#third punic war

[mapsontheweb]

Third Punic War - 149 BC

by u/Difficult_Airport_86

[supercomputer-lizard]

I’m just wondering about history recently and I do polls, so have this

[abtl]

Henceforth, I will label any dish that has too much salt as "Tastes like Carthage".

[drondskaath]

Carthage | Third Punic War | TBA 2023

Greek Brutal Death Metal

Artwork by Artem Astaroth

Final links to follow...

[onlyhurtforaminute]

CARTHAGE-TANIT

[deoxy-ribonucleic-acid]

at the end of the day we are all carthaginesians at the end of the third punic war.

we have to options, kill ourselves, became slaves or die trying to avoid it

[smbilodeau]

Today's Little Known Facts in History

Today's Little Known Facts in History: The year 2000 is closer to the official end of The Third Punic War than it is to today. [The mayors of Rome and Carthage signed a symbolic treaty on 5 FEB 1985 that officially ended the 2,134 year-old war. The more you know, the weirder it gets.]

[honeybadger-the-pop-witch]

An easy way to remember the salt affecting the soil is to remember what the Romans supposedly did to the people of Carthage.

After the Roman legions won the Third Punic War in 146 BCE, they sacked the city. Burned Carthage to the ground—which there is historical record of happening. The added myth to the sacking that became popular was that the Roman general of the campaign ordered the ground to be salted.

The reasoning was that salting the ground would ensure that no crops would grow ensuring that the city of Carthage would never rise again.

Salt is protective and purifying, yes. But not for the soil.

WITCHY PSA

STOP SALTING THE GROUND.

Don't cast a circle of salt in the dirt, don't salt the soil to cleanse it, use something else. Eggshells, rosemary, wood ash, etc, but not salt!

Salt will mess up the soil and make it impossible for anything to grow for generations. On that same note, don't litter while doing witchcraft! Stop burying non-biodegradable satchels and jars or throwing them in the lake/ocean!

[canmom]

i do kinda wonder who came up with the idea of calling it 'world war 2'? i feel like all previous wars in a series would get called something like 'the third Punic war', not 'Punic War III'. we say WWII enough that it stopped sounding weird but that sounds like a movie title!

[whencyclopedia]

Cato the Elder

Marcus Porcius Cato, better known as Cato the Censor or Cato the Elder (234-149 BCE), was an influential political figure of the Roman Republic. Serving as quaestor, aedile, praetor, consul, and censor, he championed Roman virtues and detested Greek culture. He wrote the first Roman histories in Latin and was an eloquent orator. Towards the end of his career, he advocated for the Third Punic War with his famous line, "Carthage must be destroyed."

Early Life & Family

Cato was born in 234 BCE at Tusculum but spent most of his childhood on his family's estate in Sabine country. The historian Plutarch in his Lives wrote that "he gained, in early life, a good habit of body by working with his own hands, and living temperately, and serving in the war …" (379) Little is known of his early life before he entered the military.

Around 220 BCE, the patrician Lucius Valerius Flaccus saw something in the young farmer and took him to Rome where he would begin a life in politics. Married twice, Plutarch stated that Cato was both a good husband and father. Echoing the attitude of the time, Cato believed it was best to marry "a woman more noble than rich because she would be more obedient in all that is fit and right" (392). His eldest son died in 152 BCE, while his second son would be the grandfather of the Roman statesman and orator Cato the Younger (95-46 BCE) – hence the nickname of Cato the Elder, later ascribed Cato the Censor. Like the future Cato, Cato the Censor was considered a champion of Roman virtues; something he advocated throughout his extensive political and military career.

Continue reading...

[mapsontheweb]

The Third Punic War - 149 BC

[morfinwen]

[blueiscoool]

Ancient Warship’s Bronze Battering Ram Sunk During a Battle Between Rome and Carthage Found

Found near the Aegadian Islands, just west of Sicily, the bronze rostrum played a role in the last battle of the First Punic War, which ended in 241 B.C.E.

In 241 B.C.E., two empires faced off in a naval clash off the coast of Sicily. By then, Rome and Carthage had been fighting for more than two decades. Rome’s victory in the skirmish, officially called the Battle of the Aegates, brought an end to the First Punic War, the initial conflict in a series of wars between the two ancient powers.

Now, explorers have recovered a piece of that final battle: the bronze battering ram of an ancient warship. According to a statement from Sicily’s Superintendence of the Sea, the ram was found on the seafloor off the western coast of the Mediterranean island, at a depth of around 260 feet. To retrieve the artifact, the team used deep-water submarines from the Society for Documentation of Submerged Sites (SDSS) and the oceanographic research vessel Hercules.

The seabed off the Aegadian Islands “is always a valuable source of information to add further knowledge about the naval battle between the Roman and Carthaginian fleets,” Regional Councilor for Cultural Heritage Francesco Paolo Scarpinato tells Finestre sull’Arte. He adds that the find is yet another confirmation of the work of the late archaeologist Sebastiano Tusa, who spearheaded exploration of the seabed as the site of the 241 battle after a separate ram, also known as a rostrum, was first found there in the early 2000s. In the two decades since, researchers have recovered at least 25 rams from the seabed.

At the time of the Battle of the Aegates, Rome and Carthage had been at war for 23 years, fighting for dominance in the Mediterranean. As the Greek historian Polybius later wrote, the Romans sank 50 Carthaginian ships and captured another 70 along with their crews, taking nearly 10,000 sailors prisoner during the naval battle. Rome forced Carthage to surrender. But the fragile peace was short-lived: Over the next century, Rome would go on to fight a second and third war against the Punic people, winning each time.

“It was very costly, both in terms of human life and economically,” Francesca Oliveri, an archaeologist at the superintendence, told BBC News’ Alessia Franco and David Robson in 2022. “In the last phase, Rome even had to ask for a loan from the most well-to-do families to arm the fleet and build new boats.”

The recently discovered ram has been brought to Favignana, one of the Aegadian Islands, for further study. Though its features are difficult to make out because the object is covered in marine life, researchers have been able to discern a decoration on its front: a relief depicting a Montefortino-style Roman helmet decorated with three feathers.

The battering ram adds to the wealth of war relics found on the seabed, which also include 30 Roman soldiers’ Montefortino helmets, two swords, coins and many clay amphorae (large storage jars).

According to the SDSS, rams were the most important naval weapons of their time. They were placed on the bows of warships at water level so that sailors could crash their boats into enemy vessels, damaging and sinking them. The plethora of rams scattered on the seabed are testaments to the weapons’ effectiveness in ancient battle.

“We are finding so many things that help to illustrate a little better the world of the third century [B.C.E.],” Oliveri told BBC News in 2022. “It’s the first site of a naval battle, in the world, that has been scientifically documented like this, and it will continue to be documented—because the area of interest is very large. … It will take at least another 20 years to explore it fully.”

By Sonja Anderson.

[monaluisa]

More on historical Spamano???

Okay idk how much sense this will make because that post came to me in a burst of realization and I haven’t explored Spain very thoroughly before (my speciality as a fic writer is the Ancient Mediterranean and pre-Italian Unification OCs) But there are two contexts in which I’ve discussed Spain:

The first is in “Sons of Naught”, a fic set immediately after Third Punic War, wherein Rome enslaves all of Carthage’s living descendants. Primarily, this fic focuses on my Tuscany OC taking pity on my Tunisia OC, but as Romulus is discussing his plans for his newly enslaved nations with Tunisia, this exchange occurs:

Africanus grew pale. “And what of Sakar—” he caught himself before he finished, and masking his anxiety, continued, “What of Antonius?”

“Oh, worry not, Africanus. I have no designs for him such as those you think. Recall that your father started these wars in Sicily. When we fought at Messana, my men found an infant there, who was Sicily immortal, and my own blood.

“Bearing that in mind, I declare that Antonius be given to Lovinus as an attendant.”

Lovinus looked at Antonius. Antonius looked at Lovinus. Neither spoke; it was neither’s place to do so when Romulus did.

Because Lovino’s existence is connected to the start of the Punic Wars (and because, as per a previous paragraph in the fic, Spain and Portugal are too young to really be useful as slaves) Romulus kind of just hands Antonio over for Lovino to deal with, something that Lovino must have relished.

Antonio was, for all intents and purposes, living proof that Lovino’s success as a nation was guaranteed, because Romulus was an empire who could not only kill other nations like Carthage or Etruria, but actually enslave them, something that’s implied to be especially cruel on Romulus’ part, since the enslavement will only end either when Romulus falls from power or the enslaved nations die for real.

And as we all know, Rome did fall, and Romulus’ death was a pivotal moment for both Lovino and Antonio. Everyone Romulus had enslaved in “Sons of Naught” (except for my Sardinia OC) ransacked the house and escaped to the lands they represented, knowing that Lovino was too powerless to claim ownership of them any more.

As far as Lovino goes as a character, his entire identity was constructed around being Romulus’ heir—if he has no great empire to inherit, he is nothing. The playing field has been leveled, and he has to start from scratch the same way Carthage’s orphaned descendants must. Only for Sicily, though powerful, to be conquered time and time again. Only for Feliciano (who I hc as Venice prior to unification) to totally eclipse him in wealth and trade.

And only, of course, for Lovino to end up a servant in Spain as Antonio becomes the next big power in Europe. Now, until my dying breath, I’m gonna stumble around Chibitalia because there’s no way the Italy bros specifically were as young during this period as they’re shown in the show, but I do believe that Lovino’s physical growth (his age) stunted for a while during this period. Not a good sign for a nation. (see HRE staying a child for centuries before slowly and painfully perma-dying.)

Which brings me to the second example of me talking about Spain in my fics: in “A Sicut Erat”, in which my Sardinia OC reflecting on his life and downfall while he dies at the end of WW2, there’s this section about Spain’s golden age:

And in the mansion in Zaragoza, Lovinus, then called Lovino, had been humiliated once again.

“As his grandfather renamed ourselves,” Antonio explained to Nicola in the light of the fire one night, “I have renamed him and his brother both. They bear the Spanish name Vargas.”

And how miserable time had made Lovino! Sicily had amassed wealth and power, but the boy had aged only a few human years since the last time Nicola had seen him. Lovino burned with shame wherever he went, muttering curses as he swept the floors, retorting Antonio’s every word with a biting tongue. From time to time, he was struck by fits of St. Vitus’ dance, knocking over vases and tripping over his own feet, and secretly, in the pits of the night, Nicola prayed that it meant he would see the boy’s death.

Those were the days when Spain ruled the seas, and so it seemed, the world. A slave of Rome had risen to the same level as him, if not greater: so much was the gold from the New World that its glisten became dull! The merchant ships of Genoa, who had conquered Sardinia, and Venice, Romulus’ rich and happy grandson, became powerless in the face of the brave new world that formed in the West!

Now, the whole renaming thing was just me trying to make the Italy Bro’s Spanish surname make sense 😭 but in another sense, this passage shows that the tables have turned. Antonio is now Romulus, Lovino is now Antonio, and with a new world quite literally opening up for the powers of Europe to imperialize, it seems like Lovino is just…doomed. Trade is shifting from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. A new Roman Empire can never rise again, least of all under Lovino, and to him, promised a world that collapsed under his feet, that’s a fate worse than death.

But that’s not the end of the story either! Spain declines around the 18th century, and Sicily in the 19th as Lovino gets screwed over by Italian Unification (read Brutus and Achilles if you want more insight into this and other aspects of Lovino’s character 👀) but they’re both still alive, and they’re still the people they always were. They have always been bound together for some reason or another, and because neither is nearly as powerful as they once were, they are also now even.

Idk if that made sense, but there’s a lot of twists and turns in their lives that make for a compelling relationship between the two. Not even in a shipping way, necessarily. Add in their conflicting personalities though and oooooooh baby that’s good stuff.

I need to get a life lol

[abtl]

You know what, now I’m going to pin this post.

Oh the masculine urge to bring my wretched excuse of a country to its knees, symbolically salt it like the Romans did to Carthage and forever bury it in countless syntropic agriculture systems.

[gullethead]

now see you'd think it might be impossible or at least difficult to travel faster than light, but it's actually relatively easy to do given a certain level of advancement in space travel technology. the hard part is anyone being able to figure it out given the limitations of human logic and spatial reasoning, traits which evolved perfectly for day to day life in the jungles and savannahs of sub-Saharan Africa but are less perfect for visualizing the ways in which photons interact with the "material" of the four-dimensional space-time continuum we exist in. the only person to actually ever perfectly understand the reasons for the speed of light limit and how to surpass it was a 15-year-old Carthaginian boy named Gersakkun, who was an army messenger during the Second Punic War and was crushed top-down by a panicked elephant foot during the climactic Battle of Zama in 202 BCE which sealed the fate of the war against Rome. the force and angle of the blow combined with a momentary quirk of the Earth's magnetic field and otherwise unnoticeable interference from a solar flare caused his neurons to align for 43,107 picoseconds in such a way that he visualized the exact form of the universe in its entirety and reached a kind of nirvana state before the connection was broken and his body was mulched into non-existence, which is another kind of nirvana state. the spot briefly became host to an Aleppo pine (grown from part of a pinecone which had been lodged in the elephant's sole), which would have become the only tree to understand light travel, but only grasped rudimentary Newtonian physics by the time it was razed during the chaos of the Third Punic War 55 years later. the problem has otherwise remained completely unsolved.