters. One day!

But first, as always, raising large armies of mercenaries, subject conscripts, vassal warlords and allies is expensive! If you too want to help me invade Italy with a multi-ethnic army of diverse origins in a doomed effort to stop the Roman Republic, you can help by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).

(Bibliography Note: Any bibliography for the lay reader looking to get to grips with Carthage likely has to begin with D. Hoyos, The Carthaginians (2010) which provides a solid foundation on understanding the Carthaginian state and society. A solid overview of Carthaginian military history is provided by J.R. Hall, Carthage at War: Punic Armies c. 814-146 (2023). For specific periods in Carthaginian military history, note J.F. Lazenby, The First Punic War: A Military History (1996), then D. Hoyos, Truceless War (2007) on the Mercenary War and D. Hoyos, Hannibal’s Dynasty (2003) on the Carthaginian conquest of Spain, before going back to J.F. Lazenby for Hannibal’s War (1978) on the Second Punic War. G. Daly, Cannae: The experience of battle in the Second Punic War (2002) has, among other things, one of the better run-downs of the composition of Hannibal’s army. On the Gauls in Carthaginian armies, note L. Baray, Les Celtes d’Hannibal (2019), alas not translated. On the Numidians, a key component of Carthage’s army, see W. Horsted, The Numidians, 300 BC – AD 300 (2021), while on the Spanish warriors who fought for Carthage, see Quesada Sanz, F.  Armas de la Antigua Iberia: De Tartesos a Numancia (2010) now available in translation as F. Quesada Sanz, Weapons, Warriors & Battles of Ancient Iberia (2023), trans. E. Clowes and P.S. Harding-Vera. You can also find what little we know about Balaerian slingers in the opening chapters of L. Keppie, Slingers and Sling Bullets in the Roman Civil Wars of the Late Republic, 90-31 BC (2023). Finally, one must note N. Pilkington, The Carthaginian Empire (2019), an often heterodox but equally sometimes persuasive reassessment of what we know of Carthage that is intensely skeptical of our literary source tradition and an essential read (for agreement and disagreement) if one is intending to get knee-deep in the scholarship.)

A Brief Chronology

First, before we get into the details, we should lay out the basic chronology of Carthaginian military history, because as we’re going to see, not only does Carthage draw upon a bunch of different sources of military manpower, those sources themselves change over time in their composition and role within the Carthaginian system.

Now we should start with some background here on the nature of Carthage and its control over its core territory in North Africa. Carthage was a Phoenician colony, founded in North Africa (in modern day Tunisia). The population was thus likely a mix of local Libyan peoples, Phoenician settlers and even other maritime peoples (Aegeans, e.g. Greeks). The Carthaginians themselves maintained a clear ideology of being Phoenicians, using a Punic language, worshiping Punic gods and making a clear connection to their mother-city of Tyre, however some modern DNA research has suggested the actual population of Phoenician colonies might have been more genetically diverse than we have generally supposed. Of course, not every resident of Carthage was likely to be a citizen and certainly the impression we get is that some Phoenician ancestry was a requirement for full citizenship.

Carthage was hardly the only such colony in North Africa (Utica, Thapsus (in North Africa), Leptis, Leptiminus, etc. were all such colonies), but there was also a substantial local Libyan population and at least initially Carthage was subordinate to those peoples; we’re told that quite Carthage’s first few centuries after its founding (mid-eighth century) paid tribute to the locals, a relationship that inverted quite dramatically as Carthage became stronger. Carthage seems to begin projecting power overseas seriously in the mid-to-late-500s, though we cannot always see this early process as well as we’d like. By c. 500, Carthage seems to control Sardinia and the western coast of Sicily. Some sign of Carthage’s expanding control in North Africa comes when they are able to block Dorieus (a Spartan prince) from creating a Greek colony in North Africa and then shortly thereafter also destroy his effort to found a colony in western Sicily, between 515 and 510 or so. Unfortunately, we’re not really well informed at all about the armies they used to do this

Instead, Carthaginian armies first start to become really visible to us in the context of the running contest between Carthage and Syracuse for control over the rest of Sicily, which kicks off in the 480s. From the 480s to the 270s, Carthage fights a series of wars with the Greeks on Sicily, the latter generally organized around the largest and strongest Greek city there, Syracuse. There is a tendency for students to be surprised that Carthage – given its apparent power in the third century – is unable to overcome (or be overcome by) Syracuse, but it is worth remembering that Syracuse is a really big polis, on the same scale as Athens or Sparta. Recall that from 415 to 413, the Athenians throw the lion’s share of their military, at the height of their power at Syracuse and lose effectively all of it for their trouble, so Syracuse – at least when well led and organized – is a fairly major power (in as much as any power other than the Achaemenids can be major) in this period.

In any case, the first Carthaginian-Greek war in Sicily begins in the 480s and ends with the Battle of Himera in 480. They’re then back at it from 409 to 405, then again from 398 to 396, then again from 383 to 381 (?), then again from 368 to 367, then again 345 to 341 and again from 311 to 306 and then finally from 278 to 276, Pyrrhus of Epirus shows up to campaign against Carthage on behalf of the Greeks. On the one hand, at any given time in these wars, territorial control often swings wildly between Carthage and Syracuse, but on the other hand zooming out, over the long-term relatively little changes and the whole thing resembles a stalemate: Carthage controls the west of the island, Syracuse the east and the settlements in the middle either manage in the fracture-zone between the powers or submit to one or the other.

Alongside the early phases of this running warfare on Sicily, Carthage is steadily subduing the area around it in North Africa, reducing the Libyan and Phoenician settlements in what is today Tunisia to semi-autonomous subjects. Those communities remained internally self-governing, but were in practice ruled by Carthage and we’ll talk about that relationship in the next post in the series. We can’t fully see this process clearly but by c. 400, Carthage clearly seems to have control over most of its immediate surroundings. Carthage also began interacting quite early with the Numidians, the Berber peoples to the west (generally divided into two kingdoms, Massaesylii and Massylii) sometimes recruiting them and sometimes fighting them. Certainly by the start of the third century if not earlier, Carthage is the dominant power in this relationship.

The Carthaginians are also clearly active in trade in Spain, though it is unclear to what degree the Phoenician settlements there fall under Carthaginian political control and when.

Thus even by c. 480, Carthage is one of the major imperial powers in the western Mediterranean, though hardly the only ‘major player’ and remains so, steadily growing in size and influence over the next several centuries. By c. 300, the Carthaginians have secured control over western Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia, have some small footholds in Spain and most importantly have secured control over most of what is today Tunisia (what the Romans would just call ‘Africa’) and have a dominant if frequently shifting position relative to the Numidians.

That set the stage for the major wars of the third century. Carthage was in a strong position in Sicily after the end of their war with Agathocles (in 306), leading to the Sicilians to appeal to Pyrrhus in the 270s. Pyrrhus, arriving in 278 was able to win significant victories and pin the Carthaginians back to their last major coastal base in Lilybaeum, but was unable to take it (being unable to break Carthaginian naval control) and subsequently forced out in 276 once his support among the Sicilian Greeks ebbed, suffering a nasty naval defeat on his way out for his trouble.

That left Carthage in a dominant position in Sicily (but still facing a potent foe in Syracuse) when in 264 a group of mercenaries (the Mamertines) leftover from Agathocles’ war who had seized Messina – under pressure from Syracuse – appealed to both Rome and Carthage for help. That led to a four(-ish) way war in which two of the sides (the Mamertines and Syracuse) rapidly found themselves rendered irrelevant. The result was the First Punic War (264-241) between Rome and Carthage, fundamentally a war for control over Sicily, although the Romans did invade North Africa (unsuccessfully) in 256.

Carthage loses the war, with Rome consolidating control over Sicily, only to be immediately beset by a new war, the Mercenary War (241-237), when a mutiny by Carthage’s unpaid mercenaries from the end of the First Punic War set off a general revolt of its subjects in North Africa. The Carthaginians win this war, particularly with the leadership of Hamilcar Barca, who is then too politically influential to be left in Carthage, so he is packed off with an army to go do stuff in Spain. The ‘stuff’ he does in Spain from 237 to his death in 228 is to subdue nearly the entire Mediterranean coast up to the Ebro River, with that task then completed by first his son-in-law, Hasdrubal the Fair and then Hamilcar’s eldest son Hannibal.

That sets the stage for ’round two’ with Rome, the Second Punic War (218-201), an absolutely massive war waged across Italy, Spain and Africa, which represents the peak military output of either Rome or Carthage (although the First Punic War, with its massive fleets, probably roughly matches it). Utterly defeated in 201, Carthage is shorn of its overseas empire and much of its more distant African holdings, essentially reduced to ‘merely’ controlling northern Tunisia. However, rapid Carthaginian economic recovery leads Rome to instigate a third war with Carthage, the Third Punic War (149-146). Unlike the previous two wars, this is not an even contest: Carthage by this point is much smaller and weaker a power than Rome. Determined Carthaginian resistance prolongs the war, but Rome is eventually able to seize the city and destroy the Carthaginian state in 146.

Now, one thing worth noting at the end of this brief, potted history is for nearly all of this period, we have only Greek sources (Romans, writing in Latin, only really come in with the Punic Wars and even then our earliest Roman sources – Fabius Pictor – are lost, so we get him processed through a Greek – Polybius). One of the features of the history we do have of Carthage that I suspect results from this is that Carthage seems to lose a lot. But it is, at least until 264, a strange sort of losing: Carthage shows up in our sources losing major battles but then one moves forward a few decades and Carthage’s empire is larger and more prosperous. And then Carthage loses another major battle and yet somehow, a few decades later Carthage is even more powerful.

So either Carthage is the world champion at failing upwards or there is something going on with our sources. And it isn’t hard to really guess what: our key source for Carthaginian history before 264 is Diodorus Siculus, that is, ‘Diodorus the Sicilian,’ a Sicilian Greek writing in the first century B.C. who thus very obviously has a side in Carthage’s long wars with the Sicilian Greeks. Even if Diodorus is doing his best to give us a straight story, which battles are his sources likely to remember or commemorate most prominently: the Time They Really Walloped the Carthaginians or perhaps smaller engagements that they lost? Thus while we cannot know for certain, I find that I suspect Carthage’s battle-record pre-264 is likely rather better than our sources suggest.

Post-264, it seems worth noting that while Carthage loses more often than they win against the Romans, they still manage to deliver Rome some pretty stunning defeats. The notion that Carthaginians are ‘peaceful merchants’ or just ‘unmilitary’ thus seems to be almost entirely empty, a nearly pure product of later stereotypes about ‘unmanly easterners’ rather than a conclusion justified by the evidence. At the very least, by the time Rome was ready to fight Carthage, the Carthaginians very much knew how to throw a punch – indeed, they would punch Rome far harder than any other foe.

That still provides some three hundred years where Carthage is a meaningful military power where we can see their military activities, so as you might imagine, the shape of the Carthaginian army changes a lot over that period.

Component Parts

The next thing we ought to do, to get an overall sense of the system, then, is to lay out the scale of Carthaginian forces at the height of the Second Punic War, representing the largest land mobilization that Carthage ever produced. The size of the mobilization is staggering, as is the diversity of how it was raised: like most imperial powers, Carthage’s army was a diverse medley of soldiers drawn from basically everywhere that Carthaginian power reached. The way these soldiers were incorporated into Carthage’s armies was in turn a product of what their relationship to the Carthaginian state was – citizens, subjects, vassals, allies, mercenary employees.

Our sources, most particularly Polybius, provide us enough detail to get a pretty decent accounting of Carthage’s ‘peak’ mobilization, which comes in 215. Hannibal, of course, had a Carthaginian field army at that time in Italy – he had won the Battle of Cannae (216) the year before – but there were also Carthaginian armies in Spain, Sardinia and Africa, along with an active fleet. Carthage alone of the Mediterranean powers of the era seems to have been able to match Rome’s capacity for multi-theater warfare: whereas Hellenistic kingdoms could really only have one primary theater of war at a time, both Rome and Carthage could wage multiple parallel campaigns simultaneously and did so.

So let’s break down the evidence for what we have.

We can begin with Hannibal’s army in Italy, which Polybius tells us (3.114.5) consisted of 40,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry for the Battle of Cannae (216). We can actually work backwards with just a little bit of guessing to break down this army into its unit composition: Hannibal crosses the Alps with 12,000 Africans, 8,000 Iberians, and 6,000 cavalry, taking some losses in the subsequent battles but also absorbing around 9,000 Gallic infantry and 5,000 Gallic cavalry. Figuring for attrition, the composition of Hannibal’s army at Cannae has to look at least something like around 10,000 African infantry, 6,000 Iberian infantry, around 8,000 mixed ‘lights’ (North African lonchophoroi, which means ‘javelin-men’ not ‘pikemen’ as it is sometimes mistranslated) and Balearian slingers and 16,000 Gallic infantry to make the total. Of the cavalry we might suspect around 5,000 of it was Gallic cavalry and the rest split roughly evenly between Numidian cavalry from Africa and Iberian cavalry (both of which we’re told Hannibal has).

We then need to modify that force for Hannibal’s losses at Cannae: he lost 4,000 Gauls, 1,500 Iberians and 200 cavalry, but was reinforced late in the year (Polyb. 3.117.6; Livy 23.13.7) with 4,000 more Numidian cavalry and 40 elephants. That leaves Hannibal in 215 with an army of roughly 50,000: 10,000 African infantry, 12,000 Gallic infantry, 4,500 Iberian infantry, 8,000 mixed ‘lights’ (lonchophoroi and Balearian slingers), around 5,000 Gallic cavalry and perhaps 10,000 other cavalry, of which we might guess that maybe 2/3rds were Numidian and 1/3rd Iberian.

At the same time in Italy there is a second Carthaginian army operating in Bruttium (modern Calabria; Hannibal is operating out of modern Apulia) under the command of Hanno with 17,000 infantry composed mostly of Roman socii that have defected to Hannibal, along with 1,200 cavalry, mostly Spanish and Numidian (Livy 24.15.2).

The thing is Hannibal does not have Carthage’s largest army. One of the mistakes students make in assessing the Second Punic War is focusing – as most modern treatments do – almost entirely on Hannibal. But for Carthage, getting reinforcements to Hannibal is very hard – Rome at this point has a strong navy so they can’t easily sail to Italy – but the war is also very active in Spain. Carthage had come to control the Mediterranean coast of Spain as a result of the conquests of Hamilcar Barca (we’ll discuss this more when we get to these guys in a couple of weeks) and Rome was seeking to tear that part of the empire away.

Carthage had three generals operating in Spain by 215 – Hasdrubal and Mago Barca (Hannibal’s brothers) and Hasdrubal Gisco. Livy reports the combined strength of all three at 60,000 (Livy 23.49) and once again with some careful tracking through Livy and Polybius we can basically break this force down to roughly 24,000 African infantry (a mix of Hannibal’s troops left behind and reinforcements brought by Mago), a touch less than 2,000 African cavalry, and the remainder – about 34,000 – mostly Iberian troops along with some small units of Gauls (300 from Liguria) and Balearian slingers (500). We can be fairly ‘rough’ with these numbers because we’re dealing with ‘paper strengths’ that are going to be off to some degree in any case – the point here is a rough approximation of an estimate, because our sources aren’t going to get better than that.

In addition, there was a Carthaginian army dispatched to Sardinia to try to retake it, a force Livy reports as being roughly the same size as the reinforcements Mago brought to Spain, which would mean 12,000 infantry and 1,500 cavalry, probably nearly all African (Livy 23.23.12).

Finally, Carthage maintained a force still in Africa. Hannibal had, at the war’s outset, transferred to Africa some 13,850 Iberian infantry, 870 Balearian slingers and 1,200 Iberian cavalry, while redeploying some 4,000 Metagonians (from what is today eastern Morocco) to Carthage as well.

Taking all of that together we can estimate very roughly (with some rounding) that Carthage has, under arms, in 215:

• 50,000 African infantry
• 17,000 Italian socii
• 12,000 Gallic infantry
• 52,000 Iberian infantry
• 10,000 various ‘lights’ (including at least 1,370 Balearian slingers)
• 21,000 cavalry of which probably roughly
  • 5,000 are Gallic cavalry
  • 5,000 are Iberian cavalry
  • 11,000 are African and Numidian cavalry (with the Numidians probably the larger share)

For a total of roughly 162,000 men under arms. Notably missing from this total are any Carthaginian citizen troops, but for reasons I’ll get to below, I do think there probably were some in North Africa. For comparison, the peak mobilizations of the major successor states (the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms) are probably around 80,000 men. Carthage is doubling that mobilization and very nearly matching Rome’s own maximum mobilization (around 185,000 men).⁴

Carthaginian Citizen Soldiers

Now you may have noticed something a little odd for the Carthaginian army implied by the figures above: there aren’t any Carthaginians in it. And that tends to be one of the core things that folks ‘know’ about Carthaginian armies, which is that these were ‘mercenary’ armies, where Carthaginians only served as officers. That is, after all, more or less directly what Polybius tells us and historians ancient and modern tend to take Polybius at his word. And while Polybius is being more than a little sneaky with his description of Carthaginian armies as mercenary in nature, the idea that Carthaginians didn’t serve in quantity in Carthaginian armies is at least half true, but with important geographical and chronological limitations.

Here, we are interested in the Carthaginian citizens themselves. And we begin with the first exception to the idea that Carthaginian citizens didn’t fight, the chronological one: Carthaginian citizen armies are actually very common everywhere (that is, both at home and abroad) in the fifth and fourth century. Diodorus (11.22.2) reports ‘Phoenicians’ in the Carthaginian army for the Battle of Himera (480) which are likely Carthaginian citizen soldiers we hear of Carthaginian citizen soldiers in later Carthaginian expeditions to Sicily in 409 too. As late as 339, at the Battle of the Crimissus, the Carthaginian army includes, according to Diodorus, a Sacred Band of Carthaginian citizens several thousand strong (Diod. Sic. 16.80.4) which seems to be a picked force from a larger body of Carthaginian citizens, given that he describes its members as distinguished even among the citizens for valor, reputation and wealth.

Now in most treatments the next thing that will get said is that in the third century – when both the First (264-241) and Second (218-201) Punic Wars occur – the Carthaginians changed this policy and citizens stopped serving except as officers. But I think that perhaps misses what is really happening here and the reason has to do with the perspective of our sources: we have no Carthaginian sources or even North African sources. What we have are the reports primarily of Romans (who fought Carthage), Greeks on Sicily (who fought Carthage) and mainland Greeks like Polybius, who relied on the other two. My point is not necessarily that these sources are hostile to Carthage (though they are), but rather that their focus is directed. We are seeing Carthage like one would see a statute in a dark room lit entirely from one side: only half the statute will be illuminated.

Our sources are very interested in the armies that Carthage sends against Syracuse and Rome and almost entirely uninterested – or uninformed! – about the forces that Carthage might muster in other places. We only see Carthaginian North Africa clearly in brief snippets: when a Greek or Roman tries to invade it (310, 256, 204and 149) or in the context of a major revolt like the Mercenary War (241-237) which draws our sources attention.

But what do we see whenever the action shifts to North Africa? Citizen soldiers in Carthage’s armies. While Diodorus inserts into his narrative a line about how the Carthaginians were unprepared for fighting when Agathocles (tyrant of Syracuse) lands his army in Africa in 310, they quickly manage to put together a citizen soldier army – Diodorus says of some 40,000 soldiers, but Diodorus’ numbers here are often useless (Diod. Sic. 20.10.5-6). We don’t hear anything about citizen soldiers during Rome’s unsuccessful invasion in 256 (during the First Punic War), but when Carthage’s expeditionary army (returned from Sicily at the war’s end) revolts in 241, Carthage immediately raises a citizen army to put down the revolt and succeeds in doing so (Polyb. 1.73.1-2). Likewise, when P. Cornelius Scipio soon-to-be-Africanus lands in North Africa in 204, the Carthaginians raise citizen forces (alongside all of their other troops) to try to stop him and Carthaginian citizens formed a major part of Hannibal’s army at Zama (202; Polyb. 15.11.2-4), including both infantry and cavalry.

And of course, when Rome returned for the final act in the Third Punic War (149-146), Carthage – largely shorn of its empire – responded by mobilizing a citizen force to defend the city, alongside freed slaves (App. Pun. 93-5) and resisted fairly stoutly.

In short, with the exception of M. Atillius Regulus’ invasion of 256, every time Carthaginian Africa is ‘illuminated’ for us we see Carthaginian citizen forces. Now our sources often present these forces as basically ‘scratch’ forces, raised in a panic, but while the Carthaginians sometimes lose the battles that result, these armies are not a ‘rabble’ by any means. Carthaginian citizen forces were evidently sufficient to defeat their own mercenaries and the Libyan revolt in 241. At Zama (202), the Carthaginian citizens form the second rank of Hannibal’s army and while Polybius is quick to lean into stereotypes calling them cowards (for not reinforcing the first battle line, composed of mercenary troops), in practice what he actually describes is that the Carthaginian citizen line is able to throw the Roman hastati back and is only forced to retreat by the advance of Scipio’s second line of principes (Polyb. 15.13.5-8).

My suspicion is thus that Carthaginian citizen soldiers may have never fully gone away, but rather they may have been confined largely to operations in North Africa. It makes a degree of sense that the Carthaginians might want to wage their imperial wars almost entirely with auxiliary troops recruited from their dependencies (or paid for as mercenaries), with Carthaginian citizens serving only as generals and officers, while reserving their citizen soldiers for operations closer to home. And there must have been more of such operations than we are aware of. Remember: Carthaginian armies really only become fully visible to us as they interact with Greek and Roman armies, but obviously Carthage must have accomplished the subjugation of much of North Africa, must have managed to subordinate (if not subdue) the Numidians, must have been able to hold that control through military strength (for our sources are very clear that Carthaginian control was often resented) and finally must have been able to also deter the Saharan, Berber and Lybian peoples on their borders.

In short, there is almost certainly quite a lot of Carthaginian campaigning in Africa which we can’t see clearly and it is possible that Carthaginian citizen soldiers continued to be active in these operations throughout. In that case, Carthage may well have kept its citizenry in some degree of readiness for war, which may explain why substantial bodies of Carthaginian citizen soldiers seem to be available and militarily effective so quickly when Carthage’s core territory in Africa is threatened. That said, short of some very convenient (and very unlikely) Punic inscriptions showing up, this remains merely a hypothesis; our sources offer no hint of this and indeed Polybius states the opposite, that the Carthaginian citizenry was broadly demilitarized.

Carthaginian Arms and Tactics

Of course, if Carthaginian citizens did sometimes fight, that raises a key question: how did Carthaginian citizens fight? With what arms and tactics?

The first answer is that our evidence is infuriatingly limited here. After all, Carthaginian citizen soldiers do most of their fighting visible to us relatively early where our main sources are writers like Diodorus, who – because he is writing a universal history covering everything from the earliest mythology (he includes the Fall of Troy) down to his own day (mid-first century B.C.) – rarely gives a lot of details. Normally we might supplement this with visual evidence in artwork or equipment deposited in graves, but there is very, very little of this. That point has sometimes been taken to reflect Carthage’s ‘unmilitary’ character, but it is worth noting that prior to 146, we have similarly little archaeological or representational evidence of the Roman Republic’s armies and no one accuses the Romans of being ‘unmilitary’ in character.

What evidence we do have suggests that the Carthaginians largely fought as heavy infantrymen in a manner not too different from Greek hoplites. Now I want to caveat that immediately to say this doesn’t mean they fought as hoplites – it is certainly possible but by no means necessarily or certain that the Carthaginians might have adopted weapons or tactics from the Greeks. The Levant had its own infantry traditions on which the Carthaginians might have drawn which included heavy armor and large shields. At the same time, as noted, it seems like Phoenician colonies drew in a lot of Aegean (read: Greek) settlers, so it would hardly be shocking of the Carthaginians did adopt Greek armaments.

However, I want to pause for a moment to draw one point of important clarification: at no point did any Carthaginian or any soldier in Carthaginian service that we know of, fight in a Macedonian-style pike phalanx. The idea that the Carthaginians adopted this style of fighting is based entirely on old mistranslation of lonchophoroi as ‘pikemen’ when in fact the lonche is a light spear and these are light infantry javelin-men fighting in support of African heavy infantry. We’ll talk more about them next week.

We have a few small engravings (small engraved impression seals called ‘scarabs’) from Carthage and Phoenician settlements in Sardinia, which depict soldiers and they show men with large apparently circular shields and spears.⁵ Numidian royal monuments, which may be drawing on Carthaginian material culture (it would have been high status) feature large round shields as a design motif and one intriguing monument, a statue base excavated in Rome, has been supposed by Ann Kuttner to possibly be a Numidian comission showing Numidian arms (or perhaps the captured arms of Carthaginians?) and shows a large round shield of the same type seen on their royal monumnets, alongside tube-and-yoke cuirasses (two of which are set up as trophies) and plumed helmets of the pilos/konos type (a kind of Hellenistic Greek helmet).⁶ And our literary sources regularly describe the Carthaginians as forming heavy infantry battle lines (using the word φάλαγξ, phalanx, to describe them) and report Carthaginians as wearing helmets and armor, with large shields and spears.⁷

On that basis, both Gregory Daly and Joshua Hall (both op. cit.) conclude that the Carthaginians must have fought rather a lot like Greek hoplites and I think this is both basically correct and probably the best we can do. By the Punic Wars, we have hints that Carthaginian troops (both citizen and subject from North Africa) may also be adopting Italic equipment, which I’ll get into more in the next post: by the end of the Second Punic War and certainly by the Third Punic War, Carthaginian soldiers may have looked actually quite ‘Roman’ in their kit.

All of that said, as is obvious from the forces Carthage arrayed for the Punic Wars, Carthaginian armies included far more than just citizen soldiers – indeed, many Carthaginian armies evidently included few if any Carthaginian citizens outside of the officer corps. So to better understand Carthage’s armies, we are going to have to branch out to think about their other forces, which we’ll begin to do next week.

1. J.H. Thiel, A History of Roman Sea-Power Before the Second Punic War (1954), 334. To say that this reputation runs afoul of our sources would be an exercise in staggering understatement. Instead, it seems extraordinarily clear to me that Carthage’s reputation for being peaceful and un-military derives almost entirely from orientalist stereotypes about quiescent ‘Easterners.’
2. Calculating the combined Roman losses from the River Aous, Cynoscephalae, Thermopylae, Magnesia, Callinicus and Pydna is necessarily a bit of guesswork (Aous has no reported casualty figure for the Romans, for instance), but the heaviest losses of the bunch were almost certainly Callinicus (2,200 lost, including captured), with the rest all likely below 1,000 a piece. If we generously assume 15,000 Roman losses for all of them together, individual Carthaginian victories at Drepana (249), Trebia (218), Trasimene (217), Cannae (216), the Upper Baetis (211) all meet or exceed that figure. Catastrophic Roman fleet losses to storms in 255 and 253 along with the combined Carthaginian-victory-plus-storm at Phintias (249) also well exceed those figures. The Battle of the Bagradas River (255) comes in just short of our 15,000 figure, but given how generous that is to the heirs of Alexander, we probably ought to include it. So we might argue that fighting the Carthaginians inflicted more casualties on the Romans in a day than fighting the Hellenistic kingdoms did on at least seven occasions; nine if we count storms. Of course Roman losses to disease and other sorts of attrition in both wars would have been higher, but this considers only battle deaths.
3. That is double the peak mobilization of any other ancient Mediterranean state not called ‘Rome.’
4. For more on maximum mobilization figures, see of course, Michael J. Taylor, Soldiers & Silver: Mobilizing Resources in the Age of Roman Conquest (2020).
5. Hall, op. cit., 29, fn. 15.
6. See W. Horsted, The Numidians 300 BC -AD 300 (2021). Osprey volumes of this sort vary wildly in quality, but Horsted’s is quite good and one of the few sustained efforts at reconstructing Numidian warfare in detail.
7. E.g. Plut. Tim. 27-8.