The Rise of Carthage & Rome

A History of Mankind (100)

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Saved from the Persian threat by Phoenician’s objections to Cambyses aggressiveness and the Greeks’ wars against the empire, Carthage developed a complex political system that set it apart from its neighbors, all of them ruled by tribal monarchies. This system was remarkably similar to that of an alien Italian city that would eventually erase Carthage from the map.

In keeping with the Phoenician tradition, Carthage first had relatively weak kings which effectively acted as Tyre governors/vassals, but evolved into a republican system during the Sixth Century BC, under the leadership of a senate which, itself, was senior to a Council of Elders that probably served as a sort of review chamber. By the Fourth Century BC and probably earlier, according to Aristotle[1], there also was some sort of popular assembly of free men, possibly similar to Greek poleis assemblies, described with some exaggeration by Aristotle – no lover of democracy – as democratic to a degree “that does not exist under other constitutions.”

The commonalities with Rome, later to be Carthage's foe and slayer, are striking. Roman tradition held that Romulus and Remus were twins born of the rape of their mother Rhea Silvia by the god Mars[2], suckled by a she-wolf; they established the city in 753 BC, although fortified settlements devoted to banditry and small-time farming existed in the central hills of the later city from at least the Fourteenth Century BC[3].

In any case, much like Carthage was ruled by Tyre representatives before it replaced such “kings” with a republic that eventually came to have two top magistrates at the top, Rome was ruled by “kings” often under obligations to external Etruscan powers until, late in the very same Sixth Century[4], an independent Roman republic replaced the monarchy: and it developed a system with two leading magistrates, that was controlled by a senate.