Quora Question: Why Did The Romans Not Destroy Greece the Way Destroyed Carthage?

The Romans had a lot more respect for the Greeks than they had for the Carthaginians. They had fought two long and bitter wars with Carthage and regarded them as enemies. There was no such animus in the Roman attitude toward the Greeks. The Greek language was prestigious and a Roman was not considered educated […]

How Was Rome Affected by the Punic Wars?

The Punic Wars brought about Rome’s vast increase in power and at same time a significant moral decline. From the introduction in my book The Death of Carthage: “As warlike as they were, the Romans of the third century B.C. maintained certain principles that were gradually lost in the second century B.C.. The first of […]

Book Review: Taken At the Flood; The Roman Conquest of Greece, by Robin Waterfield

Ph In my research about the third Punic war, the one in which Rome destroyed Carthage, I ran across an intriguing quote by the Greek historian Polybius. “The ruin of Carthage is indeed considered to have been the greatest of calamities, but when we come to think of it the fate of Greece was no […]

The Moral Decline of Ancient Rome

The period of the Punic Wars was a critical time in the history of Western civilizaition. They saw the rise of Rome as the dominant power in the civilized world and, no less important, its concomitant moral decline. From its beginnings under its founder Romulus, Rome had always been a warlike society and its history […]