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national pride was affronted by the abundance he saw there, more so by Carthage itself, a city whose manifest prosperity and buoyancy was unclouded by the overseas worries incurred by Rome. Recalling fallen comrades at Zama, and the bloody battles preceding it, it must have seemed to him that Rome had won the war, had gone on to master the Mediterranean, only that Carthage should cream off the benefits.
    Embittered by past events, his reflections were exacerbated by the city's approach to arbitration. When the commission insisted that both sides bind themselves in advance to its de­cision, Masinissa agreed but Carthage dissented. Her experience of Roman mediation scarcely made for confidence. As a token of belated independence, the argument was trivial, yet for Cato it portended danger of the gravest kind. From the moment the commission returned to Rome, the dispute unsettled, its leader was obsessed with the threat, as he saw it, of a revived Carthage. He is said to have shown the members of the senate a ripe fig, picked in Africa three days earlier, to emphasize the proximity of the old enemy - a con­tinuing enemy, he averred. Thereafter, unable to let it rest, Cato reportedly concluded every speech he made, whatever its subject, with the slogan 'D elenda est Carthago'-' Carthage must be destroyed.'
 

6: Flashpoint
     
     
    Unsurprisingly, considering its enormity, Cato's message was not greeted with rapturous applause in Rome. Even today, when weapon capabilities have made mass destruction common­place, the idea of blotting out a great city - not in war or under dire provocation, but as an act of cold-blooded political ex­pediency - accords more with fantasy than reality.
    Applied to ancient Carthage, with her uniquely formidable ramparts, it verged on the preposterous.
    All the same, the proposal found a following. That it was not dismissed out of hand says much for Cato's personal standing, and perhaps more about the diminishing equability of Roman response to foreign problems. Little is known of complexions in the senate at this period, but the repetitious obstinacy of the old man's propaganda suggests both grim hope on his part and lack of popularity.
    The following year, 152, Cato was snubbed by the dispatch of a further commission to Africa, this time headed by a pro­minent opponent of his views, Publius Scipio Nasica ('Scipio of the Pointed Nose'). A close kinsman of 'Africanus,' Scipio Nasica had no cause to love the Cato faction. According to one source, he parodied the notorious 'Carthage must be destroyed' exhortation by concluding his own addresses to the senate with the words, 'And I think that Carthage should be left alone.'
    At all events, he returned to Italy with inflammatory news for the Catoists, having persuaded Masinissa to yield some disputed ground to Carthage. Scipio Nasica did not deny the renewed vigour of the African city, but took the view, not original, that a buoyant rival was essential to Rome's inner strength, to her traditional virility which, he claimed, would degenerate - indeed, was so doing - without competition.
    Another strategic possibility, seen by some as a stronger incentive to pre-emptive action than Cato's fears, cast Masin­issa as the main threat, Carthage being the economic key the king needed to possess an African nation of world account. By this reckoning, the pro-Numidian party in Carthage, not her popular movement, was the real barometer of trouble ahead for Rome.
    The support for these arguments in 152 is conjectural. Nothing known suggests that Cato's campaign made much ground in its first year. Certainly, it did not discourage Carth­age, at last a modest beneficiary of Roman mediation, from further appeals to Rome for help against Numidia. Then, in 151, a number of diverse events combined with dramatic force.
    For twelve hectic months the Roman legions in Spain had been in almost ceaseless combat. Reports told of countless deaths; of the impossibility of