Did the Romans really salt the earth of Carthage?

During the third century BCE, Rome and Carthage became rivals as both powers expanded their power across the western Mediterranean.

Conflict broke out in 264 BCE with the First Punic War, a struggle largely fought at sea for control of Sicily.

Rome, which had had no strong naval tradition prior to this, had built an entirely new fleet and eventually defeated Carthage after more than two decades of fighting. 

At the end, Carthage lost Sicily and later had to pay large sums of money in reparation payments.

Roman control of the island, which became the Republic’s first major overseas possession, then followed.

In 218 BCE, Carthage responded by launching the Second Punic War. When Hannibal crossed the Alps, the fight moved to Italy, where he won major victories at Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae.

Roman losses were severe; however, Hannibal lacked reinforcements, and Rome refused to negotiate. 

Instead, the Romans turned to a long-term strategy that focused on cutting off Carthaginian supply lines.

Under Scipio Africanus, Roman armies had taken control of Spain before they invaded Africa, where, at the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE, Scipio defeated Hannibal.

Carthage was forced to surrender its fleet, pay another large sum, and accept restrictions on its military activity. 

By the mid-second century BCE, Carthage no longer posed a serious military threat.

However, many Roman senators believed the city could still recover and one day challenge Rome again.

Cato the Elder became the leading supporter of Carthage’s destruction. After every speech, regardless of subject, he declared that “Carthage must be destroyed.”

In one instance, he held up a fresh fig he claimed to have obtained in Carthage just days earlier, warning the Senate how close and fertile the city remained.

This repeated demand helped influence Roman public opinion. 

So, in 149 BCE, after Carthage had broken the peace treaty by defending itself against Numidian attacks, Rome used this as a reason for war.

The Senate authorised a military expedition, and Roman troops landed in Africa to begin the Third Punic War.

After three years of siege, Scipio Aemilianus led the final assault and captured the city. 

The story claims that once Roman forces took Carthage, they scattered salt across the site to ensure that no crops would grow and that the city could never be rebuilt.

According to this tradition, the act symbolised the total and permanent destruction of the enemy, also while it reinforced Rome’s image as both thorough and absolutely merciless. 

At face value, the tale appears consistent with Roman attitudes toward defeated enemies.

However, no surviving ancient historian who described the events mentioned salt.

Appian, who had given the most detailed account of the siege, had written about how troops had burned buildings and had slaughtered civilians as resistance collapsed, but he gave no hint of any agricultural ritual.

Appian of Alexandria, whose Libyca is the fullest surviving narrative, relied on earlier Greek and Roman sources, though there is no clear evidence that any of them drew directly from eyewitnesses. 

Meanwhile, Polybius, who had personally known Scipio Aemilianus and had likely spoken to participants in the war, had also omitted any such detail.

Later Roman writers, including Livy, offered no evidence that the Romans performed any act with salt after the city’s destruction.

For this reason, and on the basis of surviving sources, the claim is unsupported by the historical record. 

The image of salt that was poured over ruins has often appealed to modern writers because it adds a dramatic effect to an already brutal event.

It suggests that the Romans wanted to erase Carthage as a city and to prevent the place from ever sustaining life again.

The story became widely known only in the 19th century, when nationalist writers began to repeat the claim, often without citing ancient sources, which later surveys of the literature have shown. 

Salt had ritual uses, as well as economic and practical roles across many ancient cultures, in several instances.

It preserved food, featured in religious offerings, and sometimes appeared in legal ceremonies.

In a few textual cases, it also symbolised destruction or a curse. However, deliberate salting of land to prevent farming remained extremely unusual. 

The most cited example appears in the Hebrew Bible. In Judges 9:45, Abimelech destroyed the city of Shechem and sowed salt into its ruins.

However, the passage suggests a ritual meaning, rather than a practical attempt to damage soil.

The amount of salt required to poison farmland permanently would have been very large, and it is unlikely, given logistical constraints, that such a resource would be used in this way. 

Among the Greeks and Romans, no similar practice has so far been recorded in surviving texts.

Roman commanders burned crops and destroyed storehouses during wartime to weaken enemy resistance, but they did so for military reasons.

They showed little interest in long-term agricultural damage once a city had been conquered.

Also, salt was too valuable to waste, as it was vital for food preservation, trade, and possibly even soldier payment.

The Latin word salarium may reflect this association, but its exact origin remains uncertain. 

Ultimately, salt was tended to be treated as a scarce commodity. To waste it on symbolic gestures would probably have seemed unwise to most Roman military planners.

Outside of the Shechem account, there are almost no surviving ancient examples of sowing salt into conquered cities, as Roman military campaigns focused on controlling people and land, not on making the land permanently useless.

In some cases, cities were destroyed, and their populations enslaved. However, the soil itself was not targeted in any specific fashion. 

Later writers, especially during the medieval and early modern periods, began to attribute symbolic salting to various ancient events as a way of highlighting the consequences of rebellion or failure.

The destruction of Corinth by Rome in the same year as Carthage’s fall, which involved mass slaughter and demolition, never attracted similar tales of salt, which illustrates how the myth of salting Carthage evolved without being applied to similar Roman acts of destruction. 

As such, writers in the 19th century began to repeat the claim, often without reference to sources.

Some drew false parallels to biblical stories, while others tried to make Roman brutality more dramatic.

Eventually, the tale passed into popular histories, school textbooks, and general knowledge without primary evidence. 

As mentioned above, Appian, who wrote in the second century CE, offered the clearest narrative of Carthage’s fall, and in it, he described how Roman troops stormed the city, battled house by house, and set buildings alight.

The fires burned for several days. Thousands died, and survivors were sold into slavery.

When the fighting ended, Scipio ordered the complete demolition of what remained.

According to Polybius, Scipio wept as he watched the destruction. Polybius had reported that Scipio had quoted Homer and had lamented the inevitable fate of all great cities, including Rome itself. 

The Romans dismantled walls, tore down public structures, and levelled the site.

The territory then became part of the new Roman province of Africa. However, no ancient author reported the use of salt.

Neither Polybius nor Livy referred to such an action, and they described events in considerable detail. 

Later archaeological work had, so far, confirmed a destruction layer consistent with a large fire, collapsed buildings, and Roman weapons.

No physical evidence has yet been found to indicate the presence of salt or any chemical treatment of the soil.

Roman agricultural interest in the region makes such a ritual unlikely, since the surrounding land soon became a valuable grain-producing zone. 

In 44 BCE, Julius Caesar announced plans to refound Carthage, while Augustus completed the work decades later.

Roman settlers had returned to the area and had established a successful colony, known as Colonia Julia Carthago, under Augustus.

This colony, which became one of the largest cities in Roman Africa, supported trade and agriculture.

The rapid recovery of the site would have been impossible if the land had been deliberately poisoned. 

We must conclude then that there is no reliable evidence in the surviving record that the Romans salted the earth at Carthage.

The story cannot be traced to any ancient source, and it probably originated from medieval storytelling or from misinterpretation of religious texts.

Later writers added the detail to reinforce the idea that Rome completely erased its enemy. 

Nevertheless, the Roman destruction of Carthage was already extreme, and it brought about the final end of Punic power.

Archaeology confirms, on current evidence, that the land was not too damaged to be recovered.

Roman farmers returned, and the area prospered within a century. For this reason, most historians today consider the story of salting Carthage to be a myth.

It shows the power of later storytelling rather than the facts of Roman history.