Chapter II: Carthage

The terrible war, known as the inexpiable or the truceless war, was just at an end, after three years’ duration. The mercenaries who had served so faithfully under Hamilcar in Sicily had by the bad faith of the Carthaginian Government, headed by Hamilcar’s greatest enemy, Hanno, been driven to a revolt to try and recover the arrears of pay due to them for noble services for years past. When the effete Hanno, after a first slight success, had allowed his camp to be captured, the Government, at the last gasp, had begged Hamilcar to fight against his own old soldiers. For the sheer love of his country, he had, although much against the grain, consented to do so. But the towns of Utica, the oldest Phœnician town in Africa, and of Hippo Zarytus were joining in the revolt; the Libyans and Numidians had risen _en masse_ to join the revolutionists, and the Libyan women, having sold all their jewellery, of which they possessed large quantities, for the sake of the revolted mercenaries, there was soon so much money in the rebel camp that the very existence of Carthage itself was at stake. Therefore, although Hamilcar well knew that all the mercenaries, whether Libyans or Ligurians, Balearic Islanders, Greeks, or Spaniards, were personally well disposed to himself, he had been forced to take up arms against them.

Under Spendius, a Campanian slave, and Matho, an African in whom they had formerly placed great trust, the rebels had gained various successes, and, on visiting them in their camp, had treacherously made prisoner of Gisco, a general in whom they had previously expressed the greatest trust, and whom they had asked to have sent to them with money to arrange their difficulties. Hamilcar had been at first much hampered by his enemy, Hanno, an effeminate wretch, being associated in the command with himself; but when the Carthaginians found that, by leaving Hanno to hamper Hamilcar, with all these well-trained soldiers against them, they had got the knife held very close to their own luxurious throats, they removed Hanno, and left the patriotic Hamilcar in supreme military command. Their jealousies of him would not have allowed the aristocracy and plutocracy to have done so much for the man whom they had deserted for so long in Sicily had they not known their own very existence to be at stake. For they ran the risk of being killed both by the Libyans and mercenaries outside, and by the discontented people inside the walls.

When Hamilcar assumed supreme command, the war had very soon commenced to go the other way. He forced the easy, luxurious Carthaginian nobles to become soldiers, and treated them as roughly as if they had been slaves. And he made them fight. He got elephants together; he made wonderful marches, dividing the various rebel camps; he penned them up within their own fortified lines. Many deserted and joined him; many prisoners whom he took he released; a great African chief named Naravas came over to his side. All was going well for Carthage when Spendius and Matho mutilated and murdered the wretched General Gisco and his six hundred followers in cold blood. After that no more of their followers dared to leave them for fear of the terrible retaliation that they knew awaited them. But how Spendius and all his camp were at length penned up and reduced to cannibalism, eating all their prisoners and slaves, how Spendius and his ten senators were taken and crucified, while Matho, at the same time issuing from Tunis, took and crucified a Carthaginian general and fifty of his men, and how at length, after slaughtering or capturing the 30,000 or 40,000 remaining rebels, Hamilcar took Matho himself prisoner, are all matters of history.

On the morning of the opening of our story, there was to be a terrible sacrifice offered up to the great Baal Hammon, the sun god Moloch, the Saturn of the Romans: the terrible monster to whom in their hours of distress the Carthaginians were in the habit of offering up at times their own babies, their first-born sons, or the fairest of their virgins, whose cruel nuptials consisted not in being lighted with the torch of Hymen, but in being placed bound upon the outstretched, brazen, red-hot hands of the huge image, from whose arms, which sloped downwards, they rolled down into the flaming furnace at his feet. And fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, yea, even the very lovers of the girls, looked on complacently, thinking that in thus sacrificing their dearest and their best to the cruel god, they were consulting the best interests of their country in a time of danger. Nor were the screams of the victims, many of whom were self-offered, allowed to be heard, for the drums beat, the priests chanted, and the beautiful young priestesses attached to the temple danced in circles around, joining the sound of their voices and their musical instruments to the crackling of the fire and the rolling of the drums.

When Hamilcar bid his boy, Hannibal, look forth upon the city before him, on the sea in front and behind him, and upon the country around, it was a lovely morning in early summer. The weather was not yet hot; there was a beautiful north-west breeze blowing down the Carthaginian Gulf straight into the boy’s face, tossing up little white horses on the surface of the sea, of which the white-flecked foam shone like silver on its brilliantly green surface. Across the gulf, upon whose bosom floated many a stately trireme and quinquireme, to the east side arose a bold range of rugged mountains with steep, serrated edges. Turning round yet further and facing the south, the young Hannibal could see the same mountain range, dominated by a steep, two-horned peak, sweeping round, but gradually bearing back and so away from the shores of the shallow salt water lake then known as the Stagnum, now called the Lake of Tunis. This lake was separated, by the narrow strip of land called the Tœnia, from the Sirius Carthaginensis, or Gulf of Carthage, upon the extremity of which is now built the town of Goletta. There was in those days, as now, a canal dividing this isthmus in two, and thus giving access for ships to Tunis, a distance of ten miles from Carthage, at the far end of the Tunisian lake.

Turning back again and looking to the north and north-west, Hannibal saw stretching before him the whole noble City of Carthage, of which his father’s palace formed one of the most southern buildings within the sea wall. Close at hand were various other palaces, with gardens well irrigated and producing every kind of delicious fruit and beautiful flower to delight the palate or the eye. Here waved in the breeze the feathery date palm, the oleander with its wealth of pink blossom, the dark-green and shining pomegranate tree with its glorious crimson flowers. Further, the fig, the peach tree, the orange, the lemon, and the narrow-leaved pepper tree gave umbrageous shelter to the winding garden walks. Over the cunningly-devised summer-houses hung great clusters of blue convolvulus or the purple bourgainvillia, while along the borders of plots of vines gleaming with brilliant verdure, clustered, waist-high, crimson geraniums and roses in the richest profusion. Between these palaces lay stretched out the double harbour for the merchant ships and war ships, a canal forming the entrance to the one, and both being connected with each other. The harbour for the merchant ships was oblong in shape, and was within a stone’s throw of the balcony upon which the boy was standing. The inner harbour was perfectly circular, and surrounded by a fortification; and around its circumference were one hundred and twenty sets of docks, the gates of each of which were adorned with beautiful Ionic pillars of purest marble.

In the centre of this cup, or cothon as it was called, there was an island, upon which was reared a stately marble residence for the admiral in charge of the dockyards, and numerous workshops for the shipwrights. All were designed and built with a view to beauty as well as utility.

For that day only, the clang of hammers had ceased to be heard, and all was still in the dockyards, for there was high holiday and festival throughout the whole length and breadth of the City of Carthage on the glad occasion of the intended execution, by fire, of Matho and the remaining rebels who had not fallen by the sword in the last fight at Tunis.

Just beyond the war harbour, there was a large open place called the Agora, and a little beyond and to the left of it Hannibal could descry the Forum placed on a slight elevation. It was a noble building, surrounded by a stately colonnade of pillars, the capitals of which were ornamented in the strictly Carthaginian style, which seemed to combine the acanthus plant decoration of the Corinthian capital, with the ram’s horn curves of the Ionic style. Between the pillars there stood the most beautiful works of art, statues of Parian marble ravished in the Sicilian wars, or gilded figures of cunning workmanship of Apollo, Neptune, or the Goddess Artemis, being the spoils of Macedon or imported from Tyre. The roof of the Forum was constructed of beautiful cedar beams from Lebanon, sent as a present by the rulers of Tyre to their daughter city, and no pains or expense had been spared to make the noble building, if not equal in grandeur, at any rate only second in its glorious manufacture to the magnificent temple of Solomon, itself constructed for the great king by Tyrian and Sidonian workmen.

A couple of miles away to the left could be seen the enormous triple fortification stretching across the level isthmus which connected Carthage, its heights and promontories, with the mainland. This wall enclosed the Megara or suburbs, rich with the country houses of the wealthy merchant princes. It was forty-five feet high, and its vaulted foundations afforded stabling for a vast number of elephants. It reached from sea to sea, and completely protected Carthage on the land side. Between the city proper and this wall beyond the Megara, everywhere could be seen groves of olive trees in richest profusion, while between them and the frequent intervening palaces, were to be observed either waving fields of ripening golden corn, or carefully cultivated vegetable gardens, well supplied with running streams of water from the great aqueduct which brought the water to the city from the mountains of Zaghouan sixty miles away.

To the north of the Forum and beyond the Great Place, the city stretched upwards, the width of the city proper, between the sea and the suburbs, being only about a mile or a mile and a half. It sloped upwards to the summit of the hill of the Byrsa or Citadel, hence the boy Hannibal, from his position on the sea level in rear of the harbours, was able to take in, not only the whole magnificent _coup d’œil_ of palaces and temples, but also that of the high and precipitous hill forming Cape Carthage, which lay beyond it to the north, whose curved and precipitous cliffs enclosed on the eastern side a glittering bay, wherein were anchored many vessels of merchandise.

The summit of this mountain was, like the suburbs of the Megara to the west of the city, studded with the rich country dwellings of the luxurious and ease-loving inhabitants of Carthage.

But it was not on the distant suburbs that the lad fixed his eager gaze, it was on the gleaming city of palaces itself. Here, close at hand on the right, he could see the temple of Apollo with its great golden image of the god, gleaming between the open columns in the morning sun. Further away appeared the mighty and fortified buildings of the temple of Ashmon or Æsculapius. To the left of the city the fanes of Neptune, Diana, and Astarte glittered in the sun, while occupying the absolute centre of the town, and standing apart in a large and now crowded open space, was clearly visible the huge circular temple of the awful Sun god--Saturn, Baal Hammon, or Moloch. The drums and trumpets loudly sounding from the vicinity of this temple, and the wreaths of smoke winding up between the triple domes plated with solid gold, told that the terrible sacrifices had already begun. Indeed, the yells of execration of the myriads of brightly-robed populace, most of them women, as victim after victim was dragged forward by the priests and thrown upon the dreadful sloping arms of the god, a sight Hannibal could easily observe between the rows of columns, often nearly drowned the blare of the trumpets and the rolling of the drums.

Well, indeed, might they scream, these women of Carthage, for owing to the cruelties and massacres of those upon whom they were now wreaking their vengeance, all who had been their husbands or lovers were gone. There were now scarcely any men left. Thus they saw themselves condemned either to a perpetual virginity, with no hopes of ever knowing the joys of motherhood, or fated at the best to a share with many other women in the household of some rich and elderly noble, since polygamy had been recently decreed as a means of repopulating the State. All the young men remaining alive, Hamilcar had enrolled in his army, and although a few of the more luxurious and ease-loving might leave him and remain in Carthage, that army was, so rumour said, about to start with him and the flower of Carthaginian manhood for unknown battle-fields, whence it was improbable that they would ever return. Thus, the older women screamed and yelled with fury at the loss of husbands or sons, and the young women screamed with rage at the loss of the once possible husbands, who never had been and never could be theirs. Yet, all alike, having put off their mourning for the day, were gaily attired for joy at the burning alive of their enemies. They had even adorned their raven locks with the brilliant crimson flowers of the pomegranate, as red as their own red lips, or the blood which had been shed in torrents by Spendius and Matho, and which was again to flow that very day on this joyful occasion of revenge.

Leading from the harbours and the Great Place up through the town to all these temples were three streets--the Vicus Salutaris, on the right, leading to the temple of Æsculapius; the Vicus Satyrnis, in the centre, leading to the great brazen god Moloch; and to the left, the Vicus Venerea or Venus Street, leading to the temple of the Carthaginian Venus and Juno in one; Tanais, Tanith, or Astarte, the Goddess of Love and the Queen of Heaven combined. These last two streets swept round on either side of the hill of the Byrsa or Citadel, and it was on this hill that the eye of the youthful Hannibal chiefly rested, for within and above its walls he could see on the summit of the hill the temple of Melcareth, the unknown and invisible god of whom no image had ever been made. Melcareth was the great Spirit of life and the protector of his father, before whom he was to register his vow.

Plainly built of white marble, in simple but solemn simplicity, it was surrounded with plain Doric columns of Numidian marble. This very plainness made the exterior of the building more impressive; and as it occupied the highest point in the whole city, the boy could see it clearly.

At length, with a sigh, he took one last lingering look all round, from the mountains of the Hermæan Promontory to the Gulf, from the Gulf to Cape Carthage, and to the city from the hill of the Catacombs, round and past the triple wall enclosing the Megara, away to the white buildings of Tunis in the distance, and to the lake near at hand.

“I have seen it all, my father,” he said at length; “not a headland nor a house, not a tree nor a temple, will ever fade away again from my memory. It is all engraven on my heart.”

“It is well,” said Hamilcar; “now go and prepare thyself to accompany me to the temple of Melcareth; thou shalt accompany me upon my elephant, for I shall go in state. Here, Maharbal! Imlico! Hanno! Gisco!”

A crowd of officers rushed in from the ante-chambers, where they were waiting; the great General gave directions about the ceremony that was to take place, and orderlies and messengers were soon galloping in every direction.