A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

that she had broken their treaty and made threatening noises. Like a dog rolling on its back,
Carthage offered instant and total obedience, and for a while the Romans thought they were going
to be deprived of their war and the rich booty it would bring. So they ordered the Carthaginians to
abandon their city and to move ten miles inland - a course that would inevitably destroy a city that
depended on the sea for its trade. This had the desired effect of making the Carthaginians angry.
Rome was able to declare war.
For an earlier generation of Romans, the conquest of Carthage would have been an easy matter. But
things had changed since the last Punic war. Riches had flooded into Rome, permitting unheard-of
luxuries - such as taking baths in milk. Political corruption had become commonplace; but the
politicians also set out to corrupt the plebs with flattery and amusements. A man who wanted to
become a consul had to put on a gladiatorial show costing thousands of pounds; the richer the
show, the more likely he was to be elected. The old Romans had had only one festival a year; now
there were dozens. The intellectuals read the Greeks, quoted Plato, and cultivated a taste for boylove.
Rich young dandies wore semi-transparent robes and took a pride in their hair-dos. In a mere
half-century, Rome had turned into a kind of Sodom.
The result was that the first attack on Carthage was a failure, almost a disaster. The defenders
hurled back the attacks, and disease reduced the morale of the Roman besiegers. The second year of
war was just as bad, the Romans wasting themselves in attacks on outlying towns. Finally, the
Romans appointed a young general named Scipio - grandson of the man who had won the previous
war with Carthage - and the fortunes of the Carthaginians took a turn for the worse. Scipio built a
mole across the harbour to prevent supplies getting in. Carthage began to starve to death. They took
Roman captives on to the walls, tortured them, and hurled them down at the besiegers. The
Carthaginians - always given to internal intrigues - began to quarrel among themselves, and men
were crucified in the streets. Children were sacrificed to the God Moloch, rolled down into a
furnace, to try to avert disaster.
When the Romans assaulted again, the city fell. They hacked their way in, burning houses as they
went. The defenders now fought grimly, retreating street by street. They were too weak to resist for
long. Even so, it took the Romans six days to reach the citadel, the steep rock in the centre of the
town with a temple on its summit. The last of the Carthaginians surrendered. In the temple, nine
hundred Roman deserters who knew they could expect no mercy set the temple on fire and died in
the flames. The prisoners were sold into slavery, and Carthage was burned to the ground. The
senate issued orders that not a stone was to be left standing. When the city was reduced to ashes,
the ground was ploughed. Julius Caesar later built another Carthage, but not upon the same spot.
The ground that had seen so much agony was accursed. (And the phrase is here meant literally - the
Roman priests performed an elaborate ceremony to curse the ground.)
In the same year, 146 B.C., the Romans intervened in a quarrel between Greeks - who regarded
themselves as Rome’s allies - and treated the city of Corinth as they had treated Carthage, levelling
it to the ground, cursing the site and selling all its citizens into slavery. A few years later, when the
province of Lusitania, in western Spain, rebelled against Roman occupation, its city of Numantia
was wiped off the face of the map and its citizens massacred or sold into slavery. None of these acts
of terrorism was necessary. But Rome was trying to make up in violence what it lacked in strength
and discipline.
The trouble was that Rome was becoming fat, lazy and vicious. A few Romans of the old school
warned against the danger; but the majority of their fellow citizens simply could not see what they