CARTHAGE HAD EXISTED for over half a millennium when the Romans destroyed it in 146 BCE. Located in a natural harbor on the coast of modern day Tunisia, it was for centuries the great maritime power of the ancient Mediterranean, a cosmopolitan, mercantile city with colonies scattered across the North African coast, Southern Spain, Sardinia, and Sicily. But the Romans left little trace of it. After razing the city and laying a curse on its rubble (but not, as is popularly believed, sowing its soil with salt), the besieging Roman army gave the contents of Carthage’s libraries away to hostile neighboring states, in whose hands Carthage’s written works were lost or destroyed. Subsequent histories of the defunct thalassocracy were written by its enemies—Romans, but also Greeks, who had for centuries fought with Carthage for control of Sicily.
