Broadsheet

Lisa Graves is a legal activist and the author of a remarkable and terrifying book, Without Precedent, that documents the assault on democracy via the story of John Roberts. I spoke with her about how America has come to its current state, and what the future may hold:

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TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Lisa Graves

(recorded 4/9/26)

Paul Krugman: I’m speaking today with Lisa Graves, author of an incredibly revelatory and deeply disturbing book called Without Precedent, about the Roberts Court and what it has done to America. And...hi, Lisa. Welcome on.

Lisa Graves: Paul, thank you so much for having me on. It’s an honor to be here with you. And thank you for your kind words about my book.

Krugman: I guess I was first sort of seriously alerted to what was happening at the Supreme Court in 2000, with the stolen election and all that. But I have to say, I don’t think I fully appreciated what Citizens United would do. And so why don’t you give us a little background on what has happened, the court and its role and what’s been happening to America?

Graves: Well, I really appreciate your starting with Bush v. Gore, because that in some ways is the beginning of this period. It’s a precursor in a way to what we’ve been experiencing. And that was when the US Supreme Court, in a sharply partisan decision — although not all the Republicans voted to stop the recount — five Republicans voted to stop the recount in 2000, in Florida. And the effect of that was to give George W. Bush the presidency and with it, not just the power to, in essence, make war with the consent of Congress, but also the power to remake the courts, the Supreme Court in particular.

And by the way, as part of my research for the book, I looked into what was happening at that time, and it turned out that Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni Thomas was working for the Heritage Foundation on the predecessor to Project 2025 — basically Project 2000. And she was screening people for positions in the potential George W. Bush administration. And Clarence Thomas didn’t recuse himself from that case. By the way, that five-four decision — it would have been four-four. The count would have been allowed to proceed. And the count that actually occurred with news organizations after the fact, after Bush was sworn in, showed that Gore would have won Florida and would have become the president of the United States.

By the way, after Thomas voted to effectively make George W. Bush the president, Ginni Thomas was given a promotion as the liaison from the Heritage Foundation to the White House, and she became the highest paid non-board member of the Heritage Foundation. And so she was rewarded very well for her work and, basically, for the consequence of her husband’s decision to vote to stop that recount.

So that was really a moment where I think a lot of people didn’t understand what was happening. And because that decision happened so quickly, there were no motions for Thomas to recuse himself. It just was a very rapid, very political, partisan decision by the court. And it is really a precursor to what’s happened next, which is that George W. Bush was reelected as an incumbent, or elected anew in 2004. And there were two vacancies that came up immediately. It was for O’Connor’s seat and Rehnquist’s seat. And John Roberts got the role of chief justice, and Sam Alito got the role of associate justice.

And then to fast forward to your question about Citizens United, again, this is a 5-to-4 decision issued by the Roberts Court, where Clarence Thomas sat on that case — the fifth vote, in essence, on that case — even though a billionaire named Harlan Crowe had staked his wife Ginni Thomas with $500,000 to launch a group to take advantage of the decision to come in Citizens United, to allow these so-called C4 groups under the IRS code to spend unlimited money to influence elections. And Clarence Thomas did not recuse himself from that case, and even had the audacity to write a concurring opinion saying that disclosure of money being spent by these groups — who the sources are — would chill speech, meaning money, like the money to his wife, which he did not disclose.

And so that decision unleashed a tsunami of cash into our elections, where candidates are routinely outspent by the outside groups. And this has given a disproportionate, and extraordinarily disproportionate, power to billionaires in our society, in America, to secretly influence elections in order to get people into positions of power to advance their interests, like the huge tax breaks that Donald Trump signed into law at the behest of Charles Koch and his groups in the first term of President Trump. And again, similarly, in this second term of Donald Trump, the extension of those deeply unfair and destructive tax cuts for the richest few.

Krugman: You kind of described what Citizens United is, but let’s talk more about that. Citizens United is the birth of super PACs, right?

Graves: Yes.

Krugman: And it’s basically saying that outside players — but it ends up being largely billionaires — can put lots of money with some basically tissue-thin restrictions on what they can do, but can basically put in unlimited amounts of money to influence political campaigns.

Graves: That’s right. And so Citizens United was a decision that basically asserted that under the First Amendment, money is speech, and that outside groups that were not coordinating with the candidate — so-called independent expenditures — they could spend unlimited money, and they were not subject to the rules that the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, BiCRA, otherwise known as McCain-Feingold, sought to put in place to deal with this sort of what they were calling soft money — money that was outside the campaigns that was not required to be disclosed.

So Citizens United and its progeny — a case called Speech Now vs. FEC — that’s what spawned these super PACs, where you have enormous money going into PACs, political action committees. That money can be million-dollar, even $10 million checks. For the super PACs that are operating in a particular way, they have to disclose their donors. But for the C-4 groups, which are these other nonprofits, they don’t have to disclose their donors.

And so what it’s created is a situation in which, on the one hand, a billionaire can now give millions to a super PAC in a way that they could not give directly to the candidate. They couldn’t just write a check to the presidential candidate or congressional candidate. They can do it now in an unlimited amount through the super PACs. And then separately, they can give tens of millions of dollars — unlimited money — secretly to a C-4 group that runs so-called issue ads. Those are the ads that say vote for or against this person, or call them because you oppose their policy. But it’s really obviously about influencing the election, and that’s the dark money that’s being spent in our elections.

Krugman: The Times found that 300 billionaires represented 19% of all campaign financing in the 2024 cycle. But I’m not sure how they know. Are the C-4s even in there? It may be more than that, right?

Graves: It’s certainly more than that. And only under certain circumstances can you actually see some of the funding of a C-4, based on how it’s related — who’s funding it, if who’s funding it is known. So for example, if a foundation gives to a C-4, if it has the capacity through a trust or a foundation to give to a C-4, that sort of giving is required to be disclosed. But if an individual, a billionaire like Charles Koch, writes a check to the C-4, that is not disclosed. It’s only if it comes through a nonprofit entity that you can see just a glimpse of the sources of that funding.

So whenever I talk to reporters who are doing those calculations about how much money is being spent by billionaires, I always tell them that their counts are going to be extraordinarily under the actual reality, because we know that these outside groups, these C-4 groups, are spending hundreds of millions of dollars cumulatively in the election cycle, and the only people who know who’s giving to them are the groups themselves. And probably some of the candidates know who’s giving to those C-4s.

Krugman: Wow. So if we look at someone like Peter Thiel, who basically bought a Senate seat for JD Vance. I don’t actually know the number, but the numbers we see may actually be only the tip of the iceberg.

Graves: That’s correct. There are a couple of rules in states and also at the federal level for certain types of independent expenditures, or if you have what’s known as a 527 group under the IRS code, that is allowed to spend directly in elections. But even then, what you see is a shell game. So for example, the Republican State Leadership Committee, RSLC, has created a subgroup to target state Supreme Court races. And it’s the sole funder of the subgroup. So when the subgroup discloses who funds it, it’s disclosing its parent organization. So it doesn’t disclose how much of that money is from Leonard Leo, or how much of that money is from Charles Koch or Koch Industries or the oil companies that goes into the bigger pool of funds.

And so there are all these ways in which I believe that most of the money that’s being spent in our elections in America is not disclosed. It’s not disclosed under the campaign finance reports of the candidates, of the party, or the super PACs, because it’s the C-4 money that is most potent, because it’s the vehicle that allows them to hide the true funders — the biggest funders of these operations.

Krugman: If we look at issues like energy and climate policy, there’s obviously huge amounts of fossil fuel money flowing into elections, but there’s also huge amounts of money going into supporting pseudo research at think tanks, which is a kind of whole universe. And if they’re already supplying a very large part of campaign finance, then add in all of this stuff, and we really live in a political environment that’s very much determined by big money.

Graves: That’s really true, and while the C-4 spending sometimes is not described as political, it’s obviously political. It’s obviously spent around the elections to influence the outcome of the elections. And it’s often spent on ads, which is why there was a bill that was introduced by members of Congress that was called S1 in the previous Congress, which was designed to basically say, if you’re going to spend money around the elections, it really needs to be disclosed.

But as you point out, in some ways that enormous money that’s coming in around our elections is, in a way, the tip of the iceberg, because there’s this whole other structure where fossil fuel companies and fossil fuel CEOs like Charles Koch and others, are spending enormous sums year after year on these so-called think tanks — or as some people call them, “stink tanks.”

Krugman: Heh.

Graves: But really, these are entities that have been stood up over the past few decades to generate research findings that are informed basically by the funders who are funding that research, in order to assail efforts to mitigate climate change, for example.

And when you look at the nonprofit infrastructure in the United States, the United States has a thing that is known internally, in essence, by the experts as “the independent sector.” We have the private sector, the public sector meaning government, and the independent sector—and that’s the nonprofit sector. And it is an enormous part of the US economy. That’s like churches and hospitals and colleges. But a significant portion of that nonprofit spending is going into policy operations, operations that describe themselves as informing the public, as public education — not public schools, but educating the public.

And the fossil fuel industry has played a big role in funding a number of these groups that are at the forefront of basically “studies” — and I’ll use that term loosely — but studies that then are cited by some members of Congress as a basis for objecting to the reality of climate change, or objecting to government efforts to intervene and try to mitigate climate change. And so it’s a massive distortion machine. We sort of swim in a political environment, a political and social environment, which has been greatly influenced, swayed by the amount of so-called research that these groups are putting out in order to advance the industry’s interests.

And this is part of what’s known as a third-party strategy that the tobacco industry really helped pioneer in America, where they were trying to fend off efforts to regulate tobacco and its cancer-causing effects. And so they didn’t want to run ads, for example, saying “tobacco companies say tobacco is just fine” — although they did say smoking was good for you — but they put forward doctors and, you know, so-called studies saying it was safe, even though the actual independent science was showing that there were carcinogenic effects in some instances of smoking.

And so that third-party tactic is what the fossil fuel industry and its CEOs are using. They don’t think that people would believe them if they ran an ad saying, “Hey, I’m Charles Koch. Trust me, all this fossil fuel money that’s making me the 23rd richest person in the world — it’s great for everyone. The planet isn’t on fire, and we can solve everything.” You know, instead, what happens is they fund these groups that do bus tours and they lobby Congress, or they do all these influence campaigns. And the objective is to protect the industry basically at all costs.

And there was a book that was written a couple of years ago about how in Koch world, both the for-profit part of Koch Industries—which is now known as Koch—and in their nonprofit empire, carbon was job one.

Krugman: Right. And there’ve been some studies— I think by Oreskes and others—that demonstrated how among the alleged scientific papers that disputed the consensus about climate change, the percentage funded by the fossil fuel industry was basically 100. That this is an entirely manufactured thing by special interests. So you place a big emphasis on fossil fuels. Tobacco is kind of where the strategy begins. But fossil fuels are, in your view, at the root of this perversion of the U.S. system.

Graves: Well, I think it’s a key component of it. Other than, I suppose, the war industry.

Krugman: Right.

Graves: Which is related. The fossil fuel industry is the most lucrative field of business in the world. And they’ve made so much money, you know, selling fossil fuels. And there’s a real intolerance for any limit. And in fact, when you look at a lot of the groups that have been funded in the US that are part of attacks on the EPA, attacks on the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon, when you trace those back, you can see money from the coal industry and coal barons. You see money from the natural gas—otherwise known as the methane gas—producers, the frackers and the compressing companies for those fracking for the gas and oil industries.

And you can see within that what’s happened: a number of these big CEOs — for example, the largest seller of compressed gas compressors in the United States for these big fracking operations — they’re paid an enormous amount for running these companies. And then they create a nonprofit that then fuels groups like the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, and these other entities that are at the forefront of trying to stop congressional efforts to regulate carbon or to mitigate climate change.

Krugman: So, I mean, we’ve seen a lot of certainly favorable tax treatment for fossil fuels forever. But still, you know, I’ve been around for a while. I remember the 70s when, in response to the oil crises, we did get price controls and windfall profits taxes. They may not have been great policy, but it’s kind of unthinkable that we would do that now. What changed, do you think? Why did the U.S. system become so much more porous to this kind of influence?

Graves: Well, I so appreciate your raising that, Paul, because the timing of that coincides with a memo that was written by a person who became a justice on the Supreme Court. It’s called the Powell memo. It was written by Lewis Powell to the Chamber of Commerce. And that was just months before Powell was nominated by Nixon to the Supreme Court. And in that memo, the Powell memo, he wrote that American businesses needed to play a greater role in American society. And I think this is a laughable assertion. He asserted in 1971 that no one had less influence on public policy in America than the American businessman. That wasn’t true then. It’s certainly not true now.

And that memo helped spawn a new generation of investment in trying to capture these levers of power. And so demi-billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife and others rose to that call to create this apparatus to oppose government regulation. For example, Scaife helped fund some of these early think tanks in the 1970s. But another key figure in that time was Charles Koch, when he had just inherited his father’s company in the late 1960s. He was very involved in these early right-wing movements. He personally, actively objected to those price controls. He started seeding groups in the Libertarian Party, an adjacent movement, before he ultimately tried to co-opt the Republican Party and move this into the mainstream of that Republican Party agenda, you know, with the help of Reagan, who had deeply antagonistic views toward regulation.

When you look at that period, that’s when Charles Koch, as a young man, claimed that America under Nixon was basically socialist because we dared to have any price controls. And then, in response to the efforts of Congress and the White House to address the oil crisis and the challenges that America was facing in terms of the energy crisis and the like, Charles Koch actually opposed the creation of a Department of Energy for the United States of America. He objected to that. And so those are very early parts of this movement that most people don’t know happened. You know, it’s obviously before Google. It was a bit below the radar. But that helped seed decades now — the 80s, 90s, the 2000s into the present moment — where those initial investments really took hold.

And I guess the key in some ways to their success is that I always describe Charles Koch as being the deepest, longest, most enduring funder of this effort to attack the regulation of carbon and the like. And he’s been at it now for, you know, going on 50, coming up on 60 years, really.

Krugman: Right, so this is going back to the Powell memo in, like, 1970–71. So this is 55 years now. I guess what you’re saying is that the billionaires got smarter and learned to play the long game.

Graves: Yes.

Krugman: It’s the power of long-term thinking, except not on behalf of the human race.

Graves: Yeah. It’s astonishing, because you can see there’s all these different assessments of progressive funding versus so-called conservative funding, and there has not been the type of investment in this infrastructure to push these fringe ideas into the mainstream on the left. It is just not how the funding works on the left. The right has billionaires and families of billionaires and children of children — proto-billionaires, you know, multi-multimillionaires back in the day — whose families have been at this for decades now. You can see it through the foundation work they’ve done, and how the different foundations have spawned other foundations.

And so on the right you see a very deep investment in moving these fringe ideas into reality, into legally binding rules for us, including to the Supreme Court. And on the left — for example, on the Supreme Court, or in the middle to the left there — there was this effort to not capture the Supreme Court, to try to put people on the court who had a reputation for fairness, and not because they were going to be someone who was driving the law to the left. But the right has been really disciplined in this court-capture plan, along with its plan to capture these other levers of power.

Krugman: Yeah. I think to some extent unions used to be the kind of long-term strategic players such as they were on the at least moderate left. But we all know what happened to unions. Although that’s another story.

Graves: But can I add in there? Because part of what we saw was how Reagan came in with this hostility to unions, even though he’d led the Screen Actors Guild. He came in with this real effort to try to break the unions. And then that was met, ultimately, in the longer run, with big funding from these big foundations, including the Bradley Foundation, which had one of the biggest reserves in the country, and it was targeting unions to break unions, but also to break their political power, their political influence.

But when I traced this back, this so-called “right to work” movement — which is not about the right to work, but the right to break unions in these states — what you can see in the historical record is one of the early funders of that effort was Fred Koch. Charles Koch’s father, in the 1950s, was one of the big backers of this long-term campaign to limit the power of unions, the power of people to organize in unions, and also to basically try to break their political power.

Krugman: Wow. So that means these are sort of dynastic efforts. I haven’t really thought about that. But, you know, we talk about the institutions, but it’s actually also these sort of personalized dynasties, which is just amazing.

Graves: Yes, so Dick Scaife and the Mellon fortune. It’s the Mellon Banking Corporation. Andrew Mellon was Treasury Secretary under Coolidge and Hoover, and ended up basically losing his cabinet seat due to a financial scandal. So that Mellon banking fortune became basically Richard Scaife’s fortune. That’s the origin of it.

Krugman: Because back in the day, you know, pre-Citizens United, when you looked at right-wing think tanks and all of that, it turns out there was sort of Bradley or Mellon-Scaife money behind almost all of them. But now I think it’s a bigger pool.

Graves: It is a bigger pool. We have more billionaires now, or more people in that class — that 0.000001.

Krugman: Yeah, I think it’s four zeroes and a one. But I always forget.

Graves: Yeah. And it’s interesting, because I used to occasionally talk to reporters about David Koch when he was alive, and they’d say, “Oh, but he’s given so much money to the theater or to cancer research,” but they’ve given less money, in some ways at the time, to political operations, although that’s now increased. And I would say it costs a lot more money to build a building than it does to actually buy policy, unfortunately, in America.

And so what’s happened is we have this political class of super-elite, super-rich people who have extraordinary sums at their disposal. So, for example, one of the richest men in America and in the world is a guy named Jeffrey Yass. He got rich on TikTok and also on these super-fast trades on Wall Street. He’s the richest guy in Pennsylvania. When he drops $1 million, $10 million in a race — let’s just put that ballpark out — it’s a huge sum, but from the standpoint of a dollar per dollar, the ratio is the equivalent of an ordinary American buying a coffee and a bagel once a week. It’s just nothing to them.

Krugman: I think it’s less true now, but still quite true, that given how much political decisions can influence the wealth of the wealthy, the amount that is spent to influence elections is actually still a pretty small number.

Graves: Yes, it really is. I mean, when Elon Musk was dropping 100 million or 10 million a year in these different races, he has so much money. I think at one point I calculated how much he was making per minute, or how much, in theory, his net worth was per minute. And what he was dropping in the races was nothing. It was pocket change to him. Basically, it would be pocket change to an ordinary American. Their wealth is so vast. And so, interestingly, even though they’ve invested a lot of money — people like Musk and Koch — in our elections, they still, in essence, don’t over-invest. They could spend a lot more and still not have it make a dent into their holdings.

Krugman: One thing I think most people really don’t have a sense of — even if you’ve heard a number, you don’t have a sense of how rich the rich are. You know, this was a time years ago when inequality was a lot lower. But I remember when I was still at MIT — so it’s a long time ago — but I don’t remember who we had. You know, faculty was rolled out for lunch with some rich guy, and the president of MIT whispered, “If only we could get his daily fluctuation.”

Graves: Yeah, that’s how much money. And now it’s incredibly more so.

Krugman: Yeah. Fossil fuels was really, really big. Still is, I suppose. But lately we’ve been seeing a lot from crypto and tech. What’s your sense of what they’ve achieved? I mean, they’ve spent an enormous amount of money and obviously bought a lot into this last election. But where are we on that?

Graves: Well, I will say just briefly, one last note on the fossil fuel industry, there’s a great news story out in ProPublica this weekend about the money behind the effort to give immunity to the fossil fuel industry, to forbid liability, and have Congress do so and have the states try to help with that. And so that piece really details that spending, that includes some significant amount of spending by Leonard Leo, who is the guy who helped pack the US Supreme Court. And so that issue—the fossil fuel influence on policy, the effort to get them off the hook for the liability for the climate changes that are underway—that is an ongoing, active campaign by the industry, or by the industry’s proxies, by the groups that are advancing that agenda.

But you’re right, now with the fossil fuel industry in terms of influence, it is being rivaled by, I guess the new rich in a way, in terms of the tech industry and the tech billionaires. And their influence was enormous in a way. Before this election, they had tremendous capacity, due to their wealth, like the Peter Thiels and others, to spend in our elections or to back certain candidates and get their person in a position of power.

But now that you have this administration that is basically making deals with our public policy — which I personally would describe as bribery, but they have not been charged — where you have industry insiders who are getting benefits: the tech industry, the media industry, getting benefits from kissing up to Trump, from doing favorable coverage in essence for Trump, you have a corruption component, in my view, that is combining the effect of the wealth already. And you have the policy distortion. You have this additional component because Trump is so willing to basically bend policy to favor his friends or people who favor him.

And then the crypto money, that’s the darkest of the dark money. I used to think that the dark money coming in around the election—the money spent by C-4s or their related C-3s—was dark money, but crypto is the darkest money. I mean, it is inherently concealed in terms of who the money’s going to and who holds the money. And we now have a president and his family that is involved in crypto and adjacent to crypto operations in a way where who knows how much money is coming in and from what sources, foreign or domestic? And crypto has also sought to basically influence politicians on a bipartisan basis, giving money to Senate candidates on both sides of the aisle in order to try to limit the regulation of that industry.

Krugman: Yeah, I’ve always thought that we kind of underrated the influence, the importance of sheer actual personal corruption. It’s not just campaign finance, but it’s actually what you yourself get: a bonus for accommodating special interests. But it used to be that led to cushy jobs at think tanks. We used to talk about how if you lost an election, that’s okay. There’d be a Center for Fear and Loathing that would offer you a job. But now it’s actually millions of dollars in the new dark money that somehow flow to you personally. Or in the case of Trump, billions of dollars.

One thing I learned from Rick Perlstein, one of my favorite historians of this whole thing, is that there’s another industry which has always played a large role in funding, which is basically the quack medicine industry. I mean, in some sense, that’s what’s going on with RFK Jr. We think of it as just this crazy guy. But actually, there’s a lot of money there.

Graves: There’s an enormous amount of money there. This so-called MAHA movement —to “Make America Healthy Again”—has really taken advantage of the internet’s access to create these individual communities, where people are getting really selective science. And I use that term loosely. Dressed up as science. Again, it may be funded by industries that are benefiting from it. But you also just see the rise of this influencer culture in the US, where some of them are also paid by these companies to promote their products or promote their lifestyle. And it has become such an influential, distorting thing.

I mean, the notion that we would have a rejection of vaccines and vaccinations for children in the aftermath of eradicating in the US diseases like measles, in the aftermath of a whole period, you know, 50, 60, 70 years, of having a really successful public health policy for vaccination to prevent these childhood diseases that can maim kids or blind them or, you know, basically disable them for life. And yet you can have this surprisingly large number—though it’s still a small percentage of the American population—embrace attacks on that science. And do so despite all of the weight of evidence of how successful these vaccines have been in promoting the health of the American people. It’s extraordinary that this is taking hold.

But as you point out, it’s not just the marketplace of ideas. It’s a marketplace. And that marketplace is profiting from pushing quack remedies and profiting enormously from pushing remedies that don’t work. And we saw that in full scream during the pandemic, when quack treatments, which were not effective at all, were so widely embraced and promoted by some of the people profiting from them, and also by Donald Trump himself or his closest advisers.

And one of the things I looked at at that time — ultimately there was a New York Times story about this — but I took a close look at how RFK Jr.’s wealth himself had increased over time, moving from his role in the Riverkeepers to his role of prominence in this anti-vaccine movement. And you could just see, as he took more and more aggressive positions against vaccines, how much more he himself was paid. I think in 2021 or 2022, he was making half a million dollars a year from the nonprofit group that he was leading, attacking vaccinations. So he was benefiting himself personally from those attacks.

Krugman: You’ve sort of structured your book around John Roberts’ own biography and how that kind of parallels the history of the movement. So tell us about that a bit.

Graves: Yeah. Thank you so much, Paul. It was a labor of love to write this book, because I really think that it’s hard to understand what’s happened to America without understanding what’s happened to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court under John Roberts has exerted extraordinary power. And has asserted power in ways that the court has not previously done, including when John Roberts orchestrated the destruction of Section 4 and Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. And he’s now on the precipice of doing the same to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in the Louisiana vs. Callais case that the court has heard and will be decided this summer.

But what people don’t realize is that John Roberts cut his teeth on trying to block the extension of the Voting Rights Act, trying to block the repair of the Voting Rights Act after his mentor, Bill Rehnquist, helped destroy a significant component of that act, which was designed to prevent the dilution of Black votes.

Krugman: Right.

Graves: And so you have a person who was chosen for the Supreme Court not because they thought he would be fair, but because they thought he would be a ringer. And he spent his early days in the Reagan administration as a Reagan revolutionary at the top of the Justice Department, trying to block the renewal of the Voting Rights Act with the amendments to overturn a Supreme Court decision. He spent time at the White House counsel’s office for Reagan, trying to block civil rights enforcement. He has devoted his life to advancing this very far-right agenda.

And he was someone who, when he was nominated, was not met with any of the howls of “No More Souters,” which was the sort of campaign mantra from the Federalist Society of not wasting a Supreme Court seat on a fair judge. And so after Roberts was confirmed, Bush nominated his counsel, a Republican lawyer named Harriet Miers, to the bench. Robert Bork and these other right-wing leaders screamed that this was a betrayal of their movement, to appoint a Republican lawyer and not a loyalist. And so her nomination was pulled down and Alito was swapped in, and again, “No More Souters” was not chanted at him.

And so the Republicans were able to secure a court that is now operating like a lever of power, aiding Donald Trump, aiding the Republican Party at almost every turn. And that includes the counter-constitutional ruling John Roberts orchestrated in 2024, giving Donald Trump unprecedented immunity from criminal prosecution. And then he and his fellow Republican appointees married that decision with 24 rulings last year on the emergency docket, the shadow docket, basically telling Donald Trump he could go forward with extreme actions, extreme assertions of presidential power, that were contrary to the Constitution, statutes, regulations, but that he could proceed over the temporary restraining orders that lower court judges had issued. And so this court, in my view, is out of control. It’s in desperate need of reform. And John Roberts is helming this court that is on a path of destruction against our rights.

Krugman: So, shadow docket. I didn’t know what that was until I heard you talk about it. So explain to people what that means.

Graves: Yes. So what most people don’t know is that the Supreme Court has about 8,000 to 9,000 petitions every year, and it only takes about 60 cases. It chooses 60 cases. These are all matters of discretion. They’re not required to take any of these cases unless it’s a state versus state case. And so the court is taking fewer cases, and it’s basically creating a docket where one year it’s about destroying the separation of church and state, another year is destroying reproductive rights, another year it’s destroying regulation of industry and carbon.

And then it has this emergency docket, which typically has been used for death penalty appeals. Someone claims at the last minute, “Please stop my execution,” and the court will issue a ruling, without full briefing, without oral argument, on an emergency basis. That emergency docket has been deployed by John Roberts and his fellow appointees as a shadow docket to basically change the law in America in significant ways over this past year in terms of policies on immigration policy, or allowing these mass firings to go on, allowing the gutting of funding for sciences and more. The court has allowed those things without having full briefings, without having a full opinion on it. They’ve just reversed the decisions of lower court judges.

And it’s significant in many ways because—as Judge Michael Luttig has talked about—this is a huge lack of transparency, a way in which the court is operating outside the bounds. But also, it’s the case that in almost every one of those shadow docket cases — where, again, no oral argument, no real public discussion, no opinion written — the court has intervened and overturned lower court rulings that temporarily blocked Trump, after those lower courts made factual findings that people would suffer irreparable harm and that under the law they were likely to succeed. What the Roberts Court is saying is: “you’re not likely to succeed. We are basically pre-reversing those cases.”

Krugman: So the contrast is that something like the birthright citizenship — where probably they won’t do the most horrible thing, but there are formal arguments — that’s all in the glare of publicity. But a lot of the things they’re empowering — the sort of pogroms against immigrants — are being done just sort of, “Oh, by the way, the Supreme Court has, without any visible deliberation, suddenly said that what Stephen Miller wants is okay, right?”

Graves: Yes.

Krugman: That that’s really quite horrifying. Gosh.
So now let’s talk about the immunity issue. There’s been a lot of stuff in this since 2004 that is really horrifying. But the immunity for Trump is kind of the most glaring of them. And just tell us about that for a second.

Graves: Yes. This case that was issued by John Roberts — it was a 6-to-3 decision right before the election in 2024, and it invented immunity from criminal prosecution for a president. That’s never been the law in America. Ever. Not since the beginning. And that’s why there was a reaction to that decision, in part to have the introduction of the No Kings Act, because that immunity decision basically made Donald Trump king-like in his powers, by saying that he and any future president could not be held accountable for any crimes they committed.

When John Roberts wrote that opinion, he basically effectively pardoned Trump for the crimes he had committed. But he larded that opinion with additional assertions, trying to set the pardon power beyond any judicial or congressional review, asserting that there’s no limit on how a president can direct the Justice Department in its prosecutions, even though there have been longstanding limits in order to protect from the weaponization, the politicization, of the Justice Department to go after political enemies.

And so you have a situation now where you have a president who can commit crimes—and has committed crimes, in my view, and in the view of Jack Smith—who can commit crimes under John Roberts’ opinion. Hopefully this will be ultimately repudiated. He can pardon his co-conspirators, which is what he did when he pardoned the January 6th people who were convicted. But in essence, he could pardon any of his cabinet members or others—people on the ground in Minneapolis, for example—if he wanted to. He could pardon people who were engaging in illegal activity at his behest in foreign policy, war crimes, or domestically. And that would be okay under John Roberts. That is the essence of the destruction of the rule of law. If a president can break the laws, and he can order people to break the laws, and he can then give them immunity or pardon them for doing so, basically no law can hold.

And on top of all that, you know, it’s John Roberts who swears in Donald Trump on January 20th, 2025, where Donald Trump takes an oath to uphold the Constitution, to defend the Constitution. And yet John Roberts has just allowed Donald Trump to violate the Constitution in that immunity decision. A lot of people haven’t read the Constitution all the way through. I’m certain Donald Trump has never read more than maybe a sentence of it. But there are two duties in particular of the president in Article Two of the Constitution, and one is to uphold the Constitution. And nothing could be further from upholding the Constitution than breaking the law, than violating our criminal laws. And so John Roberts orchestrated this. It is a truly destructive decision that puts us all at risk.

And I hope that the people will come together to reform this decision, to reject it along with embracing court reform, like I’ve been working on with my work partner Alex Aronson at Court Accountability, and with our allies, to put together a really bold package of reform for the next possible opportunity to reform this court. But also to restore our rights and repeal—in essence reject—this immunity decision, which is counter-constitutional. It’s an anathema.

Krugman: So what would that mean? Hope for the best? Hope that we actually have a fair enough election in 2028 and a mass public revulsion against everything that’s been happening? How do we get out of this? Because the problem is a lot of these justices are still fairly young. So how do we get out of it?

Graves: Well, there are a lot of reforms that we’ve supported. For example, term limits, but also some jurisdictional changes for the court. I personally have been looking into court expansion and intermediate appellate court changes to try to deal with this court’s excesses and the fact that this court needs to be unpacked. The term limits would, if they were applied immediately, have an effect on removing three of the justices.

But I also think we need robust ethics reform, because the idea of taking secret gifts from billionaires, I mean, it’s outrageous. Or having a billionaire or a billionaire-funded group on the right funding a spouse, fueling a spouse’s income that feathers the nest of the justice. That’s outrageous and wrong. But there are so many other pieces that this court has dismantled, including the power to regulate carbon. That effort that the court has engaged in to try to kneecap the EPA [and rollback] voting rights, reproductive rights—there aree so many things where I think most of the American people really want changes. They want to get our rights back and expand them.

And so I’m hopeful that we can put together and be part of a movement that makes those reforms not just possible, but that people perceive how essential they are. Or this court—the Roberts Court—will continue to just dismantle our rights.

Krugman: Okay. Other than that, we’re doing great, right?

Graves: But you know, here’s the thing, Paul. There are more people than ever that are supporting these reforms. There is a growing reform movement. It’s hard to see, given the way Donald Trump captures the headlines and the legitimate controversies over the war and over the Epstein files and more. But beneath that, when you look at the polling, what you see is that people understand that this court is not trustworthy, cannot be trusted, and that we need to reform the court. And they also, on issue after issue, reject this administration’s policies, almost across the board. And so I think that there is a real desire for us to take a different path. A better path.

Krugman: That’s, I think, a hopeful note to end on.
Thanks so much for talking with me today.

This is the first part of a series looking at the structure of the Carthaginian army. Although Carthage has an (unfair!) reputation for being a country of “peaceful merchants who tended to avoid wars,”¹ Carthage was, I will argue, without question the second greatest military power the Mediterranean produced – eclipsed only by Rome. If we do not realize this, it is merely because Carthage had the misfortune to fight Rome ‘in the first round,’ as it were.

Carthage is, in particular, the only military power that ever manages to seriously challenge Rome on an even footing, blow for blow, after the Romans completed the conquest of Italy. The Carthaginian military system pushes Rome to the very brink of defeat twice, in contrast to the Hellenistic great powers, the heirs of Alexander, none of which ever force the Romans to ‘dig deep’ into their forces. Put another way: the Romans put Alexander’s heirs to bed mobilizing against them less than a third of the military force it took for Rome to match Carthage. The Carthaginians inflicted more casualties on the Romans in a single day than all of the successor states (a label which does not include Epirus, so no Pyrrhus here; worth noting the Carthaginians beat him too) managed in pitched battle combined. And they did this more than once; I’d hazard they managed it about seven times.²

So in this series, we are going to lay out the structure of Carthage’s armies (alas, we have very little information as to the structure of their navy), because as we’ll see, the Carthaginian military system was quite complex, drawing soldiers from all over the western Mediterranean.

Now there is an a bit of organizational trickiness here: Carthage drew forces from many different places at many different times. In practice, the Carthaginian military becomes visible to us as early as 480 (with the Battle of Himera) and seems to change significantly between this period and the army visible to us in the first book of Polybius, which fights the First Punic War (254-241) and the Mercenary War (241-237). Then the Carthaginian army undergoes another substantial shift visible to us, in terms of its composition, during the Barcid Conquest of Spain (237-218) such that the Carthaginian army that fights in the Second Punic War (218-201) looks very different again. And then Carthage loses its army and so its military forces from 201 to the end of the Carthaginian state in 146 look different again.

My solution here is to structure this treatment around the largest Carthaginian mobilizations, which were those during the Second Punic War: Carthaginian numbers peaked in 215 with something on the order of 165,000 men under arms.³ We’ll work through the components of that force (operating, as it did, in multiple theaters) and for each component of it, we can then note how – as best we can tell – that specific component changed over time.

I should also note what I am not doing here: this is not a full rundown of Carthage’s military history or the Punic Wars; rather it is an outline of the components of Carthage’s land forces. I think a treatment of the Punic Wars on a similar level to our “Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph” series is probably worth doing, but would be a much larger and more involved series than this, because the Punic Wars are quite long conflicts with many twists and turns and often multiple simultaneous theaters. One day!

But first, as always, raising large armies of mercenaries, subject conscripts, vassal warlords and allies is expensive! If you too want to help me invade Italy with a multi-ethnic army of diverse origins in a doomed effort to stop the Roman Republic, you can help by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).

(Bibliography Note: Any bibliography for the lay reader looking to get to grips with Carthage likely has to begin with D. Hoyos, The Carthaginians (2010) which provides a solid foundation on understanding the Carthaginian state and society. A solid overview of Carthaginian military history is provided by J.R. Hall, Carthage at War: Punic Armies c. 814-146 (2023). For specific periods in Carthaginian military history, note J.F. Lazenby, The First Punic War: A Military History (1996), then D. Hoyos, Truceless War (2007) on the Mercenary War and D. Hoyos, Hannibal’s Dynasty (2003) on the Carthaginian conquest of Spain, before going back to J.F. Lazenby for Hannibal’s War (1978) on the Second Punic War. G. Daly, Cannae: The experience of battle in the Second Punic War (2002) has, among other things, one of the better run-downs of the composition of Hannibal’s army. On the Gauls in Carthaginian armies, note L. Baray, Les Celtes d’Hannibal (2019), alas not translated. On the Numidians, a key component of Carthage’s army, see W. Horsted, The Numidians, 300 BC – AD 300 (2021), while on the Spanish warriors who fought for Carthage, see Quesada Sanz, F. Armas de la Antigua Iberia: De Tartesos a Numancia (2010) now available in translation as F. Quesada Sanz, Weapons, Warriors & Battles of Ancient Iberia (2023), trans. E. Clowes and P.S. Harding-Vera. You can also find what little we know about Balaerian slingers in the opening chapters of L. Keppie, Slingers and Sling Bullets in the Roman Civil Wars of the Late Republic, 90-31 BC (2023). Finally, one must note N. Pilkington, The Carthaginian Empire (2019), an often heterodox but equally sometimes persuasive reassessment of what we know of Carthage that is intensely skeptical of our literary source tradition and an essential read (for agreement and disagreement) if one is intending to get knee-deep in the scholarship.)

A Brief Chronology

First, before we get into the details, we should lay out the basic chronology of Carthaginian military history, because as we’re going to see, not only does Carthage draw upon a bunch of different sources of military manpower, those sources themselves change over time in their composition and role within the Carthaginian system.

Now we should start with some background here on the nature of Carthage and its control over its core territory in North Africa. Carthage was a Phoenician colony, founded in North Africa (in modern day Tunisia). The population was thus likely a mix of local Libyan peoples, Phoenician settlers and even other maritime peoples (Aegeans, e.g. Greeks). The Carthaginians themselves maintained a clear ideology of being Phoenicians, using a Punic language, worshiping Punic gods and making a clear connection to their mother-city of Tyre, however some modern DNA research has suggested the actual population of Phoenician colonies might have been more genetically diverse than we have generally supposed. Of course, not every resident of Carthage was likely to be a citizen and certainly the impression we get is that some Phoenician ancestry was a requirement for full citizenship.

Via Wikipedia, a decent-if-not-perfect map of Greek and Phoenician colonization. It is worth noting when looking at this map that the Etruscan were organized into states, but not united, while the Thracians, Dacians and Illyrians were non-state peoples at this time.

Carthage was hardly the only such colony in North Africa (Utica, Thapsus (in North Africa), Leptis, Leptiminus, etc. were all such colonies), but there was also a substantial local Libyan population and at least initially Carthage was subordinate to those peoples; we’re told that quite Carthage’s first few centuries after its founding (mid-eighth century) paid tribute to the locals, a relationship that inverted quite dramatically as Carthage became stronger. Carthage seems to begin projecting power overseas seriously in the mid-to-late-500s, though we cannot always see this early process as well as we’d like. By c. 500, Carthage seems to control Sardinia and the western coast of Sicily. Some sign of Carthage’s expanding control in North Africa comes when they are able to block Dorieus (a Spartan prince) from creating a Greek colony in North Africa and then shortly thereafter also destroy his effort to found a colony in western Sicily, between 515 and 510 or so. Unfortunately, we’re not really well informed at all about the armies they used to do this

Instead, Carthaginian armies first start to become really visible to us in the context of the running contest between Carthage and Syracuse for control over the rest of Sicily, which kicks off in the 480s. From the 480s to the 270s, Carthage fights a series of wars with the Greeks on Sicily, the latter generally organized around the largest and strongest Greek city there, Syracuse. There is a tendency for students to be surprised that Carthage – given its apparent power in the third century – is unable to overcome (or be overcome by) Syracuse, but it is worth remembering that Syracuse is a really big polis, on the same scale as Athens or Sparta. Recall that from 415 to 413, the Athenians throw the lion’s share of their military, at the height of their power at Syracuse and lose effectively all of it for their trouble, so Syracuse – at least when well led and organized – is a fairly major power (in as much as any power other than the Achaemenids can be major) in this period.

In any case, the first Carthaginian-Greek war in Sicily begins in the 480s and ends with the Battle of Himera in 480. They’re then back at it from 409 to 405, then again from 398 to 396, then again from 383 to 381 (?), then again from 368 to 367, then again 345 to 341 and again from 311 to 306 and then finally from 278 to 276, Pyrrhus of Epirus shows up to campaign against Carthage on behalf of the Greeks. On the one hand, at any given time in these wars, territorial control often swings wildly between Carthage and Syracuse, but on the other hand zooming out, over the long-term relatively little changes and the whole thing resembles a stalemate: Carthage controls the west of the island, Syracuse the east and the settlements in the middle either manage in the fracture-zone between the powers or submit to one or the other.

Alongside the early phases of this running warfare on Sicily, Carthage is steadily subduing the area around it in North Africa, reducing the Libyan and Phoenician settlements in what is today Tunisia to semi-autonomous subjects. Those communities remained internally self-governing, but were in practice ruled by Carthage and we’ll talk about that relationship in the next post in the series. We can’t fully see this process clearly but by c. 400, Carthage clearly seems to have control over most of its immediate surroundings. Carthage also began interacting quite early with the Numidians, the Berber peoples to the west (generally divided into two kingdoms, Massaesylii and Massylii) sometimes recruiting them and sometimes fighting them. Certainly by the start of the third century if not earlier, Carthage is the dominant power in this relationship.

The Carthaginians are also clearly active in trade in Spain, though it is unclear to what degree the Phoenician settlements there fall under Carthaginian political control and when.

Thus even by c. 480, Carthage is one of the major imperial powers in the western Mediterranean, though hardly the only ‘major player’ and remains so, steadily growing in size and influence over the next several centuries. By c. 300, the Carthaginians have secured control over western Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia, have some small footholds in Spain and most importantly have secured control over most of what is today Tunisia (what the Romans would just call ‘Africa’) and have a dominant if frequently shifting position relative to the Numidians.

That set the stage for the major wars of the third century. Carthage was in a strong position in Sicily after the end of their war with Agathocles (in 306), leading to the Sicilians to appeal to Pyrrhus in the 270s. Pyrrhus, arriving in 278 was able to win significant victories and pin the Carthaginians back to their last major coastal base in Lilybaeum, but was unable to take it (being unable to break Carthaginian naval control) and subsequently forced out in 276 once his support among the Sicilian Greeks ebbed, suffering a nasty naval defeat on his way out for his trouble.

That left Carthage in a dominant position in Sicily (but still facing a potent foe in Syracuse) when in 264 a group of mercenaries (the Mamertines) leftover from Agathocles’ war who had seized Messina – under pressure from Syracuse – appealed to both Rome and Carthage for help. That led to a four(-ish) way war in which two of the sides (the Mamertines and Syracuse) rapidly found themselves rendered irrelevant. The result was the First Punic War (264-241) between Rome and Carthage, fundamentally a war for control over Sicily, although the Romans did invade North Africa (unsuccessfully) in 256.

Via Wikipedia, a rough map of Carthage’s territorial control at the beginning of the First Punic War, though I’d argue this probably overstates Carthaginian control in Spain somewhat (New Carthage isn’t even **founded** yet!)

Carthage loses the war, with Rome consolidating control over Sicily, only to be immediately beset by a new war, the Mercenary War (241-237), when a mutiny by Carthage’s unpaid mercenaries from the end of the First Punic War set off a general revolt of its subjects in North Africa. The Carthaginians win this war, particularly with the leadership of Hamilcar Barca, who is then too politically influential to be left in Carthage, so he is packed off with an army to go do stuff in Spain. The ‘stuff’ he does in Spain from 237 to his death in 228 is to subdue nearly the entire Mediterranean coast up to the Ebro River, with that task then completed by first his son-in-law, Hasdrubal the Fair and then Hamilcar’s eldest son Hannibal.

That sets the stage for ’round two’ with Rome, the Second Punic War (218-201), an absolutely massive war waged across Italy, Spain and Africa, which represents the peak military output of either Rome or Carthage (although the First Punic War, with its massive fleets, probably roughly matches it). Utterly defeated in 201, Carthage is shorn of its overseas empire and much of its more distant African holdings, essentially reduced to ‘merely’ controlling northern Tunisia. However, rapid Carthaginian economic recovery leads Rome to instigate a third war with Carthage, the Third Punic War (149-146). Unlike the previous two wars, this is not an even contest: Carthage by this point is much smaller and weaker a power than Rome. Determined Carthaginian resistance prolongs the war, but Rome is eventually able to seize the city and destroy the Carthaginian state in 146.

Via Wikipedia, a rough map of Carthaginian control at the start of the Second Punic War. This map **substantially** overstates Carthaginian control of the Spanish interior, however.

Now, one thing worth noting at the end of this brief, potted history is for nearly all of this period, we have only Greek sources (Romans, writing in Latin, only really come in with the Punic Wars and even then our earliest Roman sources – Fabius Pictor – are lost, so we get him processed through a Greek – Polybius). One of the features of the history we do have of Carthage that I suspect results from this is that Carthage seems to lose a lot. But it is, at least until 264, a strange sort of losing: Carthage shows up in our sources losing major battles but then one moves forward a few decades and Carthage’s empire is larger and more prosperous. And then Carthage loses another major battle and yet somehow, a few decades later Carthage is even more powerful.

So either Carthage is the world champion at failing upwards or there is something going on with our sources. And it isn’t hard to really guess what: our key source for Carthaginian history before 264 is Diodorus Siculus, that is, ‘Diodorus the Sicilian,’ a Sicilian Greek writing in the first century B.C. who thus very obviously has a side in Carthage’s long wars with the Sicilian Greeks. Even if Diodorus is doing his best to give us a straight story, which battles are his sources likely to remember or commemorate most prominently: the Time They Really Walloped the Carthaginians or perhaps smaller engagements that they lost? Thus while we cannot know for certain, I find that I suspect Carthage’s battle-record pre-264 is likely rather better than our sources suggest.

Post-264, it seems worth noting that while Carthage loses more often than they win against the Romans, they still manage to deliver Rome some pretty stunning defeats. The notion that Carthaginians are ‘peaceful merchants’ or just ‘unmilitary’ thus seems to be almost entirely empty, a nearly pure product of later stereotypes about ‘unmanly easterners’ rather than a conclusion justified by the evidence. At the very least, by the time Rome was ready to fight Carthage, the Carthaginians very much knew how to throw a punch – indeed, they would punch Rome far harder than any other foe.

That still provides some three hundred years where Carthage is a meaningful military power where we can see their military activities, so as you might imagine, the shape of the Carthaginian army changes a lot over that period.

Component Parts

The next thing we ought to do, to get an overall sense of the system, then, is to lay out the scale of Carthaginian forces at the height of the Second Punic War, representing the largest land mobilization that Carthage ever produced. The size of the mobilization is staggering, as is the diversity of how it was raised: like most imperial powers, Carthage’s army was a diverse medley of soldiers drawn from basically everywhere that Carthaginian power reached. The way these soldiers were incorporated into Carthage’s armies was in turn a product of what their relationship to the Carthaginian state was – citizens, subjects, vassals, allies, mercenary employees.

Our sources, most particularly Polybius, provide us enough detail to get a pretty decent accounting of Carthage’s ‘peak’ mobilization, which comes in 215. Hannibal, of course, had a Carthaginian field army at that time in Italy – he had won the Battle of Cannae (216) the year before – but there were also Carthaginian armies in Spain, Sardinia and Africa, along with an active fleet. Carthage alone of the Mediterranean powers of the era seems to have been able to match Rome’s capacity for multi-theater warfare: whereas Hellenistic kingdoms could really only have one primary theater of war at a time, both Rome and Carthage could wage multiple parallel campaigns simultaneously and did so.

So let’s break down the evidence for what we have.

We can begin with Hannibal’s army in Italy, which Polybius tells us (3.114.5) consisted of 40,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry for the Battle of Cannae (216). We can actually work backwards with just a little bit of guessing to break down this army into its unit composition: Hannibal crosses the Alps with 12,000 Africans, 8,000 Iberians, and 6,000 cavalry, taking some losses in the subsequent battles but also absorbing around 9,000 Gallic infantry and 5,000 Gallic cavalry. Figuring for attrition, the composition of Hannibal’s army at Cannae has to look at least something like around 10,000 African infantry, 6,000 Iberian infantry, around 8,000 mixed ‘lights’ (North African lonchophoroi, which means ‘javelin-men’ not ‘pikemen’ as it is sometimes mistranslated) and Balearian slingers and 16,000 Gallic infantry to make the total. Of the cavalry we might suspect around 5,000 of it was Gallic cavalry and the rest split roughly evenly between Numidian cavalry from Africa and Iberian cavalry (both of which we’re told Hannibal has).

We then need to modify that force for Hannibal’s losses at Cannae: he lost 4,000 Gauls, 1,500 Iberians and 200 cavalry, but was reinforced late in the year (Polyb. 3.117.6; Livy 23.13.7) with 4,000 more Numidian cavalry and 40 elephants. That leaves Hannibal in 215 with an army of roughly 50,000: 10,000 African infantry, 12,000 Gallic infantry, 4,500 Iberian infantry, 8,000 mixed ‘lights’ (lonchophoroi and Balearian slingers), around 5,000 Gallic cavalry and perhaps 10,000 other cavalry, of which we might guess that maybe 2/3rds were Numidian and 1/3rd Iberian.

At the same time in Italy there is a second Carthaginian army operating in Bruttium (modern Calabria; Hannibal is operating out of modern Apulia) under the command of Hanno with 17,000 infantry composed mostly of Roman socii that have defected to Hannibal, along with 1,200 cavalry, mostly Spanish and Numidian (Livy 24.15.2).

The thing is Hannibal does not have Carthage’s largest army. One of the mistakes students make in assessing the Second Punic War is focusing – as most modern treatments do – almost entirely on Hannibal. But for Carthage, getting reinforcements to Hannibal is very hard – Rome at this point has a strong navy so they can’t easily sail to Italy – but the war is also very active in Spain. Carthage had come to control the Mediterranean coast of Spain as a result of the conquests of Hamilcar Barca (we’ll discuss this more when we get to these guys in a couple of weeks) and Rome was seeking to tear that part of the empire away.

Carthage had three generals operating in Spain by 215 – Hasdrubal and Mago Barca (Hannibal’s brothers) and Hasdrubal Gisco. Livy reports the combined strength of all three at 60,000 (Livy 23.49) and once again with some careful tracking through Livy and Polybius we can basically break this force down to roughly 24,000 African infantry (a mix of Hannibal’s troops left behind and reinforcements brought by Mago), a touch less than 2,000 African cavalry, and the remainder – about 34,000 – mostly Iberian troops along with some small units of Gauls (300 from Liguria) and Balearian slingers (500). We can be fairly ‘rough’ with these numbers because we’re dealing with ‘paper strengths’ that are going to be off to some degree in any case – the point here is a rough approximation of an estimate, because our sources aren’t going to get better than that.

In addition, there was a Carthaginian army dispatched to Sardinia to try to retake it, a force Livy reports as being roughly the same size as the reinforcements Mago brought to Spain, which would mean 12,000 infantry and 1,500 cavalry, probably nearly all African (Livy 23.23.12).

Finally, Carthage maintained a force still in Africa. Hannibal had, at the war’s outset, transferred to Africa some 13,850 Iberian infantry, 870 Balearian slingers and 1,200 Iberian cavalry, while redeploying some 4,000 Metagonians (from what is today eastern Morocco) to Carthage as well.

Taking all of that together we can estimate very roughly (with some rounding) that Carthage has, under arms, in 215:

50,000 African infantry
17,000 Italian socii
12,000 Gallic infantry
52,000 Iberian infantry
10,000 various ‘lights’ (including at least 1,370 Balearian slingers)
21,000 cavalry of which probably roughly
- 5,000 are Gallic cavalry
- 5,000 are Iberian cavalry
- 11,000 are African and Numidian cavalry (with the Numidians probably the larger share)

For a total of roughly 162,000 men under arms. Notably missing from this total are any Carthaginian citizen troops, but for reasons I’ll get to below, I do think there probably were some in North Africa. For comparison, the peak mobilizations of the major successor states (the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms) are probably around 80,000 men. Carthage is doubling that mobilization and very nearly matching Rome’s own maximum mobilization (around 185,000 men).⁴

Carthaginian Citizen Soldiers

Now you may have noticed something a little odd for the Carthaginian army implied by the figures above: there aren’t any Carthaginians in it. And that tends to be one of the core things that folks ‘know’ about Carthaginian armies, which is that these were ‘mercenary’ armies, where Carthaginians only served as officers. That is, after all, more or less directly what Polybius tells us and historians ancient and modern tend to take Polybius at his word. And while Polybius is being more than a little sneaky with his description of Carthaginian armies as mercenary in nature, the idea that Carthaginians didn’t serve in quantity in Carthaginian armies is at least half true, but with important geographical and chronological limitations.

Here, we are interested in the Carthaginian citizens themselves. And we begin with the first exception to the idea that Carthaginian citizens didn’t fight, the chronological one: Carthaginian citizen armies are actually very common everywhere (that is, both at home and abroad) in the fifth and fourth century. Diodorus (11.22.2) reports ‘Phoenicians’ in the Carthaginian army for the Battle of Himera (480) which are likely Carthaginian citizen soldiers we hear of Carthaginian citizen soldiers in later Carthaginian expeditions to Sicily in 409 too. As late as 339, at the Battle of the Crimissus, the Carthaginian army includes, according to Diodorus, a Sacred Band of Carthaginian citizens several thousand strong (Diod. Sic. 16.80.4) which seems to be a picked force from a larger body of Carthaginian citizens, given that he describes its members as distinguished even among the citizens for valor, reputation and wealth.

Now in most treatments the next thing that will get said is that in the third century – when both the First (264-241) and Second (218-201) Punic Wars occur – the Carthaginians changed this policy and citizens stopped serving except as officers. But I think that perhaps misses what is really happening here and the reason has to do with the perspective of our sources: we have no Carthaginian sources or even North African sources. What we have are the reports primarily of Romans (who fought Carthage), Greeks on Sicily (who fought Carthage) and mainland Greeks like Polybius, who relied on the other two. My point is not necessarily that these sources are hostile to Carthage (though they are), but rather that their focus is directed. We are seeing Carthage like one would see a statute in a dark room lit entirely from one side: only half the statute will be illuminated.

Our sources are very interested in the armies that Carthage sends against Syracuse and Rome and almost entirely uninterested – or uninformed! – about the forces that Carthage might muster in other places. We only see Carthaginian North Africa clearly in brief snippets: when a Greek or Roman tries to invade it (310, 256, 204and 149) or in the context of a major revolt like the Mercenary War (241-237) which draws our sources attention.

But what do we see whenever the action shifts to North Africa? Citizen soldiers in Carthage’s armies. While Diodorus inserts into his narrative a line about how the Carthaginians were unprepared for fighting when Agathocles (tyrant of Syracuse) lands his army in Africa in 310, they quickly manage to put together a citizen soldier army – Diodorus says of some 40,000 soldiers, but Diodorus’ numbers here are often useless (Diod. Sic. 20.10.5-6). We don’t hear anything about citizen soldiers during Rome’s unsuccessful invasion in 256 (during the First Punic War), but when Carthage’s expeditionary army (returned from Sicily at the war’s end) revolts in 241, Carthage immediately raises a citizen army to put down the revolt and succeeds in doing so (Polyb. 1.73.1-2). Likewise, when P. Cornelius Scipio soon-to-be-Africanus lands in North Africa in 204, the Carthaginians raise citizen forces (alongside all of their other troops) to try to stop him and Carthaginian citizens formed a major part of Hannibal’s army at Zama (202; Polyb. 15.11.2-4), including both infantry and cavalry.

And of course, when Rome returned for the final act in the Third Punic War (149-146), Carthage – largely shorn of its empire – responded by mobilizing a citizen force to defend the city, alongside freed slaves (App. Pun. 93-5) and resisted fairly stoutly.

In short, with the exception of M. Atillius Regulus’ invasion of 256, every time Carthaginian Africa is ‘illuminated’ for us we see Carthaginian citizen forces. Now our sources often present these forces as basically ‘scratch’ forces, raised in a panic, but while the Carthaginians sometimes lose the battles that result, these armies are not a ‘rabble’ by any means. Carthaginian citizen forces were evidently sufficient to defeat their own mercenaries and the Libyan revolt in 241. At Zama (202), the Carthaginian citizens form the second rank of Hannibal’s army and while Polybius is quick to lean into stereotypes calling them cowards (for not reinforcing the first battle line, composed of mercenary troops), in practice what he actually describes is that the Carthaginian citizen line is able to throw the Roman hastati back and is only forced to retreat by the advance of Scipio’s second line of principes (Polyb. 15.13.5-8).

My suspicion is thus that Carthaginian citizen soldiers may have never fully gone away, but rather they may have been confined largely to operations in North Africa. It makes a degree of sense that the Carthaginians might want to wage their imperial wars almost entirely with auxiliary troops recruited from their dependencies (or paid for as mercenaries), with Carthaginian citizens serving only as generals and officers, while reserving their citizen soldiers for operations closer to home. And there must have been more of such operations than we are aware of. Remember: Carthaginian armies really only become fully visible to us as they interact with Greek and Roman armies, but obviously Carthage must have accomplished the subjugation of much of North Africa, must have managed to subordinate (if not subdue) the Numidians, must have been able to hold that control through military strength (for our sources are very clear that Carthaginian control was often resented) and finally must have been able to also deter the Saharan, Berber and Lybian peoples on their borders.

In short, there is almost certainly quite a lot of Carthaginian campaigning in Africa which we can’t see clearly and it is possible that Carthaginian citizen soldiers continued to be active in these operations throughout. In that case, Carthage may well have kept its citizenry in some degree of readiness for war, which may explain why substantial bodies of Carthaginian citizen soldiers seem to be available and militarily effective so quickly when Carthage’s core territory in Africa is threatened. That said, short of some very convenient (and very unlikely) Punic inscriptions showing up, this remains merely a hypothesis; our sources offer no hint of this and indeed Polybius states the opposite, that the Carthaginian citizenry was broadly demilitarized.

Carthaginian Arms and Tactics

Of course, if Carthaginian citizens did sometimes fight, that raises a key question: how did Carthaginian citizens fight? With what arms and tactics?

The first answer is that our evidence is infuriatingly limited here. After all, Carthaginian citizen soldiers do most of their fighting visible to us relatively early where our main sources are writers like Diodorus, who – because he is writing a universal history covering everything from the earliest mythology (he includes the Fall of Troy) down to his own day (mid-first century B.C.) – rarely gives a lot of details. Normally we might supplement this with visual evidence in artwork or equipment deposited in graves, but there is very, very little of this. That point has sometimes been taken to reflect Carthage’s ‘unmilitary’ character, but it is worth noting that prior to 146, we have similarly little archaeological or representational evidence of the Roman Republic’s armies and no one accuses the Romans of being ‘unmilitary’ in character.

What evidence we do have suggests that the Carthaginians largely fought as heavy infantrymen in a manner not too different from Greek hoplites. Now I want to caveat that immediately to say this doesn’t mean they fought as hoplites – it is certainly possible but by no means necessarily or certain that the Carthaginians might have adopted weapons or tactics from the Greeks. The Levant had its own infantry traditions on which the Carthaginians might have drawn which included heavy armor and large shields. At the same time, as noted, it seems like Phoenician colonies drew in a lot of Aegean (read: Greek) settlers, so it would hardly be shocking of the Carthaginians did adopt Greek armaments.

However, I want to pause for a moment to draw one point of important clarification: at no point did any Carthaginian or any soldier in Carthaginian service that we know of, fight in a Macedonian-style pike phalanx. The idea that the Carthaginians adopted this style of fighting is based entirely on old mistranslation of lonchophoroi as ‘pikemen’ when in fact the lonche is a light spear and these are light infantry javelin-men fighting in support of African heavy infantry. We’ll talk more about them next week.

We have a few small engravings (small engraved impression seals called ‘scarabs’) from Carthage and Phoenician settlements in Sardinia, which depict soldiers and they show men with large apparently circular shields and spears.⁵ Numidian royal monuments, which may be drawing on Carthaginian material culture (it would have been high status) feature large round shields as a design motif and one intriguing monument, a statue base excavated in Rome, has been supposed by Ann Kuttner to possibly be a Numidian comission showing Numidian arms (or perhaps the captured arms of Carthaginians?) and shows a large round shield of the same type seen on their royal monumnets, alongside tube-and-yoke cuirasses (two of which are set up as trophies) and plumed helmets of the pilos/konos type (a kind of Hellenistic Greek helmet).⁶ And our literary sources regularly describe the Carthaginians as forming heavy infantry battle lines (using the word φάλαγξ, phalanx, to describe them) and report Carthaginians as wearing helmets and armor, with large shields and spears.⁷

Via the British Museum (inv. 127214), a fifth century Phoenician scarab showing a warrior wearing a cuirass, greaves, a helmet, a large (round?) shield and carrying a spear, found in Sardinia. While the curator’s description assumes this warrior is Greek, Carthaginian seems far more likely given the find location, art-style and equipment.

On that basis, both Gregory Daly and Joshua Hall (both op. cit.) conclude that the Carthaginians must have fought rather a lot like Greek hoplites and I think this is both basically correct and probably the best we can do. By the Punic Wars, we have hints that Carthaginian troops (both citizen and subject from North Africa) may also be adopting Italic equipment, which I’ll get into more in the next post: by the end of the Second Punic War and certainly by the Third Punic War, Carthaginian soldiers may have looked actually quite ‘Roman’ in their kit.

All of that said, as is obvious from the forces Carthage arrayed for the Punic Wars, Carthaginian armies included far more than just citizen soldiers – indeed, many Carthaginian armies evidently included few if any Carthaginian citizens outside of the officer corps. So to better understand Carthage’s armies, we are going to have to branch out to think about their other forces, which we’ll begin to do next week.

In a 2005 Y Combinator “class photo”, Altman and Swartz are standing next to each other. Despite the fact that Altman was sporting a reasonable number of popped polo collars (zero), Swartz was clearly the better-dressed of the two.^* ↩︎
* Aaron would’ve loved this footnote. Christ, I miss him.
With rare exceptions, I continue to think it’s a sign of deep C-suite dysfunction when a company has multiple “CEOs”. When it actually works — like at Netflix, with co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters (and previously, Sarandos and Reed Hastings before Hastings’s retirement in 2023) — the co-CEOs are genuine partners, and neither reports to the other. There is generally only one director of a movie, but there are exceptions, who are frequently siblings (e.g. the Coens, the Wachowskis, the Russos). A football team only has one head coach. The defensive coordinator is the “defensive coordinator”, not the “head coach of defense”. It’s obvious that Fidji Simo reports to Sam Altman, and thus isn’t the “CEO” of anything at OpenAI. But OpenAI does have applications, and surely is creating more of them, so being in charge of applications is being in charge of something real. By any reasonable definition, AGI has not yet been achieved, and many top AI experts continue to question whether LLM technology will ever result in AGI. So Simo changing her title to (or Altman changing her title to) “CEO of AGI deployment” is akin to changing her title to “CEO of ghost busting” in terms of its literal practical responsibility. ↩︎︎