stressing their sameness. Eratosthenes, toward the end of the third century,
asserted that Rome and Carthage were twinned in space, being located on the same
meridian; he also mentioned the two cities as models of “admirably governed bar-
barians.”^59 Polybius likewise produces a sustained comparison of the two cities in
book 6 (51 – 56); in particular, he stresses the similarity between the constitutions,
saying that Carthage had monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements,
rather like Rome and Sparta (6.51.1 – 2). Such a perspective is perhaps to be ex-
pected from Greeks, trying to make sense of these two non-Greek rivals. But Cato
the Elder apparently also stressed how much the constitutions of Rome and
Carthage had in common, for he commented on how Carthage had a mixed con-
stitution, with monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements.^60
This interest in Carthage as a mirror of Rome is a major preoccupation for the
Romans. Carthage is indeed the “Other” to the Romans — barbarian, mercantile,
untrustworthy, cruel.^61 But this is no simple polarity, for the “Other” does not rep-
resent only alterity, as a collection bag for all of the differences between oneself
and the other identity. Rather, the “Other” can be a screen on which to project the
aspects of oneself that one would rather not think about on home ground. Cultural
issues that are too vital to ignore but too painful or embarrassing to acknowledge
as integral can be displaced onto another object for comparatively safer contem-
plation.^62 From this perspective, Carthage is a way of thinking about many aspects
of Romanness that are disquieting, and that Romans would generally prefer not to
recognize as germane to themselves — foreign ancestry, luxury, decadence, and
barbarism. This orientalist catalogue represents qualities that the Romans spend a
lot of time denouncing in the Carthaginians, but they are qualities that are central
to Rome, or potentially central. Rome is indeed, as Ovid ’s Dido calls Aeneas’s
future foundation, “a city the equivalent of Carthage” (instar Carthaginis urbem,
Her.7.19).
The shared destinies of the two cities are nowhere more memorably evoked
than in the reaction of Scipio to the sack of Carthage in 146 b.c.e., where he imi-
tated the weeping Marcellus at Syracuse sixty-five years earlier.^63 The capture of
Syracuse was remembered in the tradition as a crucial tipping point in Rome ’s
imperial progress, marking a stage of no return in the encounter with the allures
and decadence of Hellenism;^64 the capture of Carthage was another such defining
moment in Roman memory, removing from the map the only power that had pre-
sented a mortal threat to the Romans, and accelerating irreversibly their move-
ment toward the corruption of unthreatened power.^65 Our knowledge of the scene
with Scipio comes from the report of Polybius, who was embedded in the Roman
- Synchronizing Times II: West and East