People in Spain are definitely not Romans, despite Russell Crowe's character in Gladiator, which means that by 201 BCE, Rome was definitely an empire. The third Punic War was a formality. Rome found some excuse to attack Carthage and then destroyed it so completely that these days you can't even find it on a map. Eventually, this whole area and a lot more would be incorporated into a system of provinces and millions of people would be ruled by the Roman Empire. And it's ridiculous to say that Rome was a republic until Augustus became Rome's first official emperor, because by that time, Rome had been an empire for almost 200 years. There's a reason I'm arguing that the death of the republic came long before Caesar and probably around the time that Rome became an empire. If anything destroyed the idea of republican Rome, it was the concentration of power into the hands of one man.