He turned sharply to his chest, drew out a scroll I had not seen before. Finding his place, he began to read, his voice trembling:
“If the soul really is immortal, what care should be taken of her, not only in respect of the portion of time which is called life, hut of eternity! There is no release from evil except the attainment of the highest virtue and wisdom …”
“‘The highest virtue and wisdom,’ Hannibal, do you hear, do you? Now listen, listen to Plato’s Phaedo!” And he read on:
“The way to the other world is not a straight and single path – if that were so, no guide would be needed; but there are many partings of the road, and windings … As for that soul which is impure or has done impure deeds … from that soul everyone flees and turns away; no-one will be her companion, no-one her guide, but alone she wanders in extremity of evil …”
“To whom does that apply, Hannibal? To Hanno, or to those who crucified him?”
I did not answer. Even now, I do not know.
The days that followed were tense. The whole of Carthage swelled with talk. My father had been instructed by the Council to reach terms of peace with Rome after twenty-four years of war. Despatches went back and forth. Through Astegal and Hamilax came the news.
We were to evacuate the whole of Sicily, swear not to attack Syracuse nor the allies of Syracuse, surrender all prisoners-of-war without ransom and pay an indemnity of 2,200 talents within twenty years. Then, we learned, the Roman commissioners had been instructed by the Senate that the indemnity should be paid within ten years. To Roman demands that all their deserters should be given up for execution and that our troops should give up their arms and pass under the yoke, my father replied that he would rather fight on. Those points the Romans conceded, winning instead an increase in the indemnity by a further 1,000 talents and the promise that we would evacuate not just Sicily, but Corsica and Sardinia as well.
Silenus was sad. “This is the end,” he said to me, “of nothing. Your father has made peace because Carthage is exhausted. The Romans have made peace because they too are exhausted. But Regulus was right. There is not room for two great powers. One must be destroyed.” But I thought not of such things. To me, a boy, the peace meant that my father was coming home – to stay.
We were at the harbour to meet him, I, my mother, my siblings Mago, Hasdrubal and Sophoniba, Silenus and, of course, Hamilax. None of the Elders came. There would be time enough for councils. The people had come, of course, warned of my father’s return by the trumpet heralds high on the temple of Eschmoun. They would have seen his galley round the great mole and enter the commercial harbour and we heard their shouts of welcome and of joy. But we awaited Hamilcar Barca within the inner military harbour, shut off from the outer by great nail-studded gates.
One of these opened. I heard a harsh command. My father’s quinquereme leapt into our sight and swept across the basin to its quay marked by two columns, the scorpion of our house on each, the horns of Ammon on their capitals. He vaulted over the thwart and was with us, taking first my mother then each of us in his arms. Only when he embraced Hamilax could I see him fully, tall and lean, a full hand taller than Hamilax, strong. It was his eyes, though, that held us all, clear, deep brown on purest white. He smiled. “Come, let us go home,” he said, and led the way to the wagon waiting by the quay.
I hoped to hear it all from him in time: the fires, the legions, Eryx, Sicily, the years of battle. I hoped for time. I knew that at first he would be deep in council and seeing to affairs. But the war was over. There would be time. That was not to be. The Truceless War began.
Leaving Sicily, my father’s orders were that our troops should return gradually to Carthage. They had not been paid for several years. Huge sums we did not have were due. I knew my father’s mind, for I was with him when he admitted Gisco and other Elders who had come to our house. “I have fought for nearly seven years in Sicily,” my father said, “and now you have peace. Give me mine. I must see to my own affairs. Pay the soldiers as you can. They are to trickle back, not flood.”
“Pay them, Hamilcar, with what?” cried Gisco.
“Why, the jewellery you wear itself would pay a squadron, Gisco,” my father joked, leaving the room. But he had every confidence in Gisco. “He may be no soldier,” my father said, “but as an administrator he has no equal.”
Several days later, my father left Carthage with Hamilax and four trusted slaves on a tour of his estates, his forests of oak at Zartana, his granaries at Chozeba and Tirzah, his summer house at Issachar and farms of sheep and goats at Marephath. He was to be gone for several months. We were all to wish he had not gone at all.
We became aware of the mercenaries’ returning almost imperceptibly in the months my father was away. Their camp was to the city’s rear upon the plain that stretched away and round the gulf to Tunis. I saw it grow as, each afternoon, I went for my ride with Abdolonim. The Ligurians had been first to return and pitch their ordered tents of skin upon the sand. Then came the Lacedaemonians, a race apart, who slept upon the ground within the ditch that they had dug. Soon the Balearics came, slingers from the Spanish isles, who formed no order like the rest but mingled, ate and slept wherever they could. Darytians from Gaetulia next put up their shelters of dry grass and waited in the wind.
A month passed and returning Iberians set their marquees of canvas with the rest; the Gauls made shelters out of planks, the Libyans out of stones. The Negroes and Numidians slept in trenches in the sand. The camp grew. There were 10,000 there, then 20,000 and Abdolonim would not let me near and a sense of menace grew around the camp as strong as was the reek and stench of this great host, the mercenaries of Carthage.
From the city to the camp plied traders, pedlars, women, boys. The women were of every nation on the earth, brown as dates, sallow as olives, yellow as melons, white as alabaster; women sold by sailors, seized by soldiers, stolen from desert caravans, captured at the sacking of cities, worn out by the penises and practices of many men when they were young and beaten when they were old, left to die among the donkeys and the dung. All moved and mingled in the camp, women of Cappadocia with gold plates in their hair, of Gaul with wolfskin on their breasts. Those of Cyrenaica, wreathed in violet gauze, vermilion-faced, sang songs of sadness where they sat on mats of rush. Amongst the clamour and the smell and smoke of many fires moved Lusitanians, with necklaces of sea-shell and pendulous naked breasts, gathering for fuel the droppings of the animals to be dried in a strengthening sun.
So much I could see for myself. But by the month of Eloul, in mid-summer, I began to hear from the servants and the slaves and from Silenus of merchants unpaid for their wares, of women for their services. Sellers of oil and water, tailors, moneylenders, bakers all complained of accounts ridiculed. For a sheep, the mercenaries offered the price of a pigeon; for three goats that of a pomegranate. The soldiers, it was said, had begun to drink wine, a thing forbidden on pain of execution in a Punic army. Prowlers were abroad at night and from the city there came complaints of thefts and rapes and pillagings. With the summer heat there rose a tension that afflicted all. Even Silenus found no consolation in his scrolls, in his philosophies.
Still my father was away. Still Gisco waited. I felt for the mercenaries, unpaid still, and knew that they must dream of many things that might have been and some that might yet be. One would buy a farm, one a ship, returning
