Destruction of Carthage
Rome destroyed Carthage in the spring of 146 BC after a siege of three years. The Third Punic War was not provoked by any Carthaginian threat. Carthage had been disarmed by the treaty of 201 BC, had paid off its indemnity early, and had recovered commercially — which was the grievance. It was forbidden to make war without Roman permission, and when Numidia raided it repeatedly under Masinissa, its eventual self-defence gave Rome the technical breach it needed. Cato is reported to have ended every speech in the senate with the demand that Carthage be destroyed. Rome demanded hostages, then all weapons, then that the population abandon the city and resettle ten miles inland. The first two were met and the third was refused, which is what the demands were designed to achieve. The Carthaginians held out with improvised arms, women reportedly cutting their hair for bowstrings. Scipio Aemilianus took the harbour and then fought street by street through six days into the citadel on the Byrsa. Some 50,000 survivors were sold into slavery and the city was burned. The story that the site was sown with salt is a nineteenth-century invention with no ancient source. Polybius, who was present, records Scipio weeping as it burned and quoting Homer on the day Troy would fall — reflecting, he said, that Rome would come to the same end. Rome founded a colony on the site a century later. It became the capital of the province of Africa and one of the largest cities in the western empire, and the Arabs destroyed it again in 698. The ruins are a suburb of Tunis.
- Category: Military
