Recovering Carthage: An Interview with Richard Miles
- Recovering Carthage: An Interview with Richard Miles
How did you come to be interested in ancient Carthage?
As a young postgraduate student I went on an archaeological dig with Henry Hurst, an archaeologist from Cambridge University. The site was the Tophet, the sacred enclosure where the Carthaginians supposedly sometimes sacrificed their firstborn children to the Baal Hammon and Tanit, the patron deities of the city. Although we were meant to be studying the later Roman remains, I was immediately hooked on the earlier Carthaginian city. My imagination was also caught by Serge Lancel’s brilliant study of the actual city of Carthage.
How has our understanding of ancient Carthage changed in the last few decades?
It has changed enormously because of the vast amount of archaeological work that took place in Carthage from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s. German, French, British, and Dutch/Belgian projects worked right across the city and involved everything from the discovery of one of the last neighborhoods standing before the destruction of the city to a brilliant excavation of Carthage’s famous circular harbor. All of this work greatly increased our knowledge of Carthage’s religious, economic, social, and cultural structures. Much of the credit has to be given to M.A. Ennabli, the head of the Carthage archaeological park for much of this period. He kept the archaeologists working, often in the face of considerable opposition from powerful figures in the ruling clique.
A major emphasis in your Carthage Must Be Destroyed is that Carthage needs to be placed within its proper trans-Mediterranean context. How is our understanding of the classical world altered when we do this?
Perhaps most importantly it allows us to realize that the ancient Mediterranean was no pristine classical fantasy peopled only by Greek philosophers and toga-clad Romans. It was a rich, murky cultural stew made up of all sorts of different peoples—Etruscans, Samnites, Iberians, Syrians, Carthaginians, and many others. These peoples traded, fought, intermarried, and most importantly talked with one another. It is this often forgotten fact that gave the region much of its cultural and economic vibrancy. My Carthage and Ancient Worlds books are an attempt to tell that story.
This does not detract in any way at all from the achievements of Greece or Rome. In the case of the Greeks in particular we often forget that much of their genius came from taking the innovations of others and making them better. Take the alphabet (borrowed from the Phoenicians) and look what they did with that!
Carthage is often thought of as a dominant maritime-naval power that was seemingly destined to clash with the dominant land power of that region, Rome, for hegemony of the western Mediterranean world. Yet throughout much of the Punic Wars, it was Rome not Carthage that enjoyed command of those waters. How do you account for that?
Well, prior to the First Punic War, Rome had no fleet at all. As the war continued, however, the Romans managed to build up a formidable fleet capable of challenging and defeating the Carthaginians. It was an incredible achievement; perhaps their greatest, particularly when one takes into account that Carthage was the strongest naval power that the Mediterranean world had ever known. It was the equivalent of Britain assembling a baseball team and comprehensively defeating you Americans after only a couple of decades. It was achieved by playing to Rome’s military strengths as a land power while at the same time negating the Carthaginians’ far superior seamanship.
The Romans invented a new device called the corvus or crow, which was effectively a raised gangplank that was swiftly dropped onto enemy ships when they came into range. Roman marines could then charge on board and hand-to-hand fighting would ensue. A combination of clever tactics, determination, good fortune, and appalling weather led to final victory and the Romans being able to call the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum—Our Sea.
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