Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hi, Janina. Hi, Emma. You're back. I'm back after all these mean weeks. You're back in history sexy. How exciting. I'm back in the Northern Hemisphere. I'm back on the podcast.
I went in the sea and I came back home. And you come back refreshed, recovered to be poisoned by the English again. Yes, to be deeply poisoned by the English and injured and poisoned immediately by the English. But now I'm recovered from that. So that's nice. That's what we do. Yeah.
But now that we don't go to overseas countries and injure and poison the inhabitants, we wait for you to come to Great Britain and then just trip you over. Yes, basically, I got back on English soil. I immediately fell down some stairs and injured my butt. And then after I was like basically recovered from that, I got COVID. Yep. So I'm so happy to be back.
Theresa May's hostile environment in action. Theresa May's hostile environment in action. I love to be an immigrant. Keir Starmer's now. In Keir fucking Starmer's England. I don't think I can really blame Keir Starmer for COVID, but I'm going to do my best. I mean, I reckon we can probably try. He's such a fucking ghoul that I'm going to blame him for everything that's wrong in my life and the lives of everyone I know and love.
I think at least 80% of the time it's going to be apt. Yeah. It's like a stop clock. It's going to be accurate at least some of the time. Yeah. But welcome back to History of Sex, Eugenina. We missed you. Thank you. Thank you. Now, it's been a while since we did an episode because we had a kind of cascade of technical crises at the same time that you were getting COVID. Yeah, I feel like there's quite a bit.
had a different crisis Oliver had a technical crisis you had professional crisis not like a crisis but just the normal state of having to do your job and it being stressful because you've got a deadline and then I had just I have been living in my own personal clusterfuck of bad luck in about five different directions at once
And all of that came together with Oliver's computer just deciding to die. Just really like... Just giving up. Suiciding itself and having to be sent away to be fixed. Like that's how badly it decided it didn't want to be alive anymore. And then because of that, we got locked out of SoundCloud. And at the same time, SoundCloud just deleted an episode. Yeah.
So episode 104 just vanished and we couldn't get in because we didn't have Oliver's laptop so it was all just it was a good time but we have fixed all of the problems now and we're back on an even keel and Oliver originally was supposed to be finishing his part but I think
I think he might be vaguely traumatised by his laptop recording an episode and then he had to possibly it was him having to edit his own voice that made his laptop die because that is hellish it is the worst possible thing to have to do and so he politely asked if maybe we could do that another time so we will and it will be another episode later down the line but instead we're coming back
To answer a question from Amanda Taylor, I'm going to say Chiasan or Chiasan maybe? Amanda Taylor Chiasan, who asked, what's the history of Carthage and did the Romans really destroy it and salt the earth? And I wrote about this slightly recently and read a great article about the second half of the question. It's now one of my little soapbox topics.
Oh, delightful. So I thought that this would be a fun one to do because I feel like people don't know a huge amount about Carthage. Yeah, which is the Romans' fault, right? It's 100% the Romans' fault. They did that on purpose. Yeah. And I got to go there last year, which I enjoyed very, very much. And also I've now currently got this bugbear about a little hyper fixation on whether the Romans really salted the earth, which I'm not going to spoil for you. Okay. Okay.
I'm excited though. So, yeah, so we're just going to do as much as we possibly can on the history of Carthage because Carthage as a city was deliberately destroyed by the Ravens and also all of its literature and art and basically almost everything that it produced. Yeah, all its own historical records, everything. Yeah, were burned.
And we have a couple of kind of references to Carthaginian literature and one agricultural text. They were really obsessed with this guy called Mago who wrote an agricultural text that they all just copied. So we have bits and pieces of what he said about agriculture, which is, I guess, fine if you're into agriculture.
But very little about what they said about themselves in terms of like their history, their politics, their religion, their understanding of themselves. Yeah. All we have is stuff that is written about them by their enemies. Yeah.
And then a kind of limited amount of archaeology because Carthage was destroyed by the Romans. Then it was rebuilt. Then it was destroyed again by the Umayyads, the Caliphate. And it's now a living city. The city of Tunis now is effectively on top of Carthage. And so you can't really do that much archaeology underneath the city that people live in. Yeah.
They don't like it when you dig up their houses. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't like it if someone dug up mine. So I think that's fair. It is one of those situations where it feels like everyone is obsessed with the Roman Empire and the modern West because the Roman Empire destroyed all the other places with whom you might have been obsessed if you knew they existed. But you don't because the Romans destroyed the records. Yeah, and then made them sound like barbarians. Yeah.
Yes. But for a long time, Carthage, so Carthage was in Tunisia. It's basically where Tunis is now in this lovely little bay. It was for a few hundred years like the dominant naval power in the Western Mediterranean and probably the most powerful city state in the West. For
For a good couple of hundred years, maybe 300 years. That, however, meant that when the Romans started becoming a power outside of Italy, the first people that they banged into were the Carthaginians. And it was kind of an epic showdown, which is what they're best known for, really, as being the...
the enemies of Rome. And if you know anything about Carthage at all, I suspect people know about Hannibal bringing elephants over the Alps. Yeah. It's Hannibal and Dido. Yes. Other things you will know, which is kind of nice, like a book-ending Carthage with the Aeneid and Hannibal. Yes. Although Hannibal is not the end, but he... And Dido is not her name. So...
It is kind of a good way of like, we basically like the two things that affected Rome and the things that we know about them, which is Dido, who is, so we'll talk about the legend of the foundation of Carthage. So Carthage is what's called a Phoenician city in that it is, Phoenicia is this culture that comes from the area, this area in Lebanon, which kind of is in between the
what we would call Mesopotamia, so like Assyria, Iraq and Iran, and the Mediterranean, essentially. So it's basically modern-day Lebanon to be broad about it. And it has these really big cities of which Tyre is the biggest one, but it also has like Sidon and Byblos and Beirut, Phoenician city, and they are...
one of the oldest cultures in the world, one of the oldest urbanized cultures in the world, one of the earliest writing systems in the world. The Greeks believe they invented writing. They are a huge... Basically, they make all of their money by being in between...
This is like 3000 BCE. They kind of emerge by being in between like Assyria and the sea. They can bring in anything that comes across the sea into Mesopotamia. Anything from Mesopotamia that goes out can go through them and they basically make tons of money by being merchants. Yeah.
They also, and this is why they're called Phoenicians, which is not a word that they use for themselves, they invent Tyrian purple, which is the purple dye that is made from grinding up snail shells, which is the only purple that exists in the ancient world.
And the Greeks call this area Phoinica, which is their word for kind of reddish purple. And that becomes then the Phoinicans, the Phoenicians, which is why we call them the Phoenicians. So they're basically kind of named Phoenicians.
where purple comes from. Yeah, basically. These are the purple people for purple. The purple lads, when you get your purple, you go to the purple boys. Yes. And they have their whole, their own shared language, a shared religion, a shared kind of culture, but they are separate city states. The biggest one is Tyre and the
kind of traditional story of the foundation of Carthage is that in about 813 BCE so like the 9th century BCE there is this drama like in Tyre whereby a princess has her husband is killed by her brother and
And she has to flee the city in order to save herself and to save her husband, who is also her uncle, save her uncle husband's fortune. It was a succession crisis, right? The kingdom had been left to her and her brother jointly and then her brother wanted it all. So he came for her and her rich husband. And she flees, goes to Cyprus, picks up 80 virgins. As you do.
as you do, and then keeps going because Cyprus is also Phoenician. So they keep going in order to find somewhere else to live. They end up in this kind of, they find this little bay in Tunisia and they settle in. The name of that person is various because we do not have any Carthaginian writing about this. We have Greeks, we have...
We have Romans. We have the best version of it comes from a guy called Justin, which seems unlikely, but is his name. Yeah, Justin is the male Tiffany, right? Like you think it was invented in the 80s, but actually it's 100 years old. Extremely old Greek name. Yeah. So he wrote an epitome, so like a summarization of a book
from the first century BCE, so from about the time of Julius Caesar, from a Romano ghoul called Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, who was working off of Sicilian sources. And the only other source we have is the kind of extract of a book by a guy called Timaeus, whose works were
preserved in some form in Diodorus Siculus' library of history, which is also 1st century Roman after Carthage was destroyed. So all of these are written hundreds of years after the death of Carthage by people who'd never met a Carthaginian. As a result, this woman gets called variously. They think that her name is probably Halashat or Alashat. Phoenician is a Semitic language, so it doesn't preserve the...
Right. So, but they think it's Halashat or Alashat. Greeks called her Alyssa. And then the Romans eventually call her Dido, which is just not even trying. Yeah.
Like Alyssa, I can see how you heard Alishat. Yeah, it's like a Hellenization, I guess. Yeah, exactly. It's like we call like Diodorus Siculus, sometimes gets called Diodorus of Sicily. Yeah. Or like Pompeius Magnus, we call him Pompey the Great. Like you can see how they got that. Yeah. Diodo.
Just making it up. So her brother incidentally is called Pygmalion. Which I assume is where Pygmalion comes from Galatea as well though. So don't listen to me. I'm going to get in the weeds about George Bernard Shaw for no reason. I mean always good time to have some George Bernard Shaw but I think that Pygmalion is probably also a Greek version of his actual whatever his actual name was. But
Anyway, they land in Tunisia. They find that there are people that already live there. The Greeks call this area Libya. So there's a lot of, they just call the whole of North Africa Libya. Sure. But so they land in Tunisia. They find there are people who already live there who are like, hello. This is our country actually. Who are you and your 80 virgins? And what would you like? And they say, we would like to live here, please. These people are what we now tend to call the Berbers. They call themselves the Amazigh or Amazigh.
but they are kind of semi-nomadic peoples of North Africa. They come to basically an agreement with the Berber people that the newcomers, these people who've got off all these boats, can have as much land as can be covered by a single hide, which is called, in Greek, is a biercer. So...
And you can kind of see where this is going if you know anything about any kind of myth or legend. I think it's St. Bridget has the same one that we did, where basically, because she is blessed by the gods, she is able to... And sexy and clever. Exactly. She manages to take the hide that she's got and strip it down and stretch it out into a single thread...
that goes all the way around an entire hill which is now basically in the centre of modern day Tunis. I don't think that technically counts as being covered by a hide, but good on it. It does not. But...
Apparently they were able to have enough of a debate about the linguistic points that they were like, you know, fair play actually. And so they let her keep this entire hill, which is now called Berser Hill and was the centre of a lot of Carthage for a long time. And she named it Kortesat, which in Phoenician means new city because no ancient people were very good at naming things. Yeah.
They only named things after themselves or New City. Or they call it what it is, like Hill, Hill, Hill, Hill. Hill, Hill, Hill, Hill. Which I can never remember what it's actually called, but that it means Hill, Hill, Hill, Hill. Yeah, they just call, like there's so many places called New City. Yeah. And like the Phoenicians were, Phoenicians are a very colonial culture. Like they also found loads of other cities. Yeah.
all over North Africa, Cyprus. Like they love sending out people to, like in Spain, there's loads. Yeah. It's not just ancient people though, to be honest. You go to New Zealand, there are loads of rivers called like river number three. It's the third one we found. Yeah.
Yeah. And so they're just like, this is the new city. And Naples as well. Naples is from Neopolis because it was the new city founded by the Greeks. So anyway, so they call that Khashat. In Greek, the Greeks call it Khashadon, which becomes in Latin Carthago, which becomes in English Carthage. So new city. The rest of this legend is that Elissa slash Dido kind of rules the city.
the city that grows on this hill and then gets involved in a situation where she's going to have to marry a local Berber king called Iarbas and she doesn't want to so she kills herself. Fair enough. It's the only possible solution. It is the only possible solution. That has been intensely eclipsed
by the story that Virgil wrote where he actually makes Carthage a lot older than it is by shifting the foundation of Carthage and Dido and the existence of Dido all the way back to the same time that Troy falls. And they do argue about this a lot in the ancient world. They're like, when were the Trojan War? Like, when do we date it? And they all pretty much date it to kind of 1200 BCE. Like, that is when they think it happened.
And so he just shoves it back 400 years. So he has Aeneas leaving Troy when Troy is destroyed, going on his big epic mission, going to Carthage, falling in love with Dido and then having to abandon her because he has to go and found his own city. And that's more important. And then she kills herself because she can't live without him.
Which is a worse reason to kill yourself than because someone wants to marry you that you don't want to marry. It is. And he makes her very pathetic. And also makes the whole of the foundation of Carthage and Dido about Rome. Yeah, classic Roman behaviour. Yeah, it is classic Roman behaviour. And by this point, like the point at which Virgil is writing, like some slight spoilers, but by the point at which Virgil is writing, Rome has destroyed Carthage.
cursed it, made it clear to everybody that it's the worst place in the world, enslaved all of its inhabitants. So the only Carthaginians anybody would have met for, like by the time he's writing, Carthaginians are all dead, but descendants of people that were enslaved by.
by the Romans and have it's been so long since it happened it's been a hundred years that they have rebuilt it they've recolonised it as a Roman colony so Carthage now re-exists as a Roman as a Roman colony but we'll get there so to then make it all about Rome as well from its very beginning is kind of a cultural colonisation that the Romans were extremely good at
So the archaeology of Carthage is kind of doesn't disagree horrifically with the story. Like it kind of works that it was founded in about the 9th century BCE. Oldest finds were found on the hill Beersa and then spread down to the coast, suggesting that that was where the oldest kind of Phoenician colonization was. We do know that
the Carthaginians had to pay the Libyans tax, like paid local kings taxes for the first 300 years that they were there. So what probably happened is that this was a 9th century colonisation programme. It's basically the same age as various other cities,
in the same area. So in Sardinia, Cadiz in Spain is a Phoenician city, was founded as Gades, which eventually became Cadiz and is founded at about the same time. Lyxas in Morocco is also a Phoenician city. And basically they're doing what the Greeks do for,
500 odd years later, which is just send out groups of colonists or kind of how America was kind of colonized. Like they just pop people in a boat or like 10 pound poms. They just popped people in a boat and sent them out. Or like you deal with this, but find us found a city, like find a place, found a city off your pop.
And it works. And so that does seem that this, you know, this was part of a colonization program at a point when Tyre was very rich, that they wanted to kind of culturally spread into the Western Mediterranean. And so that's what they did. And it was very successful. And the earliest city was planned. You can see apparently that there are a kind of grid here.
streets um that are made of beaten earth which i like um and like clear roads that were built um and they just basically import phoenician culture into carthage as far as the archaeology shows like their gods are the ancient gods so they bring baal is the big one i think he's probably the most famous one like people know who baal is don't they
Yeah. Yeah. And Melkart is another one. He's a really big, like, kind of protector god from Tyre. Astarte is another one. Bar-Haman and Tanit are the two that you see, like, loads and loads of. Mm-hmm. Like, because what we do have is inscriptions. Yeah. And the only thing that the Romans didn't burn when they burned the city down is the temples. So a surprising amount of the inscriptions to gods and things have managed to survive. Yeah.
So these are all ancient Near Eastern gods from, like, you see them in Mesopotamia and you see them all over Lebanon and Syria. They're, like, the gods of this period. The Romans, annoyingly, and so the Greeks do this as well, like, whenever they turn up somewhere and they're writing about another culture, they find it very hard to just write down the fucking name that the locals use. LAUGHTER
Well, they don't have any respect for the name the locals use. The locals, you have to understand, are idiots compared to them. And their own accounts of themselves should simply not be counted. Yeah. And what they think is that they're so dumb that they don't realise what the actual names of the gods that they worship are. And so they will be like... And then they built a temple. And in the centre, there is a temple to Asclepius. And you're like, 100% isn't a temple to Asclepius, is it? Like...
It would be super fascinating to know it's some kind of healing cult, presumably, because that's who Asclepius is. So it would be super nice to know what that guy's name was. But they just refused to use any Punic names. So we don't know. So there is a temple to a healing god. Because on
on the on Berser because all the so much has been built and rebuilt on it we don't have anything left of it and we don't know what it was because none of the Romans were kind enough to write down that name. The big question that comes up over and over again with Carthaginian kind of religion though is whether they practice child sacrifice which the Romans very much believed that they did
And the Greeks did to a certain extent as well, but the Romans did very much. They do that thing where they will give you loads of detail about ritual that allegedly occurred and there'll be several accounts of this ritual and they're so detailed and sometimes they have like dialogue and none of them are the same. LAUGHTER
And you're like, well, I don't, like, this is really hard. So basically they believe very strongly that human sacrifice was, not human sacrifice, but child sacrifice was part of Carthaginian religion. It appears in lots and lots of Roman writing, but after the Romans had burned them to the ground. And so it kind of feels like
Is this an excuse for why they had to... Yeah, they just want to say, you didn't want the sisters to survive anyway. Look how horrible they were. Exactly. And so... But...
So Diodorus Siculus tells us that they threw babies into bonfires. Sorry, I should probably have content warned this, but hopefully the mention of child sacrifice is enough of a content warning. So he has some quite detailed descriptions of babies being thrown into bonfires. And then Plutarch has some very detailed descriptions of babies having their throats cut. And you're like, well...
Which one was it? Yeah. And it's kind of a cliche of Carthaginian culture after a while for the Romans that this is what, that they would like baby eating Bishop of Bath and Wells and that they would snatch a baby and throw it into a fire drop of a hat. And certainly this is what they did.
every time there was a crisis like you see it in crisis points I will say the one thing that we do know about the Romans is that after at least one battle with the Carthaginians they did do a human sacrifice and buried two Greeks in two ghouls but that was fine apparently yeah don't worry about that that's necessary and that was different that's different yeah this and so
So when I was in Carthage or in Tunis and I went on a little tour around the bits and bobs of Carthage, they take you to this place that is considered to be the kind of quote unquote best evidence for whether they did child sacrifice, which is a tophet, like a little building, which is basically a baby cemetery. Right. And it has lots of little urns, some with descriptions with the kind of partially cremated remains of
babies, some of which were stillborn, some of which appear to have been miscarried. So they're still fetal, all of which are infants. And those who want to argue for child sacrifice have suggested that this is the space where those babies went, even though clearly some of them were not natural deaths. And so potentially they just actually had a specific place for burying children. Yeah, possibly what they've got there.
is just that they actually take child death very, very seriously and consider it to be a kind of particular horror that they have a specific kind of child cemetery for, you know, even miscarried babies are included, which a lot of societies do not. But that does exist and they will tell you when you go that this is evidence of child sacrifice. But it seems to me it's evidence that children died. Yes. And famously...
children die. They do, especially before antibiotics. They did it quite a lot. Especially before, yeah, safe birthing practices and antibiotics and...
Hand washing, yep. And hand washing. Yep. Yes, so there's also one kind of freeze. It's like a drawing of a priest holding a baby, which is taken as evidence that the priest is totally going to murder the baby. Again, the baby's very much alive, so. Right. So I would say I'm always, like, super dubious of human sacrifice unless somebody actually saw it. Yes, and the thing is, if you're doing a human sacrifice...
There's going to be a very specific ritual around that. Like, it's not going to be a mix and match. No. Something that serious is going to have a standard practice built around it. And if there isn't any evidence of that, then I'm inclined to believe that there's not. Probably not. Probably not. At least not generally, no. But the Romans did do human sacrifice, so maybe they did. But mostly...
Other than the human sacrifice, what the Carthaginians are famous for is being real good at boats. A special interest to a lot of people. They are great at boats. I will say that you can still see the harbours and the harbours are very cool. This is a niche kind of version of famous, but in the ancient world, what the Carthaginians were famous for is that they had these two man-made harbours where they had turned two lagoons into...
kind of very, very well protected harbours. And there is an outer one which can be accessed directly from the Mediterranean, which is for merchant ships. And that is like a kind of normal square. It looks really modern, actually, like it's really square. It's now the place where very rich people live in Tunis. So it's surrounded by very fancy, beautiful houses. But it's
It is a kind of... It looks super modern, but at the end, there is like a little canal. And the canal now has like a little bridge over it. But once upon a time, it had a big gate. And behind that gate, there is a second harbour, which is circular. And that was for the military. So the naval ships were...
were all housed in that, were completely inaccessible to anybody from the outside, were invisible to anybody from the outside. So you couldn't just kind of sail up and down and see how many ships the Carthaginians had. And was a space where they could retreat to as well and close the gates and nobody could get them. And nobody could come into their harbour because it's got quite a narrow entrance. So they would just be sailing into...
Well, they'd just be sailing into death, essentially. So it's like a very, very secure, very, very private. They can do things in there that nobody knows what they're doing and they can keep their Navy safe in a way that most Navies can't be kept. And they become unbelievably good at...
building ships they build something called a quinkareem you've heard of a trireme a great name no i haven't heard of a trireme so trireme is like your basic ship in the ancient world a quinkareem is bigger than that sure it has like 300 oarsmen that's a lot of people and
So a trireme has 170. Yeah. Which isn't a lot. There's 300 oarsmen. It is super big. It's got a big bronze ram on the front and it will just massively overpower a trireme, basically. And will come at you and smash directly into you. And then once you've been scuttled, then they shoot you with all of their archers and then they board you and kill you all. Great. And they are fantastically good at this.
That seems fair. It seems to have really worked it out. Like they know what they're doing. They do. They're also, what we know about their political system is not amazing. We know that they are basically a republic and,
They seem to have a kind of consular system where they have two people who are elected every year called Sufis. And they have a citizen assembly called the Ham, which is a nice name. And then they have like an assembly of judges. So they have kind of like a tripartite, like they're doing their best situation. But what goes on in their politics is very obscure because the Romans are not interested. But before they meet the Romans, they spend all of their time meeting the Greeks, basically. Yeah.
Because they are unbelievably good at sailing and they have come from a very ancient trading culture of sailing. They are great at merchant activity and finding new places to work with. So they do these real cool Atlantic expeditions. As far as we know, they're like the only Mediterranean peoples that like go successfully into the Atlantic.
So in about 550 or 500-ish BCE, they're like super powerful. They are the merchant navy that is controlling the Western Mediterranean. They send out two Atlantic colonial expeditions. So they go through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Atlantic and one goes north and one goes south. Hmm.
to go and have a look at what's going on. Yeah. And they leave behind this. So we, again, have a Greek epitome of the Punic account of the expeditions. Classic. But we have basically an exploration going down
the Atlantic coast of Africa. There's quite a long argument about how far they got down the Atlantic coast as to whether they got down, like it might be the Canary Islands that they got to, which is not bad. But they go to Tangier and then go all the way down and they talk about all of these people that they see. And then they get to these islands that they call the Gorgades, which might be the Canary Islands. And they say that it's full of hairy women who are
who just shout at them a lot, basically. Great. And so they land. The people on the island are like...
Please go away. So obviously they do what any good colonial power does, which is chase some Africans. Absolutely. Kidnap some of them. And then when these women won't like basically submit and admit that they have been enslaved, they kill them. Sure. Classic. What else are you going to do? And then they flay them and then they take their skins back to Carthage.
where they display them for the rest of time. Great. Yes. Great behaviour. Yes. For a while, because of a deeply confused 18th century biologist, it was thought that they did not actually meet people. They met gorillas. Okay. And just interpreted them as people. Yes. Yes.
because they basically, people in the 17th, 18th century thought that ancient people were just real thick. Yeah, sure. And especially ancient people who lived on the continent of Africa. Exactly. For a while, everybody, like that kind of story spread that they actually had kidnapped some gorillas and killed them. But the word gorilla comes from the word Gorgades eventually. And so I think we think it's just a,
it's just a confused biologist. Sure. He doesn't understand the etymology of his word. Great. It was some people that they murdered, just to be clear, and then displayed as trophies. But, so they do do this and they do say that they see things like troglodytes and they describe a lad that's on fire. They use the term chariot of the heavens, which is fun. That is fun. Yeah. We never call things fun things like that anymore. Very rarely. It's all called river number three. Yeah.
See, they were calling their cities the new city, but then they were calling their natural phenomena the comet of, what did you say? The chariot of the heavens. The chariot of the heavens. Like, that's so much better. It is. I reckon that Hanno, there's a king here, he's called Hanno. Well, the Romans call him a king, but whoever he was, Hanno was...
Like it was good at words. Yeah. Yeah. So they do that and they go all the way down and they basically decide that there's nothing like that. Everybody that they meet is like, oh, no, please go away. And so they just come back and that's the end of Atlantic exploration down that way. But they do turn north and sail all the way up the north coast of Iberia, all the way across. And they discover the Scilly Islands and the Scilly Islands off the coast of Britain, like of Cornwall and are now British islands.
area. What they are is massive producers of tin and as a result Carthage, realising that they can get here, become the only people supplying tin into the Mediterranean. That's pretty good. It's a pretty good gig if you can get it. It takes the Romans, they don't learn where they have come from until Julius Caesar. But
fully 500 years later they do not know where the Carthaginians are getting tin from and it drives them mad oh you love to see it but they basically have a monopoly on that so they are sending people they're sailing out of the Strait of Gibraltar do you want to know my good fact about the Mediterranean by the way yes I learned fairly recently and I've just like my current fact to enjoy telling people about so there was a crisis about
kind of nine million years ago that meant that the Mediterranean was cut off from the Atlantic Ocean and dried out completely. That's insane. It was just a big basin of dryness for a few million years. It was effectively a desert, a salinity crisis. And then literally one day, 5.3 million years ago, the Strait of Gibraltar burst open in a thing called the Zanclian Deluge.
And in less than two years, the water in the Mediterranean poured through. And then now we have a beautiful sea. And now we have a four million kilometer, four million cubic kilometer sea of the Mediterranean. Yes. That's amazing. And like all the nicest places to go on holiday. All because basically the theory, well, there's various theories as to what happened.
like the best theory is that there was basically like a stream like trickling through what is now the Strait of Gibraltar but was at one point land and like just through the process of millions of years worth of erosion it just wore away enough for it just wore away and wore away until one day it just exploded and in less than two years like like from 1997 to 1999 it just like burst
burst through like in the most intense deluge of water you can humanly imagine 1000 times stronger than the Amazon River says one geologist wow yeah anyway that's my good fact about the Mediterranean that's a good fact I love it and that's why it's just that like tiny little gap between Spain and Africa hmm with a tiny little rock of Gibraltar and it causing problems and
But anyway, so like 500 by 500, they're this massive culture. They have a huge amount of influence all over the Mediterranean. They start to come in contact with the Romans. And this is like how they really have left their mark on... Otherwise they would be like so many other city states and cultures that rise and fall and kind of like leave no mark on the European consciousness. But this is how they leave a mark on the European consciousness.
this the first time they meet is 509 BCE and they make a pact of friendship which a Greco-Roman historian called Polybius found in an archive and translated which is good and what he wrote was a history of a Roman or a history of one of the Roman generals that fought Carthage so it survived nice but
They did something relevant to Rome and so we remember a thing. So he transcribes it, which is super useful. It basically is an agreement of friendship between Rome and Carthage. At this point, Rome is just starting to spread out. Rome is only about 200 years old. It's just starting to spread out into Italy. It says that Rome...
Roman traders are not allowed to go past a certain point in the Mediterranean, but Carthage promises that it will not harm any coastal cities who are allied with Rome, which is zero at this time.
And it doesn't put any limits on their military behavior, but does say that if Roman traders want to do trade in any area within Carthaginian influence, like Sicily or Sardinia or North Africa or anywhere, then or Southern Italy, they have to have a Carthaginian official present.
So it's like a very bureaucratic situation. You can do stuff, but we're in charge and we're going to monitor everything you do. Yeah, and presumably this is to make sure the taxes are being paid or just like to exert a little bit of influence over whatever is going on. But Rome at that time is not super interesting to Carthage. Carthage is super stressed about the Greeks, who the Greeks never unify, which is why they're never able to be united.
any kind of real imperial power outside of like they are city states kind of bullying each other for the most part. But they are super colonial as well. They love to send out little groups of guys and occasionally a city state will send out an attempt. But they're always comparatively so small that they never really get so far. In the kind of first time that they start causing stress is when they found Marseille. So Marseille is a Greek city
founded as Mycenae and the Carthaginians were super pissed off about it. They considered Marseille to be very much in their territory and not Greek at all. They really tried to stop Marseille being founded. There was a big war about it, which they lost and Marseille was founded. And then it was just kind of like a fucking two fingers up from the Greeks forever that they could sail into Marseille. Yeah.
Also a delightful city. Liked Marseille a lot. I highly recommend a visit to Marseille. But what they're mostly doing is fighting over influence in Sicily and Sardinia with various Greek people, effectively. Like who gets to control Sicily, who gets to control Sardinia. Yeah. Yeah. And that goes on for centuries, basically. Kind of ebbing backwards and forwards with nobody really winning anything over.
and just kind of goes forwards and backwards. You get these kind of big... You get a dynasty that arises for the first time called the Magonid dynasty. And everybody in Carthaginian history has the same name. There are only about four names to go around. So we have Hamilcar, we have Mago, we have Hannibal. We've got a lot of Hannibals and Hadrisbal. And they all just kind of reuse names. But they get a little dynasty, but they all kind of all fall apart largely because of fighting...
in either Sicily or Sardinia.
Like there will always be a battle with some Greeks, often some Athenians, but could be Corinthians or something else in one of those places. And it will go backwards and forwards and eventually there'll be a loss. And then the dynasty will fall because it's largely Republican. They don't really love a dynasty. That's fair. That's not unreasonable. Yeah, they do seem to be quite good at keeping single families out of power. Yeah. Or like not allowing one person to gather as much power that it fucks up the Republic. Yeah.
Yeah. Hannibal probably comes the closest, actually, but they do what is right and correct and chase him out. LAUGHTER
Yeah. So that is what is going on until you get to the defining kind of point, the point at which there is a switch from Greece being the problem to Rome being the problem for the Carthaginians, which is 279 BCE. It's a guy called Pyrrhus of Eprius who fucks it all up.
Pyrrhus of Epirus is kind of a fascinating guy who probably deserves a whole episode all of his own because he's one of these guys who's like he's king and then they exile him and then he comes back and gets to be king again and then he goes and does some conquering people he invents the term Pyrrhic victory it's a pretty good showing really it is and then he goes home it's just like sorry everybody and is the king again and he just has one of those like lives like a real capital L life but
So he kind of bursts out of Eprius in Greece and Rome at the time is expanding into the southern Italy and Carthage is still fucking about in Sicily and Sardinia. So what you've got in 279 is Carthage is hanging around in Syracuse, Rome is hanging around in Tarentum and then Pyrrhus of Eprius comes out and...
and starts causing problems basically for everybody. He starts invading places. He kind of tries to invade Syracuse. He joins Terentium to fight the Romans. He just causes havoc, effectively. He tries to invade Italy. He just is a kind of nightmare guy. And this forces Roman...
and Carthage to make a treaty with one another that they will... They're not going to fight him together, but they won't make peace with him without the other one's agreement and that they will... Like, he's a common enemy to them, basically. Just a unified, fuck this guy. Yeah, exactly. And this kind of starts to bring them together and...
And they have some epic battles with Pyrrhus, including the Battle of Asculum in 279, which is where he won but lost so many men that he is believed to have said, if we win one more fight with the Romans, I will be entirely lost. Yeah. And thus a Pyrrhic victory. And thus a Pyrrhic victory.
where you win, but at such an enormous cost to yourself that may as well have not have. Yes. This basically, this is called the Pyrrhic Wars. Eventually he is defeated and kind of creeps back to Eprius to make everybody stop paying attention to himself. But it ends the Carthaginian walks with the Greeks because it's just such a massive series of battles and they see that Rome is kind of becoming a threat and they're
This just kind of stops all of their activity in Syracuse and Sardinia. And like, they're just like, we can't do this anymore. Basically, they just calm down and become much less military. This, incidentally, is what is going to fuck up the Carthaginians as we go. That sometimes they will go, you know what, lads, maybe we've had enough.
Which is very sensible humanitarian policy and is the kind of thing that I agree with and would absolutely do. Just take yourself out of the game. The game's not going very well. It's very expensive. People keep dying. It's kind of miserable. It's been going on for centuries. We've not really won anything. Let's just walk off. You've got nowhere to fold them. Shake it off. Shake it off. Yeah. Unfortunately, the Romans do not understand or know this perspective because they're psychopaths.
They will simply go to war forever rather than get therapy. They would rather go to war forever and ever than get therapy. So 10 years after Carthage has been kind of like stressed out by Pyrrhus so much and by the Romans showing that they've decided to just go home, the first Punic war starts. It kind of starts by accident in Tertullus.
In 264 BCE, there is a crisis at Messina in Sicily. There's tyrants in Sicily. There's always a tyrant in Sicily. Sicily loves a tyrant. They do. They should say this because they did love a tyrant. There's always about seven of them. They've always got a funny name. It's always really hard to tell who's in charge of what and who's allied with who. But Sicily...
there's a crisis at Massena with tyrants. One side asks Rome for help and the other side asks Carthage. Both sides show up. The Romans, in fairness, say, do you want to, I don't really want to go to war. Do you want to just do peace? And the Carthaginians say, no, we promise that we'll do a fight. And,
And this starts with a proxy war fighting for a city that neither of them owned and neither in particular cared about. And it erupts into the First Punic War, which goes on. Do you know how long the First Punic War lasted for? Tell me. How long do you think an ancient war lasts?
I always assume they're not that long, right? Like, how long can you maintain it when you don't have, like, trains to bring you your troops' food? You'd think that. 23 years. Oh, that's way too long. That is way too long to do a war. Yeah. At the start of this war, Rome does not have a navy. It has no navy at all. That goes on for quite a long time until...
I say quite a long time. It goes on for like five years until the Romans realize that they would be better off if they did have a navy because the Carthaginians keep bringing stuff and fighting them and they keep attacking their supply ships and stuff. Yeah. Because a lot of this is happening in Sicily. So they captured Quincodrome in its entirety without destroying it, took it home and just copied it. Yeah, that's fair. That's smart. Yeah.
And within a few years, within a couple of years, they had 17 ships. And like within a terrifying blink of an eye, they had hundreds of ships. And by the end of this 23 years, they had like a full-fledged massive navy. This is the war that if you have read A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, you will know Publius Clodius Pulcher got furious at some sacred chickens who...
Because the Romans just transferred their land-based rituals onto boats. And the deal with when they go to war is that sacred chickens have to eat in order to demonstrate that the gods approve of the battle that they're about to go into. So please mentally put that into every battle scene you've ever seen. They just had some sacred chickens on a boat.
I am imagining the chicken from Moana. Yes, fair. Entirely reasonable. They have him on a boat. The chickens, weirdly enough, just do not want to eat on the boat because they're being thrown around in the Mediterranean, which is choppy. They refuse to eat, so Kulcha grabs them, throws them off the side of the boat, shouting, if they won't eat, let them drink, and charges into battle, at which point he promptly loses 90 ships in a single battle.
Because you can't throw your chickens away and expect to win. Don't fuck with the sacred chickens. They're there for a reason. Did the gods approve? No, they did not.
Anyway, so this goes on for so long. The Romans demonstrate pretty quickly why they take over the entire Mediterranean eventually, which is that they do things like lose 90 ships and they just immediately build 90 more. They just keep coming. And as with the Pyrrhic victory and what we'll see in Cannae, it doesn't matter how badly you beat them, they will just come back. Yeah.
It's like this is the Russia of their day. Just like endless men to throw into a battle. They have endless men and there's nothing they won't do. Yeah. And if you lose and you go home, they'll kill you. So they...
eventually get the upper hand so much so that they force Carthage to sue for peace in 241 BCE. They take Sicily as a Roman province in its entirety. This is how Sicily becomes their first technically overseas province. They send Carthage home in a kind of don't do it again way, basically. And they kind of make a traditional peace treaty with Carthage at this time. As far as they're concerned, they've beaten them. They've now got a navy, which is great for them. And
They drive Carthage out of Sicily. What happens in Carthage is that Hanno the Great, who is the leader during this time, goes home and immediately starts another war with the Libyans. Because one of the interesting things about Carthage is that they're on the top of...
There's a whole continent there. Like they could go south at any point, but they're always very naval. They're always completely focused on the sea. And they do not really expand at all into the land around them. They make sister cities. The thing is about that, though, is that the Mediterranean is such a pleasant sea. It's enclosed, so it's not very rough most of the time. And like, why would you mess with a good thing?
Africa is full of desserts. It's hard there.
Yep. And they're like, we don't want to fight the Libyans, so they don't. But what they have done is they are using the Libyans as kind of mercenary forces a lot. And they have now flipped the situation where they are sort of taxing them. And so they get into a land war with the Berber people. This goes extremely badly, so badly that they also have to pull out of Sardinia completely as well. And so by the end of the 240s BC, they're like very much on the back foot.
They kind of pull themselves together, take a deep breath, recenter, refocus. And 20 years later, they start thinking about expanding again. And they look at Spain this time. They are not interested in Sicily anymore. They've given up on that.
They can see that the Romans are not yet really in Spain. They do have a lot of influence. There are Phoenician cities in Spain. Spain and Portugal have always been in very close contact, obviously, with North Africa, with Phoenician cities. They are like, what if instead of fighting the Romans over here, we try to expand around the Romans? Yeah, just go somewhere else.
You know, Spain is not Romanized at all yet. It's not been invaded. They've not really done anything. So 219 BCE, they turn up in Spain and this is where Hannibal appears and Hannibal sacks Segentum in Spain. Rome takes this to be a violation of their peace treaty. They basically see Hannibal coming up the side of
And they're like, nope. And this restarts the war. And this is the second Punic War, which goes on for a mere 17 years. Oh, sure. Just a quick one this time. Just a quick one this time. This is one of the most brutal European wars ever. It is nasty. This is when... So, 219, Hannibal starts sacking towns in Spain. 219...
18 is when he crosses the Alps. He takes all of his war elephants. He crosses the Alps from Spain into Italy, which scares the shit out of the Romans. Like they basically like never recover from the horror of this occurring to them. Like him just crossing the Alps. He does not march on Rome, which was stupid. Had he marched on Rome. If he had done that at that point, then we would have, we would never have had a Roman Empire. It would have been Cothedonian. It may well have been.
May well have been a Carthaginian empire. Carthaginian. I made it. Yeah, because he doesn't. He presumably thinks that it's going to be too well fortified or is scared. This is a kind of Carthaginians lose their nerve moment where you're like, the Romans would never do this. The Romans would have come for you and taken out your eyes.
But this scares the life out of Rome, but he doesn't. He basically just kind of goes around Italy, sacking various cities and has a lot of victories. Like for two years, he has these spectacular victories culminating in...
The very, very famous Battle of Cannae, which appears in all of the Rome Total War video games. And if you do a video games, I will say Oliver Texner said one of the classic battles every boy loves. So one of the classic battles that every boy loves.
Considered to be one of the worst battles in European history. Something like 50,000 men die in a single day. It is a nasty, brutal battle. It is consistently remembered. When I was in the Vatican earlier this year with my mum, there is one of the halls in the Vatican. There was one of the waiting halls to go and see Pope Sixtus or whatever. It's painted with all of the territories of the papal states or all of the territories where the pope
where the Catholic Church existed at the time that it was made. And then it has all of these historical events painted on them. And one of them in Italy is the Battle of Cannae. Sure. Which is like this 15th century version of the Battle of Cannae. Because it's like the most important thing that they could think of that had happened there. Yeah. And it is... And the Romans lose. It is a terrible, terrible loss for them. Like, terrible.
tens of thousands of people die. The Romans almost never get over it. They consider it to be their gods hating them. They do some human sacrifices about it. They bring in some new gods, but they never back down. Like virtually any other culture would have been like, okay, maybe this, like, okay. Maybe we should have a sit down. But they're like, no, all we should do is, like, they do things like, because they're kind of running out of men, they start buying things
enslaved people, like buying people from the field, from like domestic people who are enslaved in houses, like just anyone who is willing to sell a slave, they will buy them and then they draft them into the army. Sure. Like forcibly draft them. And they, yeah, they're just like, there is nothing that they, they do some human sacrifices. Like there's nothing that they won't do in order to keep going until they have won the fight. Yeah.
And so they just keep going. And the war...
spreads further and further they manage to force Hannibal out of Italy eventually and then it spreads to Macedonia because some Macedonian guys get involved and it takes over like a huge amount of Europe like the fighting is occurring on multiple fronts for a very long time and Rome just gets stronger and stronger and stronger this is like you know the point at which Rome starts expanding into the east yeah because every time they defeat someone they take their city and
And they eventually, in 204 BCE, they win. They defeat Carthage decisively. Scipio Africanus is the guy, the general who leads the final victory. They burn Carthage.
the entire Carthaginian navy they forbid them from ever having a navy again they impose massive taxes and restrictions on them they say that they're not allowed to have a standing army they say that they're not allowed to fight anywhere ever again they're not allowed to fight in Africa they're not allowed to fight on the sea they basically make them a kind of vassal state they put them under cowardly really like please don't ever fight us again
Kind of. But as far as their consent, it's a real punishment because they're such a martial culture. It's like taking away the right to even have any future honour because all of their honour at this time comes through warfare. Hannibal, weirdly enough, is fine. He just goes home and is like, oh God, sorry guys. Yeah.
And so he goes into politics, is elected, like their version of consul, a couple of years later, and then does loads of administrative reforms. Okay, sure. Keep yourself busy, I guess. It's amazing that they would be like, well, kind of all of this feels like it's your fault. Like...
You had the upper hand and you lost a really big war that went on for nearly two decades. And now you want to be telling me that I have to turn in this form in triplicate.
But basically the council of judges has kind of taken over and it's become a bit of an oligarchy. So he starts moving into like auditing stuff and reducing the power of judges and making things elected positions and spends a couple of years kind of making the state better, probably, and less corrupt. Mm-hmm.
And like really, like, you know, you take the eye off the ball for a little while and somebody will try and take advantage of it. And that's what happened during this war. And this is what pisses the Carthaginians off. And some powerful Carthaginians are just like, get out. They do keep his reforms, but they are also like, look, we just, you're very unpopular now. Thank you for sorting it out. Now, please run along. We just never want to see you ever again.
Essentially, which is nicer than the Romans would do because the Romans would have had him executed for losing a war. But yeah, they're just like, please leave. So he leaves. He, and this is my favorite part, goes to Rome. Great. Of course, why not? So he goes to Rome and is like, can I stay here? And they say, no.
We know this bit because in stories about Scipio Africanus, there's a demonstration of how benevolent and kind he was. He tries to protect his old enemy and be like, maybe we can give him house. But the Romans are like, no, mate. Can I? Come on.
And so he goes to Macedonia, but the Romans are like, you know that we own that now. You can't stay there. And so he just keeps going. And eventually he takes his own life in Bithynia in 183 BCE. He's just like, I have no home anymore. I cannot. No one likes me. Yeah. No one likes me. No one will look after me. And the Romans keep being mean to me due to the fact that I killed so many of them.
But thanks to Hannibal's reforms, they are actually able to kind of rebuild themselves and can kind of continue to be like they don't suffer, except militarily, really, like they're able to still be a very powerful and very rich merchant city, which is why there is a certain faction in Rome that go on and on and on and on for decades about how we need to destroy Carthage.
And so Cato the Elder is the famous one there. He never actually said this and it's not in any of the sources. Carthage must be destroyed. Carthago Delenda Est is a version of things that he said that has been kind of chopped up
and made pithier by English speakers. Right. That is what he's famous for, for saying at the end of every single speech, Carthage must be destroyed. That's what's happening in Rome. There's like a lot of people who think that they can't be trusted, that they'll start trouble again, that they should be destroyed, that they shouldn't be allowed to be like a vassal state. There are in Carthage basically two factions, one which is like we should try and get on with the Romans and the other ones which like we should fuck the Romans up. But,
Most of those I can understand the point of view. I mean, knowing what the Romans' attitude is going to be for the rest of time, I would have fucked them up. I mean, yeah, at least go down in a blaze of glory instead of on your knees, I suppose. But they're kind of pushed into the situation because what has happened is in the process of the Second Punic War, which was enormously...
successful in terms of land grabs for the Romans. They have taken over a good chunk of North Africa, which they call Numidia, which is the kind of bit of Tunisia adjacent really to Tunisia. And they have put a king in charge there who is a Roman client king. He is basically just a Roman official in a different hat. And he really enjoys just pissing them off. So he knows that the Romans...
have not let them have any army anymore, that they're not allowed to defend themselves. He knows that any attack on him would be seen as breaking the treaty. So he just keeps stealing land, basically. Like he just keeps moving in
closer and closer to the city of Carthage like taking bits of their land and slurping it up moving people in moving power like basically just prodding at them over and over again sending colonies and he just keeps doing this over and over again until eventually they lose patience and in 151 BC Carthage kills some Numidians and they
they have a small battle. It's not a very exciting one in the grand scheme of things, but there is a battle with a Roman allied force. It does demonstrate they have technically fought a battle in Africa, even though they immediately feel bad about it, probably because they're lost. They are,
they're demolished because these guys have not fought in decades so they're instantly demolished completely forgotten how to do it yeah because they lost they're like oh fuck so they do execute the generals pretend that the whole thing happened by accident like oh my god we don't know how it happened the army just kind of ran out there we didn't even know we had one they send like
multiple people to Rome to like grovel and be like please forgive us we'll never do it again they just really do their best to be like please we're so sorry don't just fell in there yeah the Romans however have had this party for decades that are like Carthage must be destroyed they say look we told you they can't be trusted here's the evidence now we must destroy them
And so they immediately go out and restart the war. They besiege Carthage. So it starts in 149 BCE. They besiege Carthage and some nearby towns like Utica. And it goes on. It goes on for kind of three miserable years. For funsies, both of the two kind of head guys in Carthage during the siege have the same name. They're both called Hasdrubal.
Great. Yep. Thanks for that. Which is fun. It makes things real easy. They are, like, it's kind of indecisive for three years. They hurt themselves by one of the Hasdrubals is related to the king of Numidia. It's like a cousin or an uncle. And so when the king of Numidia turns up in order to support the Romans, the Carthaginians bludgeon him to death in their senate house. What?
Which feels like an own goal. But this war has a lot of own goals on their behalf, to be fair. So this leaves them with this one guy, one hashed war. But the consuls outside are also not particularly great at warfare, particularly. And so they're not really...
pressing their advantages there's like none of the battles are particularly decisive like nothing is going particularly well so in 147 Scipio Aemilianus turns up with his pet historian Polybius in tow who is going to then write a history of this telling everybody how great Scipio is sure and you've got to bring someone to write about how great you are wherever you go it's very helpful it's very helpful yeah and
And Scipio knew this. So he turns up, he is the grandson of Scipio Africanus, which is how they've decided that he's going to be the best person to deal with this. Sure. As it turns out, he is quite good at warfare. So he basically just starts battering his way through the walls, which is not something that Romans actually do that much, like trying to destroy the walls. That's not generally their process. They much prefer to have somebody on the inside just open the door for them.
It does make things easier. Yeah, but he does this. However, the Carthaginians, and this is where they could have turned the tide and fail. This is their kind of final moment of not seizing the moment. During the years of the siege, they have managed to pull together enough scrap wood to build themselves 50 triremes in their hidden harbour. Remember that little hidden harbour? Yeah. No one can see from the outside. They've got 50 boats.
They have a little navy that the Romans do not know that they have. It's hidden. They burst out, surprise the Romans, completely take them by surprise, have entirely the military naval advantage. They've got the Romans on the back foot. They could destroy them. What they do instead is...
is sail around in a circle and go home because they've forgotten how to do navy as well as army they don't remember they know how to build boat but they don't know how to do navy anymore they don't know how to do navy anymore you really need to see it they have forgotten so badly that they stay home for three solid days giving the romans a lot of time to form a plan for what they're going to do
when the next time the navy they now know exists appears which they do and the romans just immediate like the romans have like okay we'll get ships like they're gonna come back out again they get ships they they burst back out and they're like oh god oh they prepared what we wouldn't have done that and genuinely taken by surprise have a naval battle panic try to go back but
But because they're now panicked, they get stuck in a queue trying to get back into their own harbour and are obliterated. Sure. And this basically is like the final straw. That's like the kind of last battle. And eventually, very shortly afterwards, Scipio kind of burns and batters his way through the walls, gets into the city and
It takes six days and six nights of fighting in the streets to subdue Carthage, which involves the slaughter of a lot of innocents, during which time Hasdrubal hides in the fortified part of Bersa, the original, with that side of their citadel. So he hides up there watching it happen. So once they have killed everybody and enslaved everybody else, they then just start to burn the city.
at which point has just ball kind of comes and begs for his life and skippio says sure because i can put you in my triumph his wife on the other hand kind of and this is like such classic roman like a night a real cool flourish it's so literary so i feel like this can't possibly have happened his wife on the other hand like humiliated by her husband's capitulation walks down calls him a
Cuts her own children's throats and throws them into the burning temple and then launches herself after it.
Yeah, that is a very Roman thing to do. It is such a, like, kind of mythic behaviour. Like, this strong woman showing up her weak husband. Like, she won't even let her children be taken into slavery. Yeah. Like, it's simultaneously barbarous and heroic. Like, it's so literary. Yeah. But they then spend...
several weeks just burning the city to the ground. They destroy it. They take so many prisoners that it genuinely becomes a kind of problem for the Roman economy. They take preposterous amounts of plunder and enrich themselves because it's still a very, very rich city. And according to legend, they salt the earth so that nothing will ever grow there ever again. Do you think? I feel like...
It's right next to the ocean, so the earth was probably already a little bit salty. It probably was a little bit salty. Okay, this is where my bugbear comes in, and this is the end. So...
Did the Romans really destroy it? Yes, they did. They burned everything that they could except the temples and they left it in a ruin. And deliberately, systematically destroyed its records as well. It's not like the records got destroyed by accident while the city was burning. They went and deliberately erased everything. Yeah, they did their very best to erase it.
However, my new best friend, R.T. Ridley of the University of Melbourne, in 1986, decided that he would see where the story of them salting the earth came from. And so he went through every single ancient source that mentions Carthage in any way, shape or form.
I've found that there is absolutely no reference to the salting of the earth. The sources say that they burned it, that it took 17 days to burn the entire city. Several say that they cursed the land, basically made it like religiously unacceptable for people to live there.
Right, yeah. Because they're very religious people, they never say anything about ploughing or salting. They say that it was utterly destroyed. They say that it was a ruin. There's images of Marius walking in the ruins about 50 years later. This is 146. So, yeah. So the only reference, according to R.T. Ridley, my new best friend, to salt in reference to North Africa is that...
Pliny the Elder says that Utica, which is kind of the next city along, and also a Phoenician city, produced loads of salt. Okay. That's it. That's it. So there's salt nearby and they burned the city down. Yes. So he's like, okay, where did it come from? So he then starts going through modern sources. The narrative that Rome ploughed the ruins...
so that nothing would ever grow there again, is invented by a man named Bartold Niebuhr in a lecture at Bonn University in 1870. That's the first... That's it. That's the first mention of the ploughing. The idea that they destroyed it, ploughed over the ruins to make it a field so that nothing would ever grow there again. Or insisted that nothing would ever grow there again and cursed the ground so that nothing would ever grow there again.
That's when that starts, 1870. This is the kind of point where historians are starting to feel very novelistic. And so it builds throughout kind of various versions of the retelling over and over again. So Theodore Momsen, who's a very novelistic kind of writer, has like whole images of, you know, them...
ploughing their way through the earth and da da da da. However, it is not until 1930 that a man named B. Hallward, a man who wrote virtually nothing else ever again, but did write an article in the first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History, which is a kind of like
Encyclopedia kind of the... It's like a super useful, like basic essays on various topics in ancient history. He wrote in the kind of Cambridge Ancient History...
essay on the destruction of Carthage. Buildings and walls were raised to the ground, the plough passed over its site, and salt was sown in its furrows. Sure. Okay, so he just made it up. He just made it up. Good, good, good. And then, because R.T. Ridley is the kind of man that I like, he's like, I wonder where this does actually come from.
And he points out that there are lots and lots of references in Assyrian literature which refer to earth being salted so that nothing will ever grow there again after the destruction of towns, of which one of those references makes its way into the Bible in the book of Judges where Abimech captures Seshem and sows the ground with salt. And so he thinks that...
that Hallward maybe knows his Bible better than he knows his Carthaginian history. And he has just imagined that he once upon a time read that. Carthage was salted.
Yes, but it wasn't. It was just burned down and the ruins were still there and it was kind of a bit of a tourist attraction for a while. And that is the end of Punic Carthage. In 40-ish BC, in 46 BCE, Julius Caesar began the process of recolonising it and he sent some colonists and refounded the city and called it Colonia Iulia Concordia Carthago. That's too much. That's too long. Yeah.
Yeah, so weirdly everyone just called it Carthage. And a colony is like the highest of the hierarchy of Roman settlements. So it means it got all, it was like became the centre of Roman power in North Africa, basically, for a long time until Triopolita. So what you have now is tons and tons of very epic Roman era from the rebuilt Carthage. So there's
There's a forum. There's tons of real good mosaics. It became a very wealthy and cool city. Perpetua was killed there probably. Augustine was born nearby. Tertullian is from there. It became like a real big Christian city. And then it was taken by vandals in the...
late 4th century retaken back into the Byzantine Empire by Justinian was Byzantine for a while and then in 698 it was taken by the Umayyad Caliphate sacked down again and then kind of deserted for a while and was mostly used as a quarry to build Tunis sure yeah well and that's the story of Carthage it's just a real shame it is a real shame but I think it's probably the more common story of cities er
Yeah. The ones that then endure. But even the ones that we think of that endure don't really. Like Rome was buried under modern for a long time. Yeah. And then it's all been excavated out again for a large part, which is why whenever you look at a
A column, it's always got big gaps down the middle. It's because it was knocked over, broken in half. They haven't been standing for thousands of years. All of this time. Exactly. It's one of those weird things that we look at, like the death of a city or a country. It's always sad, but...
Despite the fact that everything ends? Everything ends. We like to think that some things can be eternal, but nothing is eternal. Everything will end. No. And even if they do last for quite a long time, they will end eventually. And they have never stayed the same. They're always changing. Every era is the end of the old era and the beginning of a new era.
Yeah, there's no stasis. And we don't actually want there to be. It just always seems a shame that we don't get to keep everything. Yeah. But if we kept everything, then we wouldn't get new things. No. It all works out, hopefully, in the end. Life is constantly... This is why I really like... There is an episode of Fall of Civilizations podcast about Carthage, which I'll also recommend. And that's one of the reasons why I like Fall of Civilizations podcast, because I do find it strangely comforting to know...
civilizations can last for thousands of years and end and then be some confusing ruins in a desert yeah to another civilization that has risen and will one day you know like the ozymandias effect yeah i think that's the thing that is the most tragic though is that it is always a mystery with the like it's the loss of the knowledge of a civilization yes i mean that's always a shame and then we always have to rediscover it all over again yeah and we always know that we we are only getting like
a tiny fraction of what it was. Yeah, but that's what keeps people like me in business. So, yeah. So upsides, there's always something for historians to do. Yeah. And then we get to argue about it because we've all got like four pieces of information. It's the same four pieces of information and we are going to stress about how to interpret it. Yeah. That was a fun question. I enjoyed it. Thank you very much. Next question.
Next time we're doing a you question, Janina. We're doing a very Janina question, which is, why is Shakespeare the bard? Why him? How did he get so famous and why did his work stick out? Yeah. Which I'm excited to learn about. That's from Morgan. Thank you, Morgan. Yeah, thank you, Morgan. Yeah. Do we get to talk about the authorship bullshit? I find the authorship boring kind of tedious. Yeah.
We'll talk about it a little bit, yeah, probably. But I think it is just not as exciting a theory as people like to pretend. It's a very stupid theory. It's a very stupid theory. Maybe that's why I like it. Maybe, yeah. All right, just for you, I will talk about the authorship. Thank you.
Okay, if you would like to ask us a question, then you can go to historyofsexy.com and their things are there. Or you can support us on Patreon and send us a question there. Or just support us on Patreon anyway. And if you support us at the £5 a month amount, you get a sticker. And if not, you get bonus episodes and Discord access. And what else? You can buy merch. Yeah. You can do all kinds of things, but it's all at historyofsexy.com, so you should go there. You should go there. Yeah. Yeah. Until next time, Janina. Bye.
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