Carthage
The Phoenician trading empire of North Africa that rivaled Rome for the western Mediterranean until Rome besieged, burned, and erased it in 146 BCE.
For six centuries Carthage was the richest city in the western Mediterranean, and then Rome decided it should not exist. In the spring of 146 BCE, after a three-year siege, Roman legions burned the city for seventeen days, sold the survivors into slavery, and demolished what remained. The most successful commercial empire of the ancient world was deliberately erased, and the erasure was the point.
A trading superpower
Carthage began around 814 BCE as a colony of Phoenician Tyre, on the coast of what is now Tunisia. Punic, the Roman word for Carthaginian, is simply Latin for Phoenician. Where Rome grew by conquering land and farming it, Carthage grew by trade: its ships worked the whole western sea, and its network reached from North Africa across Sardinia and much of Sicily to the silver mines of southern Spain. It fielded fleets and hired armies paid for by that commerce, and for a long stretch it was simply the dominant power west of Greece. Governed by a merchant oligarchy of wealthy families rather than a king, the city grew fabulously rich; its harbor, a great artificial basin with a circular military port at its heart, could shelter and repair scores of warships at once.
Three wars with Rome
Two ambitious republics could not share one sea. The three Punic Wars, fought between 264 and 146 BCE, decided who would rule it. The first (264 to 241) was a long naval slog over Sicily that Rome narrowly won. The second (218 to 201) was Hannibal's war: he crossed the Alps, wrecked Roman armies at Cannae, and roamed Italy for years, yet Carthage still lost once Rome carried the fight to Africa. By the third war Carthage was no real threat, but the senator Cato the Elder reportedly ended every speech, on any subject, with the same line: Carthage must be destroyed.
The salting that never happened
So it was. Rome manufactured a pretext, besieged the city, and in 146 BCE took it street by street. The popular story that the Romans plowed the ruins and sowed them with salt so nothing would grow is a myth: no ancient source mentions it, and it surfaces only in books from the nineteenth century onward. The reality was blunter. The site was cursed, the population enslaved, the territory annexed. A century later Julius Caesar and Augustus founded a new Roman Carthage on the same ground, which grew into one of the great cities of the empire.
Today the ruins sit in a suburb of Tunis, the circular military harbor still visible as a quiet pond. The phrase Carthaginian peace, a peace imposed by total destruction, entered the language because Rome showed exactly how thorough a victor can choose to be.