Shut Up!!
Marginally relevant: I read in H.G. Wells’ Outline of History that after the destruction of Carthage, many Carthaginians converted to Judaism (which was welcoming converts during that period), as being the only Semitic thing left going; so many modern Jews are their descendants. I’ve never read this elsewhere.
I’ve never heard that. There was a Jewish community in Roman Carthage.
Comicus: But we Romans are rich. We’ve got a lot of gods. We’ve got a god for everything. The only thing we don’t have a god for is premature ejaculation… but I hear that’s coming quickly.
what does “need” mean? Carthage seemed to be the only nation constituting a strategic threat to Roman regional power. If Romans were to have a religious aversion to destroying nations, maybe there would have been a moral debate along the lines of “would damage from potential punishments from the gods for an unjust action of destroying Carthage outweigh the benefits accruing from it?” But in practice I don’t think they had such religious scruples, so it made good sense for them to destroy the potential enemy when they were too weak to resist.
As many posters here have pointed out, “need” is a relative term. However, it’s worth remembering that much of Carthage’s power came via trade advantages. Their army consisted for the most part of hired mercenaries, and like the Athenian empire some centuries before the unrivaled Carthaginian navy guaranteed access to a variety of markets.
The first two Punic wars reversed this advantage: Rome saw the military and commercial value of shipyards, and by seizing Sicily and the other islands of the western Mediterranean new farmland could feed Italy’s growing population. The third war, then, could be seen as a natural extension of this trade advantage, and from that perspective, a final war was inevitable.
Captain Amazing’s summary lists the proximate cause for the third Punic war, but IMO the reaction to the supposed re-militarization of a traditional rival was alarmist; it was more likely a convenient excuse to get hold of the rich resources of North Africa. Importing grain from North Africa was a lot easier once the Carthaginians were out of the way, and it should come as no shock the Romans took out Numidia a few decades later in the Jugurthine war.
Public unrest over grain prices in ancient Rome played an important role in the politics of the time, much like oil in the 21st century. It’s probably a little glib to draw a parallel between the destruction of Carthage and, say, the invasion of Iraq (or the demonization of any oil-rich government who doesn’t play ball with the US–see Venezuela), but it’s not completely ridiculous.
In I, Claudius, Robert Graves has Claudius speak of a “Punic Curse” which befell Rome because of its unjust destruction of Carthage (a reason for its being unjust is given, but I forget it), and which took the form of the sudden immense wealth accruing to the senatorial class, eroding Rome’s traditional republican virtue and ultimately destroying the Republic. (And a case could indeed be made for that. E.g., the fall of the Gracchi, whose doomed land-reform struggle was intended to restore the decaying class of citizen yeoman farmers, certainly weakened the Republic’s institutions.) When young Claudius, living in the reign of Augustus, seeks a prophecy of Rome’s fate from the Sibyl at Cumae, she intones:
Who groans beneath the Punic Curse
And strangles in the strings of purse
Before she mends must sicken worse
Her living mouth shall breed blue flies
And maggots creep about her eyes
No man shall mark the day she dies
But whether Romans of Claudius’ time or any time after the Third Punic War actually spoke of any “Punic Curse,” or it is just Graves’ literary invention, I do know know.
It’s Graves’ literary invention, which he uses, in terms of a prophecy, to describe the Julio-Claudians.
Don’t remind them, but I haven’t had a report published in a year and will soon be a “guest” if I don’t get off my ass and start writing.
While the poetic “prophecies” and maybe also the term “Punic Curse” were indeed made up by Graves, I’ve read that its basic theme appears already in some of the Roman historians: namely, that the Roman republic was ultimately corrupted and destroyed by the wealth and commercialization that resulted from the destruction of Carthage.
Weren’t they produced by Phil Spector? 
Meh. I admit I’m not well-versed in Roman history, but this sort of reeks of true scotsmanship, doesn’t it ? As in, “no *True *Roman would become a corrupt merchant, we’re proud warrior race guys ! Morals and values gone to the dogs these days, t’s all the Carthaginian influence and their ghastly heavy metal music, blah blah blah”
Similar arguments were made when the mercantile class started rising from the muck in the mid to late Middle Ages (both in Europe and in Japan) - valorous hearts turned astray by perfid coin, dastardly Lombard and Tchooz bankers undermining the nobility and sanctity of the established order, cats and dogs gnashing their teeth together, etc.
Then it was all the philosophers’ fault, and the revolutionaries, and the Commies, and now the Kenyan Muslims :p. The Empire’s *always *being corrupted and its morals and values threatened by some nefarious and unEmpir-y force.
Rome may have been superstitious but it’s intellectuals like Seneca and the preservation of the great Greek philosophers helped pave the way for the Church Fathers and St. Augustine.
How do you figure the same couldn’t have been said of a Phoenician hegemony ? And where does the destruction of Carthage play a part in the preservation of Greek/Roman philosophy ?
Carthage if they had won would have destroyed the Roman philosophy and system of governance. Thus no Roman philosophy survives. Plus Butterfly Effects would make the world utterly unrecognizable by today.
Hey, maybe so, whatever you say. Hoc bello canis meus non est.* 
I hold no brief for the argument that it was Rome’s destruction of Carthage that eventually led to the downfall of the Republic; I was just pointing out that that idea didn’t originate with Robert Graves but goes back to the Roman historians themselves.
- That’s “I don’t have a dog in this fight”. In purest dog-Latin, of course.
Not necessarily - they could very well have treated Rome the way Rome treated Greece. The Romans razing Carthage to the ground, salting the ruins and consciously destroying every last scrap of its culture was pretty exceptional and extreme, even by the standards of that time. I’m not sure the Phoenicians bore an equivalent ill will towards Rome.
Don’t get me wrong, they were quite probably ticked off by the first two Punic wars :). But enough to have ethnocide (culturecide ?) on the books ? I honestly cannot say.
As for the Butterfly Effect… well, yes. That’s the point of alternative history musings, really. If your position is that the past needed to have happened the way it did *because *it did, and therefore it’s good that it did, there’s not much to talk about. Circular reasonings are self sufficient like that
ETA : Besides, since we don’t have any Carthaginian philosophy left, who’s to say their thinkers weren’t just as good, or even better, than the Roman ones ?
Well I don’t support the ethnocide that followed but the conquest of Carthage was to (ostenibly) prevent Carthage from becoming strong again so it may have been justified in a world that was very much dog eat dog.
How do you know? Roman philosophy was entirely derivative of Greek. The culture of Carthage was destroyed so thoroughly that there is no way to tell if it did not have similar potential, or better, to learn from the Greeks. And the Carthaginians certainly mastered republican government all on their own. (In government, neither Rome nor Carthage seems to have taken any lessons from Greece.) Of course the world would look very different if Carthage had prevailed, but there’s no way to say if it would be better or worse.
Got the book out of the library. Claudius writes: