and grumblings. Carthage replied with barred gates and doubled watch and silence.
At last Gisco acted. I was at Khamon’s Gate to see him depart in his purple litter, bunches of ostrich feathers at each corner, crystal chains and ropes of pearl swinging to the movement that it made.
Behind him went twenty dromedaries, their bags heavy with gold, the bronze bells around their necks clanging as they lurched along. Around them rode the horsemen of the Sacred Legion, armoured in golden scales, astride their snorting stallions from Hecatompylus, the plumes of their bronze Boeotian helmets soaring to the sky. Then came the clerks on donkeys, with the tablet and the abacus for reckoning what was owed. With them went Silenus, unadorned as was his way, in simple cotton shift. Last in litters came the Twelve Interpreters, skilled in desert tongues, each with parrots tattooed on both arms, their headdresses of peacock plumes swaying softly in the breeze.
That struck me at the time, that Gisco knew at least he must communicate with many men who had no common tongue. Some dekadarchoi, some captains, Silenus had told me, would know Punic, but he was to speak the words of Gisco to the Dorians and Spartans, the Boeotians and the other Greeks. The Twelve would deal with the Libyans and Numidians. As for the rest, the Gauls and the men of the west beyond the Pillars of Herakles, Silenus did not know.
It had, I knew, always been a policy of Carthage to keep its army polyglot. So would insurrection be more difficult. But if this worked in war, it did otherwise in peace. The Truceless War began, as Silenus said, not from principles nor passion, but because people could not communicate. I have made it my business from that time up to this to learn the tongues of those around me.
Arriving at the mercenary camp, Gisco and his entourage were soon surrounded by men clamouring for the pay that was their due. Two heralds sounded silver horns, the noise died down and Gisco spoke, standing on a table of the clerks. First he told, Silenus said, of the Republic’s gratitude to its soldiers for the service they had lent to Carthage. “We want our money, not your gratitude!” cried back someone who spoke Punic. Gisco ploughed on. Times, he said, were hard. Carthage was now poor – “But you are not!” came voices from the back – “and if a master has only three melons, is it not right that he should keep two for himself?” The indemnity to Rome was crippling. The treasury was empty, the purple fisheries exhausted, the farmland abandoned in the war producing nothing. Carthage would have to sell its silphium reserve and further tax the trading towns. “Why, only yesterday,” said Gisco, “I had myself to pay for a bath-slave what a year ago would have bought me an elephant, no” – he must have thought they would appreciate his wit – “a virgin from Bithynia.”
So Gisco went on. “Excuses are like arseholes,” came a voice in Greek from the back of the crowd. “Everybody’s got one!” Those that understood – not Gisco – laughed.
By now the crowd was thousands strong and pushing hard against the circle around Gisco formed by the the Sacred Legion. “You will be paid, all of you, in full – but in time.” Gisco paused to let first Silenus, then the Twelve translate this to the crowd. The menace grew as the words “in time” sank in and were passed in many tongues around.
“I have with me,” Gisco then cried out, “a xthet of pure gold for each of you as earnest of our faith. As for you Balearics, whose pay is always women, a caravan of virgins, fattened up and rubbed with benjamin, is even now on its way from Abdera. We have commissioned galleys which will take you to your homes. You will be paid in full before you leave.”
“For our horses too?”
“Yes,” said Gisco mournfully, “for your horses too. Now form up lines before these clerks who will pay you each the gold and take a record of what more each of you is due.”
This too was translated round the camp. Numidians from the mountains, wrapped in the skin of bears, who had been leaning forward, ominous on their clubs, and Dorians, flaxen-haired, who had begun to finger their swordbelts made of iron, now relaxed. It might, Silenus thought, have worked, for these were people who had trusted Carthage, some for generations.
But just as the mercenaries were beginning to form obedient lines, a giant Campanian stepped forward and sounded a great horn. He was beyond the horses and before the mercenaries and what he said was said so fast the harm was done before any could gainsay. He announced rapidly in six different languages, in Latin, Gaulish, Balearic, Libyan, Iberian and Greek, that he had something important to say. Since it was Greeks who were most numerous around him, he went on in Greek.
“Now hear what this man has truly said,” the Campanian shouted. “He called you cowards, vermin, sons of dogs and bitches. Had you not lost for Carthage the war with Rome, she would not have to pay her indemnity to Rome so why, then, should you be paid?” Silenus tried to move to Gisco to translate this for him, but was held fast in the press. “One stater is all you will get. These clerks are here to record not what you will be paid but how you are to be punished, in the Cantabrian mines or as galley slaves. These were the true words of Gisco. Let us not take a stater. Let us take Carthage itself!”
So simply was it done. The horsemen of the Sacred Legion were pulled from their mounts, Gisco’s circle drowned. Hands tore off his necklace of blue stones, his gold clasps, his heavy earrings. The dignity of Carthage was trampled in the dust.
They were all held then in a human corral, the Sufet and Silenus, the Twelve, the clerks, the high-born of the Legion. The bags of gold were brought. The Campanian – his name was Spendius – seemed in command. “What shall we do with them?” came cries. “Kill them!” said one, and “Cut off their balls!” another. “No, let’s eat them …” Spendius held up a great axe, double-edged. Silence fell. “What we shall do” – he paused – “is keep them,” he said, “as hostages, though we may have some sport with him” – and he prodded Gisco in the stomach with his axe – “first.”
Silenus was a gentle man. The pain it caused him first to witness what was then done and next to recount it to the Council was a pain from which he was never to recover. Years later in Spain I found his copy of Homer’s Iliad with this passage marked and marked again. Priam, King of Troy, is mourning for dead Hector, his greatest son, champion of Troy which now must fall, for Hector has been killed by Achilles:
γεραιὸς
ἐντυπὰς ἐν χλαίνη κεκαλυμμένος˙ ἀμϕὶ δὲ πολλὴ
κόπρος ἔην κεϕαλῇ τε καὶ αὐχένι τοῖο γέροντος,
τήν ῥα κυλινδόμενος καταμήσατο χερσὶν ἑησι.
The old man sat veiled, beaten into his cloak. Excrement lay thick on his head and neck, he was an old man, for he had been rolling in it, he had gathered it and smeared it on with his hands.
Such, I suppose, Silenus thought his sorrow and his suffering to be. Yet his was a less brutal suffering than many begun that day. First the mercenaries put Gisco in a frame of rough-hewn planks. To the board behind his neck they nailed his hands and to the one between his legs they nailed his knees. A man they called Zaracas did these things, moaning with the pleasure that this brought him. It was Spendius, though, who put out the Sufet’s eyes, pushing with his great strength on the Sufet’s sockets with his thumbs until both eyeballs popped. Then he bit through with his teeth the cords of both the Sufet’s eyes. His
