I heard that a curse was placed on the land of Carthage after the Third Punic War. Was it common for leaders of Rome to use curses militarily and/or politically like that?

by UnderwaterDialect
KiwiHellenist

Not common, no. The only close parallel is the cursing of Corinth. Both curses are reported by Macrobius, Saturnalia 3.9.10-11, who attributes his knowledge to one Furius. (We know of various people named Furius, but there's no way of knowing if Macrobius' one is a known Furius.) The cursing of Corinth is also mentioned in Florus, 1.33.5, who mentions that it took place to the sound of a trumpet, which may suggest a ritual element.

There's also what looks like an allusion to the cursing of Carthage in Servius' commentary on Aeneid 12.841, who specifies that the Romans tried to appease Juno in the Second Punic War, and that at the end of the Third War she -- a cult statue, it must be inferred -- was brought to Rome along with sacred objects.

It looks fairly likely that these two curses, both in 146 BCE, are the only two curses in Roman history. Both appear to have been aimed at preventing future habitation of the sites. (And, of course, both were ineffective!)

It has been suggested that these two curses were drawing on the republican-era practice of evocatio, a military practice designed to remove the protection of an enemy's gods in favour of a Roman divinity. This has been contested by people who know more about Roman religion than I do, but it looks pretty convincing. Evocatio could be used to transfer a god from another city to Rome, as was done in the case of Juno Regina at Veii in 397 BCE, and an unidentified deity at Isaura Vetus in the 70s BCE.

Servius' story is pretty clearly about an evocatio of Juno at Carthage in 146 BCE. Whether that's the same thing as the curse in Macrobius, and whether either or both were antiquarian inventions, is a matter for debate.

There's a decent write-up by Nicholas Purcell, 'On the sacking of Carthage and Corinth', in Innes et al. (eds.) Ethics and rhetoric: classical essays for Donald Russell on his seventy-fifth birthday (Oxford, 1995), 133-148, which discusses the curse at 140-142.

(As a footnote, I trust there's no danger of any misunderstandings about 'salting the earth' in this context. That's a 19th century fabrication, based on a conflation of a practice of ploughing the earth in order to destroy a city, and the biblical 'salting the earth' at Shechem (Judges 9.45). Salting wasn't about making the earth barren anyway, but about turning it into a green space: salt was regularly used as a fertiliser in antiquity.)