Carthago delenda est

However, Cato the Censor visited Carthage in 152 BC as a member of a senatorial embassy, which was sent to arbitrate a conflict between the Punic city and Massinissa, the king of Numidia.

Instead, only a paraphrastic translation is the Greek rendering of the Catonian phrase by Plutarch in his Life of Cato the Elder, 27: "Δοκεῖ δέ μοι καὶ Καρχηδόνα μὴ εἶναι" ("Videtur et hoc mihi, Carthaginem non debere esse"—"It seems best to me that Carthage no longer exist").

[16] In 1673, the English minister Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury revived the phrase in the form "Delenda est Carthago" in a speech before Parliament during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, comparing England to Rome and the Dutch Republic to Carthage.

[citation needed] In the 1890s, the London newspaper Saturday Review published several articles that expressed an anti-German sentiment, summed up in the quote Germania est delenda ("Germany must be destroyed").

[17][18] In 1899, the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy retained the phrase's form "Carthago delenda est" for the title of a pacifist essay condemning war and militarism published in the liberal London newspaper The Westminster Gazette.

[citation needed] Janusz Korwin-Mikke, a Polish eurosceptic member of the eighth European Parliament (2014–2018), often paraphrased Cato the elder.

(A poza tym sądzę, że Unia Europejska powinna zostać zniszczona")[23] Former Dutch politician Marianne Thieme, once lead candidate for the Party for the Animals, always concluded her speeches in Parliament with the phrase: "Furthermore we are of the opinion that factory farming has to be ended."

[32] The verb est[i] functions as a copula—linking the subject noun Carthago to the predicative verbal adjective delenda—and further imparts a deontic modality to the clause as a whole.