Carthage Page 8
‘The second document, Fathers, passes from Bostar of Chalcedon to Scipio minor all that remains of his late father’s estate.’
‘But this is impossible!’ This time it was Antonius on his feet. ‘Only a senator could promulgate such a thing.’ He span round, glaring at his peers. ‘Which of us has done this?’
Into the shocked, bewildered silence, I answered, old friend. ‘Rufus Curtius Flaminius, Fathers. It was done in his name, and with his seal.’
Now Cato’s voice rose over the hubbub that ensued. ‘Curtius, Curtius! He is a senator of Rome no more!’
I closed my eyes and stroked my beard. Did you know I have grown it again? When my colleagues were quiet, I went on. ‘That is correct, Censor. “Is”. But Curtius was, until this morning. And this deed was executed two days ago. Scipio’s son, Reverend Fathers, is alive, and will soon be here.’
[There follow several pages of self-congratulation, and reminiscences about campaigns this Lucius Valerius Flaccus fought with Rufus Curtius Flaminius in Bithynia and Macedonia and Spain and other places that now belong to Rome. Then there are patrician japes about Cato’s petition to matriculate arms, and so on. Though an historian, I have preferred to break off this narrative at a point which, it seems to me, a dramatist might have enjoyed.]
From Hanno’s memoir
I remember when I met him as though it were yesterday. It was an autumn morning, the wind from the north, cirrus clouds scudding across the sky. Bostar was working. I had done my day’s Punic, started out for a walk, returned for a cloak against the chill, and gone out again. As I entered the potters’ quarter, not for the first time on my walks I stopped to watch a particular woman at work; both because she was a woman, and I still found that strange because in Capua only men could ply such a trade, and because she was making a huge, deep-bellied pot, larger than any I had seen before. Potting fascinates me. I had become a useful amateur, before this war. In Punic we call a potter yotser. The word means ‘the one who gives shape to the unshaped’. The Latin word figulus is much more mundane. We are all unshaped before the gods’ great wheel. Of me, see what they have made.
As I, squatting, watched the woman work, her wheel spin, her hands form this thing of beauty from mute clay as the kiln behind her smoked, sputtered and flared, my eye was caught by movement under a blanket to the woman’s right. A face appeared, like a weasel’s, the features sharp and pointed. It was a human face, a young man’s, yet one that looked old beyond its years. At first, I couldn’t understand. The body was on all fours, and yet the blanket over it was humped, like a laden mule. ‘Mother, may I go and see them now?’ the figure said.
‘Yes,’ the woman replied, suddenly looking up at me with kind and lustrous dark-brown eyes. ‘You can, Halax. But be back for the midday meal. And take this one with you – if he wants to go. Do you want to go with my son Halax and see elephants?’ she asked me, her wheel slowing, her hands still on the clay. ‘I have seen you before.’
‘I–– I––. Elephants? Yes, I suppose so.’
‘Then follow me,’ Halax said. I looked up at him. Standing up, I looked down. He was half my height, his head a shock of curly, ginger hair. He had enormous, red, swollen and ballooning ears whose lobes hung almost level with his chin. But my eyes were drawn, despite myself, to the lump that was his back. I forced my eyes away from that. My eyes met his, green ones flecked with grey, squinting into the sun. They bored into me. ‘My mother says,’ the words flew out of him like the songs of birds in the morning, ‘that it is rude to stare.’
Letter preserved in the archives of Rome
Speusippus, secretary to Cato the Censor, to Marcus Antonius Regulus, Chief Clerk of the Aerarium. My master is unwell. He is in bed, suffering from one of his blinding headaches. Even the buzzing of flies gives him pain. So he will not attend your audit today. I went in to ask him whether he would want you to proceed without him, but he waved me away, and groaned, so I do not know. What I think likely is that he will chastise you whether you proceed without him, or whether you do not. I leave the choice to you.
From Bostar’s journal
At least they came by day this time, the stewards of the Sufet. And they were different men. Perhaps stewards were allowed time off – something Mastanabal did not seem to grant himself. It was almost a month after my nocturnal meeting. ‘The High Sufet Mastanabal bids you join him the day after tomorrow for a boar hunt,’ one of the stewards intoned, rather than said. ‘And the boy Hanno is to accompany you.’
‘Boy?’ I replied. ‘He’s hardly that. He––’
‘The boy Hanno is to accompany you.’
‘All right. But a boar hunt?’
‘A boar hunt. A litter will call for you both just after first light.’
‘A litter? We can walk. I’ve never––’
‘A litter will call for you just after first light.’ In unison, this pair of martinets bowed their heads at me, turned and retraced their measured way.
Letter found among Cato’s papers, and preserved in the
archives of Rome
My dear mother. It has been nine months now since we left, and still I have not heard from you. Please write to me, and tell me you are well. How is the boarding house? I hope the taxes are not too high. I could send you some money. At least I could ask Bostar to. He has much of it, in chests in our house. Write to me, soon. If you have difficulty with the characters, I am sure Labienus or Artixes will help you write down what you feel. Please tell Labienus that I am thinking of him, and Artixes too. I wonder how you all are.
Bostar and I are in Carthage. Bostar says we are safe. You can send a letter to me here, at the house we have rented. Tell the courier you use that it stands second last on the left before the potters’ quarter, near the temple of Eschmoun. [Here there are marks from a different hand in the margin, and these last words are underlined. I can only assume, since I found this letter in Cato’s papers, that it never reached the widow Apurnia, and that these marks are Cato’s, or one of his men’s. So much love in life gets lost, or does not reach its end.] We have a servant who cooks and cleans. Bostar works mostly, and says he is waiting for a message. About what, he will not say. I do know that he went to see someone they call the Sufet. He is a kind of king. But you know how Bostar always has plans.
The weather is much like it was in Capua. The language, Punic, is strange, but I have learned a great deal. I was lonely here at first, but now I have a friend. His name is Halax. He is a hunchback. He took me to see extraordinary creatures they call elephants. They are huge, ten times bigger [four, I would say.] than the biggest horse, and live in stables within the city walls – which gives you some idea of how big the walls are. [This hyperbole as to the elephant’s size is, I suppose, inevitable in one as young and impressionable as Hanno was then. But he was referring, of course, to the African elephant, not the Indian. The former differs from its cousin in being bigger, having larger and triangular ears, a concave back and a more segmented trunk. Readers who wish to learn more of this great mammal should refer to Aristotle’s seminal work, De Partibus Animalium.] Some of the elephants have tusks, and they all have long trunks with lips at the end of them and very large ears. They drop steaming turds bigger than my head. I was scared, but Halax talked to these elephants. He said they are gentle, and just as intelligent as men. I asked him how you could tell them apart. He said: ‘Look at their ears. They are as different as human faces.’ I peered up, and began to see what he meant. As I did so, I am sure that one of them, a huge cow called Ruba with a broken tusk, winked at me, raised her trunk and smiled. I stroked her belly. The skin was as thick as a leather cuirass.
The Carthaginians use these elephants to carry great burdens around the city: stones for building, merchants’ wares. Halax says they are much used in forestry, dragging whole trees out by the roots in the forests south of here and then carrying as many as three trees down to the nearest road. He says my father had elephants with him when he invaded Italy. Is that t
rue? How could they have survived the Alps, the cold and the snow? I must ask Bostar. He will know. Write to me, please. Your loving son, Hanno.
From Bostar’s journal
Mastanabal has proved as good as his word. I have now met Sphylax, a scholar and a fastidious young man for whom engineering is not just a science, but an art. He works from offices in the Council’s building, in the shadow of the citadel. He was reserved at first, but soon warmed when he saw that my interest was genuine. I was wrong about the walls. More accurately, I was ignorant. Sphylax has promised to take me on a tour of them tomorrow, to show me what he explained. It is all, apparently, in the joints. How do you join hewn stones to make them impervious to battering rams, even ship-borne ones like Alexander used against the walls of Tyre?
Sphylax’s father, it transpired, was responsible for supervising the rebuilding and strengthening of most of Carthage’s seaward walls while Hannibal’s war dragged on. I learned that the huge cost of this, and the higher taxes that resulted, added to the case of the so-called ‘Peace Party’ – those in Carthage who thought that Hannibal should be recalled and peace made with Rome. So it is even smaller wonder that Hannibal never had the men or munitions from Carthage for which, so often, he called. So do I put flesh on the bones of great matters in which I was involved.
Anyway, Sphylax’s father used as his model the work of Dionysius of Syracuse, and his great wall at Epipolae that no one has ever broken down. Here I was on firm ground, for I have often seen this wall, when I was a merchant’s clerk, many years and lives ago. Sphylax’s enthusiasm, though, was that of a master, and mine merely that of an acolyte of the trade. Dionysius’ engineers – their names, sadly, are lost to us – designed a casemate wall with, if my Punic served me well enough, what Sphylax called an innovative ‘chain masonry’ technique: every 10 to 20 feet, rectangular stones alternated as headers and stretchers. The headers reached through the fill to the opposite facing wall, connecting the two walls and making them, Sphylax insisted, ‘as strong as natural rock’. Carthage’s walls are made in the same way. I hope we never have to find out whether Sphylax’s confidence in their strength is right or wrong.
He turned next to defensive arms, catapults and onagers and the bows known as gastraphetes in Greek – ‘belly bows’. But here I had to confess my ignorance. Sphylax was disappointed, but promised to instruct me in this arcane art.
I changed the subject to another vital one – water. Carthage had, I learned, no crucial sources or springs a besieger might foul, not even the most vulnerable of supplies, an aqueduct. Instead, she relied on great underground cisterns, filled by the winter’s rains. How big, I asked? He laughed. ‘This city would have water,’ he said, ‘even if it didn’t rain for the next ten years.’
Measuring supply is easy. But demand? That would rise or fall, depending on fires or deaths. Still, I took Sphylax to mean that the city’s water was secure. I brought up the question of grain stores. An assistant interrupted us. Before he could answer me, Sphylax was called away. The question of filling Carthage’s bellies will have to wait for another day.
Letter preserved in the archives of Rome
Marcus Porcius Cato, Censor, to Spurius Lingustus. Your colleague Quintus Vitellius Tancinus is unavailable. Come to my offices. Draw as much money from Speusippus as you need. Hire four men, no more. Watch every boat that lands at Ostia – especially those from Massilia. One will have a young man on board, now known as Publius Cornelius Scipio, although he may not yet use that name. He is Africanus’ bastard son. He should be accompanied by a minor Capuan magistrate, one Titus Licinius Labienus.
I want to know as soon as they are here. I want to know where they stay. The villa of Rufus Curtius Flaminius, until lately a senator, would not surprise me. You will know it well. I hope the porter is still in our pay. If not, see to it.
So, find this Scipio. Watch him, every minute of the night and day. I want a report, written or spoken, at dawn and dusk each day.
Letter preserved among Cato’s papers
Furius Bibaculus to Marcus Porcius Cato, Censor, greetings. I have yours of yesterday. You refuse to allow me to buy more slaves for this project, saying I must work the ones I have even harder. Very well. But do not be surprised if many die. I am already working them eighteen hours a day, as you ordered, digging by torchlight when the sun sets. The tanks will be ready by next week. The dressed stones are here to have them lined. Then we should fill the tanks with water the week after, and bring in the fish. If they breed as fast as we believe they will, the carp from Rome’s first fish farm should be ready for market with the first winter rains – just as the natural supply begins to fail.
So, if the slaves’ strength is sufficient, our project will be complete on time. Our neighbour here, Quintus Valerius Gracchus, continues to complain. You know he built a summer house at the foot of his garden, overlooking our ground. He says the noise of construction disturbs him, as does the slaves’ smell if the wind is from the north. He says we should not have been allowed to build a farm for fish so close to Rome. But as you know, for reasons of transport that proximity is critical to our plans. So please seek to mollify Gracchus. You will know the best means for the man.
From Bostar’s journal
I must admit to a certain satisfaction. I received a letter from Labienus this afternoon. He has found Scipio’s son, and the two of them are in Rome. My plan is unfolding. [This naïvety again: there is the fable of the shepherd who found what he took to be an abandoned puppy. He trained it, and it tended his sheep until, one day, it killed them all. The puppy was not a dog, but a wolf. How can Bostar know that Scipio will be accepted? If he is, will nurture be greater than nature? The latter might prefer not peace, but war.] I will write to Theogenes, and reply to Labienus, now. My sense of well-being grows. Only this morning, as I was walking back from the barber’s in the market, I witnessed a crime. A well-dressed merchant, his retainers about him as restless remoras attend a shark, was walking in front of me. He paused and turned to talk to someone he knew, and some ruffian in a patched green cloak brushed against him. ‘My purse, my purse!’ the merchant bellowed as the other darted down the lane to our left. Well, within seconds, mehashebim and police were on the spot. By the time a crowd had gathered, the culprit had been led before the merchant, and the latter’s purse returned. The criminal, I understand, will lose his right hand. That is the punishment. [It will have been the left hand, actually, for a first offence. I have the Penal Code of Carthage here, rescued from the citadel, and I have read it with some interest – and disdain.] This incident confirms my feeling that we are safe here. I am sure that I can execute my plans.
From the journals of the Senate and People of Rome
Let it be known that from this day, a.d. xii Kalendas Mart. a.u.c. DLXXI, for distinguished service to the state and having undertaken the lustrations required by law, Quintus Valerius Gracchus is elevated to the equestrian order, with all the rights and responsibilities this commands, and is as of this day so recorded in the census of Rome. Executed under the seal and authority of Marcus Porcius Cato, Censor.
Letter preserved in the archives of Rome
My dear Curtius. They have arrived safely, and the young Scipio graces your villa here in Rome. I must thank you for getting me involved. He is his father’s son, no doubt. There is much of Africanus in his mien. There is a great deal he needs to learn – his table manners, for example, are atrocious – but we will teach him in time. He is tall, and lithe, and well proportioned, though I would say his arms are a little too long. His forehead, eyes, high cheekbones and nose are his father’s. His full mouth and sandy hair are, I must suppose, from his mother – but I will pass quickly on. He looks strong and healthy. Even his teeth seem fine. I will take him to the baths with me tomorrow and then we shall see more. His Latin is rudimentary, and of course he has no Greek at all. He and Labienus converse in a Gaulish–Latin pidgin, which makes a disagreeable sound. But underlying that, he has a voice li
ke a lyre and a laugh that sings. Indeed, were he not who he is and these times not as they are, I should be very tempted to claim this Ganymede for my own. What, I wonder, are we to do with him? Or do you want me to take him under my wing, show him some art and dally the days away? Theogenes awaits your instructions, as he always enjoyed those of Africanus, extol that numinous name.
Letter preserved in the archives of Rome
Curtius to Theogenes. I am writing this myself, by return courier. He is neither colt nor kouros, by all the gods. Get him a tutor, for a start. Try that man Ennius. He lives on the Aventine somewhere. He’s a Messapian, but they say he’s good. And he’s a client of Cato’s, so at least there’s irony here. I want Scipio’s Latin perfect within three months. In fact, get him several tutors. Ennius for language, another for background and manners, a third for arms. Can your charge use a sword? Does he know a pilum from a postern? I assume that he can ride. Gauls learn to do so before they can walk, and I presume that is how he was reared. But check. Do not, I repeat, do not take him with you to the baths. Have the slaves wash and strigil him at home. Make sure he stays within the grounds of the villa until I say otherwise. I may no longer be a senator, but I believe that I still have friends. There is much to be done. Send Labienus to me here near Neapolis. Tell him to use the horses of one Demodocus. He will find his livery by the Fulvian Gate.
From Hanno’s memoir
It all happened so quickly. Bostar and I had gone down into the market that afternoon. Bostar’s teeth were hurting, and had been for some time. We were looking for a dentist, and kept being sent down narrower and narrower lanes as we sought the premises of a Scythian called Monodos – not, I admit, the most auspicious name. I look across this crowded room now, as smoke from the burning city wisps across us all and stings my aching eyes. I see Bostar, bent over a small writing table in the corner and, in spite of myself, I smile. For love, for laughter past, for loss. I both mourn and celebrate what has been, and all that might yet be.