"Carthage could have been a useful how-to manual for building the new federal government of the US. But the Romans had annihilated Carthage in the last Punic War."

American genesis

In treating the nation’s founders as holy relics, America forgets they were revolutionaries and risk-takers

"Carthage could have been a useful how-to manual for building the new federal government of the US. But the Romans had annihilated Carthage in the last Punic War. The American founders pulled their hair out. How can we use Carthage to build our federal government if we know almost nothing about it? ‘It has often you know been a subject of regret that Carthage had no writer to give her side of her own history,’ Jefferson wrote to Adams. Madison complained that only ‘circumstantial evidence’ remained from Carthage. He’d hoped to use the government of Carthage as a model to build the new US Senate, and spent months reading everything he could about it."