Maybe the USA is more like Carthage than Rome.
From the onset of our country, many have worked to connect our history with that of the Roman Republic. The great Roman hero Cincinatus was celebrated by Washington as he and others formed a society in 1783 in order to (as their current website says it) “promote knowledge and appreciation of the achievement of American independence.”
Richard Brooks wrote that Washington had “often been compared to Cincinnatus, the half-legendary hero of the Roman Republic, who returned to his farm after saving his country in wartime. The popularity of the comparison arose from a vogue among Americans of the eighteenth century for playing a noble Romans.”
And yet in 2015, as many wonder about the decline, if not foreordained destruction, of the USA, I must contemplate that we are more like the Roman Republic’s great enemy, Carthage. I am reading G. K. Chesterton’s excellent book The Everlasting Man. In it, he presents a view of the old Punic War that I had never considered.
To Chesterton, Carthage actually had the Punic War won, but then fell prey to political squabbling, to a sense of superiority that led them to not move resolutely in completing the final conquest of Rome. Carthage had been founded some 300 years before the small city of Rome really became anything of significance. By the early 300s BC, Carthage was the only thing left of the formerly great Phoenician trading empire. After Alexander the Great destroyed Tyre (the last great original Phoenician city), those refugees fled to Carthage. By the 200s, Carthage was the most powerful “nation” in the Mediterranean Sea.
The typical history of the Punic war is well-known. Carthage expanded to Sicily and Rome, having only recently taken over the whole of the peninsula, responded. Over a nearly 20 year period, Rome would build a navy to rival that of Carthage and ultimately prevail in gaining possession of Sicily. In the next 20+ years, Rome would act the aggressor, taking more islands of Carthage which would provoke one of Carthage’s native sons to act. When Hannibal crossed the alps into the peninsula, he fought valiantly, winning almost every battle and yet could never quite conquer Rome itself. Meanwhile, the strong Roman general Scipio would take the war to Hannibal’s own homelands in Spain, the furtherest reaches of Carthage, and then to the north African soil itself. While there later would be a final third part of the Punic Wars, it was really over before the famed Battle of Zama. So, in the typical story, once Rome roused herself in defense of Sicily, Carthage really never stood a chance.
Chesterton turns that around in a way that is instructive for modern Americans. He writes that after the first Punic War ended, due to the actions of Hannibal, “the interest of the story really consists in the act that Rome was crushed. If there had not been certain moral elements as well as material elements, the story would have ended where Carthage certainly thought it had ended.”
His point is that the coming of Hannibal was no less impressive than the coming of Napoleon. He writes “it was ordained that one of the great houses of Carthage should produce a man who came out of those gilded palaces with all the energy and originality of Napoleon coming from nowhere. At the worst crisis of the war, Rome learned that Italy itself, by a military miracle, was invaded from the north. Hannibal, the Grace of Baal as his name ran in his own tongue, had dragged a ponderous chain of armaments over the starry solitudes of the Alps.”
And yet, even as Hannibal had massive victory after massive victory, Rome did not succumb. Again, the typical way to say it is in praising Rome. While Chesterton does praise Rome, he does so only in pointing out the failure of Carthage.
“In the whole world, one thing still threatened Carthage, and that was Carthage. There still remained the inner working of an element strong in all successful commercial states…the shrewdness of the men who manage big enterprises…was still business government…still the broad and sane outlook of practical men of affairs, and in these things could the Romans hope….The plain business men of Carthage, thinking as such men do in terms of living and dying races, saw clearly that Rome was not only dying but dead.”
“The war was over; it was obviously hopeless for the Italian city to resist any longer, and inconceivable that anybody should resist when it was hopeless. Under these circumstances, another set of broad, sound business principles remained to be considered. Wars were waged with money, and consequently cost money…the time had come for peace; and still more for economy. The messages sent by Hannibal from time to time asking for reinforcements were a ridiculous anachronism; there were much more important things to attend to now.”
In other words, once the initial victory was achieved, the bureaucrats being more concerned with wealth than with success, decided to quit funding the war fully. They had reached wide, perhaps too far, but now that victory was within their grasp, they pulled out.
As I read this, I thought of our wars in the Middle East. Not only were they perhaps folly to start with, we certainly acted like the money-minded leaders of Carthage allowing the military advantage to dissipate. When later President Obama’s desire to flee the region in total became reality, the strength of resolve of those still in the region rose. Moreover, they rose on the back of a religious zeal, coming to defend their way of life and faith. That our government has largely turned its back on any ideas of religion, thus thinking these Muslim zealots were largely silly, didn’t diminish or change the passion of these people.
Now, much like Carthage, instead of a great victory over an opponent, we find ourselves finding soldiers and supporters of the enemy here on our very soil. I fear that like Carthage, we will only later discover that it’s all far too late. Carthage didn’t lose the Punic wars because their soldiers weren’t good enough fighters. They lost because they were facing a people with a zeal for a certain way of life, and even when the war was surely over, it wasn’t over to the Romans….and it clearly hasn’t been over to the people of the Middle East who want to preserve their way of life, having little interest in the thoughts and philosophies of Locke or Rousseau.
Sadly, my prayer is that we awake before too long. If not, perhaps future historians will talk about the USA like I do regarding Carthage…a powerful civilization that lasted for almost 600 years, and in its last 200 was the dominant power in its part of the world….simply a lost society, swept away, with the victor sowing salt in the ground so that the place never rise again.