PEDERASTY AMONGST THE ANCIENT CARTHAGINIANS
The city of Carthage, founded by a Semitic people from Phoenicia, rose to be a great power and the main rival to Rome for supremacy in the western Mediterranean until defeated in the Second Punic War (218-201 BC) and destroyed by Rome in 146 BC.
According to the greatest modern scholar on Carthage, Gilbert Charles-Picard, “little indulgence was shown to the weaknesses of the flesh” and “there appears to have been little homosexuality”,[1] but he stresses the difficulties in drawing conclusions about a people whose entire literature has been lost due to their city’s destruction.
Apart from the Roman historian Livy’s mention of a Carthaginian boy in Rome loved by the consul L. Quinctius Flaminius, which surely belongs to Roman history rather than Carthaginian, it appears that the only mentions of pederasty amongst Carthaginians by ancient writers are three. First is a report by Diodoros of a rampaging Carthaginian army raping captured boys as well as females, suggesting that, whatever their views may have been of the morality of pederasty, Carthaginians felt the attraction of boys like other ancient peoples. Then there is what Livy and a slightly earlier Roman historian, Cornelius Nepos, had to say about the Carthaginian general Hamilcar “Barca” and his son-in-law Hasdrubal.
Of the individuals mentioned here in a Greek love context, Hamilcar’s date of birth can be only very roughly estimated as around 280 BC, so he was in his early forties in 237 BC, when he went to Spain and was Hasdrubal’s lover. Hasdrubal’s age can only be guessed from the facts given by Nepos that he was both an adulescens and old enough for military service when they went to Spain. Hannibal was born in 247 BC and was thus eighteen in 229/8, when Hasdrubal was accused of wanting to become his lover.
Diodoros of Sicily, Library of History XIII 58 i-ii
Diodoros of Agyrion in Sicily wrote his history of the world known to him in forty books between 60 and 30 BC. Here he recounts what ensued after a Carthaginian army captured the Greek city of Selinous in Sicily in the spring of 409 BC and killed most of the inhabitants. The translation here is by C. H. Oldfather for the Loeb Classical Library 384, published by the Harvard University Press in 1950.
| The women, deprived now of the pampered life they had enjoyed, spent the nights in the very midst of the enemies’ lasciviousness, enduring terrible indignities, and some were obliged to see their daughters of marriageable age suffering treatment improper for their years. For the savagery of the barbarians spared neither free-born boys nor maidens, but exposed these unfortunates to dreadful disasters. Consequently, as the women reflected upon the slavery that would be their lot in Libya, as they saw themselves together with their children in a condition in which they possessed no legal rights and were subject to insolent treatment and thus compelled to obey masters, and as they noted that these masters used an unintelligible speech and had a bestial character, they mourned for their living children as dead, and receiving into their souls as a piercing wound each and every outrage committed against them, they became frantic with suffering and vehemently deplored their own fate; | [i] αἱ μὲν γυναῖκες ἐστερημέναι τῆς συνήθους τρυφῆς1 ἐν πολεμίων ὕβρει διενυκτέρευον, ὑπομένουσαι δεινὰς ταλαιπωρίας· ὧν ἔνιαι θυγατέρας ἐπιγάμους ὁρᾶν ἠναγκάζοντο πασχούσας οὐκ οἰκεῖα τῆς ἡλικίας. [ii] ἡ γὰρ βαρβάρων ὠμότης οὔτε παίδων ἐλευθέρων οὔτε παρθένων φειδομένη δεινὰς τοῖς ἠτυχηκόσι παρίστα συμφοράς. διόπερ αἱ γυναῖκες ἀναλογιζόμεναι μὲν τὴν ἐν τῇ Λιβύῃ μέλλουσαν αὑταῖς ἔσεσθαι δουλείαν, θεωροῦσαι δ᾿ αὑτὰς ἅμα τοῖς τέκνοις ἐν ἀτιμίᾳ καὶ προπηλακισμῷ δεσποτῶν ἀναγκαζομένας ὑπακούειν, τούτους δ᾿ ὁρῶσαι ἀσύνετον μὲν τὴν φωνήν, θηριώδη δὲ τὸν τρόπον ἔχοντας, τὰ μὲν ζῶντα τῶν τέκνων ἐπένθουν, καὶ καθ᾿ ἕκαστον τῶν εἰς ταῦτα παρανομημάτων οἱονεὶ νυγμοὺς εἰς τὴν ψυχὴν λαμβάνουσαι περιπαθεῖς ἐγίνοντο καὶ πολλὰ τὴν ἑαυτῶν τύχην κατωδύροντο· |
Silver didrachm of Selinous, ca. 450 BC. On the obverse: Herakles about to club the Cretan bull. On the reverse: the river-god Hypsas sacrifices at an altar with a serpent coiled around it
Cornelius Nepos, Lives of Eminent Commanders XXII. Hamilcar 3 i-ii
Cornelius Nepos was a Roman biographer, whose Excellentium imperatorum vitae (Lives of Emnent Commanders) was just one book of his De viris illustribus (Illustrious Lives). The life of Hamilcar first appeared in a second edition of the latter, published in 27 BC. The translation is by J. C. Rolfe in the Loeb Classical Library volume 467 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1929).
| [Hamilcar] contrived to be sent to Spain in command of an army, and with him he took his son Hannibal, then nine years old. He was accompanied also by a distinguished and handsome youth[2], Hasdrubal by name, whom some said that Hamilcar loved less honourably than was proper; for so great a man could not escape being slandered. Because of that charge the censor of morals[3] forbade Hasdrubal to be with Hamilcar; but the general gave him[4] his daughter in marriage, since according to the code of the Carthaginians a father-in-law could not be denied the society of his son-in-law. | [i] effecit ut imperator cum exercitu in Hispaniam mitteretur, eoque secum duxit filium Hannibalem annorum novem. [ii] Erat praeterea cum eo adulescens illustris, formosus, Hasdrubal, quem nonnulli diligi turpius quam par erat ab Hamilcare loquebantur; non enim maledici tanto viro deesse poterant. Quo factum est ut a praefecto morum Hasdrubal cum eo vetaretur esse. Huic ille filiam suam in matrimonium dedit, quod moribus eorum non poterat interdici socero genero. |
Titus Livius was the author of much the most substantial history of early Rome, the Ab Urbe Condita (From the Founding of the City), written between 33 and 9 BC and publishing in 27 BC. The translation here is by Revd. Canon Roberts in Livy, History of Rome, published by E. P. Dutton in New York in 1912. This is the only passage of Greek love interest in Livy’s Book 21.
Describing events following the drowning in battle in 229/8 BC of the Carthaginian general Hamilcar, surnamed Barca, who had been conquering Spain:
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The death of Hamilcar, occurring as it did most opportunely, and the tender years of Hannibal delayed the war. Hasdrubal, coming between father and son, held the supreme power for eight years. He is said to have become a favourite of Hamilcar's owing to his personal beauty as a boy; afterwards he displayed talents of a very different order, and became his son-in-law. […] Whilst little more than a boy, Hasdrubal had written to invite Hannibal to come to him in Spain, and the matter had actually been discussed in the senate.[5] The Barcines wanted Hannibal to become familiar with military service; Hanno, the leader of the opposite party, resisted this. “Hasdrubal’s request,” he said, “appears a reasonable one, and yet I do not think we ought to grant it.” This paradoxical utterance aroused the attention of the whole senate. He continued: “The youthful beauty which Hasdrubal surrendered to Hannibal’s father he considers he has a fair claim to ask for in return from the son. It ill becomes us, however, to habituate our youths to the lust of our commanders, by way of military training. […]” |
[2 iii] Mors Hamilcaris peropportuna et pueritia Hannibalis distulerunt bellum. Medius Hasdrubal inter patrem ac filium octo ferme annos imperium obtinuit, flore aetatis, uti ferunt, primo Hamilcari conciliatus, [iv] gener inde ob aliam indolem profecto animi adscitus […] [3 ii] Hunc vixdum puberem Hasdrubal litteris ad se accersierat, actaque res etiam in senatu fuerat, Barcinis nitentibus ut adsuesceret militiae Hannibal atque in paternas succederet opes, [iii] Hanno, alterius factionis princeps, “et aequum postulare videtur” inquit, “Hasdrubal, et ego tamen non censeo quod petit tribuendum.” [iv]Cum admiratione tam ancipitis sententiae in se omnes convertisset, “florem aetatis” inquit, “Hasdrubal, quem ipse patri Hannibalis fruendum praebuit, iusto iure eum a filio repeti censet; nos tamen minime decet iuventutem nostram pro militari rudimento adsuefacere libidini praetorum […]” |
[1] Gilbert and Colette Charles Picard, Daily Life in Carthage at the time of Hannibal, translated from the French by A. E. Foster (New York: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 243 and 253.
[2] The translator’s “young man” has been replaced by “youth” since the Latin word in question, adulescens, indicates a male older than a puer (boy) but younger than a iuvenis (young man).
[3] Presumably this implies that Carthage had some sort of law making such a relationship an offence against public morals, but it is impossible to know precisely what constituted the offence. The only other ancient people amongst whom it would have been an offence were the Romans (for whom it would only have been an offence (and even then only a mild one) if Hasdrubal a freeborn Roman citizen) and the Jews (for whom all sexual acts between males were illegal). The former is more likely to have applied to the Carthaginians since Diodoros records that they were not averse to raping captured enemy boys.
[4] The translator’s “young man” has been replaced by “him” as not quite accurate, since there is only a pronoun and not a noun in the Latin.
[5] Hannibal was eighteen when his father died. It is not clear where he was at this moment. He was not in Carthage itself, since he had left it aged nine to accompany his father to Spain and Livy later has him say twice that he never returned to it until recalled prior to his defeat at the battle of Zama in 202 BC.
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