Phase 7

The Fall of Carthage

The Third Punic War (Latin: Tertium Bellum Punicum) was the third and last of the Punic Wars fought between the former Phoenician colony of Carthage and the Roman Republic. 

  The peace treaty at the end of the Second Punic War required that all border disputes involving Carthage were to be arbitrated by the Roman Senate and required Carthage to get explicit Roman approval before going to war. As a result, in the 50 intervening years between the Second and Third Punic War, Carthage had to take all border disputes with Rome's ally Numidia to the Roman Senate, where they were decided almost exclusively in Numidian favor.

  In 151 BCE, the Carthaginians considered that their debt to Rome was paid, meaning that, in Punic eyes, the treaty was now expired. (French, Peter (2010). War and Moral Dissonance) But not so according to the Romans, who instead viewed the treaty as a permanent declaration of Carthaginian subordination to Rome akin to the Roman treaties with its Italian allies. Moreover, the retirement of the indemnity removed one of the main incentives the Romans had to keep the peace with Carthage – there were no further payments to be made.  

Farmland of Ancient Carthage

 The Romans had other reasons to conquer Carthage and her remaining territories ("The Histories". Fordham University).   By the middle of the 2nd century BCE, the population of the city of Rome was about 400,000 and rising. Feeding the growing populace was becoming a major challenge. The farmlands surrounding Carthage represented the most productive, most accessible and perhaps the most easily obtainable agricultural lands not yet under Roman control. (Appian's History of Rome: The Punic Wars §§66-70)
  In 151 BCE Numidia launched another border raid on Carthaginian soil, besieging the Punic town of Oroscopa, and Carthage launched a large military expedition (25,000 soldiers) to repel the Numidian invaders. As a result, Carthage suffered a military defeat and had to pay another fifty-year debt to Numidia. Immediately thereafter, however, Rome showed displeasure with Carthage’s decision to wage war against its neighbor without Roman consent, and told Carthage that in order to avoid a war it had to “satisfy the Roman People.”
  In 149 BCE, Rome declared war against Carthage. The Carthaginians attempted to appease Rome, and received a promise that if three hundred children of well-born Carthaginians were sent as hostages to Rome the Carthaginians would keep the rights to their land and self-government., At Utica now a ally of Rome a Roman army of 80,000 men gathered there ( Scullard, Howard Hayes: A History of the Roman World, 753 to 146 BCE).   The consuls then demanded that Carthage hand over all weapons and amour. After they were handed over, Rome additionally demanded that the Carthaginians move at least sixteen kilometers inland, while the city itself to be burned the ground.  When the Carthaginians learned of this, they abandoned negotiations. The Romans attacked and put the city under siege, officially beginning the Third Punic War.

Fortress of the City of Carthage

  After the main Roman expedition landed at Utica, the consuls Manius Manilius and Lucius Marcius Censorius launched a two-pronged attack on Carthage. The army of the Carthaginian Generals Hasdrubal the Boeotarch and Himilco Phameas repulsed them.

  

The Consul Manius Manilius

History does not record much about Hasdrubal the Boeotarch.  Boeotarch is a Carthaginian office, the exact function of which is unclear; it is not the same with the Greek office of the same name. Manilius lost more than 500 men to the Carthaginian cavalry while collecting timber around the Lake of Tunis which surprised them. (Appian, Punica 97-99)

Map of Lake Tunis and Carthage

 A worse disaster fell upon the Romans when their fleet was set ablaze by fire ships which the Carthaginians released upwind (Appian, Punica 99). 

Fire ships sent to set the Roman fleet afire

  Consul Calpurnius Piso replaced Manilius in 149 BCE, after a severe defeat of the Roman army at Nepheris, a Carthaginian stronghold south of the city. In 148 BCE, Piso was defeated while attempting to storm the city of Aspis, near Cape Bon.  Undeterred, he laid siege to the town of Hippo Greta (modern Bizerte, the modern capitol of Tunisia) in the north, but his army was unable to defeat the Punic army there before winter and he had to retreat.

The Consul Calpurnius Piso 

  When the news reached Rome of Piso’s setbacks, the senate elected another consul to take his place. The Romans elected the young but popular Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus as consul, a special law being passed to lift the age restriction. Scipio restored discipline, defeated the Carthaginians at Nepheris, and besieged the city closely, constructing a mole to block the harbor. Scipio Aemilianus's intervention saved four cohorts trapped in a ravine (Appian, Punica 102-105).  Nepheris fell to Scipio in the winter of 147-146 BCE (Appian, Punica 126-130).   

Scipio’s advance on Nepheris

  

The Carthaginians manned the walls of Carthage and defied the Romans, a situation that lasted for two years. In this period, the 500,000 Carthaginians inside the walls transformed the city into a huge arsenal. They produced about 300 swords, 500 spears, 140 shields and 1,000 projectiles for catapults daily (Appian of Alexandria, The Punic Wars, "The Third Punic War").  

Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus was the grandson of Cornelius Scipio Africanus

  In spring 146 BCE, the Romans broke through the city walls of Carthage, but they were hard-pressed to take the city. Every building, house and temple became a stronghold and every Carthaginian had taken up a weapon. They were inevitably gradually pushed back by the overwhelming Roman military force and destroyed. The Romans methodically moved slowly, capturing the city house-by-house, street by street and fighting each Carthaginian soldier who fought with courage born of despair. 

The Battle of Carthage

Eventually after hours upon hours of house-to-house fighting, the Carthaginians surrendered.    Many Carthaginians died from starvation during the later part of the siege, while many others died in the final six days of fighting. An estimated 50,000 surviving inhabitants were sold into slavery. The city was then set afire and leveled. 

Carthage set Afire and Burning

 Before the end of the battle, a dramatic event took place: 900 survivors, most of them Roman deserters, had found refuge in the temple of Eshmun, in the citadel of Byrsa, although it was already burning.  The land surrounding Carthage was eventually declared ager publicus (public land), and it was shared between local farmers, Romans, and Italians.

The Ruins of Byrsa

 The Carthaginians negotiated their surrender, but Scipio Aemilianus expressed that forgiveness was impossible either for Hasdrubal, the general who defended the city, or for the defectors. Hasdrubal then left the Citadel to surrender and pray for mercy, (he had tortured Roman prisoners in front of the Roman army (Appian, Punica 118)). At that moment, Hasdrubal's wife allegedly went out with her two children, insulted her husband, sacrificed her sons and jumped with them into a fire that the deserters had started. The deserters too then hurled themselves into the flames, (Appian of Alexandria The Punic Wars, "The Third Punic War") upon which Scipio Aemilianus began weeping. . He recited a sentence from Homer's Iliad, (Homer: Iliad; book 6) a prophecy about the destruction of Troy, that could be applied now to Carthage's end. Scipio declared that the fate of Carthage might one day be Rome's (Polybius: Histories, Book XXXVIII).  In the words of Polybius:

  “Scipio, when he looked upon the city as it was utterly perishing and in the last throes of its complete destruction, is said to have shed tears and wept openly for his enemies. After being wrapped in thought for long, and realizing that all cities, nations, and authorities must, like men, meet their doom: recollecting that this happened to Ilium, once a prosperous city.  To the empires of Assyria, Media, and Persia, the greatest of their time, and to Macedonia itself, the brilliance of which was so recent, deliberated on the verses escaping him, he said:

“A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish,

In addition, Priam and his people shall be slain.

In addition, when Polybius speaking with freedom to him, for he was his teacher, asked him what he meant by the words, they say that without any attempt at concealment he named his own country, for which he feared when he reflected on the fate of all things human. Polybius actually heard him and recalls it in his history (Polybius XXXVIII, 5 The Fall of Carthage).”

  Carthage was systematically burned for 17 days; the city's walls and buildings were destroyed. The remaining Carthaginian territories became the Roman province of Africa.  Utica the Punic City that switched loyalties at the beginning of this War became the capitol of the Roman Province of Africa.

The Remains of Roman Utica 

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