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

Abstract

<p>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</p>