The Aftermath Of Rome's Annihilation Of Carthage | Carthage | Timeline

You are looking at the Hiroshima of the classical world. Below the suburbs of modern-day Tunis, on the coast of North Africa, lies history's most infamous piece of scorched earth, Carthage. In 146 BC, the Romans wiped it out in an act so brutal and so calculating that it has no equal in the ancient world. They torched the city and massacred and enslaved its people. They then destroyed what had survived the flames, brick by brick. This was the price Carthage paid for defying Rome for 150 years. When the order was given, Delenda es Catargo, Carthage must be destroyed. What followed was a Roman holocaust. The eradication of a city and the end of a civilisation. Carthage was not just destroyed, it was annihilated. This was a city that ceased to exist. It's a miracle that anything remains at all. All that are left are the fragments of a sinister people. I want to explore the real life of Carthage. According to the Romans, it was an incredibly dark world of oriental strangeness and barbaric sacrifice. The foreigners from a far-off continent with weird beliefs and perverted practices. But how much of what we know about Carthage is true? And how much of it is just the black propaganda of the Romans? I want to peel away the layers of myth and discover the truth about the Carthaginians. And most important of all, why did Rome have what it took to rule the world? Whilst Carthage was crushed into oblivion. For 100 years, Carthage would remain a cursed wasteland. A scene of total devastation. But that's not the end of the story. Carthage will be brought back from the dead. And who by? None other than its bitterest enemy, Rome. This resurrection wasn't an act of atonement. But a supreme act of empire building. Which marked not just the death of one superpower, but the birth of another. Carthage hadn't just been Rome's only serious rival. In death, it had taught Rome the secrets of empire. Without Carthage, Rome would never have become the global power that it did. On the corpse of their dead enemy, the Romans built a new Carthage. Nothing of the old Punic city remained. Even the land itself had to be completely transformed. Like many ancient cities, Carthage was centred around a hill called the Bursa. And it gave them a wonderful defensive panorama. They could look out to sea and they could look out into the African hinterlands too. When the Romans came, they hacked away the whole summit of the hill and created a completely flat area of over six hectares. And then they constructed a massive concrete platform and built their own city on top of it. And this would be the second largest city in the whole of the Mediterranean world. The Romans were symbolically removing every last trace of the old Carthage. It was a potent way to tell the world, we are your masters now. The new Carthage would be the capital of Roman Africa. Its name says it all, the Colony of Concord. This city was supposed to be a public act of peace. Rome ruled the world, but with reconciliation in its heart, if you were gullible enough to believe it. After the summit of the hill had been levelled, the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of earth and rubble were shoved down the hill, enveloping these Punic houses below. How ironic that this symbol of the reconciliation between Carthage and Rome should bring about the further eradication of the Punic past. This was reconciliation in Roman style. Victory over Carthage helped pave the way for Rome's great step forward. Rome had been a republic for nearly 500 years, but in 31 BC, all power lay in the hands of one man. Not a senator, not a general, but an emperor, Augustus. He created a new Rome as the capital of their new world. Augustus was determined to construct a capital worthy of an emperor. It was said that he found Rome built in brick and left it in marble. And part of that Augustan legacy still stands today. The Pantheon, built by his right-hand man, Marcus Agrippa, as a temple for all the gods of Rome, exudes a sleek, muscular authority. This was a building fit for a city that was taking on the headship of the world. Under Augustus, Rome's history was rewritten. He commissioned Virgil, Rome's greatest poet, to create a spectacular myth that glorified Rome, called the Aeneid. The reason I find it so interesting is that in it, Carthage's history is rewritten too, but with a new Roman spin. From now on, Carthage would be seen through the distorting eyes of their old enemy. But the poem's heart is a tragic love story. The tale recounts the epic adventures of a Trojan prince called Aeneas, who set sail, guided by the gods, to found the Roman people. So, Aeneas is shipwrecked on the North African coast, and here he meets Dido, an exiled queen from Tyre, which is modern-day Lebanon, and she's building a brand-new city, Carthage. Now, you can probably guess the next bit. The future founders of the Roman and Carthaginian peoples embark on a passionate affair. Then Aeneas turns his back on his desperate lover and goes off to Italy to fulfil his destiny. Dido is left with nothing but a ghastly suicide and an operatic vow. After stabbing herself with her lover's sword and throwing herself onto the funeral pyre, her last words to her people ring out across the ocean. Besiege his progeny with hate and all his people that come after him. Let there be no love and no pact between our peoples. Let this be your offering to my ashes. So, the stage is beautifully set now for the everlasting enmity between these two cities and the eventual eradication of Carthage herself. The centuries-old rivalry between these two cities would become nothing more than the bitter legacy of a spurned lover. This was political myth-making on an epic scale. The sheer nerve of it. After 150 years of bitter war, what's Carthage reduced to? Nothing more than a rejected woman crying for her Roman lover. But I think it went deeper than that. In this epic poem lay the seeds of one of history's most powerful smear campaigns. It's continued right up to the present day. Carthage has been branded as foreign, decadent, perverted, cruel and treacherous. But the worst accusation of them all was that the Carthaginians, as a sacrifice to their gods, burnt their own children alive. Rome was the world's most powerful state. It didn't just win wars, it also knew how to win hearts and minds. It was the Romans who perfected the black arts of vilification and propaganda. Nobody did it better. They set about one of the most concerted smear campaigns in history. Painting the Carthaginians as everything the Romans were not. Never mind the fact that the Carthaginians made their home in the Western Mediterranean for nearly 800 years. Once Rome's poisoned pens had finished their work, Carthage had been transformed into a culture of alien, oriental intruders with no business sharing their world. Take, for instance, their language, Punic. In theatres like this, found right across the empire, the Romans performed plays that delighted in ridiculing the Carthaginians. In one play, there was a scene full of what looks like Punic dialogue. And what do we find? The Carthaginians speak gobbledygook, which no self-respecting Roman or Greek could possibly understand. Modern scholars spent years trying to decipher it. But unfortunately, it literally was gobbledygook. This wasn't Punic at all. It was a made-up language to make the Carthaginians look as ridiculous as possible. Just listen to this. This is more than just a good-natured gag. This was a conscious effort to marginalise and misrepresent the Carthaginians as being nothing more than oriental interlopers, the people who had no right to call this their home. Remember, we're talking about the Carthaginians, the people who had ruled the Western Mediterranean for 800 years at a time when Rome was nothing more than Hicksville on the Tiber. The Roman spin doctors did their job so well that the phrase Punic or Carthaginian faith actually came to mean treacherous behaviour. So the very word Punic became an insult. No wonder that the Greek historian Diodorus, writing for a Roman audience, knew exactly what his readership wanted. Just when he thought the Carthaginians couldn't be any worse, he hit them with this. They even incinerate their own children alive to placate the blackest of gods. He wrote, There was in their city a bronze image of Kronos, extending its hands, palms up and sloping towards the ground, so that each of the children when placed there rolled down and fell into a gaping pit filled with fire. Roman slurs, like so much of what they built, have lasted for millennia. Diodorus's horror story set the tone for hundreds of years of future visitors, especially those drawn to North Africa in search of just this kind of lurid tale. In 1857, one of France's greatest writers, Gustave Flaubert, arrived in Tunisia. Inspired by the tales of ancient Carthage, his novel Salambo was born. It's a great read, but it also reinforced the image of the Carthaginians as being sexually perverted religious extremists. In graphic detail, Flaubert describes how screaming children were dragged by their parents to the great statue of the god where they were burnt alive. It's said that Flaubert lived and worked here in this house, overlooking the Punic ports right in the heart of ancient Carthage, the perfect place to let your imagination run riot. 60 years later, just round the corner from here, archaeologists made a series of chilling discoveries which seemed to give credence to his most sinister ideas. 20,000 of these simple terracotta urns have been found here in Carthage. Even now, I find their contents incredibly moving and unsettling. Inside were miniature pieces of jewellery, the charred bones of animals and birds, and the burnt remains of young children and babies. Was it more than just a case of fevered imagination? Could Flaubert and Diodorus before him have actually been right? Was this the sacrificial site where the Carthaginian gods were appeased with the blood of children? These urns were found with hundreds of engraved stone dedications called stelae. Archaeologists called this place the Tophet. Now, the Tophet was a sacred precinct dedicated to two main gods, and one of them was Tanit, and this is her sign here, and it's an abstract figure of a woman with her arms outstretched. And the other was Bael Hamun, the chief god of Carthage, and here's his sign, and we find this everywhere, and this is the crescent moon, and underneath it, the sun. And some people think he was also the god of fire, which fits perfectly with the idea of babies being incinerated here. Scientific research has shown that many of the urns which contain human remains came from the fourth century. So what happened then that could have provoked an infant holocaust? Well, an invasion by a Sicilian Greek army and an attempted coup d'etat by one of Carthage's own generals. They'd thrown the city into turmoil, and in panic response, according to Diodorus, 500 children from aristocratic families were incinerated alive to appease Carthage's bloodthirsty gods. Some of the engraving on this stelae also suggests something sinister was happening here. This is a priest, his right hand raised in supplication, and in his left hand, he's cradling a swaddled infant. Was this baby being offered as a sacrificial victim? For many historians and archaeologists, this evidence is convincing. Diodorus was right. The Carthaginians in times of crisis did sacrifice their children to their gods. It's so easy to condemn the Carthaginians as barbaric baby killers, but there is so much evidence that just doesn't make sense. So if the Carthaginians were really sacrificing their own children, then it seems odd that amongst all these stelae around me here, there's not one direct reference to child sacrifice. So was this a sinister dark secret? Was this a rite that invokes so much shame that the very people that were practising it were cowered into a conspiracy of silence? On some of the stelae, there are these figures of people, and on others, what appear to be urns. Does that really provide compelling evidence for child sacrifice? It wasn't only the Carthaginians who were leaving dedications here. A Greek man called Adrestros also left a stelae. So were the Greeks sacrificing their children too? And what of the Tophet itself? This place where countless guides have spooked tourists with stories of the slaughter of innocent children is in fact a vault built by the Romans. So this rather sinister environment is a very false one. These regimented lines of stelae would never have looked like this. The brutal truth is that archaeologists have completely reconstructed the site. Even the name the Tophet has been made up by modern scholars. Other so-called Tophets have been found throughout the Carthaginian Empire, not only in Africa, but even in Europe. Not all the Tophets were dark, forbidding, tampered with places, like the one in Carthage. Here in San Antioco in Sardinia, there's a Tophet which is very different. Not least because it hasn't been ransacked by archaeologists. Okay, many of these urns are replicas, but the archaeologists who unearthed them have put them back in exactly the same positions that they were found. And some of them are original. Well, the guide suggests that it was here that the babies were set down, ready for sacrifice, and that their innocent young blood would flow down this channel into the pool below. But evidence? There is none. But there is something here that will really disturb you. The mistral, a wind which blows in from the northwest here, combines with these rocks to create the kind of natural bellows. And this was capable of creating a fire of intense heat. And sure enough, down here, archaeologists found a pile of ash full of burnt babies' bones and a tiny button for an infant's garment. The ash also contained the remains of herbs such as rosemary and lavender, capable of masking any pungent smell, like burnt flesh. Those who continue to believe the old story, the Carthaginians murdered their own children, seize on this as evidence that it's true. But I just don't believe it. There's a much simpler and more convincing explanation for what has been found in the Carthaginian Tophets. A vital piece of evidence lies here in the Palermo Museum in Sicily. This simple stone coffin which contains the body of a little girl is a real rarity because archaeologists have found very few infant burials from the Carthaginian period. And this simply doesn't stack up because we know that infant mortality rates were extremely high in antiquity. Four out of ten children didn't make it through to their second birthdays. So where are the children? Where are they buried? Well, there is one place where we know there are lots of dead babies and that's the Tophet. I believe that these children, when they died, were cremated and then placed within that sanctuary. In other words, the Tophet was a children's cemetery, not some sacrificial ground. For a place so associated with death, the Tophet strikes me as being about the cycle of life. I don't believe that these people sacrificed their children. I think they were cremated after their natural deaths. This was a community who understood the preciousness of life. There's a frugality here. Infants who had died were given back to where they'd come from in the hope that new life would spring forth, stronger and better able to survive. The fact that even today the myths still linger so powerfully tells us how well the Roman hate campaign did its job. The problem is we know so much about the myths but precious little about the reality. Underneath the layers of demonization, who were these people? What did they achieve? The answer lies with their conquerors, Rome. They built an even greater empire than Carthage's and what better way to do it than by stealing those secrets of Carthagin in greatness and passing them off as their own. When Rome destroyed Carthage, they tried to rub out every last trace of their old rivals. In Rome's brand new version of history, they naturally omitted the fact that their most powerful enemy had provided them with the template for the Roman empire. With a little detective work, you can follow an amazing trail across Europe and Africa that reveals fragments of Carthage's once great empire. They give a tantalizing glimpse of who the Carthaginians actually were. They'd colonized huge amounts of land. They were the undisputed superpower of the western Mediterranean. Barely any settlements have survived, but one has slipped through the net, Kirkuwan on the north coast of Tunisia. This small Carthaginian town had its heyday in the third century BC, a backwater whose obscurity spared at the attention of the Romans. It's an archaeologist's dream. I love this place and the picture it paints of what the Carthaginian world must have been like. These were Carthaginians enjoying the good life and their houses would have impressed any estate agent. Archaeologists have called this house number 23 Sphinx Street. And here's the courtyard, the central area of the house with its very own fresh water supply. And leading off it, we have a kitchen, very, very compact, but with all the latest mod cons, including a bread oven. And now we come to this marvellous suite of rooms, perfect not only for entertaining guests, but also just for relaxing with the family. No shortage of storage space, you'll see, with these inbuilt cupboards. And also look at this. These were laid by the previous owners. Practical as they're waterproof and easy to clean. Also beautiful. Look at the delicate marble inlay. And now for the piece de resistance. This private bathroom with ample changing area and this fantastic hip bath. Replete with seat and armrests and a basin. Just lie back and luxuriate in the hot water. This house wasn't unique. Most houses in Kirkuwan had their own private bathroom and complex plumbing systems. All this 2,000 years for anywhere in Northern Europe would come close to equaling this level of practical luxury. And this is a backwater and nowhere. Can you imagine what Carthage itself looked like? Sophisticated towns like this dotted the Mediterranean. But where did all the money come from that paid for this fine living? The answer lies in the soil. It's easy to appreciate the brilliance of a civilization when you look at intricately carved sculpture, glittering jewels and brightly burnished gold. But the fields of North Africa were Carthage's real treasures. The humble olive, the fuel of the ancient world. Not only were these a wonderful source of nutrition, but their oil filled the lamps which lit millions of homes. Now the Carthaginians planted thousands upon thousands of olive groves right across North Africa. And these weren't just for domestic consumption, they were also to be exported and converted into hard, ready cash. The olive was a mainstay of the Carthaginian economy. They were unique. Olives and their precious oil could be cooked, eaten and provided light. They were grown on an enormous scale and shipped across the Mediterranean. Carthage had coupled the secret of their farming with a superb trading network and the money poured in. The sea was the hub of their empire. Their ports were placed strategically from east to west, giving them a foothold in every land. They were the first people to see the enormous possibilities of a joined up Mediterranean. For centuries, the Carthaginian fleets had the Western Mediterranean sewn up. Even when a market was closed to their goods, they still found a way in. The wine market was dominated by the Greeks who had a firm stranglehold over it. So the answer for the Carthaginians was a canny bit of marketing. These are two fragments of Carthaginian flasks that were once filled with wine. The inscriptions read Myton and Aris, typical Carthaginian names, but unusually, both are written in the Greek script and in the Greek style. This confused archaeologists until they realised what the Carthaginians' game was. They were replacing that telltale spidery Punic script for Greek. Why were they doing that? Because Greek wine was considered to be the Bordeaux of the ancient world. It was a real mark of quality. Very clever. By the 3rd century BC, Carthaginian wine was being drunk all over the Mediterranean, even in Athens. Here in Souniraxi, in Sardinia, the Carthaginians used their trade to overwhelm the local people. From 1800 BC, the island was dominated by a mysterious people called the Niragi. The metal artefacts and the settlements that they had left behind hint at this being a very sophisticated civilisation. But when the Carthaginians arrived in the 6th century BC, the Niragi way of life would be changed completely. Carthaginian imperialism in Sardinia rarely came in the form of fire and slaughter. Instead, what we find is an influx of Carthaginian goods. Bells, coins and smooth painted pottery. And at the same time, the disappearance of Niragic artefacts. This was conquest by shopping. But as even the most benevolent of trading empires discovers, occasionally the gloves do have to come off. Monte Sirai in the heart of Sardinia, a tactical location that controlled the wealth of the region. Mines, farming, sea and trade. The perfect position to dominate the land. Carthaginians were not the first people to recognise the potential of this site. The Niragi and the Phoenicians had been here first. But Monte Sirai was a site that was worth fighting for. And that's exactly what the Carthaginians did. When archaeologists first came to excavate here, they found great swathes of ash. The remains of the destroyed Phoenician village and the most likely culprits, the Carthaginians. It wasn't only in life, but death too, that the Carthaginians imposed their will upon Sardinia. Another addition the Carthaginians brought the Sardinian landscape were these impressive underground tombs. The Phoenicians before them had cremated their dead. The Carthaginians made a point of burying theirs. The bones would have been kept in these niches here. With each new burial, the old bones would have been swept down onto the floor. Very practical arrangements. But I think this goes deeper than any passing fashions and funeral arrangements. What better way for newcomers to put down roots, to tell the world that this would be their home for generations. These tombs proclaim we're here to stay, us and our ancestors. They laid down the foundations of their culture and left this, their most potent hallmark, the sign of Tannit. I think that this shows a spiritual people who brought religion into all aspects of their lives. Wherever I've been in the old Carthaginian world, Spain, Sicily, Sardinia and North Africa, I've seen this sign. It was easily replicated. A clear and simple Carthaginian icon, almost like the crucifix for Christians. It's the clearest sign that much of Southern Europe was once Carthaginian. Tannit herself remains elusive, but one clue may lie here on these magnificent tombs, once covered in glorious colours. This woman may even represent Tannit herself. Her cloak is folded like the wings of a bird. In her hands, she carries an incense pot and a dove. The symbolism remains a mystery, but the fine work is a testament to the strength of their devotion. And Carthage could afford to spend money on this kind of gesture. Their empire spanned the Mediterranean Sea and reaped huge profits. This was too much of a temptation for a greedy Rome. When Cato urged Rome to destroy its rivals, he was driven by more than a genocidal hatred. As much as anything, this was a business decision. Rome wanted to be a monopoly. They wanted what Carthage had. So before they destroyed Carthage, they stripped it bare. Not just of treasure, but of ideas. Especially those ideas that spoke about empire. Of greatest value were the works of Mago, Carthage's agricultural genius. His advice was so good that even today, over 2,000 years later, the olive groves of Tunisia are still grown to his specifications. Rome was careful to make sure that Carthage never received the credit for her agricultural brilliance. When they torched that amazing metropolis, they made sure that they saved Mago's precious works from the flames. They were then carefully translated into Latin and then equally carefully plagiarised by Roman authors. That financial powerhouse that was Rome was built on the agricultural know-how of Carthage. With Mago's handbooks, Roman farmers could churn out olive oil, wine and grain. But they would do so the Roman way, on an industrial scale. Amid the savage destruction of Carthage, Rome's calculated decision to preserve Mago's work provided them with the keys to unlock the wealth of the Mediterranean. When Rome finally defeated Carthage after 150 years of war, it simply opened its jaws wide and swallowed its rival empire whole. But the new Roman Empire would be different. The whole of the Mediterranean would be reshaped to fit Rome's voracious appetite. The landscape was transformed and parceled up into huge estates. Tunisia, Carthage's Garden of Eden, was turned into a one-crop province. And that crop was wheat, to make the bread that could feed Rome for eight months a year. The rest of the Carthaginian Empire was rearranged like the shelves of a supermarket. Sardinia for vines, Spain for olives, Sicily for grain. Carthage had supplied Rome with the blueprint for its brand-new empire. But Rome, the brazen plagiarist, would find its most important lessons would be from Carthage's mistakes. When the Romans destroyed Carthage, they didn't just help themselves the useful know-how about olives and shipbuilding. They took the whole idea of empire and Romanised it. They stole the secrets to Carthage's success. But just as importantly, they learnt from Carthage's failures. For the next 600 years, their empire didn't just rival Carthage's, it surpassed it. Carthage's flaws would be their last and most important gift to its Roman conquerors. The Romans learnt the art of making people feel Roman, even if they were on the far-flung corners of the empire. It was an empire that was forged in violence, but sustained by subtler forces, by the ties that bind In Carthaginian towns, those ties just aren't evident. This is a really typical street in Kirkuwan, broad and flanked by row upon row of terraced houses. What really surprises me about this place is the lack of public space. Sure, here you have a large public square where people could have mixed and mingled, but that's about it. But is it just because Kirkuwan was a small, insignificant place? Well, archaeologists working in Carthage haven't found any public spaces either. It's extraordinary that from such a vast civilisation not a single great monument survives. Nothing that says, this is Carthage. It's not just magnificent palaces and glittering temples that tell you about a people. It's the mundane and the humdrum, everyday life, like how people wash. And what's clear is that the Carthaginians were doing things as individuals that Romans were doing as a group. 100 kilometres south of Carthage, in the heart of North Africa, is the spectacular Roman town of Duga. It is Roman through and through, identical to thousands of others they built from Carlisle to Mesopotamia. It was at its peak in the second century AD. The lessons that Rome learnt are abundantly clear. At its heart, three of the great institutions of Roman life. The temple, the theatre and the baths. Even though Duga was just a small country town, it still had a wonderful bathing complex for its inhabitants to enjoy. This wasn't just a matter of a quick scrub. They had hot rooms where you could sweat out and scrape off the grime of the day, cool plunge pools to reinvigorate the senses. These baths were a real hive of social activity. You could come here and listen to the gossip about who had been ripping off the imperial tax inspectors. You might even come here and complain about your neighbour. Who you suspected had stolen your best donkey. And what was more, the baths were a real equaliser. Because once you got your kit off, nobody knew whether you were rich or poor. You came to bath houses, a Gaul or a Syrian. But you entered the water a Roman. Duga is full of places like this. Places that bring people together and make them feel like they're part of something greater than just their immediate family. One of the most powerful forces in the ancient world was religion. But the Romans had an answer for that too. Instead of fighting it, they simply absorbed it. Foreign gods became Roman gods. A Latin inscription here in Duga records how a group of local dignitaries built a temple to the goddess Dioclestis on behalf of the emperor Septimius Severus. Nothing strange in that you might say. Roman people building a temple to a Roman goddess on behalf of a Roman emperor. There's more to this than meets the eye. These local worthies were probably the descendants of the Punic and African men who had once lived in this city before the Roman conquest. Dioclestis was the Roman name for Tanit, one of the most important of the Carthaginian deities. And Septimius Severus was not born in Rome, but in North Africa. So here we have African people worshipping an African goddess and dedicating their temple to an African emperor, all in the name of Rome. The Carthaginians could never inspire that sense of belonging. Here in Motia, Sicily, they paid the price for their failings. They could never win the hearts and minds of their allies. They couldn't even rely on loyalty from the Phoenicians, the people who had come from the same stock and were so similar to the Carthaginians that they thought themselves cousins. They even called upon Carthage to help defend them. From marauding Greeks. The Carthaginian army was soundly beaten by the Greeks. But then it became clear the Phoenicians, their so-called allies, had betrayed them. Archaeologists working at Motia have been able to confirm that the Carthaginian defeat was not just the product of Greek military might. While the Carthaginian armies were sweating their guts out on the hot Sicilian plains, their allies from the Phoenician colonies here were busy making fat profits, trading with Carthage's enemy, the Greeks. What made it worse was the actual level of trade increased considerably during this period of conflict. And also, archaeologists who've been excavating some of the Greek cities over here have found that the Phoenicians were also dealing arms too. You needed enemies when you had friends like these. And the brutal truth was that for many of the Phoenician cities in Sicily, the Carthaginians were just another bunch of outsiders interfering in their affairs. And after all, business was business. Much better to maintain cordial trade relations with the Greek cities, some of them only 20 miles away, rather than to bother too much with Carthage, over 200 miles across the sea. Carthage's allies were fair-weather friends. Their empire was based on trade and its people were kept happy with a ready flow of cash. But in hard times, the Carthaginians found themselves very alone. Even at the final battle of Zama, where Hannibal was fighting against the invading Roman armies to save Carthage itself, who was his army made up of? Mercenaries. People whose loyalty lasted only as long as their pay packets did. Compare this with Rome, where it is calculated that around a quarter of their soldiers died fighting in the Second Punic War for the Roman cause. But what happened to the many Carthaginians who hadn't been slaughtered by Rome's legions? How did Rome deal with them? Simple. It turned them into Romans. Don't kill them, just assimilate them. The end result is the same. Carthage vanishes. This is a funerary monument from Sicily from the Roman period. The man is wearing his toga and laurel garland at a dinner party, basically having a good time with good food, wine, women and song. In every way, a very typical Roman scene, or so you might think. But if you look carefully at some of the other decoration, you'll see a very familiar symbol indeed, the sign of Tanit. Even the people who had once been Rome's bitterest enemies had become Roman. In the modern Western world, we fall over ourselves to acknowledge the debt that we owe to the Greeks and to the Romans. In contrast, the Carthaginians have been depicted as lying, cowardly baby killers, as all the bad things that Rome was not. So much fear did they inspire in the Romans that they paid the ultimate price. The total obliteration of their city and people. Rome's savage act of vandalism ensured that their true achievements were wiped out, not only physically, but also from history. All that we are left with is a version of history the Romans wanted us to believe. I think that the Carthaginians made an enormous impact on the ancient world. They provided Rome with many of its best ideas. They gave them the blueprint for a Mediterranean empire. In truth, Carthage was not Rome's opposite, but its forerunner and teacher. The worthy enemy who took Rome to the brink and taught them how to become great.