Carthage Read online

  Getting up and leaning on the gunnel, I tossed our crusts of bread into the wake. Seagulls swooped immediately, come as sudden sprites, and soared and scrapped and dived. I was silent. So was Bostar. Then I turned, and squinted into the sun.

  ‘What’s in those chests, Bostar?’

  ‘Things we’ll need.’

  I knew – and know – when not to persevere with him. ‘Do you really think we could outrun a Roman galley?’

  He spread out his hands. ‘I don’t know. Because we could use fresh rowers, Trimalchio thinks so. And he’s paid to get it right.’

  ‘But under sail?’ I persisted.

  Bostar shrugged. ‘Again, I don’t know. But we’re carrying extra sails as well. A spinnaker, I think Trimalchio called it, and something else as well.’

  ‘The Roman ships are triremes, though, with three banks of oars.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So they must be faster.’

  Bostar chuckled. ‘There are many areas in which I feel my ignorance, Hanno. But the respective merits of ships would have to be an outstanding one. Still, let me pass on what Trimalchio told me: triremes are designed largely for their power in ramming. The Romans make war at sea as they do on land: ram the enemy ship, secure yourself to it by dropping the great, hinged corvus onto its deck, and then march your men over. Proceed according to standing orders, as on land. So the trireme is not faster than us, no. Heavier, yes, and much stronger; but slow. At least let’s hope so. Now, I don’t know about you, but I have some papers to look over. I’m going below.’

  ‘Bostar,’ I called to his retreating back.

  He stopped and turned. ‘Yes?’

  ‘About the Roman triremes. Do you think we’ll have to put Trimalchio’s theory to the test?’

  ‘That, Hanno, is another thing I just don’t know.’

  For the next few days the only ships we saw were other merchantmen, some heavy in the water and slow, others empty, spry and high and showing a good yard of gleaming viridian weed and glistening indigo barnacle on their sides. I spent hours looking for them to relieve the monotony of the rolling days, and was surprised when, as soon as they saw us, they veered away.

  On our fifth day at sea, after the midday meal I was dozing on deck. Shouts stirred me. I sat up. ‘Astern, astern!’ I heard the lookout call. I jumped to my feet. Like everyone else, I looked behind us. Despite the swell, I saw it clearly: a xebec coming up on us fast, its patched lateen sail full and pregnant in the wind. It was closing on us quickly. ‘Rowers, to your benches!’ Trimalchio roared down into the hold. ‘You, boy! When they’re up, you get down below!’ he shouted at me, brushing past to take the helm.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked him.

  ‘Bloody pirate. Corsican, by the looks of her. Now, do as I told you.’ The rowers had scampered past me. Half my body was down the steps to the cabins when, behind me, I saw the xebec jibe and turn away. The sailors cheered. I climbed back on deck.

  ‘Why?’ I asked a clearly relieved Trimalchio, wiping the sweat from his eyes.

  ‘Why?’ he replied, a twinkle in his eye. He slapped me on the back and roared with laughter. ‘Look up, laddie, up to the mizzenyards,’ he urged.

  I squinted into the sun. Ropes, booms, masts, sails, the usual flags. ‘I can’t see anything special,’ I said.

  ‘The red one. See the red flag?’

  I looked again. I saw it. ‘Yes, but it’s just a flag.’

  ‘Just a flag? That means “plague on board”, boy, plague. No wonder even pirates skirt us by!’

  ‘But have we got the plague?’ I asked incredulously.

  ‘Of course not. But your Bostar wanted us to travel, as they say, incognito. No one close enough, if possible, even to read our name. So this was one of his plans,’ he chuckled. ‘And by Neptune it works. I’ll vow there never was such a man for plans!’

  I learned later from a crewman that the number of pirate ships had risen sharply since the end of the last war between Rome and Carthage. ‘Bunch of hucksters those Carthaginians,’ he told me. ‘But at least they kept the seas safe for trade.’

  ‘Don’t the Romans?’ I asked him.

  ‘The Romans?’ He spat a great, green gob into our wake. ‘Only around Italy’s shores.’

  Letter from Cato’s papers, preserved in the archives

  of Rome

  To Marcus Porcius Cato, Censor, in Rome; Quintus Vitellius Tancinus, special legate, sends greetings from Amphipolis in Macedonia. If I understood your wishes correctly, I have excellent news. I followed your last instructions, and went to Athens. Trimalchio and his ship Apollodorus had indeed docked and provisioned there. I bribed the Greek – well, he was a Scythian, actually, and a fat one, but he said married to a Greek, the sister of one of their interminable demagogues whose name escapes me, which is a pity, since I know you like to know these things. Anyway, I searched for them in and around Thessalonika. Nothing. I tell you all this, by the way, because my expenses will be large but my effort has been considerable and there may be certain things I have, how shall I put it, forgotten … So I moved on to this city Amphipolis. A pleasant enough place. The wine is good, for Macedon, and the women even better. Through the friend of an agent’s friend, who owns a number of fruit stalls in the market and has his ear very close to the ground, I heard of a certain villa along the coast a few miles north-east of here, secluded, above its own bay. How deep is the anchorage, I asked? I paid over some more gold. Enough for a galley, I was told. And who rents it, I asked? A foreign gentleman, I was told. He paid six months’ rent in advance, in one gold bar.

  Well, well, I thought. But your excellency will be impatient to learn more. In short, yesterday I went to this villa, or what was left of it. It had burned to the ground only a few days before I got there. I spoke to a certain Arxes, an old fool and the villa’s servant. It had been his night off, apparently. He was with his woman in the local village, asleep, when someone first smelled the smoke, woke him up and he ran there. Too late. It was a conflagration. There were no survivors. Of the two inside, he said, the man called Bostar was obsessed with security and used to bar, bolt and double-lock all the doors and bar the windows each night himself, in person. He wouldn’t let Arxes do it, it seemed. Well, perhaps the smoke got to them first. Maybe they didn’t feel a thing. The point is, they’re gone. I’m sure. I poked around in the ashes until I found them, or what was left of them that is. Bones mostly. Those of a man, in what Arxes said had been the master bedroom. Those of a teenager in the room next door. That would fit your description of this Hanno. And near the body of your Bostar I found the remains of two strongboxes, both full of gold bars. I am pleased to be able to report that, although a few of them have melted round the edges, most are mint and whole. Strange thing, though. The gold isn’t Roman. There is no eagle on the ingots, but an odd-looking thing I haven’t seen before. It looks to me like a Syrian sword, though I can’t be sure.

  But the plot thickens further. In one of the boxes, alongside the ingots there are hundreds of silver coins. Now as you know, coinage is something that interests me. You will remember our experiments with Rome’s during the war. These silver coins have been minted in the incuse method: the obverse image, a man’s profile, whose I do not know, is in relief, and on the reverse the same head has been struck in negative, the two exactly aligned. That is a Greek technique, or I’m a Ligurian. And if I were a gambling man, I would say the head is that of King Philip of Macedon. If I’m right, how did these coins come to be in the late Bostar’s care?

  Anyway, your excellency, so closes another chapter in the fight against the enemies of Rome. I will rest a few days from my travails and – with the gold of course, and the strange silver which we can resmelt and recast – then I will return to Rome. Whence again I hope to be of some small service to your august self – and, of course, to the Senate and People of Rome.

  From Hanno’s memoir

  There are things I do enjoy about sea voyages, and others I do not:
the mass of sweating, bickering, masturbating men; having to relieve yourself in open view over the side; seeing the squawking gulls swoop to scavenge your floating faeces, unless you have ship’s belly and instead you stain the sea; the sudden squalls and showers; the stinging salt; the smutty songs; the interminable salted beef and biscuits; the brackish water; the constant creaks and noise; the reeving restlessness of the sea.

  But there is an embalming peace that compensates. I was mourning for the father I had never known, eager and yet apprehensive about what was to come; I was missing the known, but excited by the unknown. In these dichotomies, the sea soothed me; the darting dolphins, the reaching rainbows, the eternal that is ocean.

  Under a bleached canvas on the upper deck, Bostar chewing on his interminable bdellium gum, we made good use of the time. I learned more of Carthage, Qart Hadasht in Punic – New Town. Though it is hardly that now, it was to those colonists from Tyre who founded it almost seven hundred years ago. I mean seven hundred by our solar calendar, of course. The subject of chronology––

  [Here followed a long, erudite but recondite exposition on the science of time, and a diatribe on the allegedly cumbersome Roman calendar. The latter from deference to my patrons, the former from respect for my readers, I have removed.]

  Actually, despite Bostar’s disapproval, I preferred – and still do – the less prosaic story of the naming of Carthage from Karkhedon, a prince of Tyre and brother to Elissa. Their father, King Pygmalion, murdered Elissa’s husband because he was jealous of him and thought he had designs on the throne. When Elissa then fled in fear of her own life, Karkhedon went with her. Together, for seven years and seven months and seven days they wandered, and Elissa became known as Dido, which means ‘fugitive’ in Punic.

  In Cyprus they saved eighty girls from sacred prostitution in the temple of Venus. Their ship dangerously overcrowded, they sailed on. At last they came to what is now Carthage, but they had little money left. The native Libycians agreed, laughingly, to sell them as much land as an ox-hide would cover. That settled, Dido cut a hide into the finest of strips and so marked out an area of land more than two miles in circumference, with what is now this citadel at its centre. The Libycians were furious, but kept to the bargain. Its bloodline vigorous thanks to the women of Cyprus, the new city of Carthage flourished and grew strong.

  But Dido’s was a less happy fate. Again, there are several versions of the story. Either you believe it true that when Hiarbas, the Libyic king, wanted to marry her, Dido felt she could not be unfaithful to the memory of her murdered husband. She persuaded Hiarbas to let her build what he thought was an expiatory pyre. She had it lit. She moved towards it, as if in prayer and supplication. Suddenly, before anyone could stop her, she threw herself on.

  Or some prefer another account, better known. Aeneas, prince of Troy, was one of few to escape from the sack of that great city by the Greeks under Agamemnon, as Homer’s Iliad records. With his father Anchises and some companions, he fled the burning city only to be shipwrecked on the coast of our Cap Bon. Fishermen from the village of Kerkouane found them, and asked their queen what should be done. Dido gave the Trojans refuge, safe from the Greeks here in Carthage, behind its already mighty walls. In time, Aeneas declared his love for Dido, and asked her to marry him. After weeks of anguish about her first husband, she agreed.

  But Aeneas’ word was worthless. Having had his ship repaired secretly, one dawn he sailed away. From this citadel where I write, perhaps from this very room, Dido saw his ship sailing north in the bay, and her heart broke. She ran to the pyre already built to celebrate their nuptials, lit it, climbed to the top and lay down.

  Aeneas, of course, went on to found Rome – although the Romans hold to the preposterous claim that their city was actually founded by Romulus and Remus, who had been suckled by a she-wolf, of all things.

  [Foundation myths are fascinating. I see no harm in them, and Rome’s are better than many: the rape of the Sabine women, King Tarquinius Superbus and all that sort of thing. It gives the Romans the sense of history they need and we Greeks just assume.]

  We Carthaginians know better. From Aeneas to Cato, the Romans have been perfidious through long generations. Ask the shades of the Latins, the Etruscans, the Samnites, the Campanians, the Tuscans, the Volscians, the Umbrians, the Messapians, Fretanians, Mamertanians, Sabellians, Lucanians, Apulians, Paelignians, Marrucinians and other peoples, now no more than names, about the worth of the word of Rome. Ask the Corsicans, Sardinians, the Illyrians, the Gauls, the Balearics, even now the Greeks. Ask all the world, bar Carthage. Rome’s is a slavery my father fought with his life, and which among the Romans Scipio Africanus, his uncle Aemilianus and others sought to moderate. When will the cycle turn? Even Scipio, the son of Africanus, who besieges us here, has tried to persuade Rome to treat for peace. But he has failed.

  From Bostar’s journal

  [This Bostar is a polymath without parallel in my experience, and he kept this journal through almost all his time in Carthage. But I have extracted only what seems appropriate. The previous thirty pages or so, for example, concern his complex accounting system – which, I confess, I do not yet understand, nor the references to lines of credit held, it seems, right across the Mediterranean. How did he come by these, or finance the great endeavours he set in train?]

  We are making good progress. Yesterday evening we saw the coast of Crete to port. Trimalchio is a meticulous navigator, adept of the cross-staff, even though he dismisses the astrolabe as new-fangled gadgetry. Last night, measuring from the Pole Star to the fore and hind guards of the Little Bear, I used mine to check Trimalchio’s computation of our latitude. To his amusement, our assessments agreed.

  I have gone over and over my plans. I can find no fault with them. But there are many variables. Still, the die is cast. Now I can only wait to see which way it lands.

  Letter preserved in the archives of Rome

  To Marcus Antonius Regulus, High Clerk of the Treasury, from Cato the Censor. How dare you question my authority! I am the elected Censor, and what I ask is well within my rights. What is more, my request concerns a matter vital to the welfare of the Republic. I expect you to comply at once. Have the papers sent to my secretary, Speusippus. He will give you a receipt. To reiterate, I want: (1) the will of the late Scipio they called Africanus and (2) all the relevant bankers’ accounts. Of course he may have made deposits with bankers further afield. I have begun enquiries among our allies. But let us start with the Italian banks. Because you will have to order these from the various prefectures, you have three weeks; no more. As for the five Roman banks, I expect these in as many days.

  From Hanno’s memoir

  We spent a week rehearsing it all, with Bostar filling in the blanks; how, after the thirteen-year siege and sack of Tyre by Nebuchadrezzar five hundred years ago, Carthage assumed pre-eminence. The colony became the head, and in turn its settlements spread; Gades and Nepheris, Hadrumetum, Amathus, Tripoli and Empuriae are all cities founded in Carthage’s name. Passing beyond the Pillars of Herakles, our mariners established trading posts in Senegalia and the country called Quinia, where the women have children in threes; in Madiria and Canaria; and all these posts became towns in time.

  Then, as is inevitable, the territorial disputes began. The first were those with the Greeks of Cyrene. But they were resolved and the agreement between the two states was marked by the building of the Altar of Philenae. Both the altar and that agreement still stand. Carthage has always preferred to resolve disputes amicably. We are a people who need peace to trade, not war.

  That trade grew in range and extent, bringing us interests in Sicily especially, but all around. Some of the Greek cities objected to our hegemony. We made treaties with them, or made war. We crushed the Phocaeans and the Massaliotes off Corsica; defeated the Sicans, Sicels and Elymians on land. Our trade flourished; our caravans brought goods from the heart of Africa, diamonds, gold, glossopetri and other precious stones, and our mari
ners explored our continent’s coast.

  Our black galleys brought tin from the Cassiterides, silver and lead from Spain, nutmeg and spices from the orient and always, always, from our city’s rich hinterland and the Cap Bon peninsula we call our garden, we sold grain and the finest silphium, worth many times its weight in gold; from the shellfish fisheries along our coast, we made and sold the dye of purest, murex purple from the Greek word for which, phoinix, we take our Punic name.

  We lost some battles with the Greek tyrants of certain Sicilian cities, but after these we agreed to respect their independence if they would ours, and leave our trading routes alone. We became a match for the Greeks in power, and rivalled only by the Persians in wealth. Our ships became synonymous with strength and speed, as quick we say as a wing or a thought; and always at the heart of this empire was Carthage, a ship anchored in the earth.

  Then we began to encounter Rome. Four hundred years ago we made our first treaty with the Romans. Under it, the Italian coasts were left to the Romans, and the African to us. The question of Sicily, though, was unresolved, and the treaty left the island as a neutral zone. There were Greek cities there, Roman ones and Carthaginian. These in time the Romans sought to make their own. Our Senate protested. They were ignored, and twice the Roman fleet attacked ours. They sent an army to Africa, but were defeated. Then, leading a mercenary army, my father’s father, Hamilcar, invaded Sicily. The war dragged on, with victories for both sides, and under the eventual treaty Carthage agreed to exchange its claims in Sicily for freedom to expand in southern Spain. Again, each side was to leave the other’s trading routes alone. Carthage also agreed to pay Rome an indemnity. This meant that the mercenaries, by this time back in Carthage, went unpaid. They revolted. My grandfather Hamilcar crushed them in what we know as the ‘Truceless War’.