A Tale of Three Cities: The Roman Destruction of Carthage, Corinth and Numantia

Title
A Tale of Three Cities: The Roman Destruction of Carthage, Corinth and Numantia
Publication Date
2023
Author(s)
Taylor, Tristan S
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8558-3644
Email: ttaylo33@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:ttaylo33
Editor
Editor(s): Ben Kiernan, T M Lemos, Tristan S Taylor
Type of document
Book Chapter
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Place of publication
Cambridge, United Kingdom
Series
The Cambridge World History of Genocide
DOI
10.1017/9781108655989.013
UNE publication id
une:1959.11/56499
Abstract

The destruction of a city in the ancient Mediterranean was a potent statement of power in a 'well-known symbolic language'.1 To Greco-Roman writers there was a clear connection between the Roman destruction of the city-states of Carthage in north Africa and Corinth in Greece in 146 BCE and the elimination in 133 CE of the Spanish Celtiberian stronghold Numantia. These three acts of what we now would call urbicide — 'the obliteration of urban living-space as a means of destroying the viability of an urban civilisation and eroding its collective values'2 — were fundamental in ancient thinking on the symbolic establishment of the Roman Empire in the second century BCE: acts of terror that symbolised and secured the empire's power.3

Link
Citation
The Cambridge World History of Genocide, Volume I: Genocide in the Ancient, Medieval and Premodern Worlds, v.1, p. 278-308
ISBN
9781108493536
9781108655989
Start page
278
End page
308

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