In the years 221 and 220 Hannibal completed the conquest of Spain as far as the Ebro; in 219 he took Saguntum, in spite of an alliance existing between it and Rome. This was the cause of the second Punic war (218-201), in which the Carthaginians, under the spirited leadership of Hannibal, who made his way across the Pyrenees and the Alps even into Italy, at first achieved great successes, but at last were overcome by the inexhaustible military resources and the marvellous endurance of the Romans, who carried on the war in four places at once.
After the defeat at Zama (202) peace was granted in 201 to Rome’s humbled rival under the following hard conditions: surrender of all but ten ships of war and of all elephants, the payment of ten thousand talents, the indemnification of Massinissa, and the promise not to take up arms again without the consent of the Romans. By wise measures Hannibal sought gradually to uplift his oppressed fatherland; but in this way prejudiced the interests of the aristocracy, who before this had been unfavourable to him, and who, with the help of the Romans, exiled him from Carthage (195).
[195 B.C.-697 A.D.]
After that Carthage was ruined within by controversies between the aristocratic and the popular parties, and threatened from without by Massinissa who, set at the side of the Carthaginians by the Romans to watch them, and relying on his protectors, took from them one piece of their territory after another. The Romans, to be sure, from time to time sent commissioners to the spot, but only to give either no decision at all, or one unfavourable to the Carthaginians. Marcus Cato came there in 157 as one of these commissioners, and because the Carthaginians declined his offer to deliver an arbiter’s judgment (presumably an unfavourable one), he was from that time on extremely embittered against them, and consequently closed every speech in the senate with the words, “Censeo ceterum, Carthaginem esse delendam” (“Moreover, I think Carthage must be destroyed”).
When the Carthaginians at last, after the expulsion of the party of Massinissa (151) resisted the latter and were defeated, the Romans declared this a breach of peace, and in 149 sent the consuls, Manius, Manilius, and Lucius Marcius Censorinus, with eighty-four thousand men to Sicily. The Carthaginians begged for peace, but were required first to give three hundred children of the nobility as hostages, and to surrender all arms and munitions of war. When the Romans thereupon gave them the further command to abandon their city and settle again further inland, all classes and ranks united for the most desperate defence.
Thus began a last fearful conflict (third Punic war, 149-146), which ended with the conquest of Carthage by Publius Cornelius Scipio. Fire raged in the city seventeen days. A large portion of the inhabitants perished, the survivors were led into slavery. The city was razed to the ground, and the whole Carthaginian territory, with the exception of a few tracts that were given to the cities in alliance with the Romans, especially to Utica and Hippo, was made into the Roman province of Africa.
In 122, it was decided, on the proposal of Gaius Gracchus, to rebuild the city under the name of Junonia, and to plant there a colony of six thousand Roman citizens. However, the fall of Gracchus prevented the execution of the project. Julius Cæsar took it up again, but was not able to carry it out. The restoration did not begin, then, until under Augustus, who populated the city with three thousand Roman colonists and numerous natives from the vicinity.
The new city reached a high prosperity in the time of the empire, so that it took the second position, after Alexandria, among the cities of the empire outside of Rome. It was the seat of the Roman proconsul and of most of the other Roman officials, later also of a Christian bishop, and by reason of its favourable situation it soon became once more a rich seat of commerce, in which, however, there was no lack of schools of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, and the other liberal arts.
LAST DAYS OF CARTHAGE
In 439 A.D. it was taken by the Vandals under Genseric, and was for almost a century the capital of the Vandal kingdom, until in 533 it was incorporated in the eastern Roman Empire by Justinian’s general, Belisarius. The latter restored the ruined fortifications, and called the city in honour of his emperor, Justiniana.[e]