Around Black Athena (1990), Seminar Two (Tim Cornell)

This is an extract from my notes made at the second seminar in the series ('Representations of Carthage'), held on the 25th January 1990 in the Institute of Archaeology at UCL. There is a full set of notes for the entire seminar series, except for the first, which I missed because I didn't catch sight of the poster in time (no web in those days). The volume (Around Black Athena: the Origins of Graeco-Roman Culture) is under pressure from other work in progress, but it will eventually arrive. TY.

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[Introductory preamble: Last week set up the central themes of this conference and on Martin Bernal’s book. Bernal has set the agenda. Now we explore different directions, and try to explain the pressures on our understanding, and on historiography].

Tim Cornell began by saying that he was not speaking as an expert on Carthage. After reading Bernal’s book he wondered if there was a hidden truth in it. Perhaps there was an unconscious and systematic attempt to overlook Carthaginian culture. It is definitely a neglected area. Within the format of the study of the ancient world, there are few general books on Carthage.

Cornell mentioned the names of a few authors (Warmington, Picard), who use a standard sort of treatment of their subject. Like books on the Etruscans, there is a standard menu – an outline of the format: date, colonizations and contacts, wars in Sicily with the Greeks. And then the Punic Wars, and the final destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE. This format indicates that Carthage is of interest insofar as the Carthaginians had dealings with the Graeco-Roman world. I.e., Carthaginian culture is somebody else’s problem. Carthage is an earlier foundation than the Greek colonies. Timaeus argued that Carthage and Rome were founded in the same year (i.e., the Dido story). Punic war seen as war against the Carthaginians.  Modern scholars identify with the Romans. A product of the sources being from outside, and hostile. Is there a hidden programme here? Archaeology, especially since the end of WW2, has done little to redress the balance. Especially concerning the Punic Wars. Stresses an impoverished culture. Often the evidence is interpreted in the light of literary sources.

The Carthage we have is a stereotype. Aristotle is an ancient exception – in his Politics he admired their constitution, but the account of this is lost. Polybius also regarded it well, though he was critical of it. We know that there were pro-Carthaginian accounts also written in antiquity. Now lost. Plautus wrote on the subject of Carthage, shortly after the Hannibalic War, but it presents the Carthaginians in a most unsympathetic way. In general they got a hostile press, and this is also true of modern works. Stereotypes in modern works include (1) racism and antisemitism, and (2) orientalism (as discussed by Said).

For (1) the ancient prejudices involve the stereotype of the Carthaginians as intelligent, but in a mean and self-serving way. Expressed in terms of cunning and trickery. They were notorious to the Romans for treachery. For ( 2), they were dependent on trade, and are shown as greedy and corrupt by Polybius, who contrasted the Romans and the Carthaginians, and attributes a leaning to bribery and corruption to the latter.

They were also depicted as capable of great courage in certain circumstances, but essentially unwarlike, which was seen as a weakness. They failed to press their advantage. (Diodorus). They were interested in commerce rather than war. Cicero said that this destroyed their will to fight. This was illustrated by their use of mercenaries. Note the contrast between Hannibal and the opposition and lack of support from the government at home. The Romans thought of him as a worthy enemy (this view is presented more by modern writers than in antiquity).

Some writers suggest that the Carthaginians were not actually Phoenician. This racism was not in the ancients for they treated subject peoples harshly (Spaniards). [Bk10.36]. Polybius says harsh on subject people in North Africa – they doubled city taxes, and took half the crop [Whitaker – Carthaginians land imperialism late 4^th century]. No tribute from Sicily until quite late. 

Carthage was not interested in imperialism abroad in the 6^th and 5^th centuries, but they were interested in alliances (Etruria, and Rome). Protection for trade. Warfare in Sicily was perhaps originated by the Phoenicians and was prosecuted together (hence mercenaries). They did not use coinage till late. Not specifically Carthaginian. Hence perhaps a failure to follow up this advantage. Only in the third century did they carve out provinces, coinage, tax and mercenaries – the harshness of the Carthaginians noted in Polybius is to this period and circumstances, and is not seen as a racial characteristic.

They were servile to those who were stronger (college porter obsequiousness and arrogance). Plutarch said they were ”a hard and gloomy people”, etc. Cruelty was a frequent charge -  punishments included crucifixion (the torture of Regulus, etc). Their cruelty was demonstrated by their regular holocausts of children and the killing of prisoners in a sacrificial manner. There is a brutal account in Diodorus of indiscriminate killing – severed heads on javelins, etc.

The vices are seized on by modern detractors, who add others which are modern. There is some basis in the sources, but the tone of the passages is misleading – antisemitism and vulgar orientalism. The sources show no disgust at the physical appearance of the Carthaginians among the ancients.  Other modern notions arise from modern passages with no source warrants. It is a feature of orientalism that orientals are specifically given to religious fanaticism – Hindus, Etruscans, etc. It is taken as a sign of the eastern character {See Warmington). However there is no evidence in the sources for an especial religiosity among the Carthaginians (quantification of religiosity is meaningless anyway). There is a christianizing evaluation of oriental religiosity in some of the sources. Observers (Philo of Byblos, Tertullian) had their own axe to grind. Cult practice is prominent in surviving sources, but there may be a bias in the survivals.

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The Raft of the Medusa

The past, as has been observed, is another country. Much of what we acquire as education and understanding takes us further away from the possibility of entering into that foreign land, with each generation that passes. As a consequence, piecing together the past can sometimes involve a good deal of supposition, and much of this is done without any real consciousness that suppositions are being introduced.

In an age where both ideas of realpolitik and the centrality of ideology and different varieties of determinism (philosophical and economic in particular) are knowingly supposed to be the constants in history, knowledge of which eluded our predecessors, it is easy to introduce suppositions into historical analysis without any sense of violating the proper context of the evidence.

These suppositions create difficulties which stand between us and use of evidence which does more than fit the pieces crudely into a pattern of meaning which does more than simply conform to something like our expectations, and what we are prepared to countenance as a credible model of the past.

More significant than individual difficulties however, is the complex interaction of one with the other, and the effects of successive layers of these interacting obstacles to our understanding.

Any age has a raft of of commonly understood truths, sometimes contradictory and multiple, and differing across social groups, societies and nations. They are not examined closely (if at all) because they have the special status of commonly understood truths. Not common in the sense that they are base or full of superstition, but common in that they are universally agreed from the top of society to the bottom. These vary from age to age.

In my own lifetime, I have seen many patterns of belief change – sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. Many of these ideas have changed so dramatically that the world in which I spent my first ten years now looks as strange and remote to me as (for example) the world of nineteenth century rationalism. Mostly (in both cases), the changes which occurred in the years following were unregrettable. What is regrettable however, is that one set of unquestionable certainties has been replaced by others.

In fact, we have gone much further than acquire new unquestionable certainties: we have gone so far as to create an approach to reality which is designed to support the enlightenment agenda without a theoretical basis, It is worth drawing attention to this approach, since it illustrates a certain naivete about our own times, and the worth of our own advance on our predecessors. We assume our enlightenment, though it is hard for us to prove it. 

The philosopher John Rawls, in his Theory of Justice, published in 1971, essentially uses a normative approach as the basis of determining what is or is not just. The idea is that, though we might not any longer agree on the kind of quasi-theological or philosophical theoretical basis for what is just, which one would have found in past cultural contexts, in many cases we can agree on what is just without such a basis.  This represents a break with former traditions in which justice was understood to emerge from philosophical principle, and be instantiated in particular cases. For Rawls it is about the calculation of self-interest. 

To some extent it can be understood as a reformulation of the idea of common law, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, where law can be decided by judges on the basis of their personal judgement,  and the circumstances, without any necessary reference to a body of specific precedent, or an established legal principle. However, Rawls’ book attempts to enshrine this normative approach to justice as the successor to all philosophical approaches to the establishment of the idea of justice. 

At a stroke, all the difficulties raised by the nature of former approaches to the problem of what is just fall away. Where the old approaches provided little or no support for things which we needed to root as fundamental in our culture, if it is to function rationally, we, by the adoption of normative criteria, could begin the advance to that position.

The downside to this is becoming all too clear. A generation of lawyers and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic is now steeped in this way of thinking. If what you want is reasonable (and of course it is, since we are all reasonable people), then the precedent of other legal systems, legal prescriptions, agreements and contracts, are, from beginning to end, no more than limitations imposed by past ways of thinking. Where there is a conflict with what is clearly ‘normative’ to the reasonable mind, existing arrangements are obstacles. Those who would stand on these arrangements in the face of the normative desire, are using the past as a way of impeding the future.

 The normative view is now the just view. We are now in a period where ‘pre-emptive’ self-defence is understood to be a legitimate policy for a powerful state. And important international agreements such as the Geneva Convention can be ignored provided some kind of normative legal excuse can be provided. What it is reasonable to think, appears to be in the course of a substantial revision. Our idea of reason is changing.

We are by and large, by reflex, so sure of the rightness of our ways of thinking, particularly in the modern Western world, that we have now elevated that reflex to a place above all other rational and legal responses to the world, in the whole of history. 

Such a thing has happened before.  It is reminiscent of the elevation of the Roman Republic above all other constitutional forms, as described to us in the pages of Polybius, so that the Republic was not any longer subject to the forces that (it was understood) other states were. The ancient world had several models for state constitutions available, and Aristotle (we are told) had arranged them into a cycle. Rome fitted into this construction, but at some point the Romans decided that they had transcended that cycle, and that both Rome and its constitution transcended all other forms of polity. Rome stood apart, and was just and eternal.

The pursuit of the normative also can be seen in the culmination of the rationalist and humanist agenda of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rationalists and humanists understood themselves to be struggling under the deadweight of accumulated belief and superstition, as well as the institutions and powers which drew their authority from the religious structures dominating the intellectual landscape. 

Drawing on the intellectual models of nature which developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the rationalist perception of the world constantly sought to describe reality in terms of the laws of physics and mechanics. Nature became something which could be the subject of operations, rather than an outward expression of the mystery and character of the divine. The latter approach was derided and  progressively ignored. 

Descartes first shut out this aspect of reality as unnecessary for the analysis of the world, without significant supportive argument in favour of this, beyond the simple assertion that the world of the divine need not be invoked in order to explain physical reality. This severing of the link had enormously beneficial results in terms of the development of the sciences in general – matters were simplified enormously if all that was being considered was what could be measured, counted and weighed; and there was no imponderable interference from the intrusion of the divine. 

Though it was not the case that the world of the divine had been shown to be of no account in the development of an understanding of nature, as the sciences progressed, the quality and power of the descriptive models of nature created supplied what appeared to be the proof that a knowledge of the world of the divine was unnecessary for an understanding of nature. Thereafter, the divine became, in the world of the sciences, something to be scorned, as a relic of the days when the human race lived in a state of irrational superstition. 

The exclusion of the divine was normative, in that it seemed to make rational sense, even if it could not be supported by rational argument. In fact, no argument could be brought against what is essentially a supposition - the idea that the divine has no impact on the world of physics. Before long, any argument for the impact of the divine was necessarily an irrational argument.