Explanation: Later in life, the Roman senator Cato the Elder began ending every speech he made with “Ceterum (autem) censeo Carthaginem esse delendam” (“Furthermore, I consider that Carthage must be destroyed”), regardless of how far the topic of the speech was from Carthage or foreign affairs. He did this because… well, he was pushing for Carthage to be destroyed. He got his wish, eventually, in the Third Punic War, in which the extremely powerful Roman Republic brutally crushed Carthage, which had been reduced to a city-state bullied by its neighbors, already a shadow of its former glory.
Cato the Elder was a bit of a dick.
The First and Second Punic Wars were victories for Rome and they were just falling out of living memory and into mythology. Cato ran Rome’s Greatest Hits rather successfully.
