Carthage represented the most formidable and fearsome foe of the Roman Republic. The nation fought Romans in three Punic wars, and its great general Hannibal almost put a premature end to the history of Rome. It causes no surprise that Romans demonized the Carthaginians or their forebears the Phoenicians. Hannibal himself served as a bogeyman for many generations of misbehaving Roman children. The portrait surfaces already with Cato the Elder, who characterized Carthaginians as treaty-breakers and savage in war (Rhet. Her. 4.20). A century later Cicero delivered comparably harsh judgments. He reckoned the Phoenician penchant for the sea as mere brigandage and piracy (Cic. Rep. 2.9). It was not so much innate character as the location of the Carthaginians that fired them with enthusiasm for acquisitiveness: harbors and ready communication with other peoples induced them to lead the life of fraudulence and mendacity (Cic. Leg. Apr. 2.95). Even more pointedly, Cicero branded the Phoenicians as the most duplicitous of nations, and then added that their descendants the Carthaginians, by repeated violations of treaties, proved themselves fully up to the standards of their forefathers (Cic. Scaur. 42). Punica fides (Carthaginian perfidy) became proverbial in the Roman vocabulary, as both Sallust and Livy attest (Sall. lug. 108.3; Livy 21.4.9, 22.6.12, 30.30.27, 42.47.7). Matters only got worse when later writers looked back on Carthaginian history and labeled that people as cruel, ferocious, and despotic, while their chief trait remained that of deceit, best exhibited in flagrant breaking of treaties (Val. Max. 7.4.2, 7.4.4; Plut. Prae. Ger. Reip. 6; App. Pun. 62-4; Sil. Pun. 3.231-4).25
Yet it will not do to leave matters at that. The stereotypes retailed by Roman writers were little more than conventional slurs that stemmed from long-standing ancient attitudes quite independent of Rome. Phoenicians were great seafarers and merchantmen, an occupation that lent itself to the presumption of craftiness and duplicity in the interests of gain. The reputation appears already in Homer’s Odyssey (13.271-86, 14.287-300, 15.415-18) and recurs in Plato (Resp. 414c, 435c-436a; Leg. 747c). Romans simply repeated the cliches - but with perhaps less conviction than is often assumed.
An important text deserves notice here. The comic dramatist Plautus produced a play entitled Poenulus (‘‘The Little Carthaginian’’) within a decade or so after the end of the Hannibalic War (see also Chapter 25).26 One might anticipate animus and malevolence toward the foe that had ravaged Italy and had inflicted such grievous pain upon Rome. Yet the play leaves a very different and surprising impression. To be sure, Plautus worked, as so often, with a Greek comedy, now lost, as model, and none can say how closely he may or may not have reproduced that model (see also Chapter 25). Nonetheless, the fact of the drama’s production at a time when Roman memories of Carthaginian terror and devastation were still fresh must speak to the expectations of Plautus’ audience. And it is striking that the Carthaginian for whom the play is named does not come off badly at all. Quite the contrary.
Poenulus is stocked with stock characters: the lovesick youth, the tricky slave, the despicable pimp, the admirable courtesan, the swaggering soldier. But the Carthaginian Hanno stands apart from the conventions. He is, of course, an alien to the society he enters. Plautus underscores the Phoenician traits that are mocked and held in contempt by other characters. The prologue itself introduces Hanno as one who knows all languages - and is thus a master at dissimulation. ‘‘He is a Carthaginian indeed; what need to say more?’’ (Plaut. Poen. 111-12). The standard stereotype of the deceitful Phoenician thus surfaces from the start. Hanno’s clothing, style, and demeanor then come in for ridicule. The slave Milphio compares his attire to that of some bizarre bird, adding slurs in slang appropriate to Carthaginians, and noting that Hanno’s attendants, while showing no fingers, have rings in their ears (Plaut. Poen. 975-81).27 Milphio fails to understand Hanno’s Punic, but his ludicrous mistranslations only reinforce the conventional conceptions that the Carthaginian must be a merchant out to trick his interlocutors, like a fork-tongued serpent (Plaut. Poen. 1009-22, 1032-4). The boastful general heaps further scorn on Hanno, deriding his long tunic as sign of a shopkeeper’s attendant and his garb generally as indicative of effeminacy and male prostitution (Plaut. Poen. 1298, 1303, 1317-18; see also Chapter 21). Multiple slanders greet Hanno’s appearance and behavior.
The caricatures, however, correspond not at all to the character of the Carthaginian. Hanno is a thoroughly sympathetic figure, searching the Mediterranean for his kidnapped daughters, and exhibiting a generous spirit to all parties when they are found. A penchant for playfulness induces him to engage in some subterfuge before the denouement, but he plainly deserves his happy ending. The discrepancy between the humaneness of the man and the snide comments leveled at him must be deliberate. Plautus does not here endorse the stereotypes but subverts them. They are put in the mouths of the conniving slave and the puffed-up warrior. Hanno emerges with full credit, an embodied refutation of traditional travesties. Production of the Poenulus in the aftermath of the Carthaginian war - and presumably to a receptive audience - puts putative prejudice in an altogether different and more positive light.
We have testimony also to Roman respect for Punic learning. The Carthaginian agricultural writer Mago composed a massive treatise on farming in 28 volumes. The work came into Roman hands in the middle of the second century, and the Roman Senate itself commissioned a full-scale translation of it into Latin - even though Cato’s manual on the subject was already available. The patres entrusted this task to a member of the senatorial nobility who also happened to be fluent in Punic and headed a team of experts to accomplish the mission. The decision plainly came at the highest level. Of course, works on agriculture had pragmatic, not just (if at all) literary, value. But Mago’s contribution, subsequently rendered in an abbreviated version into Greek, had important impact upon the Roman specialists in this field, Varro and Columella (Pliny HN 18.5.22; Varro Rust. 1.1.1.10; Col. Rust. 1.1.13).28 And Roman intellectuals made good use of other Punic works. Sallust, for instance, had the geographic books of Hiempsal translated from the Punic for him, and drew on them for his history of the Jugurthine War (Sall. lug. 17.7). The reputation of Phoenicia does not resolve itself into stereotypes. A century after Sallust, the geographer Pomponius Mela, from Roman Spain and writing in Latin, heaped praise upon Phoenicians as accomplished in both war and peace, skilled in literature and the arts, no mere sailors but rulers over nations (Mela 1.65).29
Roman regard for Phoenicians eclipsed the caricatures. As long ago as the third century bc, Fabius Pictor had traced the coming of the alphabet to Italy from Arcadian settlers who derived their knowledge from the Phoenicians. And a host of other respectful references set the stage for Virgil’s moving depiction of Dido, the Carthaginian queen, a rich, complex, and ultimately appealing figure.
World History
