146 BC

Third Punic War

Roman destruction of Carthage and Corinth

Two Roman armies destroyed two cities hundreds of miles apart in the same year — but no surviving source puts the burning of Corinth and the fall of Carthage on one day.

Six days and nights in the streets

In 146 BCE, Scipio Aemilianus captured Carthage after six days and nights of street fighting. On the seventh day, the people sheltering in Byrsa negotiated permission to leave.

Appian reports that 50,000 men and women came out of Byrsa, while about 900 Roman deserters and Hasdrubal's family remained at the temple of Eshmun, identified in Appian's text as Aesculapius. Hasdrubal himself surrendered to Scipio while those last holdouts stayed in the temple.

The disposal of a city

Scipio permitted plunder, reserved precious metals and temple property, burned captured arms and unusable ships, and sent a vessel to Rome announcing the victory. The Senate then ordered any surviving structures obliterated, prohibited settlement at Byrsa and Megara, and arranged for annual Roman government of the conquered territory.

Rome did not sow the ground with salt; scholarship identifies that story as a later legend absent from ancient accounts.

The other destruction of that year

Elsewhere in the same year — not on a demonstrably identical day — the consul Lucius Mummius defeated the Achaean League, occupied Corinth and burned it. Pausanias says most Achaeans and Corinthians fled after nightfall, that the Romans killed most people they found, and that Mummius sold women and children into slavery.

The Achaean War was not part of the Punic Wars, even though both ended in 146 BCE. Corinth's Greek civic and political identity disappeared, and a Roman colony was founded there only in 44 BCE.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 8 sources 3 audit passes Date corrected

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Date corrected. The research places this at -0146.

What the sources leave uncertain

Both destructions are securely dated to 146 BCE, but no reliable surviving source places them on the same day or supplies exact calendar dates.
Appian wrote centuries later and supplies the figure of 50,000 survivors; it should be attributed to him rather than treated as a modern census.
Ancient language about total destruction should not be read as proof that every structure or every inhabitant vanished; archaeological work indicates some activity at Corinth during the period before its Roman refoundation.