Siege of Carthage (149–146 BCE)

For almost three years, from 149 to the spring of 146 BCE, Roman armies besieged Carthage, the great North African port on the coast of modern Tunisia. The siege was the central episode of the third and last of the Punic Wars. It ended with the storming of the city, the enslavement of its surviving inhabitants and the destruction of Carthage as a political power, whose lands became a Roman province.

Carthage had lost its overseas empire after its defeat in the Second Punic War, ending in 201 BCE. The peace terms limited its fleet, imposed a heavy indemnity and barred it from making war without Roman consent. Over the next half-century the Numidian king Masinissa, an ally of Rome, repeatedly raided and seized Carthaginian land, and Rome consistently backed him. In 151 BCE Carthage finally fought back, in breach of the treaty, but its army was defeated. Although the city was no military threat, a faction in the Roman Republic had long wanted it destroyed, and when the nearby port of Utica defected to Rome in 149 BCE, war was declared.

A Roman army landed at Utica under both consuls of 149 BCE. Hoping to avoid war, Carthage handed over its weapons, reportedly including 200,000 sets of armour and 2,000 catapults. The Romans then demanded that the population abandon the city and resettle away from the sea. The Carthaginians refused, freed slaves willing to fight, and prepared for a siege behind massive landward walls. A field army of about 30,000 under Hasdrubal operated outside the city. Ancient figures for the Roman force reach 84,000, but modern estimates are nearer 40,000 to 50,000.

Roman attempts to scale and breach the walls in 149 BCE were driven back, and Carthaginian fire ships and night raids caused further losses. A junior officer, Scipio Aemilianus, made his name by saving Roman units from disaster more than once. The commander sent in 148 BCE achieved little, while Hasdrubal took control inside the city and Carthage found allies, including a pretender to the Macedonian throne.

Popular enthusiasm for Scipio in Rome was such that the age limits for office were set aside, and he was given sole command in Africa for 147 BCE. He restored discipline and tightened the blockade, building a huge mole to close the harbour. The Carthaginians answered by cutting a new channel to the sea and launching a newly built fleet, which fought the Romans on equal terms until a collision trapped its ships and many were lost. The Romans then took the quay and built a brick wall as tall as the city's ramparts, from which they could shoot at the defenders.

In the spring of 146 BCE Scipio's troops broke in from the harbour. For six days after reaching the central square they fought through the residential districts, killing those they met and burning houses as they advanced. On the final day prisoners were accepted. Hasdrubal surrendered in exchange for his life, while some defenders, among them hundreds of Roman deserters, burned themselves to death in a temple; Hasdrubal's wife and children are said to have died with them. Around 50,000 survivors were sold as slaves, a small share of the pre-war population.

A senatorial commission ordered whatever remained to be levelled and forbade resettlement; the story that the Romans sowed the ground with salt is a modern invention. Scipio received the name Africanus, like his adoptive grandfather Scipio Africanus. Carthage's territory became the province of Africa, governed from Utica. About a century later Julius Caesar refounded Carthage as a Roman city, and the Punic language survived in North Africa for centuries. Because of the killing and expulsion of its people, the war has sometimes been described as a genocide.

Our 200 BCE map shows Carthage after the Second Punic War, reduced to its African heartland; the 100 BCE map shows the region as Roman territory.