The Fall of Carthage it is the final act of the Punic wars, a clash between civilizations which in terms of scope we could associate with the world wars of the 20th century, and on a symbolic level we could consider like the Cold War . In this parallel, the fall of Carthage is comparable to the end of the Soviet Union , a passage that, in the nineties, some daring assumed to be the sign of the end of history. Even at the time of the fall of Carthage (and in the following decades) someone thought about the end of the story.
Fall of Carthage the world was left only with Rome, a single world power, surrounded by barbarian tribes, for the men of the time Rome was consecrated to eternity, and would have dominated the world for eternity, but in his writings Polybius tells of a vision of Scipio Emiliano, the leader who had defeated Carthage. Scipio, in the tale of Polybius, is shown in tears in the face of the rubble of Carthage, these tears are dictated by the idea that like Carthage, not too long before the greatest world power in antiquity, also Rome, before or then, it would know its own Decline.
The idea that Rome , the undisputed mistress of the world could capitulate in the 2nd century BC appears anachronistic , and authors such as Diodorus (1st century BC) and Appiano (2nd century AD) they think they do not report these doubts which, after the battle, attacked the mind of Scipio Emiliano, but today we know, that no civilization lasts forever, that even the ineluctable Rome can fall, as had already happened in Carthage, to civilization Greek, Persian, and Phoenician, Sumerian, Egyptian, etc. etc. before Rome, and as it would have happened to the Byzantine Empire, the Islamic Empires, the Ottoman Empire, the Kingdom of Spain, France, the British Empire, the sacred Roman Germanic Empire, etc etc etc…
Polybius in his own way had sensed it, perhaps because as a Greek man hostage in Rome who witnessed the fall of Carthage, had a different point of view from that of his contemporaries, or maybe it was just a coincidence. In this post we talk about Polybius, Diodorus and Appian and their story of the capitulation of Carthage.
When Carthage capitulated its decline had indeed begun a long time ago , partly fueled by the numerous defeats suffered during the first and second Punic wars, but it is only in the third Punic war that, in 146 BC, that war fought on several occasions since 264 BC would have ended forever. / P>
Se vuoi approfondire la storia cartaginese ti rimando a questo articolo riassuntivo della storia di Cartagine
But the Punic Wars they are not only a clash of civilizations, dictated by the rivalry and political ambitions of the two greatest Mediterranean powers of the time, they are also an expression of a more intimate rivalry between two high-lineage families, the Barca family, one of the two royal houses Carthaginians, which included Annibale Barca and his elder brother Asdrubale Barca , both sons of Amilcare Barca , and on the other hand, for Rome, the gens Cornelia , an ancient Roman family to which Publio Cornelio Scipione Africano belonged , called Scipio the African, adoptive father of Publio Cornelio Scipione Emiliano , called African Minor, natural son of Lucio Emilio Paolo Macedonico.
Today we know the events of the Third Punic War , and the consequent fall of Carthage, thanks above all to the story of three Greek-Roman authors, these are Polybius, Diodorus and Appian.
The story that these three authors make presents some differences, mainly due to the political positions of the same, and at the time they wrote, it is very likely, however, that besides these three authors there are many others, who for different reasons have not come up to us.
So I want to talk in this post about the authors, who told us about the fall of Carthage, and the first thing I want to bring to attention is the historical moment in which Polybius, Diodorus and Appianus wrote about the fall of Carthage.
Polybius
Polybius was a Greek historian , hostage to during the third Punic war, who was entrusted, by Scipio the African, with the education of his adopted son the African Minor, the one who would lead Rome to the final victory over Carthage.
Polybius was born in Greece presumably in 206 BC and in 166 BC he was one of 1000 Greek nobles sent as a hostage to Rome . Polybius, among the many Greek nobles, had attracted the attention of the Romans even before the Roman victory, achieved by the consul Lucio Emilio Paolo in the battle of Pydna of 168, for the neutral positions of one's own Party.
Sent to Rome as a hostage, he remained in the future imperial capital for about 17 years, and immediately became attached to the gens Cornelia , becoming tutor of Publio Cornelio Scipione Emiliano , with whom, the historian forged a bond of friendship that would last for many years.
The friendship between Polybius and Scipio Emiliano directly involved him in the events of the third Punic war, since the command of the Roman army was entrusted to his pupil, and it seems that Polybius himself was at the side of Scipio during the final siege and the two they walked together among the remains of the city after its capitulation.
Diodorus
Diodorus, as well as Polybius, he is not really a Roman historian, and in his autobiographical works he refers to himself as a Greek historian , even if he born in Sicily , to Agyrion , today Agiria in the province of Enna , a city strongly influenced and for a long time directly controlled by the Greek polis and subsequently under the Carthaginian influence.
Diodorus was presumably born in 90 BC. many years after the final fall of Carthage and more than a century after the end of the First Punic War, during which the whole of Sicily had passed under Roman control.
Although raised in Sicily and under the control of Rome, Diodorus considers himself a Greek man, and is now considered by many historians as one of the greatest Roman annalists and historians, as well as a fine and meticulous philologist ante litteram.
His political positions seem to be of extreme neutrality, not particularly accommodating or critical of Rome and Roman imperialism, and, in the preface of his great work, the colossal Bibliotheca Historica, originally composed of about 40 books, of which we only the first five have been received in full, Diodorus presents the latter as a universal story, from the origins of the world to the campaigns of Caesar, thus recounting everything that was before him and ending the story, for practical reasons, to the years of his own waist.
In the story of him Diodorus makes use of countless sources , including numerous other authors, chroniclers and annalists, from Hecateus of Miletus to Polybius, from Ephorus to Posidonium , etc.
It is very likely that, much of the tale told by Diodorus with regard to the third Punic war, starts in large part from the writings of Polybius , but, as there are differences, it is almost certain that has also consulted other authors of whom we have no trace today, probably abraded and overwritten by medieval copyists
Appiano
Appiano , as Diodorus is not a direct witness of the third Punic war , in fact, he lived in the second century after Christ , in full imperial age under the reign of Traiano, Adriano and Antonino Pio.
Appiano was born in Alexandria in Egypt , presumably in 95 AD, and it is assumed that he spent the first twenty-five years of his life in the city that housed one of the largest libraries in the ancient world, the library of Alexandria , place where Appiano completed his training, at least until 120 AD, the year in which he seems to have moved to Rome, where he embarked on a legal career becoming and, between 147 and 161, in the period of co-regency between Marco Aurelio and Antonino Pio , thanks to a letter from Cornelio Frontone written on behalf of Appiano, and the consequent reply provided by Antonino Pio, we know that Appiano obtained the title of Roman Procurator , although many historians today speculate that his appointment was more of an honor than an assignment.
Comparison of authors
The general account that the three authors give of the fall of Carthage is generally consistent and constant, most of the facts reported by Polybius are taken up and reported, in a slightly different way from the subsequent writings of Diodorus, about fifty years later, and of Appiano , about two centuries later, even if some information and anecdotes are not reported by everyone, especially the story of Scipione Emiliano's tears which appears exclusively in the story of Polybius.
Scipio's tears
Why Polybius chose to tell the drama of the weeping of Scipione Emiliano who, after defeating Carthage in that last siege, in that last decisive battle, receiving the order to destroy the city, and seeing Carthage in flames , once the largest commercial, naval and military power in the Mediterranean ( which at the time was the world ), is due to the strong bond that united the historian to the Roman general.
Polybius had been the tutor and was a trusted advisor and confidant of Scipione Emiliano, that story appears extremely intimate and personal, it reveals Scipio's sensitivity, intelligence and concerns, and it is easy to understand why not only Polibio chose to report those passages , but also why Diodorus and Appiano chose not to bring them back.
In the account of Scipio's tears, Polybius tells us that, in seeing Carthage burn , he had a vision of the future and of the fate that sooner or later would also hit Rome.
Polybius, as already mentioned, was a Greek man transplanted to Rome, and in his memory, in his culture, there is what had once been the greatest civilization of the Ancient world, the Hellenic civilization, mother of the Greek Polis and of the empire. Alexandrian, and also the Macedonia of Alexander the Great , as well as the Greek Polis , at the time of the fall of Carthage, they were by now decayed and reduced to Roman provinces . A similar fate had shaken Carthage, once the most flourishing and powerful city in the Mediterranean, but after the Third Punic War, of Carthage nothing remained but a pile of rubble.
After the victory in the Third Punic War, the Roman will was to destroy forever the capital of the former Punic Empire, and to do so, in addition to the material destruction of the city, there was also the desire to prevent from not occupying the land on which Carthage stood for five decades.
Witnessing the destruction of Carthage and the ferocity with which Rome had decided to put an end to Carthaginian history , Polybius, through the story of Scipio's tears, in memory of what had already happened elsewhere, comes to the conclusion that every civilization in history, including the Roman is intended , sooner or later, to a process of decline , a process that can be slowed down by a series of political transformations , but which is still inevitable. And it is precisely what would have happened in Rome shortly thereafter, which, with the various social and civil wars and reforms by men like Gaio Mario and the Gracchi and characters like Silla, Giulio Cesare and Ottavian or, it underwent a process of transformation, just a century later, which transformed the Republic into the Roman Empire , and the empire itself underwent numerous political and social transformations, which in the West culminated with the deposition of Romolo Augustolo , and to the east with the fall of Constantinople by the Ottoman hands.
Diodorus and Appian, unlike Polybius, at least from the texts that have come down to us, in part because more distant and detached from the story and its protagonists, partly because they live and write in a different historical context, they do not consider Scipio's tears to be relevant and prefer to dwell on the epochal significance of the fall of Carthage, which, however, the two authors interpret in a different way and with a different sign.
Diodorus in particular , writing in years of great territorial expansion for Rome now close to becoming an Empire and not just an imperialist power, he has a hard time imagining the decline of Rome , a decline hypothesized by Polybius, but which for Diodorus is something impossible since the Rome in which he lives is now mistress of the world, and all that is outside the Roman borders are wild lands and peoples.
Like Diodorus, also Appiano he experiences the Punic wars with detachment and distance determined by the time and the world in which he writes, as well as by political circles and social environments that he frequents, environments that, although similar to those frequented by Polybius , are profoundly different because of the historical context.
Polybius is a noble Greek who lives in close contact with the Roman nobility otherwise, Appiano is not a noble but, like Polybi or lives in close contact with the Roman nobility , a nobility that in the first half of the second century after Christ has profoundly changed compared to the nobility of the second century BC, since Rome itself has changed.
Of the three authors, Appiano is the only one who lived in the imperial age , unlike Diodorus and Polybius live in the republican age, more precisely Diodorus lives at the end of the republic, while Polybius lives in the moment of maximum splendor of the republican age.
Life in Rome in the imperial age influences the way in which Appiano sees the world and relates to the ancient world. Appiano is an indirect witness of the Trajan conquest of Dacia , the last great expansionist impulse of the Roman Empire, but he is also aware that not all battles can be won and that the technological and organizational superiority of the elephantine Roman army does not ensure victory in battle, it guarantees an easy defense of the territory if these, like the Dacia, lack natural defenses. Appiano looks to Dacia and sees its enormous cost unbalanced by the flow of silver arriving in Rome , but he also looks over his shoulder and sees Adriano's defeat , just a few decades earlier, which forced him to stop the conquest and raise the emblematic Hadrian's Wall . Looking further back he sees the defeat of Varo , at the time of Augustus, against primitive Germanic tribes .
Appiano lives in those years in which many historians place the beginning of the decline of Rome, and living in a civilization on the verge of decline, such as Carthage just before the start of the Punic wars, but at the same time so close to the Roman elites and institutions, places Appiano in an ambiguous and cryptic position.
Today we do not know if Appiano sensed what was happening in Rome in those years, and chose to omit from his own account of the fall of Carthage, the episode of the weeping of Scipio for political reasons , or because not fully aware of the changes that were happening in those years, while he continued to look at Rome with the gaze of who believes invincible the civilization that at that moment dominated the world.
The fall of Carthage
The fall of Carthage in the writings of Polybius, Diodorus and Eppan represents a central event in Roman history , all three authors are perfectly aware of the epochal significance of that event that marked the definitive end of one of the largest and most impressive civilizations of the ancient world.
The Roman conquest of Carthage described by Polybius is certainly influenced by the friendship between Polybius and Scipio Emiliano , the story of Diodorus is alienated from the condition of a Rome , at that moment apparently invincible , and the fall of Carthage is presented as an inevitable passage for the fulfillment of history, a history that appears perhaps already written and seems to point in a single direction, that of a universal Rome, a concept that would have been taken up about 1200 years later by the medieval historians, the tale of Appiano instead it is perhaps the most ambiguous and cryptic, which looks at the fall of Carthage from afar , without being able to go too far beyond the almost static image of a series of events determined by the resolve of an ineluctable and imperialist Rome.
All three authors, for different reasons, they agree that Carthage during the Third Punic War had no chance of success in the clash with Rome and probably the only hope of survival of the ancient Phoenician colony , was to submit to Rome, merging their civilization with the Roman one.
If that had been the case, if Hannibal and Hasdrubal had not been so stubborn as to challenge Rome, perhaps Carthage would still exist today and perhaps, the whole world history would be different, but history is not written with ifs and buts, and in the historical reality, in the end Scipio Emiliano was right of the Barca brothers, he besieged Carthage and razed it to the ground and for 25 years the occupation of the land on which Carthage once stood was prevented.
Bibliography
E. Lo Cascio, Storia romana. Antologia delle fonti G.Geraci,A.Marcone, Fonti per la stoira romana