Quotes About Carthage

Rome's earliest dissension arose from flawed human nature and its desires for freedom, glory, and power, but it was only after the fall of Carthage that such evils flourished to the point of driving plebeians and patricians into open conflict: "The way was clear for pursuing rivalries, [and] there arose a great many riots, insurrections, and in the end, civil wars."43

D'abord, cette fois-ci, nous n'allons pas en Egypte (à quoi na sert ?) mais nous voguons vers Carthage.

December 21, 1845. Sunday.]...Elder Kimball showed the right fashion for a leaf, spoke of Elder Richards being protected at Carthage Jail, having on the robe, while Joseph and Hyrum and Elder Taylor were shot to pieces, said the Twelve would have to leave shortly, for a charge of treason would be brought against them for swearing us to avenge the blood of the anointed ones, and some one would reveal it and we shall have to part some say between sundown and dark.

The Carthage traffic cop has an alligator in his bathtub!

Great Carthage drove three wars. After the first one it was still powerful. After the second one it was still inhabitable. After the third one it was no longer possible to find her.

Two and a half centuries later, Scipio Aemilianus brought Tanit from Carthage, and the Romans revered her under the title Caelestis:

The first eastern religion was imported into Rome very officially, with the agreement of the Senate, after consultation of the Sibylline Books. In 205 Bc, after a new and more serious outbreak of showers of stones (hail?), customarily expiated by a sacrificial novena, the Books were believed to indicate that the interminable war with Carthage would end in victory if the 'Idaean Mother' was transferred from Pessinus to Rome (Liv., 29, 11, 4-5).

He associated Elagabal with two goddesses: Pallas-Allat and the 'Caelestis' of Carthage, whom the Romans identified with Juno but who was not unrelated to Venus-Astarte.

Carthage, in modern Tunisia, had grown from its origins as a Phoenician settlement

Carthage had a bigger drug epidemic than I ever knew: The cops had been here just yesterday, and already the druggies had resettled, like determined flies. As we made our way through the piles of humans, an obese woman shushed up to us on an electric scooter. Her face was pimply and wet with sweat, her teeth catlike.

Cato was the most vociferous enemy of Carthage, notoriously, tediously but ultimately persuasively ending every speech he made with the words 'Carthage must be destroyed' ('Carthago delenda est', in the still familiar Latin phrase).

C'était à Mégara, faubourg de Carthage, dans les jardins d'Hamilcar.

it is a fine sunny day and great matters loom across the horizon of history. Carthage in my rearview mirror, I blend into Time.

Does Carthage even have forests? Did Virgil know for sure or was it just convenient for his story? Virgil was a professional liar. This would not be the only place where he pruned the truth until it was as artificial as an espaliered pear tree against a wall, forced into an expedient shape and bearing the demanded fruit.

Yet it is hard to find many wars that have resulted from miscommunications or misunderstandings. Far more often they break out because of malevolent intent and the absence of deterrence, or because a prior war ended without a clear resolution or without settling disagreements—in a manner of Rome's first two wars with Carthage. Again, Margaret Atwood was empirical when she wrote in her poem, "Wars happen because the ones who start them / think they can win.

One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans ... read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa.

I swear to thee by Cupid's strongest bow, By his best arrow, with the golden head, By the simplicity of Venus' doves, By that which knitteth souls and prospers loves, And by that fire which burn'd the Carthage queen, When the false Trojan under sail was seen,— By all the vows that ever men have broke, In number more than ever women spoke,—

The order of things established by the Romans in Libya rested in substance on a balance of power between the Nomad kingdom of Massinissa and the city of Carthage.

Sallust was particularly eloquent on the theme. In his other surviving essay, on a war against the North African king Jugurtha at the end of the second century BCE, he reflects on the dire consequences of the destruction of Carthage: from the greed of all sections of Roman society ('every man for himself'), through the breakdown of consensus between rich and poor, to the concentration of power in the hands of a very few men. These all pointed to the end of the Republican system.

As Carthage went up in flames in 146 BCE, one eyewitness spotted him shedding a tear and heard him quoting from memory an apposite line on the fall of Troy from Homer's Iliad. He was reflecting that one day the same fate might afflict Rome. Crocodile tears or not, they made their point.

In Sallust's view, the moral fibre of Roman culture had been destroyed by the city's success and by the wealth, greed and lust for power that had followed its conquest of the Mediterranean and the crushing of all its serious rivals. The crucial moment came eighty-three years before the war against Catiline, when in 146 BCE Roman armies finally destroyed Carthage, Hannibal's home base on the north coast of Africa.

THE LONG SIEGE, and final destruction, of Carthage in 146 BCE was gruesome even by ancient standards, with atrocities reported on both sides. The losers could be as spectacularly cruel as the victors.