Onward and Upward - Carthaginian reenacting

[MeinPanzer]

I think some of the difficulty stems from how one defines a mercenary. As I see it, the Carthaginian army proper was composed of its native Carthaginian officers and the Liby-phoenician soldiers. Everyone else was a mercenary - a soldier for hire who was responsible for providing his own equipment and who was under no real obligation to serve other than the promise of getting paid.

Hannibal's African troops seem to have consisted of Numidian mercenaries, the Liby-phoenicians, and Carthaginians. I don't think all Carthaginians would have been officers which would put them more in the mercenary category, i.e. - men who had to provide their own equipment and who were fighting for the promise of pay...and probably so they could help stick it to the Romans.

We don't know whether these soldiers were responsible for their own equipment or not, so we can't use that to judge (and, as I said previously, we don't even know if real mercenaries, called so by ancient authors, provided their own equipment or not). I would think, though, that Carthaginian troops would be regular troops and not mercenaries. Carthage had a body of citizen militia which was surely made up of the local Phoenician citizens.