Carthage Must Be Destroyed

What the Romans reveal about the fears of empires

“Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam”
- Marcus Porcius Cato

The Roman senator Cato the Elder is said to have ended his speeches in the same way: “Furthermore, I hold that Carthage must be destroyed.” At the time, Carthage was not threatening Rome. The North African city was still recovering from its terrible defeat in the Second Punic War, a conflict that was to antiquity as monumental as either of our World Wars. But fear of Carthage was rife in Rome - a testament to how close Hannibal had come to razing the Roman capital. That the Roman Republic was the greater power in the Mediterranean, and that the terms of peace had crippled Carthage’s capacity for future war didn't matter: Carthage had to be annihilated.

When Cato was sent to mediate peace between the Carthaginians and a neighbouring nation who had invaded them, he saw how rapidly Carthage had recovered, and his fear was kindled. It was then that he began his calls for the destruction of Carthage, and the circumstances of his visit to that city provided the excuse. The terms of peace between Rome and Carthage meant that the latter required Roman assent to wage war. Small matter that it was Carthage who had been invaded, for the Romans only required a pretext. Thus, Carthage was indeed destroyed, and every Carthaginian slain or sold into slavery. The city was left in ruins, and cursed to lie forever desolate.

It is said that history repeats itself because no-one was listening the first time… yet some of us do harken to the whispers of the past. An old friend recently offered his opinion that the situation with the United States was parallel to that of the Roman Empire after the elimination of Carthage, the last regional power blocking Rome’s path to imperial glory. The parallels can be rather droll. A Roman senator had to possess a wealth of a million silver coins to qualify for the role... today you will struggle to find a US senator who is not a millionaire. Soon after our chat, I watched in horror as politicians ostensibly on the political left voted unanimously to pay $15 billion to arms manufacturers, while continuing to ignore the plight of their own citizens.

Fighting a proxy war with Russia in the vain hope that it will lead to the overthrow of Putin is a far cry from the outright annihilation of Carthage millennia earlier, but the fears are similar. If no US senator was heard to cry ‘Moscow must be destroyed’, there can be little doubt that ‘Putin must fall’ was whispered in the corridors of power. Before this, there was Afghanistan. The Russians gave up on it before the United States, the British empire before them. Rome never quite took these valleys, but Alexander the Great captured them, and like every other dominion before and after, failed to hold them. There’s a reason this land is known as ‘the graveyard of empires’.

The pride of empires and the fear of imagined threats, however, is far from the exclusive province of the military, and it is not just cities that must be destroyed in the political rhetoric of our times. The metaphors of warfare and genocide now effuse politics of every kind. We just lived through a ‘war’ against a virus which supposedly justified the unleashing of desperate and futile measures that killed and impoverished many more healthy people than the disease. The ghosts of Carthage laugh grimly at our arrogance. Hubris still demands nemesis.

The general in charge of the sacking of Carthage, Scipio Aemilianus, was the adopted grandson of the commander who had defeated Carthage in their last great war. The ‘Third Punic War’ was less a question of battles fought than a grim massacre. In the aftermath, Scipio and his counsellor, the historian Polybius, watched the city crumble as his soldiers plundered its once-great mansions. Scipio quoted Homer: “A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish, And Priam and his people shall be slain.” He saw only too clearly, albeit half a millennium too soon, that the fate which had befallen Troy, Nineveh, Persepolis, Pella, and now Carthage could not be avoided by Rome itself. It is the destiny of every empire to fall. If we do not wish to bear a similar fate, we might consider becoming wary of our own fears about that which must be destroyed.

For Asa.