Zuck got his Carthage

Carthago delenda est (“Carthage must be destroyed”) was supposedly how Cato the Elder ended all of his speeches to the Roman Senate leading up to the Third Punic War, which did indeed see the great naval empire destroyed.

For some time, the phrase has occupied the space of a cool-but-weird thing to quote, hoping for other Roman history enjoyers to notice you and maybe take you seriously.

Perhaps the most famous modern example is none other than uber-nerd Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook.

^{Mark Zuckerberg in his old Harvard dorm room. From @zuck on Instagram.}

Zuckerberg started using the phrase in the early 2010s in response to Google launching a competitor to Facebook called Google+ (it feels weird to be talking about this in a didactic history voice, but this failed social network has probably been demoted to fun fact for those who were obsessively listening to technology podcasts at the time). Anyway, Zuck was apparently so threatened by Google’s product launch that he basically enacted wartime measures at Facebook. It’s funny to look back on now, considering Google+ never took off and is now just one of a long line of Google products to be abandoned and quietly killed off..

Zuck wore the shirt again for his 40^th birthday in 2024. By then, Google+ had been officially dead for five years. Carthago delenda est had gone from rallying cry to a billionaire’s commemorative t-shirt.