Carthage: The City Rome Had to Destroy
Carthage must be destroyed. The phrase — Carthago delenda est — was reportedly repeated by Cato the Elder at the end of every Senate speech he gave, regardless of the speech’s actual subject, in the years before the Third Punic War. It is probably apocryphal, or at least exaggerated, but it captures something true about the Roman relationship with Carthage: a fear and hostility so intense that it could only be resolved by elimination, and a political culture prepared to act on that resolution against a city that had been, by the 140s BC, effectively defanged by the terms of its previous defeat.
Carthage was not Rome’s first great rival, but it was the one that left the deepest mark. Founded, according to tradition, in 814 BC by Phoenician settlers from Tyre — probably sometime in the ninth century BC in historical reality — Carthage became the dominant commercial power of the western Mediterranean over the following centuries, controlling trade routes from the Straits of Gibraltar to the coast of North Africa, establishing colonies across Spain, Sardinia, and Sicily, and building a naval power that no other state in the region could match. By the time Rome and Carthage first came into serious conflict over Sicily in the 260s BC, both were regional powers of approximately comparable strength. Nobody at the time would have confidently predicted which one would be hosting grain auctions in the other’s ruins a century and a quarter later.
The First Punic War, 264–241 BC, was fought primarily over Sicily and primarily at sea. Rome, which had essentially no naval tradition, built a fleet from scratch, adopted a device called the corvus — a boarding bridge that allowed Roman soldiers to fight ship-to-ship engagements as if they were land battles — and eventually wore Carthage down after a war of attrition spanning twenty-three years. The peace terms stripped Carthage of Sicily and required the payment of a substantial indemnity. The subsequent Roman seizure of Sardinia and Corsica during a Carthaginian domestic crisis was a violation of the peace treaty that Carthaginian sources — had any survived — would have remembered differently than Roman ones do.
The Second Punic War, 218–201 BC, was the existential contest. Hannibal Barca, commanding Carthaginian forces in Spain that the Barca family had been building for two decades, crossed the Alps with his army and invaded Italy. His campaign is among the most studied in military history: the successive battles of Trebia, Lake Trasimene, and Cannae demonstrated tactical genius of a quality Rome had not previously encountered, and for several years the Italian confederation that was Rome’s real power base showed signs of fracturing. Capua defected. Philip V of Macedon allied with Carthage. The situation, from a Roman perspective, was genuinely alarming.
Rome did not collapse. It raised more legions, it held its core Italian allies, and it adopted a strategy of avoiding pitched battle with Hannibal while wearing down his support and cutting off his supply. Scipio Africanus took the war to Spain and then to Africa, threatening Carthage itself. Hannibal was recalled. At Zama in 202 BC, the tactics he had used against Rome were turned against him, and he lost. The terms imposed on Carthage after the Second Punic War were severe: the city was stripped of its overseas empire, its fleet was limited to ten warships, it was prohibited from making war without Roman permission, and it was required to pay a substantial indemnity over fifty years. Carthage survived as a city and recovered economically, but as a political entity it was finished.
The Third Punic War, 149–146 BC, was a war of deliberate Roman aggression against a city that had complied with all the terms imposed on it. Carthage had actually completed its indemnity payments. It had fulfilled its treaty obligations. When it finally raised an army in response to attacks from the Numidian king Massinissa — who was Roman-backed and who understood that Rome would not prevent his depredations — it did so without Roman permission, which was technically a treaty violation but one that the Roman Senate was clearly looking for as a pretext. The war that followed was a siege of over three years that ended with the systematic destruction of the city, the selling of its surviving population into slavery, and the famous salting of the earth — an act that modern historians are fairly confident never actually happened, the salting story appearing in the sources much later and without contemporary support.
What survived Carthage was the idea of Carthage — a persistent Roman fantasy of the destroyed rival, available as an example of what happened to those who challenged Rome seriously, invoked as a warning and a precedent whenever the Senate wanted to make a point about what unconditional military power meant. Rome rebuilt Carthage as a Roman city in the first century BC, and the rebuilt Carthage became one of the most prosperous cities in the empire, eventually the second city of the western Mediterranean after Rome itself. The site had been too valuable to waste on a memory.
Cato’s obsessive insistence on Carthage’s destruction — if it is accurately reported — reflected something that was not primarily military analysis. Carthage at the time of the Third Punic War was not a military threat to Rome. It was a trading city that had been complying with humiliating terms for fifty years. What it was, was a reminder that Rome had once faced an existential challenge, that the challenge had come from a specific direction and had nearly succeeded, and that as long as Carthage existed, the possibility of another such challenge existed with it. The destruction was not a rational security measure. It was the elimination of an anxiety. Rome was very good at that.