In the National Maritime Museum in Haifa, mounted on a low plinth against a red wall, sits the most significant surviving object from ancient naval warfare: the Atlit Ram, a bronze naval ram recovered by divers off the Israeli coast in 1980, dated to approximately 103–102 BCE, and identified on the basis of its construction and the coins found within it as probably belonging to the fleet of Ptolemy IX Soter II of Egypt. It is roughly 2.3 meters long and weighs over 465 kilograms. It is the only complete ancient naval ram in existence, and looking at it — the three horizontal blades converging at the forward point, the decorated upper surface with its trident and eagle motifs, the massive bronze casting that absorbed decades of seawater and still holds its shape — makes abstract discussions of ancient naval warfare immediately concrete. This is the weapon. Everything else is description.

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.