Often overlooked are the ties of friendship/hospitality between the Roman and Carthaginian aristocracies. Even during the Second Punic War, Hannibal had not received the full backing of his government, which included a peace faction led by his family rival Hanno so-called “the Great.” The thirty-man “sacred council” of the Carthaginian Senate later proved more than willing to prostate themselves before Scipio Africanus and renounce all ties to the Barcids when the Romans landed in Africa in 203. The most startling connections, however, surfaced in the conflict’s aftermath. During Hannibal’s tenure as suffete in 195, after he successfully implemented political reform at the expense of corrupt senators, Livy (33.45.6) acknowledges that Hannibal’s political enemies actively conspired with their Roman guest-friends (hospites) in order to bring down the former general. The two governments, which had only recently been locked in a life-and-death struggle, could evidently find common ground in their mutual hate for Hannibal. This led Hannibal to escape into exile.

Scipio Africanus (and implicitly, I suppose, his supporters) adamantly opposed all of this, although he was in turn opposed by–you guessed it–the crotchety Cato the Elder. Why? The answer may lie in Quintus Fabius Maximus, who appears to have taken Cato under his wing during the Tarentum campaign in 209. Fabius Maximus generally receives more credit than he deserves in warding off Hannibal. In fact, Fabius spent much of the war combating his political rivals, including Gaius Flaminius (who fell at Trasimene), Marcus Minucius Rufus (who died at Cannae), and eventually Scipio Africanus, and yet he never did successfully drive Hannibal out of Italy. The positive image of him presented in our extant sources, which in no way matches his actual successes on the battlefield, may derive from the pen of his kinsman Fabius Pictor, the “father of Roman history.” In contrast, the historian Lucius Cincius Alimentus, who lived briefly in Hannibal’s camp as a prisoner of war and was privy to some sensitive information, remains largely unknown. But this is my personal speculation.
In 184, Cato attempted to prosecute the hero of Zama on the flimsiest of charges. Scipio could take no more. He, too, retreated into exile. In 183, around the same time the Romans caught up with Hannibal in the east and forced the old general to end his own life, Scipio Africanus also died bitter and dejected at the age of fifty-three. His tombstone read: “Ungrateful fatherland, you will not even have my bones.” (ingrata patria, ne ossa quidem mea habes, Valerius Maximus 5.3.2)

Cato in his final years did indeed punctuate every speech with the same vengeful statement: “But in my opinion, Carthage must not exist.” (δοκεῖ δέ μοι καὶ Καρχηδόνα μὴ εἶναι, Plutarch Cato the Elder 27.1) Frequently forgotten, however, is the response of Publius Scipio Nasica, a cousin of Scipio Africanus: “In my opinion, Carthage must exist!” (δοκεῖ μοι Καρχηδόνα εἶναι) Scipio Nasica’s position was by no means altruistic–he believed Carthage’s survival would keep his fellow Romans alert–but nevertheless reveals that Roman leadership did not wholeheartedly embrace the destruction of their former enemy. As many scholars now believe, the Senate’s decision to preserve and translate the Punic agricultural manual written by Mago represented a posthumous snub against Cato, who had authored his own work on agriculture.

Another factor to consider is the Numidian king Masinissa, who did much to orchestrate Carthage’s downfall by playing the Romans against them (to bring up another historical twist, Masinissa’s uncle Naravas was married to one of Hannibal’s unnamed sisters, thus making the two distant kinsmen). Furthermore, despite Carthage’s savage destruction in 146, its social, cultural, religious, and political institutions all survived centuries afterwards throughout North Africa. Thus the destruction was not in any way complete.