Read Online The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean by John Julius Norwich - Free Book Online
Authors: John Julius Norwich
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They were a simple, straightforward, law-abiding people with a strong sense of family values, willing to accept discipline when required to do so–as they certainly had been in 510 BC when they expelled the Tarquins, that line of Etruscan kings who had ruled them for the previous century, 14 and established a republic of their own. Their city, they claimed, predated the Etruscans by many centuries; it had originally been founded by the Trojan prince Aeneas, who had made his way to Italy after the Greeks’ destruction of his city. Rome was thus the successor to ancient Troy.
In 280 BC , an ambitious ruler of a Hellenistic state in northwestern Greece, King Pyrrhus of Epirus, landed with an army estimated at 20,000 at Tarentum (the modern Taranto). The Roman army met him near Heraclea, where it was narrowly beaten, Pyrrhus’s losses being almost as great as the Romans’: thus the concept of a Pyrrhic victory was born. For the next five years the King continued to make trouble, but with less and less success; finally, in 275 BC , having lost some two-thirds of his army, he returned to Epirus. Rome, a still obscure republic in central Italy, had defeated a Hellenistic king. The subsequent triumphal procession in the capital featured Pyrrhus’s captured elephants–the first to make their appearance in Italy. 15
But Rome’s greatest enemy was Carthage, originally a colony of the Phoenicians, which occupied part of the site of the modern city of Tunis. The Carthaginians were a thorn in the Roman flesh for well over a hundred years, from 264 to 146 BC , during which the Romans were obliged to fight two separate Punic Wars 16 before they were able to eliminate it forever. It was these two wars that brought Rome to the centre of the Mediterranean stage and–since it soon became clear that Carthage could never be defeated on land alone–made her a leading sea power. The first, which ended in 241 BC , had one extremely happy result for Rome: the acquisition of the greater part of Sicily, which would henceforth constitute her principal granary. (Corsica and Sardinia were to follow three years later.) She had greater cause for concern, however, during the twenty-three-year interval that elapsed before the beginning of the second, because during that period Carthage succeeded in establishing a whole new empire–this time in Spain.
The Phoenicians had first reached the Iberian peninsula around 1100 BC , when they founded the port of Cadiz. It was in those days an island and it set the pattern for subsequent Phoenician colonies, all of which tended to be positioned on promontories or offshore islands, often at a river mouth, presumably–since, like all merchants, they were a peaceful lot–in order not to encroach more than necessary on the natives. Of these last the most advanced were the Iberians, a mysterious people whose two languages are, like the Etruscan, not Indo-European and, unlike the Etruscan, continue to baffle us. The Iberians traded enthusiastically with the Phoenicians, with whom they seem to have existed on friendly terms. Some centuries later they were to develop a remarkable civilisation of their own, notable above all for its statuary: the so-called
Dama de Elche
, dating from the fourth century BC and now in the Archaeological Museum in Madrid, is one of the most beautiful–and most haunting–ancient sculptures to be seen anywhere.
In about 237 BC Hamilcar Barca, Carthage’s most distinguished general–or admiral, since he seems to have been equally at home on land and at sea–set off for the Iberian peninsula, taking with him his little son Hannibal, aged nine. Here, over the space of just eight years, he built up all the infrastructure of a prosperous state, with a sizable army to defend it. Accidentally drowned in 229 BC , he was succeeded by his son-in-law Hasdrubal, who established the permanent capital of Carthaginian Spain at what the Romans called New Carthage and we call Cartagena. He also did
In 280 BC , an ambitious ruler of a Hellenistic state in northwestern Greece, King Pyrrhus of Epirus, landed with an army estimated at 20,000 at Tarentum (the modern Taranto). The Roman army met him near Heraclea, where it was narrowly beaten, Pyrrhus’s losses being almost as great as the Romans’: thus the concept of a Pyrrhic victory was born. For the next five years the King continued to make trouble, but with less and less success; finally, in 275 BC , having lost some two-thirds of his army, he returned to Epirus. Rome, a still obscure republic in central Italy, had defeated a Hellenistic king. The subsequent triumphal procession in the capital featured Pyrrhus’s captured elephants–the first to make their appearance in Italy. 15
But Rome’s greatest enemy was Carthage, originally a colony of the Phoenicians, which occupied part of the site of the modern city of Tunis. The Carthaginians were a thorn in the Roman flesh for well over a hundred years, from 264 to 146 BC , during which the Romans were obliged to fight two separate Punic Wars 16 before they were able to eliminate it forever. It was these two wars that brought Rome to the centre of the Mediterranean stage and–since it soon became clear that Carthage could never be defeated on land alone–made her a leading sea power. The first, which ended in 241 BC , had one extremely happy result for Rome: the acquisition of the greater part of Sicily, which would henceforth constitute her principal granary. (Corsica and Sardinia were to follow three years later.) She had greater cause for concern, however, during the twenty-three-year interval that elapsed before the beginning of the second, because during that period Carthage succeeded in establishing a whole new empire–this time in Spain.
The Phoenicians had first reached the Iberian peninsula around 1100 BC , when they founded the port of Cadiz. It was in those days an island and it set the pattern for subsequent Phoenician colonies, all of which tended to be positioned on promontories or offshore islands, often at a river mouth, presumably–since, like all merchants, they were a peaceful lot–in order not to encroach more than necessary on the natives. Of these last the most advanced were the Iberians, a mysterious people whose two languages are, like the Etruscan, not Indo-European and, unlike the Etruscan, continue to baffle us. The Iberians traded enthusiastically with the Phoenicians, with whom they seem to have existed on friendly terms. Some centuries later they were to develop a remarkable civilisation of their own, notable above all for its statuary: the so-called
Dama de Elche
, dating from the fourth century BC and now in the Archaeological Museum in Madrid, is one of the most beautiful–and most haunting–ancient sculptures to be seen anywhere.
In about 237 BC Hamilcar Barca, Carthage’s most distinguished general–or admiral, since he seems to have been equally at home on land and at sea–set off for the Iberian peninsula, taking with him his little son Hannibal, aged nine. Here, over the space of just eight years, he built up all the infrastructure of a prosperous state, with a sizable army to defend it. Accidentally drowned in 229 BC , he was succeeded by his son-in-law Hasdrubal, who established the permanent capital of Carthaginian Spain at what the Romans called New Carthage and we call Cartagena. He also did
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