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I. ‘Delenda est Carthago’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2011

F. E. Adcock
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Extract

The odious behaviour of the Romans in the events that led to the destruction of Carthage has earned the condemnation of historians who see in it, as they have a right to do, a moral issue. The unattractiveness of the Carthaginians, whose history has been written for us by their enemies, is no defence: the bad name does not justify this execution. But the problem remains why the Senate acted as it did, and the examination of it may throw light on Roman policy and the temper of the Roman mind in the middle years of the second century. We need not suppose that the Senate decided to destroy Carthage rather than listen any longer to Cato ending all his sententiae in the Curia with the words ‘ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam’. The motives that led Cato, who after Pydna had spoken up for the Rhodians and apparently had quoted with approval a plea of Scipio Africanus against the destruction of Carthage after Zama, to urge the destruction of Carthage axe part of the investigation. But the main question is why the Senate in the end adopted his policy, if policy it can be called.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Historical Journal , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , 1946 , pp. 117 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1946

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References

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18 Mr G. T. Griffith, who kindly read this paper in typescript, has suggested that the Senate may have doubted the possibility of this in view of the ancient greatness of Carthage as a self-governing imperial State and the intractability of its inhabitants. If that view is adopted (and it cannot be plainly disproved), there is more raison d'fttat in the Senate's decision about the city than is argued above. Against it may be set the fact that the Senate seems to have counted on the present docility of the Carthaginians in expecting their final order to be obeyed (p. 124), and with the city disarmed its control should not have seemed difficult.

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