On what Rome destroyed, what it could not erase, and the history that only becomes visible when you drive between the fragments with someone who has spent her career in the ruins.
By Mary Collins | April 2026
Most ancient ruins stand in one place and wait for you to arrive. Carthage doesn’t work that way.
I understood this slowly, over the course of a day spent in a car working my way between fragments. The Antonine Baths are in one neighborhood. Byrsa Hill — where the Phoenician city once stood before Rome tore it down — is somewhere else. The outlines of the ancient harbor are in yet another direction. Modern Tunis has grown up through and around what was once the most powerful city in the western Mediterranean, and what existed before the conquest is scattered across it like pieces of an argument Rome thought it had settled.
It takes a scholar to put it back together.
What “Destroyed” Actually Meant
In 146 BC, Rome ended three wars over more than a century by destroying Carthage so thoroughly that historians still argue about what “destroyed” actually meant. The old story — that Rome salted the earth to ensure nothing would grow — is probably myth. But the destruction was real: a city of perhaps half a million people stripped, burned, and erased from the map. It was the kind of ending designed to close the question permanently.
Within a generation, Rome rebuilt it.
Because the location was irreplaceable. Carthage sat at the narrow point where Africa and Europe almost touch, and it had administered Mediterranean commerce for centuries. Empire is, at its core, practical. The harbor was too strategically valuable to leave empty.
What rose from the ruins became one of the greatest cities in the Roman world. The Antonine Baths rivaled anything in Rome itself. The city produced thinkers whose work would shape the next thousand years of Western thought — Tertullian, Apuleius, Augustine. And the craftsmen who built the new city, whose workshops and hands and visual intelligence had survived the conquest, brought their own tradition into Roman subject matter and produced work that surpassed what was being made in Italy at the same time.
What the Bardo Reveals
The Bardo National Museum in Tunis holds what may be the largest collection of Roman mosaics in the world. Made by North African craftsmen. Depicting Roman myths. In a style that is unmistakably, distinctly not the style of Rome.
That is what Carthage teaches you, and it is a lesson you cannot learn at the Colosseum.
The Lesson You Can Only Learn Outside Rome
The standard story of Rome is about dominance — conquest in a straight line, a single idea imposed on everything in its path. What the sites outside Italy keep showing you is something more complicated: Rome was not a monolith that erased what it encountered. It was a system that absorbed. Dougga kept its Libyan mausoleum standing inside the Roman city for two thousand years. Carthage filtered the Roman artistic tradition through North African hands and produced something Rome could not have made on its own. The cultures Rome conquered did not disappear. They transformed — and in transforming, they changed Rome.
That is the lesson you are trying to piece together as you drive across Tunis. Not the one in the textbook, which describes a clean sequence of political events. The one in the landscape — in the scattered fragments of a city Rome destroyed, rebuilt, and was then changed by. The version that only becomes legible when someone who has spent her career in this material explains what you are looking at.
How to See Carthage Like a Scholar
Dr. Jennifer Tobin, who leads our Wonders of Tunisia, has been working in North Africa for decades. Connecting the fragments of Carthage with her — understanding what each site is actually arguing, why the pieces are where they are — is not the same experience as arriving with a guidebook. She makes the scattered city cohere. And she explains the Bardo — which most visitors rush through — as what it actually is: possibly the most important Roman museum in the world, for exactly the reasons that are easiest to miss.
She leads the Wonders of Tunisia in October 2026.
