Destruction of Carthage

[CaptainPanic]

"Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam", said Cato the Elder. (English: "Furthermore I think Carthage must be destroyed".)

 

And it was destroyed. A whole city razed to the ground. Most of its people killed. An empire wiped off the map. Its culture either absorbed or neglected. The Romans made an effort to all but completely erase Carthage from history. It is claimed (but not confirmed) that the Romans even plowed over and salted the earth of the city of Carthage.

 

And today, nobody remembers Carthage, while most know the Roman Empire. At the same time, we know the Romans from cartoons such as Asterix, and from some movies. But what does the average person really know about them? Most is forgotten.

 

The victors are always right in history. The Roman Empire grew to be a political and cultural power for centuries after. A lot of our modern culture and languages are here because of the Romans, but in the every day life, people don't think about the Romans when they speak Latin languages... so the Roman culture is undoubtedly of value to us, but also mostly forgotten...

 

But, if an ancient Roman (a senator from 50 BC for example) could be here today. If he could look back to the Punic Wars, would he say "it was worth it", or would he wonder why they made such an effort to practically erase a culture from history, given the fact that the Roman Empire is also gone for about 1600 years (and the East-Roman empire for 557 years). Its way of living does not exist either today, and that only parts of their culture remain in an adapted form.

 

p.s. If Carthage was not destroyed, then history would undoubtedly have been different... this thread should not be a long speculation on how the world could have looked if Carthage hadn't been destroyed. There is no way to know.

[Marat]

None of us will be alive a century from now, and yet we all strive energetically to make our transient lives better, since now and the near future are important even if infinite time will swallow up and negate everything that happens in the short term. The Romans would have followed the same reasoning. Carthage was destroyed because there was no way to build and extend the Roman Empire (then still rather small) unless this aggressive, militaristic, expansionist power lying right across the narrow strait between Sicily and North Africa was removed as a distracting threat, and also negated as a competitor for the lucrative trade routes throughout the Mediterranean. People like Hannibal, Hamilcar, and Hasdrubal were fanatics in their hatred of Rome, so there was no way that they could safely be ignored, nor could Rome ever feel secure with just 'containing' Carthage by inflicting a minor defeat on it and then forcing it to accept moderate peace terms. The vicious actions to ensure that no new center of power would be established at Carthage to threaten Rome could be rationally defended by arguing that Carthage was such a strategically important location that it had to be neutralized against future development by an enemy. Even so, it became an important urban area again under Roman control.

 

Given all the intermixing of historical forces in the current net product we know as the world today, it is difficult to pick out and isolate the strands which were produced by Roman influence. However, if you view the modern world as a vector product of all the cultures that came before, the Roman Empire's 1100-year persistence won it the right to claim one of the largest contributions to the formation of the world as it now is. It is lucky for us that it was Rome and not Carthage that won the Punic Wars, since from Rome at that time we inherit a tradition of republican rule, rule of law, and preservation of the great cultural achievement of the Greeks, while Carthage at that time was apparently just a shallow, technocratic, barbarous culture, which seems to have practised a religion involving the sacrifice of living babies in ovens!

[Sisyphus]

None of us will be alive a century from now, and yet we all strive energetically to make our transient lives better, since now and the near future are important even if infinite time will swallow up and negate everything that happens in the short term. The Romans would have followed the same reasoning. Carthage was destroyed because there was no way to build and extend the Roman Empire (then still rather small) unless this aggressive, militaristic, expansionist power lying right across the narrow strait between Sicily and North Africa was removed as a distracting threat, and also negated as a competitor for the lucrative trade routes throughout the Mediterranean. People like Hannibal, Hamilcar, and Hasdrubal were fanatics in their hatred of Rome, so there was no way that they could safely be ignored, nor could Rome ever feel secure with just 'containing' Carthage by inflicting a minor defeat on it and then forcing it to accept moderate peace terms. The vicious actions to ensure that no new center of power would be established at Carthage to threaten Rome could be rationally defended by arguing that Carthage was such a strategically important location that it had to be neutralized against future development by an enemy. Even so, it became an important urban area again under Roman control.

 

Given all the intermixing of historical forces in the current net product we know as the world today, it is difficult to pick out and isolate the strands which were produced by Roman influence. However, if you view the modern world as a vector product of all the cultures that came before, the Roman Empire's 1100-year persistence won it the right to claim one of the largest contributions to the formation of the world as it now is. It is lucky for us that it was Rome and not Carthage that won the Punic Wars, since from Rome at that time we inherit a tradition of republican rule, rule of law, and preservation of the great cultural achievement of the Greeks, while Carthage at that time was apparently just a shallow, technocratic, barbarous culture, which seems to have practised a religion involving the sacrifice of living babies in ovens!

 

Well, apparently Roman propaganda still survives. That might cheer up the senator.

[Marat]

I guess you're right! Still, the Carthaginians themselves are in part to blame for the Roman predominance in the propaganda wars, since we are forced to rely on archeological evidence to figure out what they were like, while the Romans have left us a lot more of their opinions in clearly decipherable form.

[padren]

Considering the other incredibly callous and violent aspects of Roman culture (and most of the ancient world) I don't think you can really make a special case about eradicating another culture. What we have gained from the Romans wasn't a result of some charitable gift to future generations - they were largely the result of self-interested advancements to benefit themselves and maintain a violent power structure in their favor. That was the goal of just about everyone with any amount of power back then, the Romans just did it well for a while.

 

Is killing 50,000 out of a cultural group consisting of 50,000 people (thereby erasing it) worse than killing 100,000 people out of a cultural group of 500,000? In the case of the latter, twice as many people die but the culture lives on - so over 2,000 years later we could benefit from the contributions of that culture, but the cost in more lives would seem trivial because they'd be long dead anyway. However, that's just due to our perspective of having come along much later - if any life of any person has any value at all, it shouldn't matter if that life exists in the past, present or future. But somehow being critical of them robbing us of that cultural contribution thousands of years later seems petty when their many other campaigns and policies dwarfed the destruction of Carthage in terms of suffering caused.

 

I am not saying we shouldn't be saddened by the destruction of Carthage, but I think the qualities that make it especially poignant are pretty subjective to our own moment in history and how it affects us.

[Marat]

Should we assume that Carthage became completely extinct ca. 200 B.C. by the Roman viciousness after the Battle of Zama? Since the Carthaginians were ultimately Punic migrants from the initial settlement in Lebanon, and the Lebanese settlement was never wiped out, at least one branch of Punic culture, of which Carthage was a part, survived. Also, Carthage had settlements on various islands in the Mediterranean, in Lybia, and Spain, so something of its culture must have survived there, becoming merged with later Roman and then Gothic overlays.

 

One of the worst Holocausts or mass extinctions of history is now seldom mentioned, and that is the destruction of the various tribes blocking the advance of the Jewish people towards Judea at the time of Moses. The Old Testament describes in great detail how these various tribal nations were completely wiped out by the advancing Hebrews, but in contrast to the Nazi and Armenian Genocides, these mass exterminations don't seem to have made it to the list of genocides it is now illegal for anyone to deny. If they were put on that list, then liberal democratic states would wind up punishing people with the full force of the criminal law for denying stories in a religious text, which would seem to infringe that freedom of religion which is essential in a liberal society.

[Horza2002]

History is written by the victor; as Sisyphus say.

 

There are many cases in English history where this occurs too. One example is the propoganda around Richard III killing his nephews in the Tower of London. From what I remember from histroy lesssons, this appears the standard view only after he was killed by Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworthfield where he became King.