The Truth About Vengeance

It doesn't turn out the way you hope it will

For today’s Thursday Substack, I’m hoping you’ll stay with me through a historical investigation of what vengeance and revenge as political motivations produce.

That would be: death, destruction, and the warping of future generations.

I am absolutely NOT drawing parallels between America and Rome here. Yes, that’s apparently the favorite pastime of an astounding number of American males, but an ancient land-based empire and our current political situation are so different as to make parallels between the two political systems entertainment, not history.

What IS history? Human nature, the entirely understandable urge to nurture a grudge, and the devastation that ensues.

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A little bit of background: By the third century BCE, the city of Carthage had long been a rival of Rome. The two kingdoms (Carthage ruled over the surrounding north African lands, as well as the island of Sardinia; Rome, over an increasing span of land in Italy) were governed by an ancient treaty between the two that bristled with suspicion. Carthaginians thought that Romans were power-hungry militants. Romans thought that Carthaginians were greedy unprincipled bandits who would steal their trading profits. No good words were spoken. Pejorative labels were flung about. Each side believed that the other was evil.

But also, neither could wipe the other out. And so, out of necessity, they compromised. The arrangements between the two kingdoms included multiple provisions that any negotiations or agreements would be carried out in the presence of a third party, thanks to the absolute distrust and disregard that each side bore the other.

The fragile détente collapsed when the island of Sicily appealed to both Rome and Carthage for help in driving off a band of mercenaries who had settled there. Since Rome and Carthage were technically at peace, this double request was not all that unreasonable. But it lit the match under a long-building bonfire. The Carthaginians got there first and drove out the invaders; the Romans, second on the scene, simply attacked the Carthaginian occupying forces instead.

This was the beginning of outright war between the two sides; we now call it the “First Punic War”, and the two equally matched armies slogged on in Sicily for over two decades. By the twenty-third year of fighting, both nations were drained.

Carthage was the first to blink.

The city sent the commander of the Carthaginian forces on Sicily, a young man named Hamilcar, a message: they did not want to abandon him, but it was now impossible to continue sending his troops food and weapons. They stood behind him in spirit, though, and he had the power to handle the situation however he pleased.

Which gave him no option but to surrender (“in grief and rage,” the Greek historian Polybius says). Gritting his teeth, Hamilcar gave up Sicily; Rome celebrated the conquest of its first possession outside of the Italian mainland; and Hamilcar took his exiled soldiers northwest, to the Spanish coast, and planted a rebellious Carthaginian colony there.

This wasn’t just a colony. It was revenge.

This Spanish colony, Hamilcar determined, would be a new center of Carthaginian might, a base from which to launch future strikes against Rome. Hamilcar’s humiliation at Sicily had turned into a loathing for all things Roman. When his young son Hannibal was nine, Hamilcar (so Polybius tells us)

took him by the hand, led him up to the [sacrificial] altar and commanded him to lay his hand upon the [animal] victim and swear that he would never become a friend to the Romans.

This oath of eternal hatred sworn, Hannibal grew up in the Spanish colony of New Carthage, never even setting foot in his home city of Old Carthage, but programmed nevertheless to defend it against Rome. Because defending a place where he’d never been, against an enemy he had not personally encountered, had been taught to him as righteousness.

At twenty-six, young Hannibal became leader of the New Carthage forces. Instantly, Hannibal turned his back on New Carthage (his theoretical homeland) and started to fight his way along the coast towards Roman borders. His identity as a New Carthaginian was far less central, to him, than his identify as an enemy of Rome.

As Hannibal moved east, Rome sent ambassadors to Old Carthage and presented the Carthaginian Senate with an ultimatum: Surrender Hannibal, or face a second Punic War. But surrender wasn’t in the cards. Both sides were already determined to go to war. “On the Roman side there was rage at the unprovoked attack by a previously beaten enemy,” the Roman historian Livy says, “[and] on the Carthaginian, bitter resentment at what was felt to be the grasping and tyrannical attitude of their conquerors.”

Rome sent two fleets of warships, one to Old Carthage in North Africa, and one to New Carthage on the Spanish coast. Meanwhile Hannibal marched a hundred thousand foot soldiers, perhaps twenty thousand cavalry, and thirty-seven elephants, over the Alps. And Hannibal’s army broke the stalemate. Even shrunken after the grueling passage over the mountains, the Carthaginian force met the Roman troops in north Italy, and scattered them.

No one back in the city of Rome itself had seriously believed that Hannibal’s army could defeat the great Roman army, and news of the defeat caused a panic. And that wasn’t the worst of it for Rome. Hannibal stormed south, devastating the countryside, killing thousands of Romans, seeminingly unstoppable. Almost every family in Rome lost a brother, or father, or son.

One of the Roman officers who died facing the Carthaginians was called Publius Scipio, and his death gave his son—known to later generations simply as Scipio—the personal hatred for Carthage which Hannibal had long felt for Rome. In a revenge campaign against the Carthaginians, Scipio captured New Carthage (this ended with the Romans capturing Hannibal’s brother, preserving his head, and then tossing it over into Hannibal’s camp). Rome slowly began to regain the upper hand. Scipio suggested that the Romans should go on the offensive and sail directly for old Carthage, a strategy which might well pull Hannibal away from the Italian countryside, where he was still rampaging around.

In 204, Scipio landed on the North African coast with a combined army of Romans and North African mercenaries. His invasion had exactly the hoped-for effect: the Carthaginians sent a frantic message for help to Hannibal. And Hannibal came home. He was acting from patriotism, but it was a vague and reluctant patriotism; he had not been in the country of his birth since the age of nine, and he left most of his men in Italy, perhaps hoping to return soon. His vengeance was incomplete. He had not yet fully carried out his father’s wishes. The demon Rome still stood.

When the two men met (again) in battle, Carthage was outmanned. Carthage surrendered itself to Scipio and was forced to give up its fleet and its army. Its ambitions were at an end. The Second Punic War had ended. Thousands had died, and Carthage was in ruins.

Even though Carthage had been flattened, the city was a useful source for gold and silver, wine and figs. As long as Carthage didn’t have any power, Rome was happy to make use of it. The Roman Senate allowed the city to rebuild, and happily bought its goods.

Resentments last long, though.

Skip forward some sixty years. A Roman delegation, led by the elderly statesman Marcus Cato, travelled down to North Africa to visit Carthage, and Cato was horrified at what he saw. This city, which for decades had held the place of a bogeyman in the Roman imagination (Hannibal’s rampage through the Italian countryside was remembered by the grandparents), was not “low and in an ill condition,” as the Romans had been happily assuming, but—in the Greek biographer Plutarch’s words—was “well manned, full of riches and all sorts of arms and ammunition.” Marcus Cato returned to Rome posthaste and warned the Senate that “they themselves would fall into danger, unless they should find means to check this rapid new growth of Rome’s ancient irreconcilable enemy.”

The Senators were not convinced that Roman troops needed to march on Carthage at once. Cato, nearly eighty, sounded as though he were simply rehearsing past fears. They ignored him, and shut down his speeches on the topic. So Cato resorted to annoying the senators by ending every single address to the Sentate that he made, no matter what the topic (agriculture, urban repairs, tax reforms), with, “And to conclude, I think that Carthage ought to be utterly destroyed.”

The constant drip, drip, drip, drip finally riled up the Roman public to the point that the Senate agreed to levy new demands on the city: that the Carthaginians desert their city and rebuild it at least ten miles away from the coast. The Carthaginians refused, indignantly. In 149, Roman ships sailed for the North African coast under Scipio’s grandson. The Third Punic War had begun.

Cato died of old age at the beginning of it, but his rhetoric survived him. Carthage was soon in flames. Scipio’s grandson, Scipio Aemilius, led Roman soldiers through the streets, setting buildings on fire. It took two weeks for Carthage to burn to the ground.

Polybius himself was there, standing beside Scipio Aemilius as Carthage collapsed: “At the sight of the city utterly perishing amidst the flames,” he writes, “Scipio burst into tears. . . . And on my asking him boldly (for I had been his tutor) what he meant . . . he immediately turned around and grasped me by the hand and said, ‘O Polybius, it is a grand thing, but I know not how, I feel a terror and dread, lest someone should one day give the same order about my own native city.’ ”

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That is always the end of the vengeance story.

Always.

It takes a rare politician to recognize this, and let’s not give Scipio Aemilius more than his due: he masterminded the burning of Carthage before he had second thoughts.

Too late, he recognized that revenge is a boomerang, the lighting of a fire that sweeps first over your enemy’s house, and then over your own.

There are better models than Carthage and Rome for us.

My friends, do not try to punish others when they wrong you, but wait for God to punish them with his anger. It is written: "I will punish those who do wrong; I will repay them,” says the Lord. But you should do this: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him a drink. Doing this will be like pouring burning coals on his head.” Do not let evil defeat you, but defeat evil by doing good. (Romans 12:19-21

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