Carthage by Eve Macdonald: The day Hannibal slayed 20,000

It’s 146 BC. A woman stands on the heights of the mighty citadel of Carthage, North Africa, looking down upon the last, moments of this once proud city, capital of a vast Mediterranean empire.

After three years of siege, the Roman legions have finally captured Carthage.

The Roman historian Appian tell us that the woman on the walls – the wife of Hasdrubal, the last commander of Carthage – driven to a fury by the sight of her husband, kneeling in surrender, screamed out a curse: ‘Upon this Hasdrubal, betrayer of his country and her temples, of me and his children, may the Gods of Carthage take vengeance’

She then hurled her children down into the flames below, before hurling herself after. ‘The ultimate statement of death over enslavement,’ says Eve Macdonald.

It could so easily have gone the other way – especially when the brilliant Carthaginian general Hannibal was in command - and Carthage would have been no kinder to Rome. Indeed they were notorious for their cruelty, even sacrificing their children to their sinister gods Tanit and Baal.

Carthage was Phoenician in origin. The Phoenicians were sailors with canny mercantile expertise which made them fantastically wealthy.

A people of such dynamism soon came to dominate much of the Mediterranean, and were almost fated to clash with a small but rapidly rising and ferociously martial little city in Central Italy, called Rome.

The intermittent Punic Wars, as Rome called them, lasted over 100 years. They fought for 23 years over Sicily, which nearly bankrupted them both. And in 256BC they fought the colossal sea battle of Ecnomus, one of the largest sea battles by numbers ever fought. There were some 200,000 sailors and marines at sea that day. Rome won.

But Carthage was far too powerful to be defeated in a single battle, and still to come was Hannibal, inset, Rome’s most dangerous enemy. A soldier’s general, he slept in his cloak on the hard ground along with his men.

Macdonald gives a bravura re-telling of the whole story, the Alps, the elephants, and crossing the Rhone too. At last came the catastrophic Roman defeat at Cannae when at least 20,000 Romans were slaughtered in a day – more than the British lost at the first day on the Somme.

Among the Roman dead lay the consul and a staggering 80 of the Senatorial class. ‘The governing elite of Rome had been wiped out.’

Rome was, by any rational standard, finished. Yet with very Roman doggedness they simply refused to recognise it. As the Roman poet Ennius put it, ‘The victor is not victorious if the vanquished does not consider himself so.’ They scraped together an army of older men and farmers’ boys, fought back – and Hannibal never did manage to take Rome. After losing the support of his fellow Carthaginians, and facing arrest by the Romans, he fled east into exile and died in Asia Minor.

In 146 BC, the Romans literally emptied out the city. They then razed the city to the ground where it still lies, on the edge of modern Tunis.

Macdonald has done a fine job of resuscitating its ‘heroic warriors, beautiful queens and intrepid explorers, the colonisers, villains and victims,’ rescuing them from obscurity, from the flames, and the vengeance of Rome.