Rome Vs Carthage

Briefly discuss how the governments of Rome and Carthage differed.

The relationship between Rome and Carthage are most infamous for their conflicts over the course of ancient history (the Punic Wars). In fact, from my point of view, Carthage was only well-known as Rome's rival, thus, the amount of information discussing Carthage's government is not as extensive as their Italian counterpart. The fact that Rome reduced Carthage to ashes also contributed to the problem. Nevertheless, we still have enough information to see how the two governments compare.

Rome and Carthage started out similarly as both of them had some different forms of oligarchy. In Rome, most of the power was placed in the hand of the patricians (ancient.eu, nd), whereas in Carthage, the power belonged to the oligarchs (theancientworlds.net, nd). They both have a few elite ones as heads of state, which with Carthage they were called Suffets (or "judges"), and Consuls in Rome. Those heads of state were nominated by the Roman Senate and Carthaginian Council, which comprised of the aforementioned rich families.

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Aristotle also suggests that Carthage's government is a mixed of both oligarchy and democracy (livius.org, nd). There was no record on whether Carthage "transform" themselves from oligarchy to democracy like Rome, so I think we can safely say that they started out as such. The reason for this unique form of government (for the time, at least) maybe due to the fact that Carthage started out as a trading empire, so trading was their core interest, they would suffer greatly if their bread and butter were treated poorly. The people assembly of Carthage has much more voice in the city's problem, even more so in the difficult times like the Punic Wars (theancientworld.net, nd). It's a very important to note this point as we will see how Rome differed from that in the next