A Carthaginian Peace: Versailles, the Treaty of Lutatius, and the Three Documents of 241–237 BC

This article reexamines the Treaty of Lutatius (241 BC), arguing that the modern expression “Carthaginian peace” is more accurately applied to the Roman addendum of 237 BC than to the original treaty itself. The phrase entered the modern vocabulary through the debate over Versailles as the name for a settlement that destroys the defeated. This article asks a question the users of the phrase rarely ask: what were the terms of the peace that Carthage actually signed? Read as a document, with its negotiated draft distinguished from its ratified text, and both distinguished from the codicil of 237 BC, the Treaty of Lutatius of 241 BC fails the label on every count. It was a bargained and survivable settlement, hardened first by Roman domestic politics during ratification and then deformed by an extorted addendum that Polybius himself condemned as contrary to all justice. It is the addendum, not the treaty, that exhibits the Versailles pattern: terms punitive beyond the battlefield result, a payment obligation whose capacity was destroyed by the same instrument that imposed it, and a grievance that scheduled the next war. The label, if it is to keep its Keynesian meaning, belongs to the codicil—and the historian who says so most plainly is Rome’s own.