Rewatching 2000's Gladiator there's the famous scene where Maximus has his first big encounter at Rome's Colosseum, where him and his men are intended to be slaughtered for show with them playing the part of the Carthaginians at the battle of Zama as they get destroyed by the Romans in a 'Re-enactment', but manage to turn the tables and come out on top.
The scene is ridiculous for a variety of reasons, not least the fact that the re-enactors supposedly playing the part of the Romans of Scipio Africanus's armies seem to be highly orientalised Chariot Archers, but the description of the announcer that the Carthaginians were 'Barbarians' got me curious, did the Romans perceive the Carthaginians as Barbarians, both when they were fighting them in the Punic wars and in the centuries afterward?
To the modern mind the word Barbarian creates an image of crude, brutal warriors that are opposed to the very concept of civilization (yes I am aware that this is highly insulting to the real life cultures labelled as Barbarians but its how I understand the prejudices of settled, urbanized societies like Ancient Greece, Rome or China against a lot of their foes). It would seem to line up pretty well with the stereotype of the Romans fighting Celtic and later Germanic people to the north, but Carthage was a sophisticated, urban empire, would the Romans still have applied the label of Barbarian to them? If so, was Barbarian just a generic term for 'Foreign enemy' that would have also been applied against longstanding centers of civilization like the Hellenistic empires and the Persian empires, and that the whole notion of barbarians being uncivilized and intrinsically opposed to traditional concepts of what is civilized was a later evolution of the term?
The Romans definitely saw them as barbarians. Our modern stereotype of barbarians as violent fur-clad warriors is indeed derived from the particular stereotype the Romans had about Celts, Germans and Dacians. But the concept barbarian was also applied to non-Roman peoples. These weren't just foreign enemies either, they were cultures that the Greeks and Romans deliberately defined themselves in opposition to and better than.
Particularly relevant to the Carthaginians is the stereotype of eastern barbarians. This found its origin in Greek views of eastern civilizations but was soon assigned to the Carthaginians (especially since, around the time of the Persian invasions, the rulers of Syracuse started to peddle a narrative about their conflicts with Carthage as the western theatre of a larger assault by eastern barbarians on Greek liberty to excuse their absence in the fight against Persia), and much of these ideas subsequently passed on to Rome.
Oriental barbarians like Arabs, Persians and, especially for Rome, Carthaginians, were effeminate, cruel, untrustworthy, licentious and impious. By contrast, the Romans were masculine, merciful, trustworthy, chaste and always rendered due respect to the gods. In fact, this stereotype of Carthaginian untrustworthiness went so far as to make the phrase "punic faith" a proverb for untrustworthiness. And of course, with the Carthaginians, they sacrificed their children to the gods. The matter of human sacrifice among the Carthaginians is still debated (I personally do think it existed), but regardless of its veracity, with both the Carthaginians and with northern peoples like Celts and Germans the Romans used it as a way to put their own culture in a better light, since they didn't practice it and in fact outlawed it. So while they weren't regarded as primitive like the northern peoples, and the Romans and Greeks could definitely vocalize a certain respect for them on occasion, their culture was still seen as lesser and opposed to Roman culture. Carthage in particular was held up as the great other, standing for everything the Romans did not stand for.
Also a note on the gladiator scene: that sort of thing was meant to be fun and spectacular, not educational. So that sort of fanciful recreation of a past battle would not necessarily be out of place.
Main source for this: Carthage must be destroyed by Richard Miles.