In Our Time - Carthage's Destruction

Episode Date: February 12, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Destruction of Carthage. The North African city of Carthage was rich and powerful, but in the second century BC it suffered a terrible fate. The Greek historian Appian wrote about it: “Then came new scenes of horror. As the fire spread and carried everything down, the soldiers did not wait to destroy the buildings little by little, but all in a heap. So the crashing grew louder, and many corpses fell with the stones into the midst. Others were seen still living, especially old men, women, and young children who had hidden in the inmost nooks of the houses, some of them wounded, some more or less burned, and uttering piteous cries.”When the Romans finally conquered their great enemy in 146 BC, they razed it to the ground, sold off its library and tried to destroy not merely the city but the civilisation based upon it. Carthage was removed from history with such effect that it’s hard to know the city save through Roman eyes.It was a pivotal moment in world history that left Rome as the supreme power in the Mediterranean but after it was gone the ghosts of Carthage haunted Rome and seemed to hint at Rome’s own fate. With Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge; Jo Quinn, Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Oxford and Ellen O’Gorman, Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Bristol

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the North African city of Carthage was rich and powerful, but in the second century BC it suffered a terrible fate. The Greek historian Appian wrote about it.

Then came new scenes of horror, as the fire spread and carried over. everything down, the soldiers didn't wait to destroy the buildings little by little, but all in a heap. So the crashing grew louder, and many corpses fell with the stones into the midst. Others were seen still living, especially old men, women and young children, who had hidden in the inmost nooks of the houses, some of them wounded, some of them more or less burned, and uttering piteous cries. Carthage was destroyed by Rome and destroyed utterly. Its people scattered and its library broken up. The Romans removed Carthage from history, with such effect that it's hard to know, to

know the city save through Roman eyes. But the ghosts of Carthage haunted the citizens of Rome for many, many centuries, and its destruction of the opulent and civilized Carthage was not a moment of triumph, but seemed to be a harbinger of Rome's own fate. The women

to discuss the destruction of Carthage are Joe Crawley Quinn, lecturer in ancient history at Oxford University. Eleanor Gorman, senior lecturer in Classics at the University of Bristol, and Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. Marybeard, we think, if we think or people like you think,

that Carthage was founded in about the 9th century BC. Can you explain the myths around the foundation of Carthage? Yeah, they're great myths. Or at least the ones Romans told are really vivid. The story goes that there was a glamorous, beautiful princess who came from the ancient city of Tyre in the modern Lebanon, a Phoenician city, a trading nation, a Semitic nation, that she fell out with her home city

because her brother, the king, murdered her husband. And in reaction to this, she decides to leave town and she gets on a boat and she hits the African coast. She decides she wants to found a new place for herself and she comes to land and she does a deal with the people living there that they will let her have enough land that can be enclosed by an oxhide.

So they think, oh, that's simple. She just wants to pitch a tent. But actually what she does, because she's a clever old thing, is she cuts up the oxhide into strips and makes it encircle a vast tract of land where she found her new city of Carthage, which means in the Punic tongue new city.

What happens then is that she has this city, but she's eventually, the other members of the town, try to marry her off to a local Libyan. And rather than do this, she throws herself on a burning pyre and dies. Now that's the earliest version. And in that... When we're talking about the 9th century-ish?

Well, you know, in mythic 9th century. Mythic 9th century. We could stretch to 1,500 BC. Oh, you classical historians, what fun you have. We could. And in this early version, that seems to be the earliest Roman version, she's called Elissa. But what interestingly happens is over Roman time,

her story becomes aligned with the Roman story. She has another name, which is much more familiar to us, which is Dido Queen of Carthage, and she plays a part in the great founding story of Rome, because Aeneas, who is a Trojan warrior, who flees Troy when the Greeks sack the city in the Homeric story, Aeneas, who is destined to found Rome, gets washed up in Carthage,

and here in Roman view the two myths meet, and Aeneas arrives on the coast, finds the gorgeous Dido up building her new city, stays there, they fall in love. But Anias eventually, called by his destiny, leaves Dido. She, now in a slightly different circumstance, throws herself on the pyre. But as she throws herself on the pyre,

she curses the Roman nation, and she predicts that vengeance will come from the same. city of Carthage to take vengeance on Ineus' desertion of her. And there is, in Roman story, the origin of the hatred between the two countries. And it's put in what people think of as one of the greatest poems ever written, ineered by Virgil's Aeneid, which is actually based on Homer, so the interconnections grow and grow. It is absolutely central to the neared.

It's what happens in the great love story in books. for, but it's also, I think, that's only one part of the way that the Romans start to jiggle these stories, to align them. And there's one kind of Roman academic antiquarian who decides that actually, and it doesn't quite fit, obviously, that Roman Carthage are so rivalrous that they're actually founded in the very same year. So they kind of come up of twins of the Mediterranean

who are destined to come into conflict. Joe Quinn, by the third century BC, we come into more realistic time, acceptable time. Carthage had become the most powerful, arguably the most powerful city in the Mediterranean. Can you give us a sense of its wealth, its power, its position, because now it is robble in a suburb? Yeah, we're told that it was the richest city in the world in the third century. It was a huge imperial and commercial power. It controlled the African coast from Morocco to Egypt. It controlled Spain.

It also, I think this is really important, controlled the strategic islands in the Mediterranean. Sardinia, Ibiza, a lot of Sicily, Malta, those kinds of places. Ships going anywhere in the Mediterranean had to pass by Carthaginian lands. Let's talk about its ships for a moment. It was notable for its magnificent fleet, well-armed, fast, vastly superfluous. in technology to anything else going around the Mediterranean at the time? Yeah, it was absolutely formidable. And in fact, the only way that the Romans could build a fleet, we're told,

is when they eventually managed to capture a Carthaginian ship and copied it exactly. And that was how they eventually came to overcome them on the sea. Two things are. When you say it's a great trading nation, trading in what? And secondly, it had all these places around the Mediterranean. But it wasn't an empire in the sense that Roe's. became an empire, it had a much looser association with those whom it controlled in a way. Can you answer, I'm sorry to ask two questions. It's a very, very bad thing to do, but there you go.

Well, in the first place, what we find them trading is a huge variety of things. There's a great trade in pottery, not only pottery as containers for other things, a pottery in its own right, with countries from Spain to Phoenicia to the homeland, but particularly Italy. They get a lot of fine crockery from Italy. They send out cooking wear all over the Mediterranean. They're also trading in wild animals for the games, of course, because they have African animals, especially elephants, that kind of thing.

They're trading in fish. I mean, there's a huge sea trade. They make a lot of their profits from the sea. And there's a particular kind of fish source called Garum by the Romans, which they make by leaving fish entrails out in the sun until they're completely rotted. And then it's their equivalent to tomato ketchup, basically. And that is hugely popular.

They export that everywhere. They export dye, purple dye, famous Phoenician purple dye. So they've got this fleet, they have this trade, which they bring up their wealth of Africa, and they go along the North African coast, and they have a special trade with Spain, and they trade in back to all this. Can you just tell them?

how they organised their empire because it was not total domination and total authority in the sense of the Roman Empire was soon to become and was already becoming inside Italy itself or call Italy. It's interesting. In a lot of places they do seem to have been much more interested

in controlling access to commerce, basically. So raising taxes, particularly port taxes. They wanted to be able to know where shipping was going in the Mediterranean and where they could stop it going to certain places. But then there are also, particularly later on in Carthagos history, indications that they were becoming more of a territorial power as well. There are coins from Sicily, for instance,

which say on them, but are sots in the territories in Punec and in the Carthaginian language. And so it seems to suggest that they're beginning to become more of a territorial power. They also became very interested in agriculture. in Africa and so beginning to expand their actual territorial lands there too. It's difficult to imagine cities, ancient cities, when there's not impossible, when there's nothing there.

We go hopefully around Middle East and see these ancient cities and have some indication, and that's very thrilling. But here, if as a Roman I'd gone or we'd gone to Carthage in the third century, what would you have seen that would have surprised and impressed us as a place? I think Romans going to Carthage in the third century would have been completely overwhelmed. It was, as I say, a very wealthy city and unlike Rome, it showed off its wealth. There's a huge amount of monumental architecture, quite different from Rome in this period. Spectacular buildings and the latest Greek and Roman, Greek and Egyptian fashions.

Even the houses, we're told they were six stories high, towering over these narrow streets, covered in the floors of colour of marble, beautiful stucco painting, and it was all in a grid system. So I think going from Rome to Carthage in a third century would have been like going from London to New York. That's the impression people would have had. I think London's okay. That's what Cato the Elder thought about Rome too. Ellen, so if the Ellen are gone,

we have these two cities coming, well, they've been talked about as twins or mirrors in a way, mirrors of each other. When did Rome first start to challenge Carth? Carthaginian power? Well, Sicily, perhaps obviously. It said the historian Plutarch, when he was writing the life of King Pyrrhus,

he said when Pyrrhus left Sicily after fighting in Sicily and in Italy, he said, this is an arena we're leaving behind for the Romans and the Carthaginians. And that's sort of fake prescience. It was perhaps obvious that once the Romans had gained control of most of the Italian peninsula, they were going to start to get anxious about the Carthaginian control in Sicily and indeed Greek control in Sicily

because of the proximity of Sicily to Italy along the Straits of Massana and Regium. Can you give, listen to some idea of the battle over Sicily? Was it quick for the Romans? It's easier we think of the great Roman army machine mowing everything before it. What happened in Sicily? How long did it take?

What sort of a fight was it? It took 22 years and it seems to have been extraordinarily drawn out. It was fought almost entirely in Sicily or in the seas around Sicily. in some places, particularly in the west around Mount Erics, it was extraordinarily bitter and went on for, there was a battle there that went on for about five years. And it wasn't always clear that the Romans were going to have the upper hand.

The war fluctuated through those 22 years. Why did the Romans triumph then after those 22 years? What was less superior? In what lay their superiority? Probably doggedness, though I suspect also that their capacity, to assimilate. I mean, Joe has already mentioned that story about

the Romans capturing a Carthaginian ship and copying it. They didn't really have any enormously effective war fleet before that. But within two years of capturing a Carthaginian ship, the Romans were winning sea battles. And that was partly

by assimilating Carthaginian tactics and partly by adopting their own particular style of warfare. Of course, their lines of supply were shorter, Sicily to southern Italy, Carthage across to Sicily, I suppose. Yes, their lines of supply were shorter. And Sicily also for them was a prize worth having. We know that from about the 5th century,

the Romans were trading with people in Sicily for grain, and the capture of Sicily was an enormously important acquisition for Rome. Even after the acquisition of Egypt later in the empire, Sicily remained the most important grain production site for the Romans, and grain, the daily breaddoll in Rome, was the lifeblood of the city. So owning Sicily so close to Italy that was so rich in grain was extraordinarily important for the Romans. And then they pushed Carthaginians out of other places after Sicily, didn't I?

Yes, so at the end of the First War, they had gained control of the Carthaginian territories in Western Sicily. Immediately after the First Punic War, the Carthaginians faced an extraordinarily bloody mutiny from their mercenary army who of course they couldn't immediately pay and while they were occupied with that terrible war which was called the truseless war

the Romans took the up the truseless war, the war without a truce while the Carthaginians were occupied with that war the Romans took the opportunity to annex Sardinia and Corsica which were also Carthaginian territories and the Carthaginians never forgave them for that and that sort of

rather sneaky acquisition of these two extra territories and the historian Plutarch said that the main cause of the Second Punic War was the rage of Hamilcar Barca who never forgave the Romans for the loss of Sicily and Sardinia and Corsica. But one of the main points, as we move on now, is that although Carthage lost that war and it were to lose the Second Punic War,

they came out richer. Their loss seemed to leave them in a much richer position. We're talking about opulent wealth resources than it did. victors, Rome, and this became, is that true? Yes, I mean, as Joe has already said, Carthage was an extraordinarily opulent city. After the first Punic War,

the Romans imposed an indemnity on the Carthaginians and asked them to pay back money over a 10-year period. Some of the sources say that the Carthaginians asked to pay back all the indemnity in one go after about five years, obviously so that they would no longer be subject to this rather humiliating tax to be paid to Rome. That must have shocked the Roman.

a little bit, who were recovering much more slowly financially from the First War, and 22 years of pouring men and resources into that war. So the Carthaginians recovered financially more quickly from the First War, and yet the resentment against Rome seems also to have been their inheritance from that war. So we know this, so. We know that the Punei Wars, we've got one, we're into two. And we're on to the subject of the programme, Mary Beard, destroy Carthage.

The person who kept saying Delinda Carthago, Carthage must be destroyed in the Senate, was not only a senator, he was an army general, he was a writer, and he was a very important man. He was Cato the Elder. Why did he despise Carthage so much and why did he want it to be destroyed?

Well, that's one of the biggest mysteries of the whole affair, I think. Cato the Elder is an enormously important figure within Roman's own mythology of themselves. He's a dogged, old-fashioned Roman. He's a Romans Roman.

His kind of public policy is always to distance Rome from luxury, from anything that reeked of Greekness. He's supposed to have called Socrates, something like a turbulent

Prackler or something, which one has a certain sympathy, but you can see where he's coming from. And by the time we come up to the third Punit War when Carthage is destroyed, Cato is an old man. And his final crusade is to get Carthage destroyed. And there's the famous story that he is so keen on this that he ends every speech he makes with the phrase, Delenda Est Carthago Carthage must be got rid of annihilated. To some extent, he may have been worried, reasonably worried, about growth in Carthaginian power.

I'm not quite sure I share Joe and Ellen's view about this opulence of Carthage, really. I think it's kind of partly Roman fantasy. But it is pretty clear that after the indemnity had been paid off after the second Punic War, that Carthage had been recovering both its kind of sense of self, I think, and its military and an economic power. And you can back that up to some extent by the archaeology of the site now. You can see that the harbour works are being restored just before the Romans decide to go to war.

So there is one way I think that Cato, who'd been our embassy to Carthage, in 153 BC I think he thinks there is a problem here we've got to finish it off and there's a strategic idea but there's something more going on with Cato's kind of real

obsessiveness about Carthage and that comes out I think in the story of how he tries to convince the Roman Senate that there is really a problem here because after giving one of his speeches he kind of reaches into the folds of his toga and he brings out some gorgeous figs and says, look, these are Carthaginian figs, beautiful, aren't they? And they're only three days away.

Carthage is only three days away from us. Now, part of the point of that much... They're still fresh after three days. They're still fresh, I suppose. But we don't know that he picked them fresh, that. No, he might have bought them down in the forum, you know, all sorts of things. This is WMD territory, you know. This is London could be attacked within 20 minutes.

You're supposed to be questioning the evidence, not me, but I mean... Nobody in there. Nobody's notes. You're questioning the evidence that he might have fixed the figs. Of course, he fixed the figs, you know? He's not dumb. Never mind. Anyway. So we think, gosh, part of the point of this is to say, look how close they are. But I think what everybody also must have known in the Roman Senate is that figs, the word fig is one of the ancient euphemisms for female genitalia. So when Cato brings figs out of his toga, he's, you know, this. This is not just any old fruit.

This is saying something about what Carthage represents, and it represents a kind of lusciousness and a feminization, a kind of luxury, which like Greek luxury, we as Romans, must not tolerate. Jurek Green, Kato could also invoke the figure of Hannibal, who'd become a hero hate figure in Italy, He'd come over the Alps on his elephants, spectacular tactical maneuver. He'd rampage around Italy for 17 or 18 years, scarcely, if ever losing a battle. He'd never taken Rome, though.

How did he play a part in the fear of Carthage, which must have hardened and grown? Well, there was the wonderful story that his father made him swear as a child to carry on his campaign against Rome. His father was the... Both Rome... Both Rome and Carthage had sort of generations of generals within one family. Exactly, exactly. So Hannibal's father made him promise taking an oath to the gods to carry on his crusade against Rome.

And that's very much the way that the Romans saw Hannibal as somebody who was an extraordinary general, often said by Romans have been the best general that ever lived, but also somebody of an absolutely implacable hatred of Rome. And so they were very confused by the fact that when he had the chance and he had a very good chance, he didn't take Rome. He carried on past because that actually wasn't what he wanted to do. That wasn't what he was there for. It wasn't to take over another country. By coming onto the mainland, the elephants are maybe an extra, but there must have been terrifying.

Coming on to the mainland, he personified for Romans and for Italy that this was a power. This was a great power. It wasn't just great ships at sea. men and armies, the idea was Roman army toe to toe could beat everybody and at that says, the Hanibos said, this was proven untrue. Absolutely. And of course a lot of Italians joined him. And that was another big problem for Rome, that their allies, even in

Italy, were discontented. And once they saw the promise of something better, they would go. I think what's interesting about these points that are being made about Hannibal is that the Romans consistently represent Hannibal as this monster who wants to destroy Rome, as Joe has pointed out. yet, as Joe's also pointed out, the evidence shows that he was not interested in destroying the city. What this shows

is that Romans are starting to think beyond their city-state. They're thinking as an empire. And if you attack any part of their empire, it's as if you're attacking their city. So when Hannibal starts the war, when he attacks the Roman ally town of Saguntum in Spain, the historian Livy says the Romans wept as if

their own city had been taken. And that's part of their imperialist imagination. So he's the second puer. Munich War, which he eventually loses at a set battle. He rushes back to Carthage and Devon Carthage comes back to set battle, and he loses that battle. Now, what triggered the third and final war, which leads us to the destruction? We haven't got to... Anyway, what led us to the third and final Punic War? Well, we've had the story of Cato and the Figs, so we can see that feeling in Rome,

certainly some people in Rome are feeling the Carthage remains a potential threat. one of the requirements that was placed on Carthage after the second Punic War was that they were not allowed to have an army anymore and they violated that part of the agreement in the years leading up to the third war because they were goaded really beyond endurance by the Numidian king to the west of them

who was continually encroaching upon rich territory of theirs and since they couldn't fight him off. They always had to appeal to Rome to mediate between them. And the Carthaginians certainly felt that the Romans always found in Numidia's favour. Numidia was an ally of Rome and had helped Rome in the Second Punic War. So eventually a pro-war party in Carthage said, enough, got together an army, went out against the Numidians, was resoundly and humiliatingly beaten. And then they had nowhere left to go. A moment, Joe, now come to you. Yeah, I think one thing is really important to remember here is that opinions in Rome

were different about this, of course, that, you know, we all know the story about Cato ending all his speeches, Delanda S. Cartago. But what's less often said is that Scipio Nasica, another extremely eminent senator, at the same time, would always

reply, and I believe that Carthage should be spared. So there's a huge amount of difference of opinion in Rome, and there's also difference of opinion over what exactly the best way to go to war is. Because what we're told in the run-up to the war itself is that even when the Romans have decided to go to war, and they apparently have decided for some time

that they're going to go to war against Carthage, but they need an excuse, and they need an excuse that will appeal to the rest of the world because they know that they need to carry them with them. And so they're waiting and looking for some reason. And then they're very pleased when Carthage gets into this war with the Numidians, because that gives them the excuse

to do what they were already going to do. Marybeard, then the Romans begin a three-year siege in 149 BC. On the surface, it seems to me from when I've read, the Carthagin should have been in an extremely weak position. They'd had to give up 300 of their young Irish secretes, presumably military men, have high quality. They'd had to give up a lot of money. They'd had to give up their arms.

And so what did they have to fight with that kept them going for three years, which should? Well, they have a fantastic sight. The fortifications at Carthage are surrounded by, largely by water. So it's a wonderful place to hold our inner siege. And the stories we're told is that basically they've got desperation, pluck, and they can manage to sit it out combined with the fact that, frankly, the Romans were hopeless. They send out a couple of generals who, just don't get their acts together properly.

Now, there's a bit of a problem about this because the way we know about the story is actually quite rarely for an ancient campaign. So it really does go back to a historical eyewitness account because the historian Polybius was actually present at the final day newmour when his patron, Scipio Amulianus, finally does take the city.

and it's at the end of three years, it's quite clear that an awful lot of the narrative that we're told about how hopeless the earlier generals were is to bolster the reputation of Scipio. But even taking that into account, I mean, we have a tremendously fixed idea that the Romans are invincible, and they've convinced us,

they convinced themselves and they've convinced us they were invincible. But looking at some of these occasions, both when they're fighting in Spain in the 150s and then when they start to besiege Carthage. They make tactical errors. Their troops are hopelessly untrained. They're kind of on the lookout for anything they can take back home to the wife and kids. And we really haven't got their mind on the job.

As the bane of the literalist, I'm sorry to bring this to bear, Mary Annette. But if they had given up all their arms around, what did they fight with? Oh, all sorts of things. things they fight with. Did they buy weapons then from the Numidians, their old enemies? How did they get all of the stuff to fight with? They make it.

Really? Yeah. Do it yourself. It's do it yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They get all the men and women, and as many of the children as they can round up. They turn all the temples into workshops.

They remake their port. They make a whole fleet out of, you know, sort of, it's Blue Peter stuff. They make a fleet of 50 ships, and the Romans are absolutely amazed. when suddenly they think the fleet has been destroyed and this whole new fleet sails out from the besieged city. They don't actually do too well in the battle afterwards.

But it must have it was really great. But there's wonderful stories about the whole city clanging with the metal working as they're turning out, they have a quota every day. They have to turn out 500 shields, 300 swords, and they're just taking metal from everywhere to do it. And we wonder if we quite believe this. Melvin's saying we've got to examine our swords. this is more carefully.

I think this picture of Carthage as the kind of blue Peter doing yourself weapons battery is also something of a thing. I could really do with that blue Peter in this discussion. The Polybian imagination. Well, perhaps the Hydra is a better example or something slightly.

There is something slightly, and we're back to the fig again and how the fig symbolises Carthage so much. There's something kind of horrifically self-renewing about it. You keep taking stuff away in it and it just grows things, it grows fleets. But finally, Skippio came along, the son of Scipio,

who had beaten Hannibal at the battle, or grandson of Scipio, so just as Hanim was the son of. And he conquered it, he cracked it, he got into the citadel. Force of numbers by that time, starvation, I presume. Military genius on Scipio's part would be the Roman. Do we have to test that? Of course we have to test that. You construct a mole across the harbour, which finally turns out to be a blockade,

which is more or less successful. And the story is told is that, you know, thank goodness in the end, you know, someone who can actually control the troops and get this war finished, comes along. But the poor old Carthaginians, you know, after this, you know, the do-it-yourself weapons factory, they're done in.

Right, now, I think the big question is you've got, give or take, you're doubt, and I'm very pleased, I mean, I'm seriously, it's good that you're, supposed to not agree with each other, you're different historian. But whether Carthus was opulent or not, it was opulent enough. It was a rich city, it was a rich enough.

Maybe it was very rich. all these crafts why did they want to destroy it utterly raise it to the ground kill everybody they could and the rest enslave make it rubble why did they want to do that

to that extent do you understand well it's worth it's worth putting in context that in the very same year the Romans also destroyed utterly the opulent and maritime city of Corinth

in Greece and several people have seen these two events in alignment that they're sending out a message to the Mediterranean world. So this is to teach the others? More or less, yes. So this is a... Well, we've moved to a new stage of Roman imperialism

and it's a stage that the Romans themselves, interestingly, look back to and see a turning point between a kind of third, second century version of how they control their bit of the Mediterranean. to becoming actually effectively the controller of the whole of the Mediterranean Sea. And they also see that turning point and that kind of destructive capacity of empire as necessary and problematic. And Roman historians looking back to this period are going to say,

what turns us into the kind of a, well, luxurious empire we now are, because in the end they're all Cotonians underneath, really. You know, scratch a Roman, and you'll find a little cato there, however much they lost a lot. Or steer, high-minded. Sort of, you know. The military man is the best man who want short rations. And other historians are little catoes, too, to quite a considerable degree. And like Joe, they think that Carthage is terribly opulent.

And actually, it has to be destroyed. And my feeling is... You mean, you're sort of... We're talking about a sort of model cleansing here. There's a moral cleansing, and part of the reason for telling the stories so often about how rich Carthage is and how they can manufacture weapons out of nothing is, of course, to justify the fact that it's destroyed. I'm sorry. And can I just bring Jo in it?

Have we covered all the grounds? These are all the reasons, this combination is why they destroyed it, utterly raised it, even cut the dogs into. I mean, these are all the reasons. It's shock and awe, isn't it? And I think what Ellen says about the destruction of Corinth in the same year is incredibly important. And then what's interesting is that 100 years later, both cities are refounded in the same year. So in 146, it's useful to Rome to completely destroy these cities. And 100 years later, it's suddenly useful to make them arise again.

Let's stay with the destruction by just a moment longer. Alan, would you like to come in on this? Well, another aspect of what both Joan Mary have been talking about is the interesting moment when, just before the Third War, when the consul Senserinas in Appian's account, says to the Carthaginians, you will have to move inland. And actually what he does is... He made 15 kilometres away from the city.

He quotes Plato's laws to them and he says, Plato says, you can't be a good city unless you're more than 10 miles inland. And this becomes part of their moralising discourse. Carthage and Corinth, in a sense, destroyed themselves because they were too near the sea. Rome conveniently is 12 miles in land. If it were nine miles in land, I suspect they wouldn't be quoting later. Does that really play? Does that really count?

It seems almost a sort of, I mean, in a not particularly flattering use of the word, an academic point. I think it fits in with the way in which the Romans are, on the one hand, physically destroying a city. And on the other hand, producing a whole set of different discourses, some quite intellectual, which are showing these destruction as necessary. It's beyond an excuse. excuse, I think, and into the idea of Rome's imperial destiny. If we destroy something, it's because it's necessary

to destroy it. But at the same time, and I think this is what makes Carthage really interesting and continues to be interesting for the Romans, is that, I mean, we've been portraying it a bit like, you know, in you come, destroy Carthage utterly, then go home and then say

whoops, what have we done a bit later. But the key moment at the destruction of Carthage for the later imagination is an eyewitness moment by Polybius, who's standing next to Scipio, when the city has been done in, and Scipio's crying. And Scipio then quotes a line of Homer about how Troy will indeed one day fall. So Polybius rather surprisingly doesn't get the point of this instantly, and he says in his history, so I plucked up courage to ask, I asked, I plucked up courage to

ask him what he meant. And Scipio mutters and mumbles, but then says something to the effect of there's a Homeric destiny here. And just as Troy, which is Rome's ancestor, was actually destroyed utterly by the Greeks. And we have just destroyed Carthage. One day, I think, there's an awful possibility that the same thing will happen to Rome. And so I think what's very, it's very interesting about this destruction is that it's not only a bit of Roman horrible imperialistic militarism. It's a destruction which makes them reflect on the nature of Rome's place in history and on the nature of how militarism can rebound on you. And so it becomes a sensitizing moment for the Romans or for the Roman elite intellectuals as well as just a kind of military job well done.

But, Ellen, this at the time was a, sorry, Joe, this at the time was a triumph, wasn't it? Literally a triumph. He had a triumphal entry into Rome, Skippew. This was considered to be a great victory. And perhaps even at the time they thought this is the beginning of a new Roman empire. As Mary said earlier, the control of the Mediterranean. I think that's right, but that didn't last. The Romans came rather quickly to see the destruction. of Carthage as the beginning of the end for Rome,

because the Roman historians take the view that losing the greatest threat that the city had meant the city no longer had anything to live up to, it could just fall back on its own excesses and decadence and the incredible wealth that come in from Carthage. That's another important thing to remember about the destruction, is not only does Scipio come back to Rome with this extraordinary triumph showing off riches beyond anything anyone had seen, they say,

but they also came back with a vast amount of cash for the city and they built an aqueduct, the aquamarchia, two years later, which completely transformed the way that Rome could manage itself. It suddenly brought in vast quantities more fresh water into the city. Can I just ask you, and this business of It is the End, we're talking about one form, 6 BC, it's got more than five centuries to go with this.

It's got us to conquer for a start. That's pretty tricky. And a whole lot of those four centuries. It's got a long way to get. It's got a push up into France. It's going all over the place. So what is this? Is this, are you all being a bit sort of indulgently retrospective?

Did they sit around in 1-4-6 BC and said, this is the end? Every text we have is indulgently retrospective. Oh, that's all right. But that's actually the fascinating thing. the Romans obsess about Carthage and most of the texts we're talking about are coming 150, 200, 300, 300 years after the destruction of Carthage

not only because they see it as the site of the birth of empire, not only because they see its destruction as the site of the birth of decadence, but also because they see the curse of Carthage continuing to work itself out in the civil wars that rack their country thereafter.

And that's the paradox. That really is the paradox that lies at the heart of Roman imperialism that we've been taught constantly to see the Romans as sort of unreflective bludgeoners who go out and conquer the world and don't give much of a thought to the consequences. What is really interesting about the Roman Empire is that they're constantly seeing it as the end.

As they expand into Gaul, Britain, Dacia, anywhere you like to name, they can still simultaneously have this view that somehow they have been undermined by their own conquest, that actually the centre of the empire has been corrupted, feminized by particularly these conquests in 146, when Rome for the first time gets wealthy. Were there any Carthaginians still, we know they were enslaved, but there must have been Carthaginians should travel to other places around the Mediterranean.

There must have been some in Rome, there must be some in Spain. Did the Carthaginians as a group have any significant existence after this destruction? Definitely. I mean, it's often said that Africa was never as Phoenician as after the destruction of Carthage. The language carries on for another five or six centuries. The Punic language. The Punic language, yeah, especially in rural areas. But in cities, for another two or three centuries, you get public inscriptions in Punic.

The gods carry on. Sometimes they get Roman names. They're very much the same Phoenician gods. You get sanctories all over Africa, well outside the... the area that Carthage ever controlled, which looked just like Carthaginian sanctuaries, you get the names of Carthaginian magistrates. They called their equivalent of the consul,

the chief magistrates of the city, Sufateen. And after the destruction of Carthage, you suddenly get Sufetim all over Africa. And that's sort of mirrored in the Mediterranean as well. There are diaspora communities everywhere. Murray. And that's where we need to pick up the point Joe made a bit earlier about Carthage actually being.

as a city refounded by the Romans. They try and settle people there. Actually, only 20 years later, that doesn't succeed. But when, under the dictatorship of Julius Caesar and then later his adopted son, Augustus, the first emperor,

they rebuild Carthage as, then it really is the New York of the Mediterranean world. And in a sense, actually, it's funny that what you see now, mostly when you go and visit this site in Carthage, Although you go with images of Hannibal, what you're seeing is this tremendously fantastic Roman city,

which finally has a great history there. Finally, Alan, do you think that, is there anything in the literature whether Romans thought it was a mistake, a serious mistake, to destroy Carthage? Oh, time and again, and we're back to Cato and Scipio Nasica here. Time and again, they replayed that debate between Cato and Scipio Nasica. They said Cato was the best orator of his age, but Nassica was the best man of his age.

and they said Nassica was the one who had got it right. He said, we need to keep this enemy here because if we don't have an enemy, we will collapse into moral decline. And then they always say, and he was right, he was the one who saw what was going to happen. It's interesting, the running of moral decline alongside sort of military empire growth.

Well, thank you very much, Mary Beard, Joe Quinn and Eleanor Gorman. Next week we'll be discussing Indian Astronomy and the Grand Observatory at Jaipur. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.