Rome could not tolerate a rival — so it destroyed one. Carthage was the merchant empire of the western Mediterranean, a city of harbors and shipwrights that grew rich moving goods across three continents. And in the end its wealth bought the longest grudge in ancient history.
Carthage ★ Spain Sardinia Sicily Tyre Greatest extent — stylized map 814 BCE Legendary founding 218 BCE Hannibal 202 BCE Zama 146 BCE Destroyed Rise · zenith · fall The rise Legend gives Carthage a founding date of 814 BCE, when settlers from Tyre — Phoenicians from what is now Lebanon — built a trading post on a Tunisian headland. The location was the whole argument: from that harbor, ships could reach Spain’s silver, Sardinia’s grain, and the African interior’s goods in a few days’ sail. And over three centuries the trading post became a metropolis, and the metropolis became a thalassocracy — an empire that ruled by sea power rather than by armies of occupation.
