Dexter Hoyos – A Companion to the Punic Wars

Автор: Dexter Hoyos
Название книги: A Companion to the Punic Wars
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Древний мир и Античность
Страницы: 561
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

A Companion to the Punic Wars offers a comprehensive new survey of the three wars fought between Rome and Carthage between 264 and 146 BC.
Offers a broad survey of the Punic Wars from a variety of perspectives
Features contributions from an outstanding cast of international scholars with unrivalled expertise
Includes chapters on military and naval techniques, strategies, logistics, and Hannibal as a charismatic general and leader
Gives balanced coverage of both Carthage and Rome

It was a welcome opportunity to be invited to edit the Blackwell Companion
to the Punic Wars and so to gather a body of specialist contributors who would
illuminate not only the military aspects of these famous conflicts but also
many other linked themes. The Companion aims to fit the warfare into its
complex environment to illuminate the culture, background, demography
and postwar fortunes of the two states that fought each other to the death
over a hundred and twenty years.
The Punic Wars marked the beginning of Rome’s imperial expansion
and ended Carthage’s. The issue was not a foregone conclusion until 201
BC: more than once, especially during the Second War, it could have turned
the other way. Together with a range of Roman leaders celebrated in literature
and tradition — Regulus, Fabius the Delayer, Marcellus the captor
of Syracuse, Scipio Africanus, his adoptive grandson Scipio Aemilianus,
and Cato the Censor — the conflicts made famous the only Carthaginian
with as notable a name today, not always for accurate reasons, as in the
ancient world, and two other great North African leaders who by contrast
are undeservedly forgotten, Hannibal’s father Hamilcar and Masinissa of
Numidia.
The historical record of these figures and their world is variedly askew.
Apart from a few quotations and papyrus fragments, the written accounts
that survive are all by Greek and Roman authors, from Polybius who
watched Carthage burn in 146 BC to sometimes uncomprehending
summary-compilers of late Roman times. Roman tradition, and increasingly
Greek, viewed the Carthaginians as quintessential fraudsters and warmongers,
memorably summed up by the philosopher-biographer Plutarch around
AD 100:
By contrast, Rome and the Romans of this era of conflict were largely held to
be solidly virtuous and heroic, not to mention much put upon by their cunning
adversaries: who, it followed logically, were entirely to blame for the
wars. This bias forms one of the modern scholar’s constant preoccupations
when assessing any aspect of the Punic Wars, as this Companion illustrates in
every chapter.
The ancient accounts are askew in other ways too. They survive unevenly,
another scholarly cross to bear, for most detailed Greek and Roman historical
works did not make it unscathed out of the Middle Ages. Those that treat of
the three Punic Wars are in a particularly unfortunate state. Only Polybius’
first five books (out of 40) are complete, although we do have sizeable extracts
from the rest; Livy’s account of only the Second War has come through,
though with short epitomes of his books on the others; Diodorus’ world history
is down to excerpts for the centuries after 300 BC; and Dio’s monumental
history of Rome is represented solely in excerpts and in a Byzantine epitome
for all the centuries before Cicero’s and Caesar’s. As a result our knowledge of
the First Punic War and the Third is lopsided and almost monochrome: the
only detailed information on the First comes in Polybius’ condensed version
and, on the Third, in Appian’s fairly short narrative which, in agreeable contrast
to his treatment of the previous two, draws partly on Polybius’ lost
account — but also devotes plenty of space to rather less admirable, Appiancomposed
speeches.
That Appian is the major source for a war fought three centuries before his
own day illustrates another problem. Polybius alone was a contemporary of
any war; Livy and Diodorus lived and wrote 100 to 150 years after him, and
the rest still later. How all of them utilized earlier sources, including documents
like the texts of treaties, what sources each chose to utilize, and how
they organized the information they drew from these are among the most
debated issues in Punic Wars studies. Livy, for example, used Polybius extensively
and thus could read his verbatim quotation of Hannibal’s treaty with
Macedon, as we still can: why did he choose to offer without comment an
improbably biased version, presumably found in an earlier Roman author?
A fourth source problem is compounded by the other three. Most Greek
and Roman authors were inexpert or uninterested in technical matters, from
military realities to topography and chronology, and their decided preference
was for dramatic and psychological retellings. Polybius does offer some discussion,
almost too compressed, of why the First Punic War broke out, whereas
what we have of Diodorus and Dio on the outbreak of the First Punic War
shows them interested mainly in the personal confrontations between
Mamertines, Carthaginians, and Romans around the straits of Messina in
summer 264 (Dio’s efforts at explaining the background are merely a series of
generalizations about mutual fear and territorial covetousness). Reporting
how Scipio Africanus’ first peace treaty with Carthage, in 203, was received by
the Senate at Rome, Livy supplies participants with plenty of oratory while
insisting that the treaty was rejected, a striking contrast to Polybius’ evidence
of ratification — which Livy himself soon afterwards assumes to have happened.
His account of the climactic battle of Zama, in turn, is bizarrely at
odds with Polybius’ which he seems not to understand fully (a Livian hazard
also found elsewhere in his work); though it is not as bizarre as that of Appian,
who like the epic poet Silius was determined to insert a hand-to-hand joust
between the two great generals. Polybius himself, with all his disdain for careless
armchair historiography, can be vague or simply wrong at times: as in his
narrative, almost place-name-free, of Hannibal’s passage over the Alps and his
implausible account of Scipio’s early political career.
The virtues of our ancient sources deserve acknowledgment, all the same.
They provide names, details of places, and a huge range of military, political,
diplomatic, administrative, social, and even (especially in Livy) economic and
religious information. Predictably, there are enough discrepancies and sometimes
contradictions between accounts to make the task of establishing a reasonably
true picture of any topic a contentious one. Yet no study of Punic War
themes, this Companion included, would be possible without the materials,
expansive, concise, or fragmentary, in the varied writings that survive.
Archaeological evidence and numismatics are in turn valuable in illuminating
the societies, cultures, and religions involved in the wars, although they
cannot to any great extent clarify the “action history” — politics, diplomacy,
warfare, and individuals. The rather small number of inscriptions from those
centuries is invaluable, from the epitaphs of some of the Scipio family, and a
(possibly) third-century milestone on a road in western Sicily, to the broken
text of Rome’s treaty with the Aetolians in 212 and second-century BC memorials
to royal Numidians, inscribed in the Punic language, in territories previously
Carthaginian. Of all the epigraphic materials that once existed, the one
that probably most historians wish had survived would surely be Hannibal’s
personal record, in Punic and Greek, of his campaigns in Italy down to 206 in
the temple of Hera (Juno) on Cape Lacinium, today Capo Colonna, in southern
Italy.
The Punic Wars created a “national” Roman story of almost Trojan War
resonance, with its cast of heroic characters, figures flawed or tragic (such as
Regulus and Flaminius), and the larger-than-life enemy — hateful yet also
admired — personified by Hannibal. The dimensions of warfare were vast for
the ancient Mediterranean world: Polybius describes the First as the greatest
known to history until the Second surpassed it, while in the Second the proportions
of Rome’s and her loyal allies’ manpower that were called on for
military and naval service approached those of twentieth-century Europe.
Hannibal’s tactical genius and the dramatic glamour of his crossing of the Alps
have gripped the imagination of all eras, and have been esteemed as lessons
valuable even to campaign-planners of recent times (notably Graf von Schlieffen
and General Norman Schwarzkopf) — though the further lesson, that a
sweeping victory does not invariably end one’s problems, has always been less
welcome. The ruthlessly imposed horrors of the Third war illuminated the
realities of great-power hegemony that again could offer lessons to later eras.
Rome’s victory in the Second established her domination of the western
Mediterranean lands, and freed her to intervene in the east. This was done
with a speed and success that stunned observers. Thirteen years after the peace
of 201 with Carthage, she had struck down the great-power pretensions of
both Alexander the Great’s homeland Macedon and the greatest of his successor
states, the Seleucid empire, and reduced the entire eastern Mediterranean
potentially to satellite status. By 167 Macedon itself had ceased to exist and
Rome had reinforced her eastern hegemony. It prompted Polybius’ famous
introductory question:
Who is so worthless or indolent as not to wish to know by what means and
under what political system the Romans in less than fifty-three years [to 167 BC]
have succeeded in subjecting nearly the whole inhabited world to their sole rule
[arche] — something not to be found in all previous history? (Pol. 1.1.5)
The ultimate result, after his time, was the Roman empire bounded by the
Atlantic, the Sahara, and the great rivers of central Europe and Mesopotamia,
remembered and sometimes envied down the ages. Polybius was more prescient
than even he knew.
One might wonder what the result would have been had Hannibal and
Carthage been victorious instead of Scipio and Rome. With Rome, Italy, and
the western lands under Carthage’s arche, subjection of the east would
not have been long in coming (especially if Hannibal continued in control; in
201 he was only 46). An empire speaking Punic and Greek, or Punic, Greek,
and also Latin, might ultimately have stretched from the Atlantic to the
Euphrates — if not beyond.