What does it mean for a war to end? The Third Punic War concluded, in practical terms, in 146 BCE when Roman legions sowed the fields of Carthage with salt. The city was destroyed, its culture scattered. The conflict was over. Yet, because no formal peace treaty was ever ratified by the Roman Senate, a technical state of war persisted in the ledgers of history. For 2,131 years, in a bureaucratic sense, Rome and Carthage remained at war.
This is not history as lived experience, but history as a grammatical error—a sentence left without a period. On February 5, 1985, two men, Ugo Vetere and Chedli Klibi, mayors of modern Rome and modern Carthage (now a suburb of Tunis), met to correct the syntax. In a quiet office, they signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation. The document was symbolic, a piece of political theater. But it poses an existential question about the stories we tell. We crave narrative closure: treaties signed, wars ended, chapters closed. This event highlights how those closures are often fictions we impose on the messy continuum of human conflict. The real war ended with the last Carthaginian death two millennia ago. Everything after was paperwork. The signing in Tunis was an acknowledgment that we, in the present, are still haunted by the unresolved ghosts of the past, and that we sometimes need to perform a ritual—however belated and absurd—to finally let them go.