Destruction of Carthage and Corinth

In 146 BC, Roman armies razed two of the greatest cities in the Mediterranean world within months of each other: Carthage in North Africa and Corinth in Greece. The coincidence was not accidental. Both destructions were the culmination of a century of relentless expansion, and their combined consequences — in capital, slaves, political prestige, and urban ambition — left their mark on the city’s skyline and its politics in equal measure.

The Third Punic War had been a long time coming. After the Second Punic War, Carthage had been stripped of its overseas territories and its Spanish silver mines, burdened with a massive indemnity. Yet it recovered with uncomfortable speed, continuing to dominate agricultural markets and repay its debts far ahead of schedule. In the Roman senate, Cato the Elder made Carthaginian resilience into an obsession, ending every speech with the insistence that Carthage must be destroyed. War was declared in 149 BC, and after three years of siege the city was levelled, its population sold into slavery, its fields rendered uninhabitable. The Greek historian Polybius, embedded with the Roman commander Scipio Aemilianus, recorded that Scipio wept as the walls fell. When asked why, he replied that he was thinking of the inevitable fall of Rome itself. The destruction of an entire civilisation produced in Scipio a moment of terrible self-knowledge.

In the same year, the Roman general Lucius Mummius suppressed a rebellion by the Achaean League and sacked Corinth, the wealthiest port city in Greece. The city was levelled, its artworks shipped west, its inhabitants enslaved. Like Carthage, Corinth would eventually be refounded as a Roman colony — Julius Caesar planted both — because the strategic logic of each site was too obvious to ignore. But in 146, the message to the wider Mediterranean world was unambiguous: Rome’s patience had limits, and those limits had been reached simultaneously in the west and the east.

The material consequences from sacking Carthage and Corinth flooded into Rome almost immediately. Spoils, tribute, and the proceeds from mass enslavement poured capital into the city, and it went directly into stone, concrete, and, in small amounts, marble. The 170s and 180s had already seen the first basilicas framing the Forum and the first documented triumphal arches, but it is after 146 that the building program accelerates into something recognizably monumental. Rome acquired its first paved roads in great basalt blocks, its first stone bridge, its first marble temple (dedicated to Jupiter Stator in the Circus Flaminius), and, by around 140 BC, the Aqua Marcia, the most ambitious aqueduct the Romans had yet attempted.

The political ramifications were equally profound. Military success raised the profile of individual generals and their families, sharpening aristocratic competition for commands and triumphs at precisely the moment when the influx of slaves was displacing Italian smallholders and concentrating land in fewer hands. The same conquest that raised Rome’s first marble temple was already displacing the smallholders and inflaming the aristocratic rivalries that would eventually tear the Republic apart.

FURTHER READING

1. Crawford, Michael H., and Fllippo Coarelli. “Public Building in Rome between the Second Punic War and Sulla.” Papers of the British School at Rome, vol. 45, 1977, pp. 1–23. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40310858. Accessed 26 June 2026.
2. Eckstein, Arthur M. Rome enters the Greek East: from anarchy to hierarchy in the Hellenistic Mediterranean, 230-170 BC. John Wiley & Sons, 2012.
3. Hoyos, B. Dexter, and Dexter Hoyos, eds. A companion to the Punic Wars. Chichester, UK:: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
4. Welch K. A new view of the origins of the Basilica: the Atrium Regium, Graecostasis, and Roman diplomacy. Journal of Roman Archaeology. 2003;16:5-34. doi:10.1017/S1047759400012976