Part 2

Meanwhile Carthage grew pre-eminent, and as she grew, manifested to the full the spirit which had made her. Her citizens sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar; they knew the African and the Iberian coasts of the Atlantic. They may have visited Britain. They crossed Gaul. It is said that they saw the Baltic. And everywhere they sought eagerly and obtained the two objects of their desire: metals and negotiation. In this quest, in spite of themselves, these merchants, who could see nothing glorious in either the plough or the sword, stumbled upon an empire. Their constitution and their religion are enough to explain the fate which befell it.

They were governed, as all such states have been, by the wealthiest of their citizens. It was an oligarchy which its enemies might have thought a mere plutocracy; its populace were admitted to such lethargic interference with public affairs as they might occasionally demand; perhaps they voted: certainly they did not rule; and the whole city enjoyed (as all such must enjoy) a peculiar calm. Civil war was unknown to it, for its vast mass of poorer members could not even be armed in the service of their country, save at a wage, and certainly had no military aptitudes to waste upon domestic quarrels. To such a people the furious valour of Roman and Greek disturbance must have seemed a vulgar anarchy, nor perhaps could they understand that the States which are destined alternately to dominate the world by thought or by armies are in every age those whose energy creates a perpetual conflict within themselves. It was characteristic of the Carthaginians that they depended for their existence upon a profound sense of security and that they based it upon a complete command of the sea. It was their contention that since no others could (to use their phrase) “wash their hands” in the sea without the leave of Carthage, their polity was immortal. They made no attempt to absorb or to win the vast populations from whom they claimed various degrees of allegiance. The whole Maghreb, and, later, Spain as well; the islands, notably the Balearics and Sardinia, were for them mere sources of wealth and of those mercenary troops which, in the moment of her fall, betrayed the town. When they contemplated their own greatness their satisfaction must have reposed upon the density of their population—their walls may have held more than half a million souls at a time when few towns of the west could count a tenth of such a number—upon their immemorial security from invasion, upon the excessive wealth of their great families (whose luxury the whole nation could contemplate with a vicarious satisfaction), upon the solidity of their credit, the resources of their treasury, and, above all, upon the excellent seamanship, the trained activity, and the overwhelming numbers of their navy.

As for their religion, it was of that dark inhuman sort which has in various forms tempted, and sometimes betrayed, ourselves. Gods remote and vengeful, an absence of those lesser deities and shrines which grace common experience and which attach themselves to local affections: perhaps some awful and unnamed divinity; certainly cruelty, silence and fear distinguished it. Even the goddess who presided over their loves had something in her at once obscene and murderous.

It is natural to those who are possessed by such servile phantasies that their worship should mix in with the whole of their lives and even penetrate to an immoderate degree those spheres of action which a happier and a saner philosophy is content to leave untrammelled. These dreadful deities of theirs afforded names for their leaders and served for a link between the scattered cities of their race: the common worship of Melcarth made an invisible bond for the whole Phœnician world; the greatest of the Carthaginian generals bore the title of “Baal’s Grace.”

With this gloomy and compelling faith and with this political arrangement there went such a social spirit as such things will breed. Not only were the Carthaginians content to be ruled by rich men always, but the very richest were even too proud for commerce; they lived as a gentry upon land and saw, beneath the merchants who were their immediate inferiors (and accustomed, it may be presumed, to purchase superior rank) a great herd of despicable and never laborious poor—incapable of rebellion or of foreign service. The very fields around the city were tilled, not by the Carthaginians, but by the half-breeds who had at least inherited something of western vigour and application.

When the crowd within the walls was too great, a colony would spring from its overflow into some distant harbour: emigrants led by one of those superiors without whom, as it seemed, the Phœnician was unable to act. It would appear that these daughter-nations were as averse to military sacrifice as their parent, and that they depended for their protection upon no effort of their own, but upon the fleet and the treasury of Carthage. In this way was built up a vast domain of colonies, tributaries and naval bases which was sporadic and ill organised in plan, enormous in extent, and of its nature lacking in permanence.

No system more corrupt or more manifestly doomed to extinction could be conceived, nor is it remarkable that when that system disappeared not a trace of it should remain among the millions whom it had attempted to command. Carthage had not desired to create, but only to enjoy: therefore she left us nothing. Her very alphabet was borrowed from our invention. Of seven hundred years during which the Asiatics had dominated Barbary nothing is left. The extinction of their power was indifferent or pleasing to the Mediterranean they had ruled; their language dwindled on through five hundred further years—its literature has been utterly forgotten. A doubtful derivation for the names of Cadiz, of Barcelona, and of Port Mahon, a certain one for Carthagena, are all that can be ascribed to-day to this fanatic and alien people: for they came of necessity into conflict with the Power that was to unify and direct the common forces of Europe.

At first the expansion of Carthage met with nothing more than could amuse its facile energies and increase its contemptuous security: it judged, exploited, or subsidised the barbaric tribes of Africa and Spain and Sardinia; it wrangled with the Greek colonies whom perhaps it thought itself “predestined” to rule—for to prophesy was a weakness in the blood from which it sprang. Some two centuries and a half before our era, when these Orientals had had footing for near a thousand and Carthage an existence of six hundred years, Rome moved to the attack.

[Sidenote: The Roman Attack]

Rome had already achieved and was leading a confederation of the Italian peoples, she had already stamped her character and impressed her discipline upon the most advanced portion of the west, she had for a full generation minted that gold into coin, when she became aware that a city with whom she had often treated and whom she had thought remote, was present: something alien, far wealthier than herself, far more numerous and boasting a complete hold of communications and of the western sea. Between the two rivals so deep a gulf existed that the sentiment of honour in either was abhorrent or despicable to the other.

[Sidenote: The Punic Wars]

The Roman people were military. They had no love for ships. The sea terrified them: their expansion was by land and their horror of the sea explains much of their history. The very boast of maritime supremacy that Carthage made was a sort of challenge to their genius. They accepted that challenge and their success was complete. Within a hundred years they had first tamed and then obliterated their rival, and the Maghreb re-entered Europe.

The first accidents of that conflict were of such a nature as to confirm Carthage in her creed and to lead her on to her destiny. She found, indeed, that the command of the sea was a doubtful thing: the landsmen beat her in the first round; clumsily and in spite of seamanship. But when, as a consequence of such defeat, they landed upon the African soil which she had thought inviolable, there, to her astonishment, she overwhelmed them. The loss of Sicily, to which she consented, did nothing to warn her. She became but the greater in her own eyes: Sicily she replaced by a thorough hold upon Spain, an expansion the more imperial that the new province was more distant and far larger, and indefinitely more barbarous than the last. It may be imagined what a bitter patriotism the surprises of the early struggle had bred in the governing class of Carthage. From the moment when, in their unexpected victory, they had burnt the Roman soldiers alive to Moloch, this aristocracy had determined upon a final defeat of Rome. The greatest of them undertook the task and undertook it not from the Mother Country but from the Empire. He marched from Spain.

The Second Punic War is the best known of campaigns. Every Roman army that took the field was destroyed, the whole of Italy was open to the army of Hannibal, and (wherever that army was present—but only there) at his mercy. In spite of such miracles the Phœnician attempt completely failed. It failed for two reasons: the first was the contrast between the Phœnician ideal and our own; the second was the solidarity of the western blood.

[Sidenote: The Failure of Carthage]

The army which Hannibal led recognised the voice of a Carthaginian genius, but it was not Carthaginian. It was not levied, it was paid. Even those elements in it which were native to Carthage or her colonies must receive a wage, must be “volunteer”; and meanwhile the policy which directed the whole from the centre in Africa was a trading policy. Rome “interfered with business”; on this account alone the costly and unusual effort of removing her was made.

The Europeans undertook their defence in a very different spirit: an abhorrence of this alien blood welded them together: the allied and subjugated cities which had hated Rome had hated her as a sister. The Italian confederation was true because it reposed on other than economic supports. The European passion for military glory survived every disaster, and above all that wholly European thing, the delight in meeting great odds, made our people strangely stronger for defeat. The very Gauls in Hannibal’s army, for all their barbaric anger against Rome, were suspected by their Carthaginian employers, and in Rome itself an exalted resolve, quite alien to the East and disconcerting to it, was the only result of misfortune.

Beyond the Mediterranean the Berber nomads, whose vague sense of cousinship with the Italians was chiefly shown in their contempt for the merchant cities, harassed Carthage perpetually; and when at last the Roman armies carried the war into Africa, Carthage fell. For somewhat more than fifty years she continued to live without security of territory or any honour, harassed by the nomad kings whom she dared not strike because they were the allies of Rome. She was still enormous in her wealth and numbers, it was only her honour that was gone; if indeed she had ever comprehended honour as did her rival.

[Sidenote: The Destruction of Carthage]

The lapse of time brought no ease. There was something in the temper of Asia that was intolerable to the western people. They saw it always ready to give way and then to turn and strike. They detested its jealous and unhappy rites. Its face was hateful and seemed dangerous to them. The two great struggles, at the close of which Rome destroyed as one destroys a viper, were conducted against members of the same family, Carthage and Jerusalem. A pretext was chosen: Carthage was abject, yielded three hundred hostages, and even all her arms. Only the matter of her religion moved her and the order to remove the site of the town. To this Carthage opposed a frenzy which delayed for three years the capture of the city; but when it was taken it was utterly destroyed. Every stone was removed, the land was left level, and suddenly, within a very few years of that catastrophe, every influence of Carthage disappeared. It was in this way that the first great power of the Orient upon the Maghreb was extinguished.

This final act of Rome was accomplished within a hundred and fifty years of the Nativity. The life of a man went by, and little more was done. It was close upon our era before the Roman habit took root in Africa, a century more before the Maghreb was held with any complete organisation. By the middle of the fifth century the Vandals had come in to ruin it.

[Sidenote: The Roman Monuments]

There were, therefore, but little more than three hundred years during which Rome was to bring up this land into the general unity of Western Europe. There is no other portion of the world Rome governed, not even Southern Gaul, where her genius is more apparent. In that short interval of daylight—a tenth of the known history of the Maghreb—Rome did more than had Carthage in seven hundred years and more than was Islam to do in seven hundred more.

[Illustration]

It is indeed the peculiar mark of Barbary, which makes it a scene of travel different from all others, that everywhere the huge monuments of Rome stand out in complete desertion. If civilisation had been continuous here as it has been in nearly every city of Europe, Africa would not move one in this fashion. Or if a race, active and laborious, had quarried these stones to build new towns, their aspect would be more familiar, because in Europe we are accustomed to such decay and it helps us to forget the vast foundation of Rome. But to find it here, sometimes in the desert, nearly always in a solitude; to round a sandy hill without trees or men and to come, beyond a dry watercourse, upon these enormous evidences of our forerunners and their energy, is an impression Europe cannot give.

[Sidenote: The Ampitheatre]

On the edge of the Sahara, in the very south of Tunis, where the salt of the waste is already upon one, there stands an arena of appalling size. It is smaller, but only a little smaller, than the Coliseum: it seems, in the silence and the glare, far larger. The Romans built it in their decline. You might as you watch it be in Rome or in Nîmes or in Arles, but you look around you and see the plain, and then the ruin grows fantastically broad and strong. Mountains are greatest when one wakes at morning and sees them unexpectedly after a long night journey; when the last sight one had by sunset was of low hills and meadows. So it is with these ruins in Africa. The silence and the loneliness frame them. They are sudden, and when they have once been seen, especially by a man who wanders in that country on foot and does not know what marvel he may not find at the next turn of the path, they never afterwards leave the mind.

[Sidenote: The Roman Planting of Trees and Towns]

The things Rome did in Barbary were these: Of agriculture, which had been exceptional, despised by the cavalry of the mountains and confined to the little plains at the heads of the harbour-bays, she made a noble and, while she ruled, a permanent thing. Indeed it is one of the tests of the return of Europe to her own in the Maghreb that with the advance of our race, corn and vineyards advance, and with our retreat they recede. Rome planted trees which brought and stored rain. She most elaborately canalised and used the insufficient water of the high plateaux. She established a system of great roads. Where Carthage had produced the congestion of a few commercial centres, Rome spread out everywhere small flourishing and happy towns; a whole string of them along the coast in every bay from the Hippos to Tangier. There is, perhaps, not one of the little harbours backed up against the spurs of the Atlas, each in its bay, that has not a Roman market-place beneath its own. Here, as throughout the west, the civilisation of Rome was easy and desired, for it was in her temper to be of a conquering simplicity and in her chronicles she openly confessed her sins. The same unity which moulded Gaul was felt in Africa. The Roman arch and brick and column, the Roman road—all of one certain type—are as plain throughout the Maghreb as a thousand miles away in Treves or Rheims.

[Sidenote: The Legionaries]

The desert was alien to Rome, as the sea was. The old trade from the Soudan which had been the staple of Leptis and which Carthage had certainly maintained, drooped and perhaps disappeared. Roman Africa turned to the Mediterranean and lived upon the commerce of its further shores. Along the edge of the Sahara a string of posts was held. Biskra was Roman, and El Kantara, and Gafsa. The doubt indeed is rather where the Romans did not penetrate, so tenacious were they in holding the southern boundary of Europe, the wall of the Atlas, against the wandering tribes of the sand. There is a fine story of a French commander who, having taken his column with great efforts through a defile where certainly men had never marched before, was proud, and sent a party to chisel the number of the regiment upon a smooth slab of rock above them, but when the men had reached it they saw in deep clear letters, cut long before, “The IIIrd Legion. The August. The Victorious.”

[Sidenote: Verecunda]

Of twenty startling resurrections of Rome which a man sees in less than twenty days on foot in any part of Algiers, consider this. Beyond Lamboesis, the frontier town of the Legionaries, with only a range of hills between it and the Sahara, there was a little town or village. It was quite small and a long way off from the city. It was of no importance; we have no record of it. Except that its name was Verecunda, we know nothing about it. One of its citizens, being grateful that he was born in his native place, thought he would give the little town or village a gate worthy of the love he bore it, and he built an arch all inspired with the weightiness of Rome.

The little town has gone. There is not a single stone of it left. But as you come round a grove of trees in a lonely part, under the height of Aurès, you have before you this great thing, as though it were on the Campagna or carefully railed round in some very wealthy city.

[Sidenote: The Great Arch]

It is all alone. The wind blows through it off the mountains. Every winter the frost opens some new little crack, and every generation or so a stone falls. But in two thousand years not so much has been ruined by time, but that the impression of Rome remains: its height, its absoluteness, and its strength. And this example is but one of very many that a man might choose as he wandered up and down the high steppes and through the gorges of the hills.

[Illustration]

[Sidenote: The Berbers]

As he so wanders, he is taken with a strong desire to grasp the whole place at one view as it stood just before the barbarians came, and to see what the Vandals saw: to look up the valley from the rock of Cirta with the temples on the edge of either precipice and to see the towns re-arise. There are men who have felt this desire in Italy, but in Africa it is a much stronger desire, and since Africa is strange and very empty, perhaps by watching long enough at night that desire might be fulfilled.

Rome not only governed, but also made, Africa. The foundations on which the Maghreb is laid, and to which it must return, are Roman; the Berber race was no conscious part of us. I have said that it did not know itself until the Romans came, and when they came the Berbers slipped into the Roman unity more slowly and with more political friction, (but with less rebellion and therefore less proof of ill-ease,) than did the Gauls. There is no more symbolic picture in the history of the Maghreb than the picture of Scipio clothing in the Roman dress that Massinissa, his ally, the king of the nomads who rode without stirrups or bridle.

[Sidenote: The Arabs]

The Berbers were not destined to preserve their Roman dignity. Something barbaric in them, something of the boundaries, of the marches, planted in these men (though they were, and still are, of our own kind) a genius for revolt. Let it be noted that in Africa every heresy arose. That Africa admitted the Vandals by treason, and that even when Africa accepted Islam, sect upon sect divided its history. Africa has always stood to the rest of the Empire as a sort of ne’er-do-weel: a younger son perpetually asking for adventure and rejecting discipline. To this the Roman horror of the sea lent a peculiar aid. Like Britain, Africa was cut off from the mainland. Like Britain, Africa was destined in the disruption of the Empire to lose the Roman idiom and the traditions of orderly life; but with this difference, that Britain was reconquered by the religion and the manner of Europe within three generations of its loss: Africa was finally invaded, not by dull barbarians staring at the City and humble before her name, but by a brilliant cavalcade which galloped, driven forward by high convictions. The Arabs came in the seventh century, like a sort of youth contemptuous of the declining head of Rome. Barbary, then, I repeat, was swept into the Arabian language and religion in one cavalry charge, and that language and religion not only became immediately the masters of its people, but had twelve hundred years in which to take root and make a soil.

For about five hundred years, from a little after the birth of Our Lord to the close of the sixth century, our culture had been universal among the Berbers. In the last three centuries the Faith was dominant. But rebellion was in them, and when the Arabs came the whole edifice suddenly crumbled.

Asia, which had first sailed in by sea and had been destroyed, or rather obliterated, when Carthage fell, came in now from the desert; Asia was like an enemy who is driven out of one vantage, and then, after a breathing-space, makes entry by another. But in such a struggle the periods of success and failure are longer than those of sieges, and even than the lives of kingdoms. The Maghreb, our test of sovereignty, had admitted the Phœnician for some six or seven hundred years. It had been thoroughly welded into Rome for five hundred. The Vandals came, and did no more than any other wandering tribe: they stirred the final anarchy a little; they were at once absorbed. But the tenacity by which Gaul, Britain, Spain and the Rhine were to slough off the memories of decay and to attain their own civilisation again after the repose of the Dark Ages—that tenacity was not in the nature of Barbary.