The short version
In 146 BCE a Roman army under Scipio Aemilianus captured Carthage after a siege lasting roughly three years, killed or enslaved most of its people, and demolished and burned much of the city. The territory became a Roman province, one more step in Roman expansion around the Mediterranean. The detail often added to this story, that the Romans ploughed the ground and sowed it with salt so nothing would grow, is not found in ancient sources and is generally regarded as a modern embellishment.
The road to the siege
The Third Punic War, fought from 149 to 146 BCE, was very different from the earlier Punic Wars. Carthage had been left with a small territory and a heavy indemnity after the Second Punic War, though it recovered some prosperity. In 150 BCE it responded militarily to repeated incursions by the Numidian king Masinissa, a Roman ally. Because treaty terms forbade Carthage from waging war without Roman consent, Rome treated this as a breach.
Some Romans had long argued for ending the rival once and for all. The tradition that the senator Cato the Elder ended his speeches with the demand that Carthage must be destroyed comes from later writers, but the underlying hostility among some senators is well attested. Rome declared war and demanded concessions step by step: hostages, then the surrender of weapons, and finally an order that the Carthaginians abandon the city and settle some distance inland, away from the sea. For a people whose life was bound up with trade and harbours, this was impossible to accept. They chose to resist.
The siege
The Carthaginians rebuilt a defensive arsenal in a short time, according to ancient accounts, and the city’s fortifications held against early Roman attacks. The first commanders made little progress. The situation changed when Scipio Aemilianus, a grandson by adoption of the victor over Hannibal, took command in 147 BCE and was elected consul.
He tightened the blockade. A mole was built across the harbour mouth to cut off supplies by sea, and the defenders responded by cutting a new channel and building ships, with some success. The Romans eventually took the harbour area and approached the city from there. Roman legions fought through the streets toward the citadel of Byrsa, which was reached by narrow roads lined with tall houses. Ancient writers describe fighting from house to house for roughly six days, with buildings being set alight and cleared as the troops advanced. The citadel finally surrendered; the Carthaginian commander, Hasdrubal, gave himself up, though some accounts describe different fates for those who resisted to the end.
The fate of the people
The scale of the losses is reported in ancient sources, which are mostly Roman and quite late, so the numbers cannot be treated as exact. The historian Appian, who is the fullest source, says around 50,000 survivors were sold into slavery. Roman slavery was an established feature of conquest, and such sales were a usual consequence of a captured city. Many others died in the fighting, from starvation, or in the fires. Some Carthaginians outside the city survived, and Punic language and culture persisted in North Africa for centuries.
Polybius, the Greek historian who was with Scipio, is cited by later writers as saying that Scipio wept as the city burned and quoted lines from Homer about the fall of Troy, reflecting that Rome might one day suffer the same. Whatever its exact wording, the anecdote shows that some Romans felt unease at the scale of what had happened.
What Rome did next
The Roman Senate sent a commission of ten to organise the aftermath. The former Carthaginian lands became the province of Africa, with Utica, which had sided with Rome, as an important centre. Cities that had supported Carthage were punished, while those that had changed sides in time were rewarded. The Senate reportedly forbade settlement on the site itself, and this was reflected in an attempted colony proposed in 122 BCE by the reformer Gaius Gracchus, which was soon cancelled. A new Roman city was eventually established there under Julius Caesar’s plans and Augustus, and it became a major centre of Roman Africa.
Excavations in the city have found evidence of a burnt layer from the destruction, particularly on the slopes of Byrsa, where later Roman builders cut into and levelled the hill. Large parts of the Punic city were buried under this work.
The salted earth story
The idea that the Romans sowed Carthage with salt is widely repeated, but no ancient writer says it. The earliest known statements of it appear to be modern, from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ancient authors do mention rituals of cursing or consecrating a destroyed site, which may have contributed to the later legend, but even those are described inconsistently. There is also a practical argument: Rome wanted the productive lands around Carthage, and spreading salt over a large area would have been difficult and costly. The better-supported account is that Carthage was razed and its land absorbed, not that it was permanently poisoned.