when carthage refused to pay what it had promised, more than twenty thousand foreign soldiers marched on the city and camped at tunis, a little over twenty kilometres from its walls. the figure is polybius’s, and so is nearly everything else: for this war he is practically our only source. the year is 241 before our era, the first punic war has just ended, and the roman people, on ratifying it, have hardened the treaty from two thousand two hundred talents over twenty years to three thousand two hundred over ten.
the short version: carthage cheated its troops. polybius tells something clumsier than wicked: gisco shipped them out of lilybaeum in batches, so that each group could be paid and sent home before the next arrived; the government, short of money and convinced that with all of them gathered it would win a discount, held them back and packed them off to sicca. there, idle, they redid the arithmetic in their own favour; when hanno asked them to give up part of it, the camp exploded. polybius speaks not of deceit but of two mistakes —concentrating the mercenaries and handing back their families, who would have served as hostages— and of a senate that ended up conceding everything. diodorus, a century later, does say carthage defrauded them.
what turned the mutiny into a war were two men and a province. spendius, a campanian who had run away from a roman master, knew what awaited him if he were handed over; mathos, a free libyan, feared he would pay for everyone. between them they took over the assemblies —anyone who disagreed was stoned— and seized gisco. mathos then called on the libyan towns, and polybius explains why they answered: during the war carthage had taken half the harvest from the peasants and doubled the taxes. some seventy thousand libyans joined. it was not just a mercenaries’ mutiny: it was the uprising of carthage’s own subjects, with the sardinian garrison in revolt at the same time.
twenty-four years of war against rome never threatened carthaginian soil. the bill for that war did.
polybius calls it the libyan war and finds no better illustration of what «most people call an áspondos war»: without libations, without the ceremony that sealed a truce. «inexpiable» is the modern latin label, and it carries a shade of religious guilt the greek does not have; dexter hoyos titles his monograph, simply, truceless war. hamilcar barca, appointed to the command once hanno had squandered his advantages, began by letting go the prisoners who would not enlist. spendius, mathos and autaritus the gaul feared that such clemency would empty their army: gisco and some seven hundred carthaginians had their hands cut off and their legs broken, and were thrown alive into a trench. from then on hamilcar threw his prisoners to the elephants.
now the historiographical caveat, which is worth not skipping. polybius writes a century later, moralises freely, and states what he is telling this war for: as a lesson on the danger of hiring mercenaries and on the difference between «a confused herd of barbarians» and men raised under law. that it surpassed in cruelty every war he knew is his verdict, not a fact. and his hamilcar, to whom he has already given «the palm» among the generals of the previous war, did not save carthage alone: he shared the command with hanno, quarrelled with him until the government made the troops choose, and the war only closed when thirty senators forced the two to be reconciled. hiero sent supplies; rome returned prisoners, let carthage be provisioned, and refused sardinia when the mutineers offered it.
the ending was not the gorge either. hamilcar, «like a good draughts player», went on hemming them in until he had penned some fifty thousand behind ditch and palisade at a place called the saw; with no relief from tunis, they ate their prisoners and then their slaves. their leaders came down to negotiate and hamilcar agreed that carthage might choose ten of them: he chose the ten envoys. the libyans, who did not know the terms, believed they had been betrayed and rushed to arms: they were wiped out, more than forty thousand of them, between the elephants and the rest of the army. mathos is not a place: he is the libyan chief still holding out at tunis, where he captured the general hannibal and crucified him on spendius’s cross. he fell after the last engagements around leptis, three years and four months after the mutiny —four and four, according to diodorus—, and was paraded and tortured through carthage.
and while carthage counted its dead, rome, which had kept the treaty throughout the war, occupied sardinia and demanded twelve hundred talents more. polybius, who admires rome, writes that there was no reasonable pretext and that it was done against all justice; among the causes of hannibal’s war he counts it the second and principal one. the next chapter is that one.
