During the 6th and 5th centuries, most military commands were held by kings, but later the generalship was apparently dissociated from civil office. Even in the time of the kings, military authority appears to have been conferred upon the kings only for specific campaigns or in emergencies. The generals are said to have been regarded as potential overthrowers of the legal government, but in fact there is no record of any army commander's having attempted a coup d'�tat. Thus, unlike a Roman consul, the Suffetes did not take part in military affairs and the Carthaginians appointed professional generals, who were separate from the civil government.

The Phoenician populations were always small, and since these communities depended on trade to survive, it was decided to exempt citizens from military service under normal circumstances, and to use the wealth of the community to hire mercenary armies. For this they were criticized by 19th and early 20th century scholars, who valued the military service of the modern nation state (conscript armies of citizens loyal to the state), and for this reason compared the Carthaginian army unfavorably with the native army of the Romans. In fact, the Carthaginian military seems to have been no worse than the Roman, and proved disloyal only at the end of the First Punic War, when the Carthaginians could not pay rewards they had promised.

Up to the 6th century, the armies of Carthage were apparently citizen levies similar to those of all city-states of the early classical period. But Carthage was too small to provide for the defense of widely scattered settlements, and it turned increasingly to mercenaries, officered by Carthaginians, with citizen contingents appearing only occasionally.By the 3rd century BC, citizens were exempt from military service (to manage Punic trading interests and industries). Given the limited Carthaginian population (even though the city probably did eventually have a population in the low 100,000s), the decision seems to have made sense. If they had fought the Romans with their own population, they probably would have succumbed earlier than they did, and their mercenary military came close to defeating the Romans. Carthage was served quite well by its officer corp despite very exacting Punic standards. They usually crucified generals who lost and were reluctant reinforce winning generals, lest too many troops feed tyrannical ambitions.

Being traders, the Carthaginians naturally were skilled seamen and had a particularly potent navy of about 200 ships. This was of course necessary to maintain contact with their overseas settlements.

Since the Carthaginians needed money for their armies and navy, they were apparently severe in their exactions of money from the native populations they controlled, especially among the Libyans (the Berber natives of North Africa). As merchants, they had a bad reputation among the Greeks. There are numerous references to them in the Odyssey, uniformly hostile.

Libyans were considered particularly suitable for light infantry, the inhabitants of the later Numidia and Mauretania for light cavalry; Iberians and Celtiberians from Spain were used in both capacities. In the 4th century the Carthaginians also hired Gauls, Campanians, and even Greeks. The disadvantages of mercenary armies were more than outweighed by the fact that Carthage could never have stood the losses incurred in a whole series of wars in Sicily and elsewhere. Very little is known about the manning of the Carthaginian fleet; technically, it was not overwhelmingly superior to those of the Greeks, but it was larger and had the benefit of experienced sailors from Carthage's maritime settlements.

The Carthaginian Army during the First Punic War

The Carthaginian army was composed primarily of mercenary troops. Africa, Spain and Gaul were their recruiting grounds, an inexhaustible treasury of warriors as long as the money lasted which they received as pay.

The Berbers were a splendid cavalry; they rode without saddle or bridle, a weapon in each hand; on foot they were merely a horde or savages with elephant-hide shields, long spears, and bear-skins floating from their shoulders. The troops of Spain were the best infantry that the Carthaginians possessed; they wore a white uniform with purple facings; they fought with pointed swords. The Gauls were brave troops but were badly armed; they were naked to the waist; their cutlasses were made of soft iron and had to be straightened after every blow. The Balearic Islands supplied a regiment of slingers whose balls of hardened clay whizzed through the air like bullets, broke armour, and shot men dead.

We read much of the Sacred Legion in the Sicilian wars. It was composed of young nobles, who wore dazzling white shields and breast-plates which were works of art; who even in the camp never drank except from goblets of silver and of gold. But this corps had apparently become extinct, and the Carthaginians only officered their troops, who they looked upon as ammunition, and to whom their orders were delivered through interpreters. The various regiments of the Carthaginian army had therefore nothing in common with one another or with those by whom they were led. They rushed to battle in confusion, "with sounds, discordant as their various tribes," and with no higher feeling than the hope of plunder or the excitement which the act of fighting arouses in the brave soldier.

The Carthaginian Army in Spain
The Carthaginian armies in Spain, though hardly uniform in composition, shared certain common features. They were generally composed of both African and Spanish contingents. The African professional troops were considered far more valuable than the Iberian tribal levies.

The heavy infantry spearmen of Libya formed the backbone. They were armed with pikes or long spears, and probably fought in a formation similar to the Macedonian phalanx. The Libyan infantry proved to be a match for Rome's legionaries throughout the Second Punic War. These spearmen were augmented by Balearic slingers, renowned as the finest missile troops in the world at the time, along with Numidian archers and javelinmen.

It was, however, the mounted arm of the Carthaginian army that was decidedly superior to its Roman counterpart. The javelin-armed Numidians were far and away the finest light cavalry in the western world. Those superb horsemen provided Carthage the margin of victory time and again. Heavy cavalry, in the form of Libyan-Phoenician horsemen, though few in numbers, provided shock action to complement the fire of the Numidians.

A key element of the Carthaginian army was its elephants. Hannibal took elephants across the Alps, but most died on the journey or after the battle of the Trebbia.