And there was never salt
A legend of the destruction of Carthage
Those who are familiar with the history of the destruction of Carthage will surely have heard or read that the city was razed to the ground and the territory, after being flattened and leveled, was covered with salt so that nothing fertile could grow there again. An anecdotal fact that is constantly repeated, even at the educational level. The spreading of salt over the territory of Carthage, representing the hatred that the Romans had for their vanished enemies, is an integral part of the historical identity that has been built on the Carthaginians. In this article, we will analyze this legend in depth.
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At school, when the teacher condensed in a few days the history of the ancient Mediterranean, we quickly saw the topic of the Punic Wars, in which Rome and Carthage disputed the hegemony of the Mediterranean in three bloody wars that ended with the imposition of Rome as the hegemonic power and with Carthage destroyed. The final fact to emphasize the drama of this confrontation: after razing the city to the ground, the Romans spread salt over the Carthaginian territory to prevent any form of life from growing there again.
I am not the only one who has heard the story of salt spreading in Carthaginian territory. Surely many of you also heard it or read it as an official fact of the history of Carthage. Let's start with the image with which I have decided to begin this article. A view of the ruins of Carthage in a quite green terrain, with the buildings of the current Carthage spreading in the background among trees until reaching the sea. It does not look like infertile land. Perhaps we could think that this is due to the more than two thousand years that gave enough time to the territory to heal the consequences of the spreading of salt, but the truth is not so. It is as simple as that the Romans never spread salt over the territory of Carthage, nor did they destroy the city completely. The idea that the Romans spread salt over the Carthaginian territory to make it infertile is nothing more than a legend or a popular belief that emerged in Europe at the end of the 18th century.
The first to write down this legend was Mr. Edward Stanley, a British who in 1786 published a book entitled Observations on the City of Tunis and the Adjacent Country, where he erroneously pointed out that the city of Carthage was razed to the ground and its territory sprinkled with salt to make it infertile. Professor Susan Stevens has an article devoted specifically to this subject, which I highly recommend for further study (A Legend of the Destruction of Carthage, 1988).
Now, returning to Mr. Edward Stanley, our character, in a genuine attempt to record the archaeological state of the city of Tunis, ended up forging this legend, something that today we could perhaps qualify as fake news. The truth is that beyond the licenses taken by Stanley (since no ancient source mentions the alleged spreading of salt in the Carthaginian territory), there is a context that allows us to understand all the ignorance surrounding Carthage at the time. The truth is that in those years, the ruins of the Punic Carthage had not yet been discovered, and it was not even certain where they were located. That changed in 1859, almost a century after Stanley's publication, when the archaeologist Charles-Ernest Beulé found traces of Punic constructions burned during the final assault on the city by Scipio Aemilianus in 146 BC, under the remains of Roman buildings. Only with this discovery, it was possible to discard the assertion of the Alexandrian historian Apianus, who maintained that the colony of Roman Carthage was in a different location from the Punic city (Pun. 136). As we can see, the ignorance about the history of Carthage at the time Stanley was writing was colossal, and it is from this context that his postulates emerge.
There are other records of cities that were supposedly scattered with salt after their destruction, as is the case of Padua when it was destroyed by Attila, Milan when it was sacked and destroyed by Frederick Barbarossa in 1162, and we can go back to examples recorded in the Bible and in the literary tradition of the Mesopotamian empires such as the Assyrian. Perhaps Stanley thought it logical, in view of the determination and cruelty with which the Romans carried out the sack of Carthage, that the city should share a fate as drastic as those just mentioned.
Now, the way to dismiss Stanley's assertions is to go to the sources; no ancient source dealing with the destruction of Carthage (whether Polybius, Appian, Cassius Dio, Orosius or other) mentions the spreading of salt over Carthaginian territory. In short, it is a non-existent fact in the sources. In the same way, it can be seen in the sources that the Romans did not raze Carthage to the ground, as evidenced by the fact that Gaius Marius took refuge in the ruins of Carthage, and that he lived in a hut he built among them for some time while waiting for tempers to calm down in Rome in the context of incipient civil wars, which was recorded by Veleius Paterculus (2. 18. 4).
The Romans also respected the Tophet, the sacred area of the city and where the temples of Baal Hamon and Tanit, the main Carthaginian deities, were located. Archaeological remains show that the area continued to be visited by Carthaginians for several decades after the destruction of the city (remember that there were many Carthaginians living in Carthaginian colonies, and many others escaped from Carthage in the final years of the war).
Personally, when I read the sources on the destruction of Carthage, it seems to me that it must be understood as a systematic and merely functional destruction from the Roman point of view. The beginning or the cause of the Third Punic War and the consequent destruction of Carthage had to do with the fact that the Romans conceived Carthage as an impregnable fortress city with access to the sea, which would always allow the Carthaginians to be a threat. What the Romans sought in destroying Carthage was not to make it disappear, but to destroy its symbols and sustainers of power: its fortification systems, which included a triple system of walls and a double fortified port (undoubtedly the most powerful fortifications of the time in the Mediterranean). The Romans were content to raze these symbols of Carthaginian power and Byrsa, the heart of the city, where the administrative buildings such as the Adirim (senate) were located. The rest was left in ruins, precisely the same ones that Marius occupied to take refuge from Sulla in 88 BC.
Let's continue reviewing the sources and archaeological vestiges, and we will see that once again, Stanley's statement does not agree with reality. Supposedly, the spreading of salt would make the territory infertile for centuries. In addition to the fact that the sources do not mention this event, we have the fact that the territory simply never ceased to be fertile. In 44 BC, only 102 years after the destruction of Carthage, while in Africa Julius Caesar decided to rebuild the city on its ruins.
With the arrival of the principateof Augustus, the first emperor, the city began to grow quickly, becoming one of the largest cities in the Empire. Herodian, writing in the middle of the third century AD, maintains that only Rome surpassed Carthage in population and economic potential (7. 6. 1). Carthage was the second most important city in the Empire, basing its growth on its agricultural potential for wheat and vines, which were exported from its central position in the Mediterranean to all corners of the Empire.
How could Roman Carthage have positioned itself in this way in a barren territory? The answer is that there was never any salt. The Romans never spread salt over Carthaginian territory and never conceived of a complete destruction that would wipe everything Carthaginian from the face of the earth. The territory remained largely fertile, now handed over to the Punic city of Utica to administer. It was only a matter of time before, in 46 B.C., Julius Caesar toured the site and recognized the same agricultural and commercial potential that the Phoenicians had seen in that location more than seven hundred years earlier, deciding to refound Carthage.
There was never any salt, and that is a reflection of how little, despite how much, we know about the history of Carthage. Therefore, we will always continue to study the past of this beautiful Mediterranean city. There is still much to be said.
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Is there archaeology of Roman Carthage? What are the similarities and differences between the street systems of Roman Carthage compared to older Roman settlements? Did Roman planners of the Second Century have a different approach to street layout compared to Britain and Syria?
It was taught in my school in 1961-65. I also took 4 years of Latin in a public high school in upstate New York. Education started losing quality curriculums and teachers by the mid 70s. After living in other countries for 15 years (where that Latin made Portuguese and Spanish easy for me to read, speak and write)..I returned to my high school to talk to my French teacher’s students. There was barely any control in the classrooms or the hallways.