With all due respect, there are a number of areas in which the above analysis from PSOL completely falls down.
Both Rome and Carthage were imperialist powers and a conflict was going to arise regardless, but the “Neither Roma nor Carthago” position here only benefits Rome. Comparing the two systems of each respective government, Carthage from my knowledge had a more decentralized, hands off approach that was both a) more respectful of communal rights of autonomous conquered nations and 2) Less able to expand itself in the same degree as Rome could have.
We actually know very little about Carthage and the way it was governed, not least because our primary sources for it are Roman and Roman-adjacent (Polybius) texts that only focus upon Carthage when it impinges upon the history of Rome. We do get some analysis of domestic Carthaginian politics (Polybius' account of Carthage's war with its mercenaries after the First Punic War), but the evidence is much too limited to suggest that Carthage was particularly more 'respectful' of those it ruled over than Rome was. Of course, the Barcids were able to expand Carthaginian rule in Spain very successfully, so there's no evidence to suggest that Carthage would have been 'less able to expand itself', provided that it had been able to attain mastery of the Western Mediterannean of course.
Therefore it would be best to align with Carthage on accounts of not having to deal with the consequences of a Carthaginian defeat. Firstly; Roman expansion into the African Continent, Greece, and Iberian peninsula would be grinded to a halt which would rapidly reduce the ability of the Romans to procure slaves to keep its economy going. Therefore, with a reduced economic input vital to the economy, there would be more incentive for reforms to the system or else there would be massive revolts, and Rome’s social strife was much more class-based in nature than the strife in Carthage. We could have at best gotten a Plebian State or a state more willing to enact populist policies to placate the Plebians. Such a model then would have spread elsewhere. On the latter situation, in this world where Carthage has one but is limited to real life factors on the growth of its empire, a Cold War of sorts in antiquity or an alliance of smaller states. This unstable unipolar or multipolar would lead to massive acts of bribery and work with smaller states, greatly enriching the region in geopolitical investments.
Several things to note here:
1. As perhaps you were getting at, Roman expansion absolutely
was key to the way in which Roman society developed in the last two hundred years of the Republic. However, it should be noted that the Romans didn't expand in order to satiate a demand for slaves; there ended up being an increased demand for slaves
because they expanded so much and so quickly. Pretty much all all ancient societies in the region had some need for slaves (Carthage was obviously no exception, nor was Athens, nor were the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the east). Roman slavery did boom in the mid-to-late Republic (although this should not be overstated), particularly with regards the development of agricultural
latifundia, but this was a by-product of expansion, not the reason for it. Roman expansion was a largely haphazard process which often came about as a result of 'high politics' (treaty obligations and 'balance of power' manoeuvring) as opposed to economic opportunism.
2. This brings me onto my second point, which is that it was this expansion that helped produce the social strife of the final century of the Roman Republic. Whilst, of course, there is plenty of discussion in the Roman texts (particularly Livy) about the 'struggle of the orders' (patricians vs plebeians), this needs to be taken with a sack full of salt; after all, Livy and other were writing hundreds of years after these events had passed, and there's a good chance that much of what they write simply refracts the politics of their day back onto a semi-legendary past. Besides, categories like 'Plebeian' are rather reductive, given that there were rich plebeians and poor patricians. What's also clear is that, at least if we follow the ancient sources, there was relatively little social strife in the Roman Republic during the era of the Punic Wars; the people of Rome actually stumped up further funds for the state after the disaster at Cannae in 216 BC, something that seems unlikely to have occurred had the city been racked by social
stasis (as it would be one hundred years later). There's no evidence that a Rome that lost of the Punic Wars would have become more 'populist' as a result. Indeed, had Rome been beaten by the Carthaginians, the latter might've imposed a pliant oligarchy in charge of the city (as happened to Athens, both after the Peloponnesian War and after the wars with Macedon), which would've represented a step back for democracy.
3. I question your view that Rome was particularly aggressive and repressive by the standards of the ancient world. This view does have its defenders (William V. Harris wrote a fairly influential book asserting this viewpoint in the 1970s), but I don't buy it. The ancient world was a
very violent, geopolitically unstable place, and this was not confined to the Romans. The
poleis of Greece were almost continuously at war (the Peloponnesian War, which rumbled on and off for twenty-seven years, was merely one in a series of wars for dominance). Alexander the Great is, obviously, well known for his conquests, and butchered a very large number of people in the process (its worth reading Appian's description of his campaigns in Central Asia, where his forces committed acts that would now be considered major war crimes). His successors fought for the best part of forty years over his empire, and even after the geopolitical situation stabilised after the 280s BC war was still frequent (the Seleucids and the Ptolemies fought six wars over Syria across a one hundred year period). Arthur Eckstein wrote a good work on the tangled and violent nature of interstate relations in the Greek east that the Romans began to enter during the 2nd century BC. All ancient states were capable of engaging in aggressive and often imperialistic behaviour; the Romans simply proved to be the most successful imperialists of them all (which I think was primarily thanks to having a military that proved itself superior to those of most of its foes).
4. The Romans certainly could be brutal to those they conquered. The Jews of Palestine are probably the most famous example of this, but Athens itself was sacked after it proved disloyal during the Mithridatic War of the 80s BC. Particularly during the late Republic, the Romans could act as bloodsuckers on the provinces, as opportunistic officials sought funds from the provinces they governed to support political careers back home, or just their own greed, as was the case for Verres, a governor of Sicily who was prosecuted during the 70s BC by Cicero. Civil Wars could bleed the provinces dry too (Brutus and Cassius shook down the eastern provinces for money and men during their war against the Triumvirs in the 40s BC). Generally speaking, however, Roman provincial government was relatively light touch, certainly compared to more modern states. The Romans were largely respectful of the practices of the cities and territories that they conquered, as long as they didn't conflict with Roman rule (as in the Jewish case). The east retained Greek as a
lingua franca long after the conquest, and there were never any attempts to 'Romanise' the Greek east. Western provinces, to an extent, did become 'Romanised', although how this process came about is fairly contentious and certainly wasn't usually imposed from the top down. The very fact that the Romans could be critical of the way certain officials behaved in the provinces (Verres was successfully prosecuted and exiled as a result of his bad behaviour in Sicily) and sometimes sought to govern the provinces fairly and conscientiously (Pliny the Younger's governorship of Bithynia is a good example of the latter), is indicative of the fact that the Romans weren't purely rapacious imperialists.
The problem with your analysis is that it assumes (like Harris) that the Romans were more violent and imperialist than others in the ancient world, whereas in reality they weren't particularly so, they were just more successful. Also, you assume that social conflict was a feature of republican life that was only diverted by success in war, as opposed to having ultimately been stoked by the results of military success. Lfromnj mentioned the Gracchan reform programme that resulted in the
cura annonae, and he's right, that wouldn't have happened without Rome's expansion. More to the point, that reform programme was actually
funded by the proceeds of expansion - Gracchus' plan was to introduce taxation in the Asian provinces in order to provide funds for a corn dole for the citizens of Rome. A Roman defeat in the Punic Wars might butterfly away the Roman empire, but it would also butterfly away the social
stasis that emerged as a result of having that empire. More to the point, we can't be sure whether, if the Carthaginians had destroyed the Romans, they wouldn't simply have become the imperialists
par excellence that the Romans turned out to be in real life.
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