Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
Posted by unbrand on 7 March 2003 | 9 Comments
“And therefore I believe that Carthage must be destroyed.”
This sentence, studied in Latin class ca. 1983 for its various examples of grammar usage (the details of which I have mostly forgotten), has been popping up in my mind a lot recently. This is the story.
The quote is by Marcus Porcius Cato who lived 234-149 BC, during a glorious, powerful time in the Roman Empire. Rome’s military dominance was overwhelming. The empire had expanded across the entire Mediterranean region – from Syria to Greece to southern France, and its army kept on conquering with no end in sight. Rome was a real super power, and Cato, a poor farm boy turned career politician, was its chief ideologist.
Carthage, an ancient city near what today is Tunis, had been controlling most of the western Mediterranean since around 300 BC, but soon had been challenged by Rome, which was expanding west and didn’t want another strong power in the area. Rome launched two wars, in which Carthage lost its possessions outside of Africa as well as its war ships, but despite that and the sanctions and conditions imposed by Rome, the city quickly recovered and regained prosperity and thus continued to play an important role in the region. In particular, it owned a lot of fertile land and successfully grew olives, grapes, grain, and other agricultural products. Carthage’s economic recovery put it in direct competition with Rome and interfered with the latter’s mercantile interests.
The Romans didn’t like that a bit, and no one liked it less than Cato. His conviction that Carthage still posed a military threat to Rome quickly became an obsession. The reason why his line about destroying Carthage became so famous is because he just kept hammering it into the minds of the people, true to the motto, if something gets said often enough, it just has to be true. No matter whether Cato was talking about tax policies, agriculture, trade issues, or expanding the sewer system of Rome – he always ended his speeches (and he is said to have been a very powerful orator) with the same sentence: “And therefore I believe that Carthage must be destroyed”.
It would go something like this: Why are so many reluctant to think the threat by Carthage is so real and imminent that we need war? Carthage is a threat to Rome. It must be destroyed.
A lot of people think Rome is the bigger threat to peace – why? Carthage is a threat to Rome. It must be destroyed.
How would you answer your critics who think this is a personal fixation, that this is about Scipio? Carthage is a threat to Rome. It must be destroyed.
Why do so many not only disagree with you very strongly, but see Rome as an arrogant power? Carthage is a threat to Rome. It must be destroyed.
Do you ever worry that this could lead to more violence, more anti-Roman sentiment, more instability in the Mediterranean region? Carthage is a threat to Rome. It must be destroyed.
It’s easy to see why this technique of repeating something ad nauseam until everybody takes it for a fact has remained ever-popular. It’s simple, and it doesn’t even take a speaker of Cato’s caliber to use it effectively.
For Cato, it definitely worked. At his urging, the government eventually imposed an impossible ultimatum upon Carthage, and the Senate decreed that Carthage had violated a treaty, which in 146 led to the 3rd Punic War and the destruction of the city. After three years of brutal fighting against fierce resistance, Rome emerged victorious, burning and razing the city and taking the few remaining survivors to Rome as slaves.
It would be another few centuries before the Roman Empire begun to crumble, and eventually fall.