Cato sprinkled it in every time: “Furthermore I’m of the opinion, Carthago should be destroyed” until he got his third punic war.
Later, when Carthago was destroyed, the Romans poured salt over the ruins. It was a symbol that nothing shall grow on this soil again.
I was bummed when I learned the salt thing was a myth.
Carthage
At least as early as 1863,[7] various texts have claimed that the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus plowed over and sowed the city of Carthage with salt after defeating it in the Third Punic War (146 BC), sacking it, and enslaving the survivors. The salting was probably modeled on the story of Shechem. Though ancient sources do mention symbolically drawing a plow over various cities and salting them, none mention Carthage in particular.[3] The salting story entered the academic literature in Bertrand Hallward’s chapter in the first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History (1930), and was widely accepted as factual.[8] However, there are no ancient sources for it and it is now considered apocryphal.[1][9][8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_the_earth
Doesn’t make Cato any less nasty tho.
Thank you for your attention to this matter
I was so amused in high school Latin when we translated one of his speeches and sure enough, there at the end, was this
I was like “hah, he said the thing!” But nobody else in class cared =/
