The Third Punic War: Carthage Must Be Destroyed

While Rome won the Second Punic War, it struck a fundamental blow to Rome’s martial manpower and military resolve. The Republic was haunted by the ghosts of Carthage and Hannibal’s campaign on Italian soil. The Romans would initiate the Third Punic War to finally put an end to the conflict between the two Mediterranean superpowers.

The Punic Wars began in 264 BCE. At that time, Rome had yet to send a legion outside the confines of the Italian Peninsula. In contrast, Carthage’s commercial influence stretched from the Levantine Coast to the Straits of Gibraltar, and beyond if we are to believe the reports of an explorer named Hanno, skirting the Atlantic Coast of West Africa. The Carthaginians regularly mustered multitudinous armies (as many as 300,000 men according to the dubious tallying of the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus) and sent them overseas to combat the rival power of Syracuse in Sicily.

But that was then. After the dust of the Second Punic War (218-201 BCE) had settled, Carthage was a shell of its former self. Hannibal’s defeat at Zama and the following peace treaty robbed the Carthaginians of all their overseas holdings and saddled them with an indemnity that was to be remitted over the course of the next 50 years.

Rome, meanwhile, was ascendant. After their pyrrhic victory over Hannibal, they would turn to the east, scoring stunning victories over the Diadochi, the successor kingdoms of Alexander the Great. First, Macedon was subdued by Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the son of the consul Paullus who fell at Cannae. Next, was the Seleucids. The Battle of Magnesia in 188 BCE against the Seleucid dynasty cemented the superiority of Rome’s legions over the traditional Macedonian phalanx. The Treaty of Apamea was signed shortly thereafter expelling Alexander’s successors from Europe and extending Rome’s political sphere into Asia Minor (modern Turkey).

In less than a century, the two Mediterranean powers had completely swapped fortunes. Rome, once confined by rival powers within the center of the Italian Peninsula, was now sending legions into Syria. Carthage, once the master of “the Middle Sea,” was now relegated to the confines of her own walls, on a small North African peninsula.

In 153 BCE, the Roman statesman Cato the Elder was sent to arbitrate a dispute between the Carthaginians and the Numidian king Massinissa, who helped Rome in the final battle of the Second Punic War.

A veteran of the Second Punic War, Cato had seen firsthand the horrors of Hannibal’s generalship. However, upon visiting Carthage, to his amazement, he did not find a dilapidated metropolis crippled by two major defeats as he expected, but a vibrant, flourishing city. Not only was Carthage able to finally pay off the war indemnity to Rome in 151 BCE, but commerce flourished and their army was rebuilt.

Cato returned to Rome, warning of a resurgent Carthage by ending every speech he made, related in subject matter or not, by exhorting the Romans to destroy their old rival once and for all: “Carthago delenda est” (Carthage must be destroyed).

Carto, almost certainly, was not alone in his sentiment. During the conflict, Hannibal culled one-fifth of the entire adult male population of Italy. There would have been few in Rome who would have been unaffected by his devastating campaign. Decades after his death, Hannibal’s legacy still haunted the Romans.

Citing passages from the treaty of 201 BCE, the Romans used the conflict with the Numidians to censure their old foes. It should not be seen as a coincidence that the cessation of the Carthaginian debt payments immediately preceded Rome’s hawkishness.

In typical Carthaginian fashion, the generals who had taken part in the conflict with Numidia were condemned to death. But this was not enough to expiate their sins in the eyes of the Romans. Sending a delegation to Africa, the Romans offered harsh terms to the Carthaginians to stop the escalating conflict. Knowing their terms, including the abandonment of Carthage, would be unacceptable, Rome prepared for war. Fear propelled them more than any real transgressions on the part of the Carthaginians.

The First Punic War was largely fought on the waves. The Second Punic War was decided by large, decisive battles in the field. The Third Punic War was little more than a single, drawn-out siege.

Carthage’s overseas empire had been confiscated. There was no threat of an overland invasion from Spain. Their navy had been disbanded. Punic sails would not be seen harrying Roman ships off the coast of Italy. The army that the Carthaginians could muster was commanded by a general named Hasdrubal and it was used primarily for the defense of the city.

According to the Greek historian Appian of Alexandria, Rome was able to field a massive expeditionary force, which it dispatched to Africa. His estimate of 80,000 men ferried on 150 ships is likely an exaggeration, but if the real figure was even half that, it was a significantly larger force than what Scipio Africanus had with him at Zama during the Second Punic War. There was an eagerness and zeal amongst the population to join this expeditionary force and see the completion of its mission.

The fate of Carthage depended on its walls. Three lines of defense ringed the city, anchored by a wall 30 feet wide and 60 feet tall. It was, in and of itself, a barracks, capable of housing 20,000 soldiers and stables of horses and war elephants. The seaward walls on the peninsula had a single wall connecting with the famous circular harbor in the southeastern corner. Towering over it was the Byrsa, the citadel of Carthage, and the spot on which, according to legend, Carthage’s mythic founder, Dido, first cut the oxhide to lay claim to her dominions.

Under constant harassment from the Carthaginians and their swift cavalry, the Romans moved against the formidable walls, constructing battering rams that required 6,000 men each to operate, and filling in lakes to allow for the construction of ramps. Fighting for their survival, the Carthaginians sallied out to destroy the Roman’s engines.

The fighting was vicious, but the commendable actions of a military tribune salvaged the day. His name was Scipio Aemilianus. The son of Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the conqueror of Macedon, and grandson of the consul killed at Cannae, he was adopted by the Scipio family, officially becoming the grandson of Scipio Africanus. He rose quickly through the ranks. The lex Villia annalis, the law requiring a minimum age for senior magistracies, was set aside for his election as consul in Rome.

Scipio returned to Carthage in 147 BCE to find the Roman war effort sputtering. Incompetence among the commanders and inexperience amongst the legions had drawn out the conflict. The admiral Mancinus had maintained the blockade of the city. Upon Scipio’s arrival, he consolidated his army for a major assault. Finding an abandoned tower, Scipio’s men scaled the facade and stormed the rampart. The Romans fought their way onto the walls before gaining control of a gate. The rest of Scipio’s army poured into the city, but darkness and unfamiliarity with the terrain led Scipio to ultimately withdraw his forces out of fear of a counterattack.

Hasdrubal, equally afraid of defections, marched Roman prisoners out onto the wall and tortured them to death in full view of the Roman camp. Scipio would not forget this Carthaginian cruelty.

Scipio knew the siege would continue as long as Carthage had access to the sea through their famed circular harbor. Setting his soldiers to work, they dug ditches and built earthenworks under the constant harassment of projectiles.

The isthmus, a narrow strip of land dominating the entrance to the harbor and abutting the weaker seaward walls, was enveloped by Roman engineering. A mole was constructed across the harbor, constricting Carthage’s last line of resupply. It was as much a symbolic action as it was a strategic one. Carthage was now cut off from the very waves that had sustained her people for over six centuries.

The populace predictably panicked. Under the veil of darkness, men, women, and children set to work cutting a new channel to the sea and constructing a new, makeshift fleet. Much to the surprise of the Romans, they awoke to see a flotilla of fifty Carthaginian ships floating out to sea. It would be the last fleet the Carthaginian Empire would ever put to sail.

Demonstrating their continued naval prowess, the Carthaginian ships fought adeptly, harassing the larger Roman ships. For hours they were locked into a stalemate. But as the detritus from the wrecked ships began to accumulate, the Carthaginians were cut off from retreating into their own harbor. With nowhere left to go, the Carthaginians scrambled to pull their ships to shore while many were rammed by the larger Roman ships or dashed against the rocks.

Cut off from all access to the sea, the inhabitants of Carthage would soon starve. But for all the martial skills that Scipio possessed, he lacked the patience to watch Rome’s old enemy wither away. He would deliver the final blow himself.

From their position on the newly constructed mole, the Romans bombarded Carthage’s seaward walls with their siege engines. Yet unbroken by their besiegers, many Carthaginians waded naked through the waters at night, bearing unlit torches. They swam up to the quay where Scipio’s machines were positioned. Emerging from the water, they lit their torches, immediately revealing their position in the dark night. They were fired upon and killed with barbed arrows and spears, but the siege engines went up in flames.

Despite the setback, Scipio, leading the cavalry in person, pushed the Carthaginians back. After taking the adjoining town of Nepheris, Scipio planned his attack on the Byrsa, the ancient citadel of Carthage.

Eschewing their siege engines, the Romans set about taking the city center block by block. Buildings, six stories tall, served as platforms from which the defenders harassed the Romans with projectiles. Through brutal urban warfare, the Romans seized each building one by one, laying boards from one roof to the next to cross. Remembering Hasdrubal’s earlier cruelty, Scipio ordered the remaining buildings be set alight, killing their occupants and turning the streets to rubble.

For six days the city burned in this manner. From the rubble of what remained, 50,000 men and women appeared before Scipio bearing olive branches from the Temple of Aesculapius. He granted the people clemency while Hasdrubal and his family remained inside the temple. Appian tells us that Hasdrubal’s wife then set the temple on fire and killed her own children to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Romans.

Looting gripped the city as Scipio allowed his soldiers to take what they had earned, according to Roman custom. As the Byrsa Hill and the famed Temple of Aesculapius burned, Polybius, the Greek historian and slave of the Aemilianus family, is said to have approached his master, who gazed upon the flames. He asked the victorious general why he shed tears. Scipio answered him, quoting the following lines from Homer’s Iliad:

The day shall come in which our sacred Troy

And Priam, and the people over whom

Spear-bearing Priam rules, shall perish all

Scipio did not cry for the Carthaginians. But as he watched the last vestiges of a once great empire descend into ruin, he could not help but be gripped with anxiety and dread that one day the same fate would befall his beloved Rome.

For now, however, Rome ushered in a new age. The same year (146 BCE) that Carthage fell, also saw the destruction of Corinth, the last free city of the Achaean League. After decades of indirect rule through puppet rulers, Rome now destroyed any semblance of Greek freedom. Greece, once the home of democracy, was subsumed by Roman hegemony.

For centuries the rivalry between the Carthaginians and the Greek world defined the central and western Mediterranean. Now, they both bowed to Roman might. The Mediterranean had always been connected by its trade routes, but now the sea, once home to many different cultures and languages, was quickly becoming Roman. It was now mare nostrum (“our sea”).

The Legacy of Carthage

Contrary to some stories of Carthage’s fall, the fields were not sown with salt. The Romans were retributive but practical. While much of the Carthaginian fingerprint (e.g. literature, art, and architecture) was erased, Carthage was a supremely positioned node on a larger commercial network. Completely destroying its infrastructure would have required significant investment to rebuild.

The new Roman city, lying near the modern capital of Tunis, served as the capital of Rome’s African province. The agricultural infrastructure in the hinterland built by the Carthaginians in the 5th century BCE fed the ever-growing city of Rome as it became more reliant on its provinces.

The province flourished and North Africa would become a great pipeline of generals, politicians, and thinkers. The future Roman emperor Septimius Severus was born in Leptis Magna (modern Libya). Two of the great early Christian thinkers Tertullian and St. Augustine were born in Carthage and Numidia respectively. There is some archaeological evidence that certain Carthaginian religious practices would persist into the Christian period and in the deserts of North Africa. But the Carthaginian Empire as antiquity knew it would never rise again.

Despite this, their story continues to be told. In the 19th century, as Napoleonic France and the British Empire were locked in a titanic struggle of their own, Napoleon would refer to the British as the “Carthaginians,” referencing their similar reliance on naval strength.

The Tunisians have not forgotten their own history either. If one were to find themselves in a Tunisian market today, they may pay with a five dinar note featuring the tragic yet heroic gaze of Hannibal Barca. It is a rather innocuous reference to antiquity and one missed by many. But how different would things be if Hannibal had proved to be successful?

A letter from the Mamertines, a group of Italian mercenaries, to both the Romans and the Carthaginians would unwittingly draw them into a conflict that would span three wars and over a hundred years.

What the First Punic War and the First World War, more than two millennia later, have in common is that they both ended with a “Carthaginian peace” with punitive pecuniary measures that would make future conflict all the more likely, rather than preventing it.

The Carthaginians were never able to effectively use their naval advantage to deal with Rome’s greater military manpower. In contrast, historian Lawerence James attributed Britain’s success in the 18th and 19th centuries to William Pitt’s strategy of the “corrective use of seapower.” Aided by booming overseas trade, the British strangled France’s overseas possessions and relegated France’s numerically superior army to the continent where the British bogged them down by funding other nations to fight a ground war.

The upstart Romans had shown a willingness to learn, adapt, and innovate. When the First Punic War broke out, they did not have a navy. By the end, Roman ships dominated the Mediterranean. When Hannibal crushed every army put before him, Fabius Maximus broke with tradition and effectuated a guerilla war, buying the Romans much-needed time.

Carthage, on the other hand, was fractious. Their society was fraught with squabbling families vying for influence. Hannibal’s campaigns were grossly underfunded and many other less successful generals were executed by their own state rather than falling to a Roman blade.

In war, the Carthaginians sought to maintain the commercial status quo. The Roman endgame was total subjugation. Saying nothing of the moral implications, in this struggle, the stronger convictions won.