The Second Punic War (218–201 BCE) had already eliminated Carthage as a military power: its navy was capped, Hispania was lost, a heavy indemnity was imposed. Even so, the city recovered within half a century, drawing renewed wealth from the natural harbour at the Gulf of Tunis. The elderly Roman senator Cato the Elder considered this revival dangerous; he is said to have ended every speech, on any subject, with 'Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam' — 'in my view, Carthage must be destroyed'. The phrase stood as one of the earliest explicit articulations of a systematic political objective in Roman discourse.

The pretext came in 149 BCE, when Carthage took up arms against the pressure of its neighbour, the Numidian king Masinissa, without Roman authorisation. Rome treated this as a breach of treaty, declared war, and from the start demanded that the city itself be obliterated. The Carthaginians first surrendered hostages and weapons, then — on hearing Rome's ultimatum that they abandon the city and rebuild ten miles inland — closed their gates. The whole population resisted for three years; women are said to have cut their hair to provide rope for the catapults.

In 147 the siege was handed to the young general Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, who closed the harbour from the sea and slowly starved the city. In the spring of 146 BCE Roman troops broke through the walls, and after six days of street fighting the last refuge on the Byrsa hill fell. The Greek historian Polybius — present with Scipio and so an eyewitness — records that Scipio wept as he watched the city burn. The city was looted, then burned, then leveled; the surviving population of perhaps 50,000 was sold into slavery. The story that Roman soldiers symbolically sowed the soil with salt is a modern invention — it does not appear in any ancient source before the nineteenth century.

In the same year, 146, a Roman force under Lucius Mummius ended a campaign against the Achaean League in the Peloponnese by sacking and destroying Corinth, turning Greece into a Roman province. At the two ends of the sea — the western Punic rival and the eastern Hellenic centre — both fell in the same year. The Punic civilisation, language, and script left only a limited legacy; today the traces of Carthage survive mostly in the archaeological sites in the suburbs of modern Tunis and in a corpus of Punic funerary inscriptions. A century later Caesar and Augustus would refound the site as a Roman colony — but by then it served only to confirm that the Mediterranean had become the basin of a single power.