Treaty of 201 BCE

The peace treaty that ended the Second Punic War. Negotiated in the months after Zama, the terms were dictated by Rome and ratified, by Polybius's account, through Hannibal's intervention against the war party in the Carthaginian senate. Carthage retained its African territories within a defined frontier (the so-called "Phoenician trenches") but lost its overseas empire, surrendered all war elephants and most of its fleet, paid an indemnity of 10,000 talents over 50 years, and accepted prohibitions on military action: no war outside Africa without Roman permission, and no war within Africa against Roman allies, chiefly Masinissa, whose subsequent border encroachments the treaty made structurally impossible to resist. The treaty did not destroy Carthage as a state, but it transformed the city from an imperial power into a regional one and, in the long run, set the conditions for the Third Punic War half a century later.