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.

Rome called the Mediterranean mare nostrum — our sea — with a proprietorial confidence that would have seemed absurd in the third century BC, when Rome barely had a navy and Carthage’s fleet controlled the western Mediterranean. That the claim became factually accurate within a century and remained so for four more is one of the more striking strategic transformations in ancient history: a land power with no maritime tradition built a navy, fought the greatest naval power of the ancient world, and eventually achieved a dominance over the Mediterranean so complete that it had eliminated piracy, secured trade routes, and reduced naval competition to the point where maintaining a large battle fleet was unnecessary. Rome conquered the sea the same way it conquered everything else — not through inherent advantage but through organizational capacity and willingness to pay whatever the victory cost.