The Fall of Carthage Read Free Page B

and perhaps better courses of action. The armchair strategist who seeks to prove how Hannibal could easily have triumphed if only he had done things differently convinces only himself.
    The Evidence
    The study of any aspect of ancient history differs from that of more recent periods for the simple reason that the sources of information are far less plentiful and their interpretation uncertain. There is doubt as to whether some major events happened in one year or the next, whilst it is now difficult to say whether some incidents, including certain battles, occurred at all. We cannot say with any certainty how the quinquereme, the main warship of the Punic Wars, was designed and constructed, and there are numerous gaps in our knowledge of the equipment, organization, command structure and tactics of the opposing armies, most especially the Carthaginians. Sometimes it is a question of trying to work out a basic sequence of events before any attempt can be made at understanding it, a situation largely unparalleled by military history from the eighteenth century onwards. Nor is the evidence evenly distributed over the period. The Second Punic War is fairly well recorded by our surviving sources, but the Third and most of all the First War are more poorly covered. Overwhelmingly the evidence is drawn from the literary accounts of Greek and Roman authors. Archaeological excavation has told us much about the layout and defences of some cities, most notably Carthage and Syracuse, and provides information about Punic culture and settlement in Sicily and Spain. Yet archaeology is best at revealing long-term trends, and is too clumsy to tell us much about military operations. Direct archaeological evidence for warfare is very rare from the entire classical period.
    History tends to be written by the winning side, but the situation is more extreme when the losers were utterly destroyed. No account exists describing any part of the conflict from the Punic perspective. Some Greek authors produced narratives favouring the Carthaginians, most notably those by the two historians who accompanied Hannibal on his Italian expedition, one of whom was his former tutor Sosylus. 4 None of these accounts have survived although it is clear that they were known to and used by some of the surviving sources. Even these lost accounts were written by Greeks in the Greek language and thus by outsiders, who may not fully have understood Punic institutions and culture. It is therefore inevitable that we see the Punic Wars from either a Greek or Roman perspective and in the accounts of authors who knew that Rome would eventually prevail. It is impossible to write a Punic version of the conflict, since it would be as unwise automatically to discount every story favourable to the Romans and credit every incident favourable to the Carthaginians as to accept all of the Roman propaganda about Punic treachery. Ultimately, this must remain the story of Rome's wars against a Punic enemy, as the name Punic Wars implies, since the Carthaginians would hardly have thought of the conflict as wars against themselves.
    Greek and Roman historians did not aspire to the same ideals as their modern counterparts. History was a branch of literature intended to entertain - an idea which would be anathema to many academics today - as well as to inform and inspire. Convention permitted appropriate speeches to be invented and assigned to leading participants at major events, and encouraged the inclusion of familiar generic set-pieces, or topoi , in descriptions of such events as the sack of cities or the aftermath of a battle. Whether this meant that such incidents were invented or simply that these were the type of events which were automatically chosen by authors for inclusion is impossible to say. The ideal of ancient historiography was that it should be truthful as well as skilfully crafted, and it is probable that at the very least the bare narrative of their accounts conform