The History of Rome, Book IV - Theodor Mommsen
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He only is a living man, the rest are gliding shades.(15)
While these events were passing, the close of the year had come
and with it a change of commanders; the consul Lucius Piso (606)
was somewhat late in appearing and took the command of the land
army, while Lucius Mancinus took charge of the fleet. But, if their
predecessors had done little, these did nothing at all. Instead of
prosecuting the siege of Carthage or subduing the army of Hasdrubal,
Piso employed himself in attacking the small maritime towns of the
Phoenicians, and that mostly without success. Clupea, for example,
repulsed him, and he was obliged to retire in disgrace from Hippo
Diarrhytus, after having lost the whole summer in front of it and
having had his besieging apparatus twice burnt. Neapolis was no
doubt taken; but the pillage of the town in opposition to his pledged
word of honour was not specially favourable to the progress of
the Roman arms. The courage of the Carthaginians rose. Bithyas,
a Numidian sheik, passed over to them with 800 horse; Carthaginian
envoys were enabled to attempt negotiations with the kings of Numidia
and Mauretania and even with Philip the Macedonian pretender.
It was perhaps internal intrigues--Hasdrubal the emigrant brought
the general of the same name, who commanded in the city, into
suspicion on account of his relationship with Massinissa, and
caused him to be put to death in the senate-house--rather than
the activity of the Romans, that prevented things from assuming
a turn still more favourable for Carthage.
Scipio Aemilianus
With the view of producing a change in the state of African affairs,
which excited uneasiness, the Romans resorted to the extraordinary
measure of entrusting the conduct of the war to the only man who had
as yet brought home honour from the Libyan plains, and who was
recommended for this war by his very name. Instead of calling Scipio
to the aedileship for which he was a candidate, they gave to him
the consulship before the usual time, setting aside the laws to the
contrary effect, and committed to him by special decree the conduct
of the African war. He arrived (607) in Utica at a moment when much
was at stake. The Roman admiral Mancinus, charged by Piso with the
nominal continuance of the siege of the capital, had occupied a steep
cliff, far remote from the inhabited district and scarcely defended,
on the almost inaccessible seaward side of the suburb of Magalia, and
had united nearly his whole not very numerous force there, in the hope
of being able to penetrate thence into the outer town. In fact the
assailants had been for a moment within its gates and the camp-
followers had flocked forward in a body in the hope of spoil, when
they were again driven back to the cliff and, being without supplies
and almost cut off, were in the greatest danger. Scipio found matters
in that position. He had hardly arrived when he despatched the
troops which he had brought with him and the militia of Utica by sea
to the threatened point, and succeeded in saving its garrison and
holding the cliff itself. After this danger was averted, the general
proceeded to the camp of Piso to take over the army and bring it back
to Carthage. Hasdrubal and Bithyas availed themselves of his absence
to move their camp immediately up to the city, and to renew the
attack on the garrison of the cliff before Magalia; but even now
Scipio appeared with the vanguard of the main army in sufficient time
to afford assistance to the post. Then the siege began afresh and
more earnestly. First of all Scipio cleared the camp of the mass of
camp-followers and sutlers and once more tightened the relaxed reins
of discipline. Military operations were soon resumed with increased
vigour. In an attack by night on the suburb the Romans succeeded in
passing from a tower--placed in front of the walls and equal to them
in height--on to the battlements, and opened a little gate through
which the whole army entered. The Carthaginians abandoned the
suburb and their camp before the gates, and gave the chief command
of the garrison of the city, amounting to 30,000 men, to Hasdrubal.
The new commander displayed his energy in the first instance by
giving orders that all the Roman prisoners should be brought to the
battlements and, after undergoing cruel tortures, should be thrown
over before the eyes of the besieging army; and, when voices were
raised in disapproval of the act, a reign of terror was introduced
with reference to the citizens also. Scipio, meanwhile, after having
confined the besieged to the city itself, sought totally to cut off
their intercourse with the outer world. He took up his head-quarters
on the ridge by which the Carthaginian peninsula was connected with
the mainland, and, notwithstanding the various attempts of the
Carthaginians to disturb his operations, constructed a great camp
across the whole breadth of the isthmus, which completely blockaded
the city from the landward side. Nevertheless ships with provisions
still ran into the harbour, partly bold merchantmen allured by the
great gain, partly vessels of Bithyas, who availed himself of every
favourable wind to convey supplies to the city from Nepheris at the
end of the lake of Tunes; whatever might now be the sufferings of the
citizens, the garrison was still sufficiently provided for. Scipio
therefore constructed a stone mole, 96 feet broad, running from the
tongue of land between the lake and gulf into the latter, so as thus
to close the mouth of the harbour. The city seemed lost, when the
success of this undertaking, which was at first ridiculed by the
Carthaginians as impracticable, became evident. But one surprise
was balanced by another. While the Roman labourers were constructing
the mole, work was going forward night and day for two months
in the Carthaginian harbour, without even the deserters being
able to tell what were the designs of the besieged. All of a
sudden, just as the Romans had completed the bar across the entrance
to the harbour, fifty Carthaginian triremes and a number of boats and
skiffs sailed forth from that same harbour into the gulf--while the
enemy were closing the old mouth of the harbour towards the south,
the Carthaginians had by means of a canal formed in an easterly
direction procured for themselves a new outlet, which owing to the
depth of the sea at that spot could not possibly be closed. Had the
Carthaginians, instead of resting content with a mere demonstration,
thrown themselves at once and resolutely on the half-dismantled and
wholly unprepared Roman fleet, it must have been lost; when they
returned on the third day to give the naval battle, they found the
Romans in readiness. The conflict came off without decisive result;
but on their return the Carthaginian vessels so ran foul of each
other in and before the entrance of the harbour, that the damage thus
occasioned was equivalent to a defeat. Scipio now directed his
attacks against the outer quay, which lay outside of the city walls
and was only protected for the exigency by an earthen rampart of recent
construction. The machines were stationed on the tongue of land,
and a breach was easily made; but with unexampled intrepidity the
Carthaginians, wading through the shallows, assailed the besieging
implements, chased away the covering force which ran off in such a
manner that Scipio was obliged to make his own troopers cut them
down, and destroyed the machines. In this way they gained time to
close the breach. Scipio, however, again established the machines
and set on fire the wooden towers of the enemy; by which means he
obtained possession of the quay and of the outer harbour along
with it. A rampart equalling the city wall in height was here
constructed, and the town was now at length completely blockaded
by land and sea, for the inner harbour could only be reached through
the outer. To ensure the completeness of the blockade, Scipio
ordered Gaius Laelius to attack the camp at Nepheris, where Diogenes
now held the command; it was captured by a fortunate stratagem,
and the whole countless multitude assembled there were put to
death or taken prisoners. Winter had now arrived and Scipio
suspended his operations, leaving famine and pestilence to
complete what he had begun.
Capture of the City
How fearfully these mighty agencies had laboured in the work of
destruction during the interval while Hasdrubal continued to vaunt
and to gormandize, appeared so soon as the Roman army proceeded in
the spring of 608 to attack the inner town. Hasdrubal gave orders
to set fire to the outer harbour and made himself ready to repel
the expected assault on the Cothon; but Laelius succeeded in scaling
the wall, hardly longer defended by the famished garrison, at a point
farther up and thus penetrated into the inner harbour. The city
was captured, but the struggle was still by no means at an end.
The assailants occupied the market-place contiguous to the small
harbour, and slowly pushed their way along the three narrow streets
leading from this to the citadel--slowly, for the huge houses of
six stories in height had to be taken one by one; on the roofs or
on beams laid over the street the soldiers penetrated from one of
these fortress-like buildings to that which was adjoining or opposite,
and cut down whatever they encountered there. Thus six days
elapsed, terrible for the inhabitants of the city and full of
difficulty and danger also for the assailants; at length they
arrived in front of the steep citadel-rock, whither Hasdrubal and
the force still surviving had retreated. To procure a wider approach,
Scipio gave orders to set fire to the captured streets and to level
the ruins; on which occasion a number of persons unable to fight, who
were concealed in the houses, miserably perished. Then at last the
remnant of the population, crowded together in the citadel, besought
for mercy. Bare life was conceded to them, and they appeared before
the victor, 30,000 men and 25,000 women, not the tenth part of the
former population. The Roman deserters alone, 900 in number, and
the general Hasdrubal with his wife and his two children had thrown
themselves into the temple of the God of Healing; for them--for
soldiers who had deserted their posts, and for the murderer of the
Roman prisoners--there were no terms. But when, yielding to famine,
the most resolute of them set fire to the temple, Hasdrubal could
not endure to face death; alone he ran forth to the victor and
falling upon his knees pleaded for his life. It was granted; but,
when his wife who with her children was among the rest on the roof
of the temple saw him at the feet of Scipio, her proud heart swelled
at this disgrace brought on her dear perishing home, and, with bitter
words bidding her husband be careful to save his life, she plunged
first her sons and then herself into the flames. The struggle was
at an end. The joy in the camp and at Rome was boundless; the
noblest of the people alone were in secret ashamed of the most recent
grand achievement of the nation. The prisoners were mostly sold as
slaves; several were allowed to languish in prison; the most notable,
Hasdrubal and Bithyas, were sent to the interior of Italy as Roman
state-prisoners and tolerably treated. The moveable property, with
the exception of gold, silver, and votive gifts, was abandoned to
the pillage of the soldiers. As to the temple treasures, the booty
that had been in better times carried off by the Carthaginians from
the Sicilian towns was restored to them; the bull of Phalaris,
for example, was returned to the Agrigentines; the rest fell
to the Roman state.
Destruction of Carthage
But by far the larger portion of the city still remained standing.
We may believe that Scipio desired its preservation; at least he
addressed a special inquiry to the senate on the subject. Scipio
Nasica once more attempted to gain a hearing for the demands of
reason and honour; but in vain. The senate ordered the general
to level the city of Carthage and the suburb of Magalia with the
ground, and to do the same with all the townships which had held by
Carthage to the last; and thereafter to pass the plough over the site
of Carthage so as to put an end in legal form to the existence of
the city, and to curse the soil and site for ever, that neither
house nor cornfield might ever reappear on the spot. The command was
punctually obeyed. The ruins burned for seventeen days: recently,
when the remains of the Carthaginian city wall were excavated, they
were found to be covered with a layer of ashes from four to five feet
deep, filled with half-charred pieces of wood, fragments of iron,
and projectiles. Where the industrious Phoenicians had bustled and
trafficked for five hundred years, Roman slaves henceforth pastured
the herds of their distant masters. Scipio, however, whom nature
had destined for a nobler part than that of an executioner, gazed
with horror on his own work; and, instead of the joy of victory,
the victor himself was haunted by a presentiment of the retribution
that would inevitably follow such a misdeed.
Province of Africa
There remained the work of arranging the future organization of
the country. The earlier plan of investing the allies of Rome with
the transmarine possessions that she acquired was no longer viewed
with favour. Micipsa and his brothers retained in substance their
former territory, including the districts recently wrested from the
Carthaginians on the Bagradas and in Emporia; their long-cherished
hope of obtaining Carthage as a capital was for ever frustrated;
the senate presented them instead with the Carthaginian libraries.
The Carthaginian territory as possessed by the city in its last days--
viz. The narrow border of the African coast lying immediately opposite
to Sicily, from the river Tusca (near Thabraca) to Thaenae (opposite
to the island of Karkenah)--became a Roman province. In the interior,
where the constant encroachments of Massinissa had more and more
narrowed the Carthaginian dominions and Bulla, Zama, and Aquae
already belonged to the kings, the Numidians retained what they
possessed. But the careful regulation of the boundary between the
Roman province and the Numidian kingdom, which enclosed it on three
sides, showed that Rome would by no means tolerate in reference
to herself what she had permitted in reference to Carthage; while
the name of the new province, Africa, on the other hand appeared
to indicate that Rome did not at all regard the boundary now marked
off as a definitive one. The supreme administration of the new
province was entrusted to a Roman governor, who had his seat at Utica.
Its frontier did not need any regular defence, as the allied Numidian
kingdom everywhere separated it from the inhabitants of the desert.
In the matter of taxes Rome dealt on the whole with moderation.
Those communities which from the beginning of the war had taken part
with Rome--viz. Only the maritime towns of Utica, Hadrumetum, Little
Leptis, Thapsus, Achulla, and Usalis, and the inland town of Theudalis--
retained their territory and became free cities; which was also the
case with the newly-founded community of deserters. The territory
of the city of Carthage--with the exception of a tract presented to
Utica--and that of the other destroyed townships became Roman domain-
land, which was let on lease. The remaining townships likewise
forfeited in law their property in the soil and their municipal
liberties; but their land and their constitution were for the time
being, and until further orders from the Roman government, left to
them as a possession liable to be recalled, and the communities paid
annually to Rome for the use of their soil which had become Roman a
once-for-all fixed tribute (stipendium), which they in their turn
collected by means of a property-tax levied from the individuals
liable. The real gainers, however, by this destruction of the
first commercial city of the west were the Roman merchants, who, as
soon as Carthage lay in ashes, flocked in troops to Utica, and from
this as their head-quarters began to turn to profitable account not
only the Roman province, but also the Numidian and Gaetulian regions
which had hitherto been closed to them.
Macedonia and the Pseudo-Phillip
Victory of Metellus
Macedonia also disappeared about the same time as Carthage from
the ranks of the nations. The four small confederacies, into which
the wisdom of the Roman senate had parcelled out the ancient kingdom,
could not live at peace either internally or one with another.
How matters stood in the country appears from a single accidentally
mentioned occurrence at Phacus, where the whole governing council
of one of these confederacies were murdered on the instigation of
one Damasippus. Neither the commissions sent by the senate (590),
nor the foreign arbiters, such as Scipio Aemilianus (603) called in
after the Greek fashion by the Macedonians, were able to establish
any tolerable order. Suddenly there appeared in Thrace a young man,
who called himself Philip the son of king Perseus, whom he strikingly
resembled, and of the Syrian Laodice. He had passed his youth
in the Mysian town of Adramytium; there he asserted that he had
preserved the sure proofs of his illustrious descent. With these
he had, after a vain attempt to obtain recognition in his native
country, resorted to Demetrius Soter, king of Syria, his mother's
brother. There were in fact some who believed the Adramytene or
professed to believe him, and urged the king either to reinstate
the prince in his hereditary kingdom or to cede to him the crown
of Syria; whereupon Demetrius, to put an end to the foolish proceedings,
arrested the pretender and sent him to the Romans. But the senate
attached so little importance to the man, that it confined him in an
Italian town without taking steps to have him even seriously guarded.
Thus he had escaped to Miletus, where the civic authorities once more
seized him and asked the Roman commissioners what they should do with
the prisoner. The latter advised them to let him go; and they did
so. He now tried his fortune further in Thrace; and, singularly
enough, he obtained recognition and support there not only from
Teres the chief of the Thracian barbarians, the husband of his
father's sister, and Barsabas, but also from the prudent Byzantines.
With Thracian support the so-called Philip invaded Macedonia, and,
although he was defeated at first, he soon gained one victory over
the Macedonian militia in the district of Odomantice beyond the Strymon,
followed by a second on the west side of the river, which gave him
possession of all Macedonia. Apocryphal as his story sounded, and
decidedly as it was established that the real Philip, the son of
Perseus, had died when eighteen years of age at Alba, and that this
man, so far from being a Macedonian prince, was Andriscus a fuller of
Adramytium, yet the Macedonians were too much accustomed to the rule
of a king not to be readily satisfied on the point of legitimacy and
to return with pleasure into the old track. Messengers arrived
from the Thessalians, announcing that the pretender had advanced
into their territory; the Roman commissioner Nasica, who, in the
expectation that a word of earnest remonstrance would put an end
to the foolish enterprise, had been sent by the senate to Macedonia
without soldiers, was obliged to call out the Achaean and Pergamene
troops and to protect Thessaly against the superior force by
means of the Achaeans, as far as was practicable, till (605?)
the praetor Juventius appeared with a legion. The latter attacked
the Macedonians with his small force; but he himself fell, his army
was almost wholly destroyed, and the greater part of Thessaly fell into
the power of the pseudo-Philip, who conducted his government there and
in Macedonia with cruelty and arrogance. At length a stronger Roman
army under Quintus Caecilius Metellus appeared on the scene of
conflict, and, supported by the Pergamene fleet, advanced into
Macedonia. In the first cavalry combat the Macedonians retained
the superiority; but soon dissensions and desertions occurred in the
Macedonian army, and the blunder of the pretender in dividing his
army and detaching half of it to Thessaly procured for the Romans an
easy and decisive victory (606). Philip fled to the chieftain Byzes
in Thrace, whither Metellus followed him and after a second victory
obtained his surrender.
Province of Macedonia
The four Macedonian confederacies had not voluntarily submitted to
the pretender, but had simply yielded to force. According to the
policy hitherto pursued there was therefore no reason for depriving
the Macedonians of the shadow of independence which the battle of
Pydna had still left to them; nevertheless the kingdom of Alexander
was now, by order of the senate, converted by Metellus into a Roman
province. This case clearly showed that the Roman government had
changed its system, and had resolved to substitute for the relation
of clientship that of simple subjects; and accordingly the suppression
of the four Macedonian confederacies was felt throughout the whole range
of the client-states as a blow directed against all. The possessions
in Epirus which were formerly after the first Roman victories detached
from Macedonia--the Ionian islands and the ports of Apollonia and
Epidamnus,(16) that had hitherto been under the jurisdiction of the
Italian magistrates--were now reunited with Macedonia, so that the latter,
probably as early as this period, reached on the north-west to a point
beyond Scodra, where Illyria began. The protectorate which Rome claimed
over Greece proper likewise devolved, of itself, on the new governor of
Macedonia. Thus Macedonia recovered its unity and nearly the same limits
which it had in its most flourishing times. It had no longer, however,
the unity of a kingdom, but that of a province, retaining its communal
and even, as it would seem, its district organization, but placed under
an Italian governor and quaestor, whose names make their appearance
on the native coins along with the name of the country. As tribute,
there was retained the old moderate land-tax, as Paullus had arranged
it(17)--a sum of 100 talents (24,000 pounds) which was allocated in
fixed proportions on the several communities. Yet the land could not
forget its old glorious dynasty. A few years after the subjugation
of the pseudo-Philip another pretended son of Perseus, Alexander,
raised the banner of insurrection on the Nestus (Karasu), and
had in a short time collected 1600 men; but the quaestor Lucius
Tremellius mastered the insurrection without difficulty and pursued
the fugitive pretender as far as Dardania (612). This was the last
movement of the proud national spirit of Macedonia, which two
hundred years before had accomplished so great things in Hellas
and Asia. Henceforward there is scarcely anything else to be told of
the Macedonians, save that they continued to reckon their inglorious
years from the date at which the country received its definitive
provincial organization (608).
Thenceforth the defence of the northern and eastern frontiers
of Macedonia or, in other words, of the frontier of Hellenic
civilization against the barbarians devolved on the Romans. It was
conducted by them with inadequate forces and not, on the whole, with
befitting energy; but with a primary view to this military object
the great Egnatian highway was constructed, which as early as the
time of Polybius ran from Apollonia and Dyrrhachium, the two chief
ports on the west coast, across the interior to Thessalonica, and was
afterwards prolonged to the Hebrus (Maritza).(18) The new province
became the natural basis, on the one hand for the movements against
the turbulent Dalmatians, and on the other hand for the numerous
expeditions against the Illyrian, Celtic, and Thracian tribes settled
to the north of the Grecian peninsula, which we shall afterwards
have to exhibit in their historical connection.
Greece
Greece proper had greater occasion than Macedonia to congratulate
herself on the favour of the ruling power; and the Philhellenes of
Rome might well be of opinion that the calamitous effects of the war
with Perseus were disappearing, and that the state of things in general
was improving there. The bitterest abettors of the now dominant
party, Lyciscus the Aetolian, Mnasippus the Boeotian, Chrematas
the Acarnanian, the infamous Epirot Charops whom honourable Romans
forbade even to enter their houses, descended one after another to
the grave; another generation grew up, in which the old recollections
and the old antagonisms had faded. The Roman senate thought that
the time for general forgiveness and oblivion had come, and in 604
released the survivors of those Achaean patriots who had been
confined for seventeen years in Italy, and whose liberation the
Achaean diet had never ceased to demand. Nevertheless they were
mistaken. How little the Romans with all their Philhellenism had
been successful in heartily conciliating Hellenic patriotism, was
nowhere more clearly apparent than in the attitude of the Greeks
towards the Attalids. King Eumenes II had been, as a friend of
the Romans, extremely hated in Greece;(19) but scarcely had a
coldness arisen between him and the Romans, when he became suddenly
popular in Greece, and the Hellenic hopefuls expected the deliverer
from a foreign yoke to come now from Pergamus as formerly from
Macedonia. Social disorganization more especially was visibly
on the increase among the petty states of Hellas now left to
themselves. The country became desolate not through war and
pestilence, but through the daily increasing disinclination of
the higher classes to trouble themselves with wife and children;
on the other hand the criminal or the thoughtless flocked as
hitherto chiefly to Greece, there to await the recruiting officer.
The communities sank into daily deeper debt, and into financial
dishonour and a corresponding want of credit: some cities, more
especially Athens and Thebes, resorted in their financial distress
to direct robbery, and plundered the neighbouring communities.
The internal dissensions in the leagues also--e. g. between the
voluntary and the compulsory members of the Achaean confederacy--
were by no means composed. If the Romans, as seems to have been
the case, believed what they wished and confided in the calm which
for the moment prevailed, they were soon to learn that the younger
generation in Hellas was in no respect better or wiser than the older.
The Greeks directly sought an opportunity of picking a quarrel
with the Romans.