Tom Holland

We only have the Roman side.

The news of Carthage's fall is sent to Rome and the Senate then send back instructions to Scipio Aemilianus that what remained of the city was to be razed to the ground.

And that a curse was to be laid on anyone who in the future might try to settle there.

So Carthage is to be left abandoned to weeds.

Everyone thinks they did that and they didn't.

No, they don't.

It was a metaphorical flourish in the Cambridge ancient history, which came out in the 1920s.

And it's just spread like wildfire ever since.

But there's no reference to that happening in any of the ancient sources at all.

But, you know, they might as well have sowed the fields with salt because the signal that the destruction of this very famous, very ancient, very beautiful city, the signal sent to the world was unmistakable.

that the Romans are no longer prepared to brook any rival, any hint of disobedience.

And that is a message that is rammed home a few months later.

So people may remember that there's this uprising in Macedon, this pretender to the Macedonian throne has emerged.

I mean, he does not last long.

He gets crushed.

And there's an uprising in Greece, and the Romans deal with that very brutally as well.

And the suppression of that uprising...

culminates in the annihilation of a second famous ancient and beautiful city, and that is the destruction of Corinth in Greece, commanding the isthmus that joins the Peloponnese to northern Greece.

And I think that anyone in the Mediterranean in 146 BC contemplating the destruction in the same year of Carthage and of Corinth

are well aware that an era has dawned in which Rome is so preponderant that effectively no one in the Mediterranean has any real independence left at all.