The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

city and at once sent out to the camp all their

fleet-material and artillery, all the military stores in the public magazines,

and all the arms that could be found in the possession of private

individuals. Three thousand catapults and two hundred thousand sets of

armour were given up.

 

They again came out to the camp. The military council was assembled to

receive them. The old men saluted the Roman ensigns, and bowed low to

the consuls, placing their hands upon their breasts. The orders of the

consuls, they said, had been obeyed. Was there anything more that their

lords had to command?

 

The senior consul rose up and said that there was something more. He

was instructed by the Roman senate to inform the senators of Carthage

that the city must be destroyed, but that in accordance with the promise of

the Roman senate their country, their laws, their sepulchres, their

liberties, and their estates would be preserved, and they might build

another city. Only it must be without walls, and at a distance of at least

ten miles from the sea.

 

The Carthaginians cast themselves upon the ground, and the whole

assembly fell into confusion. The consul explained that he could exercise

no choice: he had received his orders, and they must be carried out. He

requested them to return and apprise their fellow-townsmen. Some of the

senators remained in the Roman camp; others ventured to go back. When

they drew near the city the people came running out to meet them, and

asked them the news. They answered only by weeping and beating their

foreheads, and stretching out their hands and calling on the gods. They

went on to the senate house; the members were summoned; an enormous

crowd gathered in the market-place. Presently the doors opened; the

senators came forth, and the orders of the consuls were announced.

 

And then there rose in the air a fierce, despairing shriek, a yell of agony

and rage. The mob rushed through the city and tore limb from limb the

Italians who were living in the town. With one voice it was resolved that

the city should be defended to the last. They would not so tamely give up

their beautiful Carthage, their dear and venerable home beside the sea. If

it was to be burnt to ashes, their ashes should be mingled with it, and their

enemies’ as well.

 

All the slaves were set free. Old and young, rich and poor, worked

together day and night forging arms. The public buildings were pulled

down to procure timber and metal. The women cut off their hair to make

strings for the catapults. A humble message was sent in true Oriental

style to the consul, praying for a little time. Days passed, and Carthage

gave no signs of life. Tired of waiting, the consul marched towards the

city, which he expected to enter like an open village. He found, to his

horror, the gates closed, and the battlements bristling with artillery.

 

Carthage was strongly fortified, and it was held by men who had

abandoned hope. The siege lasted more than three years. Cato did not

live to see his darling wish fulfilled. Masinissa also died while the siege

was going on, and bitter was his end. The policy of the Romans had been

death to all his hopes. His dream of a great African empire was

dissolved. He sullenly refused to co-operate with the Romans-—it was

his Carthage which they had decreed should be levelled to the ground.

 

There was a time when it seemed as if the great city would prove itself to

be impregnable; the siege was conducted with small skill or vigour by the

Roman generals. More than one reputation found its grave before the

walls of Carthage. But when Scipio Aemilianus obtained the command

he at once displayed the genius of his house. Perceiving that it would be

impossible to subdue the city as long as smuggling traders could run into

the port with provisions, he constructed a stone mole across the mouth of

the harbour. Having thus cut off the city from the sea, he pitched his

camp on the neck of the isthmus—for Carthage was built on a

peninsula—and so cut it off completely from the land. For the first time

in the siege the blockade was complete: the city was enclosed in a stone

and iron cage. The Carthaginians in their fury brought forth the prisoners

whom they had taken in their sallies, and hurled them headlong from the

walls. There were many in the city who protested against this outrage.

They were denounced as traitors; a reign of terror commenced; the men

of the moderate party were crucified in the streets. The hideous idol of

Moloch found victims in that day; children were placed on its

outstretched and downward sloping hands and rolled off them into the

fiery furnace which was burning at its feet. Nor were there wanting

patriots who sacrificed themselves upon the altars that the gods might

have compassion upon those who survived. But among these pestilence

and famine had begun to work, and the sentinels could scarcely stand to

their duty on the walls. Gangs of robbers went from house to house and

tortured people to make them give up their food; mothers fed upon their

children; a terrible disease broke out; corpses lay scattered in the streets;

men who were burying the dead fell dead upon them; others dug their

own graves and laid down in them to die; houses in which all had

perished were used as public sepulchres, and were quickly filled.

 

And then, as if the birds of the air had carried the news, it became known

all over Northern Africa that Carthage was about to fall. And then from

the dark and dismal corners of the land, from the wasted frontiers of the

desert, from the snow lairs, and caverns of the Atlas, there came creeping

and crawling to the coast the most abject of the human race—black,

naked, withered beings, their bodies covered with red paint, their hair cut

in strange fashions, their language composed of muttering and whistling

sounds. By day they prowled round the camp and fought with the dogs

for the offal and the bones. If they found a skin they roasted it on ashes

and danced round it in glee, wriggling their bodies and uttering

abominable cries. When the feast was over they cowered together on

their hams, and fixed their gloating eyes upon the city, and expanded their

blubber lips, and showed their white fangs.

 

At last the day came. The harbour walls were carried by assault, and the

Roman soldiers pressed into the narrow streets which led down to the

water side. The houses were six or seven storeys high, and each house

was a fortress which had to be stormed. Lean and haggard creatures, with

eyes of flame, defended their homesteads from room to room, onwards,

upwards, to the death struggle on the broad, flat roof.

 

Day followed day, and still that horrible music did not cease—the shouts

and songs of the besiegers, the yells and shrieks of the besieged, the

moans of the wounded, the feeble cries of children divided by the sword.

Night followed night, and still the deadly work went on; there was no

sleep and no darkness; the Romans lighted houses that they might see to

kill.

 

Six days passed thus, and only the citadel was left. It was a steep rock in

the middle of the town; a temple of the God of Healing crowned its

summit.

 

The rock was covered with people, who could be seen extending their

arms to heaven and uniting with one another in the last embrace. Their

piteous lamentations, like the cries of wounded animals, ascended in the

air, and behind the iron circle which enclosed them could be heard the

crackling of the fire and the dull boom of falling beams.

 

The soldiers were weary with smiting: they were filled with blood. Nine-tenths of the inhabitants had been already killed. The people on the rock

were offered their lives; they descended with bare hands and passed

under the yoke. Some of them eneded their days in prison; the greater

part were sold as slaves.

 

But in the temple on the summit of the rocky hill nine hundred Roman

deserters, for whom there could be no pardon, stood at bay. The trumpets

sounded; the soldiers, clashing their bucklers with their swords and

uttering the war-cry alala! alala! Advanced to the attack. Of a sudden

the sea of steel recoiled, the standards reeled; a long tongue of flame

sprang forth upon them through the temple door. The deserters had set

the building on fire that they might escape the ignominious death of

martial law.

 

A man dressed in purple rushed out of the temple with an olive-branch in

his hand. This was Hasdrubal, the commander-in-chief, and the

Robespierre of the reign of terror. His life was given him; he would do

for the triumph. And as he bowed the knee before the consul a woman

appeared on the roof of the temple with two children in her arms. She

poured forth some scornful words upon her husband, and then plunged

with her children into the flames.

 

Carthage burned seventeen days before it was entirely consumed. Then

the plough was passed over the soil to put an end in legal form to the

existence of the city. House might never again be built, corn might never

again be sown, upon the ground where it had stood. A hundred years

afterwards Julius Caesar founded another Carthage and planted a Roman

colony therein. But it was not built upon the same spot. The old site

remained accursed; it was a browsing ground for cattle, a field of blood.

When recently the remains of the city walls were disinterred they were

found to be covered with a layer of ashes from four to five feet deep.

Filled with half-charred pieces of wood, fragments of iron, and

projectiles.

 

The possessions of the Carthaginians were formed into a Roman province

which was called Africa. The governor resided at Utica, which with the

other old Phoenician towns received municipal rights, but paid a fixed

stipend to the state exchequer. The territory of Carthage itself became

Roman domain land, and was let on lease. Italian merchants flocked to

Utica in great numbers and reopened the inland trade, but the famous sea

trade was not revived. The Britons of Cornwall might in vain gather on

high places and strain their eyes towards the west. The ships which had

brought them beads and purple cloth would come again no more.

 

A descendant of Masinissa, who inherited his genius, defied the Roman

power in a long war. He was finally conquered by Sylla and Marius,

caught, and carried off to Rome. Apparelled in barbaric splendour, he

was paraded through the streets. But when the triumph was over his

guards rushed upon him and struggled for the finery in which he had been

dressed. They tore the rings from his ears with such force that the flesh

came away; they cast him naked into a dungeon under ground. “O

Romans, you give me a cold bath!” were the last words of the valiant

Jugurtha.

 

The next Numidian prince who appeared at a triumph was the young

Juba, who had taken the side of Pompey against Caesar. “It proved to be

a happy captivity for him,” says Plutarch, “for from a barbarous and

unlettered Numidian he became an historian worthy to be numbered

amongst the learned men of Greece.”

 

When the empire became established the kingdoms of Numidia, of

Cyrene, and of Egypt were swept away. Africa was divided into seven

fruitful provinces ranging along the coast from Tripoli to Tangiers. Egypt

was made a province, with the tropical