Midterm- Genocide

The issue that I have been researching for this class is genocide.  Genocide as defined by dictionary.com is “the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group.”  In simpler terms it means the wiping a way of life off of the face of the planet through the killing and destruction of its people and property.   

            The first secondary source that I read was War and Imperialism in Republican Rome by Harris.  In this work he describes the struggle between Rome and Carthage the main genocide that I have been studying in the ancient world.  In this he tell how this was one powerful state looking to decimate another state.  He tells how this Carthage did not really bring this war upon themselves but instead had it thrust onto them by Rome.  He goes into length how Rome would find any excuse they could muster to get this war started.  They blamed in on a skirmish they had with Roman allies in North Africa and the fact that they were experienced a very prosperous time in their history.  This infuriated the Romans because they though themselves to be far superior and they therefore attacked and eventually destroyed Carthage.

            The next source I read The Worlds Bloodies History: Massacre, Genocide, and the Scars Left on Civilization By Joseph Cumming it goes into even greater detail of this genocide.  He first gives another reason for the attack on Carthage.  He gives proof of the child sacrifices that the Carthaginians had been performing.  This was against the Roman way of life and therefore was another reason they wanted to destroy Carthage.   He also tells of how the Carthaginian people did all they could to try to avoid this war from coming upon them.  They gave up 300 of their most noble youth and sent them to Rome.  They also gave every weapon that they had to the Romans in hope that they would not attack.  However, this did not stop the Romans and when they did attack the Carthaginians had to scramble to make new weapons.

The third secondary source I read on this topic was Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization by Richard Miles.  In this literature he describes how before the Roman destruction, Carthage was experiencing one of the most prosperous times in their history.  One reason for this may have been the fact that they no longer had a standing army that they had to finance and keep, since part of the treaty at the end of the Second Punic War had made it so that they could not have an army.  During this time they had used their location on the Mediterranean Sea to continue their high levels of commerce.  So even though they had to pay taxes to Rome, another part of the treaty, they were still able to maintain a high level of success in their other facets of life.

One of the ancient authors that I looked at was Thucydides in his book History of the Peloponnesian War.  In the passage that I focused on was of a different genocide then that of Carthage.  It was of the Athenian genocide of the island nation of Melos.  Here is the passage that I was able to find on the internet.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/melian.htm

This is called the Melian Dialogue.  In this passage it is the Athenian envoy telling the leader of Melos that they need to either surrender to Athens and become part of its empire or it will be destroyed.  In the end the Melian leaders decide that it is better to die free then to live as part of the Athenian state.  After they decide this they are then destroyed by Athens and the remaining people sold into slavery.  This shows how this was another genocide committed in the ancient world.  It was interesting in this text about how the leaders of Melos were given a choice and they basically chose genocide, which the Athenians then brought down upon them.

The second ancient source I read was Appian and his description of the Carthaginian genocide.  Here is the online version of his writings.

http://www.livius.org/ap-ark/appian/appian_punic_00.html

  His description is one of the ones used by the previous author I wrote of about describing the conflict between Rome and Carthage.  His text really gets into the heart of the conflict.  It describes in detail the Roman advance into the Carthaginian city and their complete destruction of its people.  There is one passage that you can read here http://www.livius.org/ap-ark/appian/appian_punic_26.html#%A7130 that describes the brutality of the genocide that was taking place.  It tells how the Romans were just running through the street slaughtering every man, woman, and child in their path.  Then it describes how they level all the building, many of them with people still inside and how in the rubble there were limbs sticking out all over the place.  His description of the genocide is very in depth and thorough.

Carthage Before and After:

These two images are the before and after shots of Carthage.  The first one is an artist animation of what Carthage would have looked like right before it was destroyed by Rome.  The second one is a modern day picture of what is left of Carthage.  As one can see it is ruins.  This is a living picture of genocide and what it actually looks like.

            Genocide is an issue that was not left in antiquity.  There are still many examples of genocide in modern times.  One such example is that of the genocide in Rwanda.  In this conflict two rival groups both based in Rwanda were struggling for power.  The group with a majority in the country was the Hutu people and they set out to destroy to minority group, the Tutsi in 1994.  In the end they were pretty successful in their genocide.  The death toll estimate reached 800,000 people slaughtered. 

            Now this genocide is different than the two I discussed earlier, Carthage and Melos.  In genocides in antiquity were done by empires looking to expand and they saw these states as getting in their way, and therefore destroyed them.  In the case of Rwanda these were two groups in a third world country that despised each other.  This was not one people trying to take over the world and the other group was standing in the way. 

            For a moment let us compare ancient Rome to the modern United States.  Were the USA to try and take over another nation and genocide its people, they would be stopped almost immediately by other nation and by the UN.  However, in the time of the Romans this infrastructure was not yet set up and since Rome was the most powerful state in the world, there were no other nations to keep them in check.  This is the main difference between genocide in modern times and antiquity.  Not since the time of Hitler has a modern genocide been similar to that of the ancient Romans or Athenians.