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.