Transcript of 643. Rome’s Greatest Enemy: Carthage Destroyed (Part 4)

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Citroën. Who has words to capture that night's disaster? Tell that slaughter. What tears could match our torments now? An ancient city is falling, a power that ruled for ages, now in ruins. Everywhere lie the motionless bodies of the dead, strewn in her streets, her homes, and the God's shrines. All over now. Devouring fire, whipped by the winds, goes churning into the rooftops, flames searching over them, scorching blasts, raging up the sky. Treasure hauled from burning temples, the sacramental tables, bowls of solid gold, and the holy robe seized from every quarter, the enemy Piling high the plunder. Children and trembling mothers, rounded up in a long endless line. So that was the greatest of all Roman poets, Virgil. And he was writing almost two centuries after Hannibal's great war against the Romans, the subject of this epic series, and a century or so after the final defeat of one of the protagonists in this story, the Mediterranean city of Carthage. Tom, in that poem, The Aneid, which is translated there by Robert Fegals, Virgil is taking us back, isn't he, to the legendary beginnings of Carthage. So shrouded in myth, the story of its foundation by the Fénitian Queen, Dido.

And the colonists from Fénitia are laboring to build a new city. They're raising the walls, they're building the palaces and temples, the harbors that the Romans will later destroy. And at this point, this bedraggled group of refugees who've been ship prepped off the African Coast turn up. These people are Trojans.

They are. They are, as you say, refugees from the sack of Troy by the Greeks. The man speaking the lines that you read so powerfully is their leader, a Prince called Aeneas, who is the son of Venus, the Goddess of Love and Beauty. Aeneas, in that passage, is describing what it had been like to live through the destruction of Troy, to watch its topless towers consumed by fire. He is giving this account at a great feast that has been held in his honor by Dido because she has fallen in love with Aeneas. We talked about this in the very first episode that we did on Carthage, I mean, about 400 years ago. Actually, I think it was episode 421. People who listen to that may remember what happens next after this feast because Aeneas and Dido go out hunting There's a storm. They take shelter in a cave. While they're in the cave, the Earth moves. Dido, although not Aeneas, assumes from this point on that they are now man and wife. The problem for Dido is that Aeneas has this destiny that has been plotted out for him by the gods, and specifically by Jupiter, the king of the gods.

And this destiny is that Aeneas has to sail to Italy and found a town there that in due course will result in the founding of Rome. And so Jupiter sends Mercury, the messenger of the gods, down to Aeneas and says, Stop hanging around with this Carthage Indian woman. Get on. Go and found Rome. Aeneas is very obedient to the will of the gods. So he dumps Dido, and he sails away from Carthage for Italy. Dido is so distraught at being portrayed like this that she stabs herself to death with Aeneas's sword, but not before she has called for her descendants to nurture an undying hatred for the descendants of Aeneas.

Shore clash with shore, sea against sea, and sword against sword. This is my curse. War between all our peoples, all their children. Endless war. That's her curse, isn't it? And that's how it all begins. She summons a demon to rise up from her bones, an avenger still unknown to stalk the descendants of Aeneas, and to hunt them down with fire and iron. Tom, who is this demon?

Well, I mean, every Roman reading the Aeneid when it came out in the age of Augustus knew exactly who was meant. It was Hannah Hannibal, Hannibal Barker, that great military genius whose career we've been describing in our previous episodes, who for almost two decades had indeed fought the Romans with fire and iron. Now, Hannibal, as we heard in our last episode, ends up this hunted fugitive, this defeated fugitive, kills himself in 183 BC. But it's the measure of the shock he had given Rome and of the terror that he had inspired in Roman hearts that still, more than a century and a half after his death, in the age of Augustus, when the Roman Empire stands splendid and without a conceivable rival on the face of the planet, Hannibal continues to haunt the memory of the Romans. I think it's not hard to imagine what a bogey man he must have seemed to Romans who had lived through his invasion of Italy and who were born in the generation or two after the great war that he had prosecuted against the Romans.

That means that even though Carthage has been defeated and forced to accept a punitive peace deal, the memory of Hannibal and of Carthage's assault on Italy means that for the Romans, in the decades after victory, Carthage remains the supreme enemy. Would I be going too far to say there's still a sense of unfinished business for the Romans?

Completely. Completely. Listeners may remember that in our previous series, we talked about Hannibal's preparations for the invasion of Italy in 218. He has a dream. In that dream, he sees a giant serpent that is following in his wake as he invades Italy. This serpent, Causing massive destruction to trees and bushes, a deafening thunderstorm following in its wake. A God then explains to him what this serpent is. This serpent is Hannibal himself. And so the dream is portending what the Romans called the Vastatio Italii, the destruction of Italy. And that is exactly what Hannibal had inflicted on Italy. So monstrous casualty figures, hundreds of thousands of people dead. Fields, vineyards, orchids, going up in flames, year after year after year. And nothing like it had remotely been experienced experienced by the Romans or the peoples of Italy. For two or three generations, there hadn't been anything like this. And today, there is considerable debate among historians about how bad the damage inflicted by Hannibal on Italy actually was. So opinions range from completely apocalyptic to merely pretty devastating. But however bad it was, what mattered was that the Romans, in the wake of Hannibal's war, remembered it as complete devastation.

So to quote Simon Hornblower on this, he's absolutely right. The trauma of Hannibal's lengthy presence, however great or small the actual damage he wrought, will not have been easily forgotten. To that extent, Hannibal's dream may have been a true prophecy. Perceptions are a reality. We know that throughout history.

And the Romans, the damage that the Cathedunians have inflicted is so deeply embedded in the Roman imagination. So the Romans come to talk about the Cathedunians. They use these expressions, punica fides, punica fraus, the idea that the Cathedunians are the embodiments, almost the linguistic embodiments of cruelty and deceit and infidelity and fraud and all of these kinds of things. The Carthaginians come to assume this almost demonic place in the Roman imagination.

Yeah. I think if you think about how the British view of the Germans in the wake of the First World War and even more the Second World War, there is something of that, the way that the Romans view the Carthaginians. People who've listened this series may well feel that this is a bit rich because the Romans as well have been known to display cruelty and deceit and treachery and so on. But that doesn't really matter because the Romans felt what they felt. This wasn't just a widespread loathing of the Carthaginians, but something more, a binding fear that was ultimately irrational.

Well, irrational because the Carthaginians Virginians have been completely beaten.

Yeah, completely smashed. It is so clear that the days of Carthage as a great power are finished because the terms that the Romans had imposed on Carthage in the wake of the defeat of Hannibal had been intended to cripple her forever. So just to remind listeners of what those terms were, a devastating indemnity payable in installments over the course of 50 years designed to kneecap Carthage's economy. The loss of all her overseas these territories. Carthage had ruled a great empire, Sicily, Spain, whatever, all gone. Once, she had been the greatest naval power in the Western Mediterranean. Her fleet is now limited to 10 warships. And her foreign policy is directly under the control of Rome, which means that she cannot go to war without Roman permission.

So at the same time as the Romans have done that, so Carthage has been knee-capped by all this. But on the western flank of Carthage, we're still in North Africa, we've got this character that we talked about before, Massinisa, who is Numidian, and he's an old pal, Scipio Africanus. He has basically been set up as a counterbalance to the Carthage in the East, hasn't he? So he's a great pal of the Romans. He is constantly biting off bits of Carthage's hinterlands. So they're, I don't know, the olive groves of North Africa and so on.

He's nibbling away at them all the time.

Yeah. And there are constant border disputes and whatnot. And basically, the Namedians are eroding Carthage's heartland year on year.

Yeah. And for Massanissa, this is the servant turning on the master because the Namedians had been a subject to Carthage. And so by salami slicing Carthage's territory, he's getting his own back on the old Imperial mistress. And so the poor Carthaginians They can't really do anything about this because they're not allowed to fight Massanissa off. And so all they can really do is send embassies to Rome complaining about these encroachments by the Némidians. But obviously, Massanissa, he's an ally of the Roman people. He can send embassies of his own and be assured of getting heard. In 171, for instance, Carthaginians have gone to Rome to complain, Massanissa sends his own son. This son of Massanissa, he He knows exactly how to play the Romans. He's endlessly going on about how the Carthaginians are treacherous and deceful. Beware of punic dece, all this stuff. The Carthaginians don't get justice. The Romans ignore Carthaginian complaints, not just because they are pro-numidian, but also, to reiterate, because they are genuinely fearful that Carthage might make a comeback. And so they feel that her territory has to constantly be eroded. But this is mad. I mean, there's no prospect of Carthage coming back.

Well, to give people a sense of the map, we're three decades on after the defeat of Hannibal, and the Roman power is spreading across the Mediterranean. So to give the example of Spain, we talked a lot about Spain. Spain, its mineral wealth, have been so important to Carthaginian power. But the Romans have basically formalized their control of the coastal bits of Spain they've conquered from Carthage. They've organized them into provinces. They're pushing inland in North Africa. We've obviously talked about Nubuja. Nubuja is basically a Roman client state. I mean, in many ways, Carthage is a Roman client state as well because it's subject to all the demands of the peace treaty. We talked last time about Greece. We're getting into the remnants of Alexander the Great Empire now. In Greece, the Romans have been launching these devastating strikes. They've humbled the heirs of Alexander, the Macedonian Kings. We talked about that last time. The legions have defeated the Macedonian Phalanx. And although the Romans are not ruling Maced or Greece directly, Roman primacy, Roman control is basically acknowledged, isn't it, throughout Greece?

Yeah. I think the Romans feel that if their strategic demands require the Greeks to knuckle down and surrender chunks of territory or autonomy or whatever, then they have to do it. There's perhaps a slight element of Donald Trump's attitude to Greenland about all this. In But increasingly, the more that Greece and the Balkans have to do what the Romans say, the Romans decide, well, there's no point in allowing the Macedonians to have any autonomy at all. I mean, we might as well snuff that out. In June 168, the legions once again meet with a Macedonian phalanx, and it's fought in a great battle on the Mastodonian Coast, a place called Pydna. The guy in command of the Roman legions at this battle is called Imelius Paulus. If that sounds familiar, then it's because he is the son of the Imelius Paulus who had died at Canai, Hannibal's great victory. Imelius Paulus at Pydna, he confessed that the advance of the Macedonian Phalanx was such a terrifying sight that he had briefly dreaded that he might suffer a defeat similar to that suffered by his father. But in the event, he wins this spectacular, utterly crushing victory.

So the legionaries, they're much more flexible, much more mobile, and they're able to infiltrate the Phalanx through gaps that open up in its ranks. And then it's just a massacre. The people in the Phalanx have these huge long spears, so they're hapless against the gladius, the stabbing saw that the Romans are using. And the whole battlefield just becomes this great sea of blood and viscera. All their guts, the Macedonian guts are spilling out. The Macedonian king is captured, he's deposed, and ends up being led through the streets of Rome in Paulus's triumph. Massaden itself, the monarchy, is abolished, and it is divided up into these four petty cantons under dodgy little republics. This is obviously a recipe for instability, but that for the Romans is precisely the point. They're not there to administer direct rule, but what they do want is Massaden left both submissive and impotent. That is what these reforms do.

Then the same thing goes for other parts of the Southern Balkans, doesn't it? So Eparus. Eparus is sacked, that's in the West, that's towards Northwestern Greece, Albania. Paulus takes more than 100,000 slaves there. And then in Greece itself, they basically take a thousand bigwigs hostage from various cities. They take them all back to Italy. And these guys had been seen as too pro-Maced, too independent-minded. And Tom, you've got a nice analogy here. Would you share your analogy with us? Yeah.

Well, to pursue the Donald Trump analogy, it's as though he were to invade Europe and take back as hostages a raft of Eurocrats from Brussels, regulators of American social media companies, and Obviously, the director general of the BBC, and they would all be taken back to Washington and kept as hostages.

Are there any people from the current government who you'd like to see taken as hostages by Delta Force back to Washington? Surely there must be.

No comment. So all these Greek hostages are taken back. Among them is a Greek from Arcadia, whose name we have been mentioning quite a lot throughout this series, and that is Polybius, who will become the great historian of Rome's rise to dominance in the Mediterranean. The theme of Polybius's history, he sets it out, it's how the affairs of Italy and of Africa came to be interwoven with those of Asia and of Greece, and all things point in concert to a single end. That single end is the establishment of a Roman imperium, a Roman Empire over the Mediterranean. Polybius would end up spending 17 years as a detaignee in Rome. This is how he came by his incredible familiarity with Roman politics, Roman constitutional arrangements, Roman affairs. He is able to interview veterans of the war against Hannibal, people who had taken leading roles in that war. But in the long run, the most useful contact that Polybius makes in Rome isn't a veteran of the war against Hannibal. But this guy is still in his teens, he's very precocious, very brilliant, and has an absolutely glittering pedigree. Because this man is the son of the Amelius Paulus, who had one at Pidna.

So he's therefore the grandson of the Amelius Paulus, who had died at Canai. He is also the adoptive grandson of Scipio Africanus, the man who had defeated Hannibal. And in Rome, adoption is taken very seriously. So that means that he is basically seen by the Romans as the grandson of Scipio Africanus. Because he is the son of Amelia's palace, he's called Emilianus, so Scipio Emilianus. He is a completely worthy grandson of the great conqueror of Hannibal. When he was only 17, he had fought with his father at Pitna, covered himself in glory. He'd then gone to Spain. He had won a military Crown, so basically the equivalent of a Victoria Cross, by being the first over the wall of an enemy city. At the same time, like Scipio Africanus, he is a great enthusiast for Greek culture, a great scholar. Actually, this is how he'd come into contact with Polybius, through the loan of some books and general literary chat. Scipio, Emilianus, and Polybius, it's like you and Tabby will be doing on your forthcoming podcast.

Who's Tabby in that analogy? I'm Scipio, Amelianus, right?

Well, Scipio, Amelianus is much younger, so it's probably Tabby.

Yeah, but it's about charisma, isn't it?

You are this Greek hostage.

No, absolutely not. Right, let's get back to Carthage. So Scipio Aemilianus, the Dominic Sandbrooke of Roman history.

The tabby-siret of the rest of history.

What does he make of Carthage? Because he's the adoptive grandson of the bloke who basically defeated it. So does he feel that he has unfinished business with Carthage? Does he to do the same?

Actually, it seems not. I think that Scipio Africanus, because he was the guy who had forced terms on the Carthageinians and got them to accept these terms, He then felt a certain responsibility towards Carthage because it's a bit like a patron with a client. That is a relationship that is very important to the Roman aristocracy. I think that Scipio Africanus, he took this seriously. For instance, for as long as When Hannibal was in Carthage, Scipio Africanus, back in Rome, had had Hannibal's back. I think all the various members of Scipio's dynasty, they share in this obligation. We can see this from Polybius, who is Is he very influenced by what the Scipio dynasty think. He's always describing how the Carthage Indians are going to Rome to complain about Massanissa slicing off bits of their territory. Polybius, he emphasizes that these complaints are just. Presumably in saying that, he is picking up on the opinion of his Scipionic patrons. But I think it's fair to say that this in Rome is a minority position. And there is one person in particular who views any attempt to water down the harshness with which Carthage is treated as essentially a form of treason.

And this is the old enemy of Scipio Africanus. Again, we met in the last episode, Marcus Porcius Cato, who, by this point, he's just turned 80, but he is as flinty and as hard core as ever. That ginger hair that he had has gone. He's now terrifyingly bald and got lots of crow feet and jowels. He's a terrifying man.

I hate him. I find Kato such an unpleasant person.

Well, I think there are good reasons for hating him, as we will see as this episode progresses.

So Cato was He goes to Carthage. I mean, of all people to go, he goes to Carthage in 152, doesn't he? To investigate yet another spat between the Carthage Indians and the Namedians, Massanissa.

Massanissa, by this point, is also very old. It should just be said.

And when Cato gets to Carthage, he is horrified by what he sees, because basically, he had assumed that the Carthaginians would be living like dogs in the gutter, their city in ruins. But actually, the Carthageans, fair play to them, they've dragged themselves upright, and the city is actually doing quite well again. And Cato doesn't like this at all.

They don't have an empire to run. They don't have wars to fight. And so the Carthageans have been able to focus all their energies on getting rich. So again, I mean, to pursue another analogy, it's a bit like West Germany after the Second World War. They're not allowed to have an army or anything. So they can just focus on inventing televisions and stuff.

That old Carthage bond parallel.

So the Carthageinians are actually doing very well. Despite the attempts of the Romans to kneecap its economy, the economy is booming. They have this hinterland. The Namedians may be snipping bits off, but Carthage still controls most of it. It's very fertile, very rich. Carthage has massive grain silos. It's essentially become the bread basket of the Western Mediterranean, which is a role that it will play throughout the history, subsequent history of the Roman Empire. They have upgraded their harbors, and they have this inner dockyard which has births for 170 ships. And Cato is obviously very suspicious of this. Why do they need births for 170 ships? And he also notices storehouses in which there are piled great mounds of timber. And so he's thinking, is this timber for the construction of merchant shipping, or are the Carthaginians planning to reactivate a war fleet? And Cato being Cato, he obviously assumes the worst. And he returns to Rome, convinced that the Carthaginians are preparing for vengeance. He stands before the Senate, and he shakes out the folds of his toga, and from his toga, there drops a fig. Cato bends down, he holds it up and he invites his fellow senators to admire it.

It's very plump. It's very beautiful. It's clearly still very fresh. Kato then reveals that this fig had come from Carthage, as he points out, a mere three-day sail from Rome. His message is twofold. Firstly, Carthage is back as a great power. But secondly, suppose a third Punic War were to be launched, a war of anihilation against Carthage, then all those lands in North Africa, currently ruled by Carthage, would become roams.

And so from that point onwards, whenever Cato stands up in the Senate and he gives a speech, he ends every speech the same way, doesn't he? He makes the same urgent, resounding pronouncement. What is more? I mean, it must be extremely boring for his listeners that he says the same thing every time. Anyway, he says, What is more? I think that Carthage must be destroyed.

I mean, Dominic, you say it must be boring for his listeners. I don't think so at all. His speeches are not necessarily about Carthage, but he always makes this comment. So you're listening to it and you're waiting for it.

How is he going to get Carthage in again?

He'll just mention it willy-nilly. But it is a drum beat, isn't it? If there's one thing the Romans love, it's a drum beat of war. I think he is essentially provoking a war fever. This statement that he's making at the end of every speech, What is more, I think that Carthage must be destroyed, abbreviated, it's become one of the most notorious of all Latin aphorisms, Cathago Delenda est, Carthage must be destroyed.

So the scene is set for the final confrontation and the anihilation of Carthage. Come back after the break for this very sad story.

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Welcome back to the Rest is History. The Year is 152 BC, and Cato, this crabby, miserable old man of Roman politics who everybody admires, or at least a lot of people admire, for his Republican austerity and his ostentatious performative puritanical morality. He is now calling for the total destruction of Carthage. Tom, you've got the word genocide in the notes. Presumably, he's not calling for the extermination of every last Carthage Union. It's the city rather than the people, or have I got that wrong?

I think if you're saying destroy a city, you are effectively saying destroy a people. To destroy the mother city of a people effectively is to destroy a people. I think it's anachronistic, but I think there is that element in it. I think that people should be aware of what is being planned, the scale of what is being planned. I mean, it is horrific.

Some of the Romans think it's horrific, right?

Absolutely. There are senators in Rome who oppose Cato. Of course, many of these belong to the dynasty of Scipio Africanus, and one of them, a guy called Scipio Nassica. He's coined his own catchphrase to counter Cato's. His is, Cthago servandar est, Carthage must be preserved. Now, listeners may be wondering, what's his motivation in Coming up with this catchphrase, is it because he has a sense of humanity, a concern for human rights? Is it from the depths of his kindness? It is not. A concern with being kind does not really seem to have been a factor. Those who are arguing against a war of anihilation, against Carthage, their motivations, we're told by a Greek historian writing a century later, fundamentally is that Rome needs a worthy enemy because having Carthage as this great bogey on their doorstep keeps them honest. It keeps them on their toes. The The worry is that if you destroy Carthage, then the Romans may become decadent and self-indulgent and may end up turning on themselves if they don't have to guard against an outside enemy. All of which, of course, in a sense, does happen. It's more than possible that that Greek historian is writing with the benefit of hindsight.

I mean, not necessarily, but possible. I do think it's clear that At the time, the chief source of anxiety for Romans in the Senate listening to Cato push for this war of Annihilation is actually that they're worried about breaking the treaty that they'd signed with Carthage because this will then offend the gods and bring down divine anger on the head of their city. Because the Romans, they saw themselves as being the most devout of peoples, and certainly they were very legalistic. So even when they are attacking Macedonian Kings or taking Greek bigwigs hostage, they always needed to feel that they were legally justified in what they were doing. They're not, as they see it, doing anything that is unmerited or unprovoked. They always have to feel that the gods are on their side. This is what large numbers in the Senate feel they need with regard to Carthage. They can't attack Carthage without a kazas belai. Fortunately for them, They have one on hand because this is Massanissa.

Right. So this bloke has been constantly having his border skirmishes with the Carthaginians and attacking their farmland and snatching their olive groves or whatever. But if you're Cato or one of the warhawks in Rome. Isn't this the perfect opportunity? He's like the equivalent of the people in Donetsk and Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine who Vladimir Putin used as a pretext, basically, for his war in Ukraine.

Yes. And so Massanissa, by now in his late '80s, is as acquisitive as ever. So his men continue to launch attacks on farms and estates in Carthage's rural hinterland with the aim of appropriating them. In Carthage, there is now total despair that Rome will ever reign Massanissa in. This despair brings new leaders to power who are much more hawkish than the previous generation. These are men who are saying, Well, look, we need more assertive foreign policy. We cannot go on like this. In 151, ignoring the prescriptions of the treaty that they had signed with Rome back in 201, the Carthage Indians go to war with Massanissa. They do not have the permission of the Romans to do this. The result for the Carthaginians, unfortunately, is disaster. Massanissa, he's now basically 90, but he's still in the saddle. He fights the Carthaginian army to a standstill near a town called Orascopa, and he isolates them on a hill. They don't have any water, so they have no option but to surrender and submit to humiliating terms, which include, again, a massive indemnity, which is bad enough. But the real disaster is the open goal, obviously, that the Carthage Indians have now given to the war party in Rome, because Hawks there can now argue that Carthage is in breach of her treaty obligations, and that therefore, if the Romans attack Carthage, the gods will be backing them.

So that's everything they need.

So now the Romans have their opportunity to launch their strike. And what is more, there are financial motives, aren't there? Because in 151, the Carthage unions have paid off the very last installment, basically, of their reparations, their war indemnity. So there's going to be no more money coming to Rome from Carthage. If the Romans want the Carthage union wealth, they have to go and seize it. So they've both They've got the diplomatic opportunity because this business with Massanitza, but also now there is a very big financial incentive for greedy people in Rome to urge a war with Carthage. It's like these people who say, well, it's like, I don't know, Saddam Hussein is a bad man, and there's a lot of oil in Iraq. Let's go in.

Yeah, exactly. In 150, the Romans begin to mobilize for an invasion of Africa. Back in Carthage, understandably, the news of this It throws the entire city into panic. They desperately try to appease the Romans. They do this, first of all, by condemning the general who'd been defeated at Orascoppa to death. It will not surprise regular listeners to this series to learn that the name of this general is, of course, Hasdrupal, yet another Hasdrupal. Then the Carthaginians send an embassy to Rome, basically to beg for mercy. When they arrive there, they're appalled to discover that this Roman task force has already left and is in Sicily, so just across the sea from Carthage. They also find Cato on absolutely top form. He gives a zinger of a speech. What people can't be trusted to keep their treaties? The Carthaginians. What people are inveterate warmongers, notorious for their cruelty? The Carthaginians. What people left Italy a smoldering wasteland? The Carthaginians. So still that harping on all the destruction that Hannibal had brought to Italy. When the Carthaginian envies They beg to know, How can we make amends? I mean, what can we do? They receive this very menacingly Delphic response by satisfying the Roman people.

But the Senate does not specify how this satisfaction can be obtained.

Let's take us to the next year, 12 months on. The Romans have landed in North Africa. They have established their base camp 30 miles northwest of Carthage. The Carthage Union sent envoies to try and negotiate with the Romans. And what happens next?

Well, they arrive at the Roman camp, and as they approach, there's this great deafening blast of trumpets. Then they enter the camp and they are led past the mast ranks of the legions who are all drawn up and who are totally silent. I mean, it must have been terrifying. Ahead of them are the two consuls sat down on a podium and the Carthage Indian envoices are brought before the consuls, and they start stammering, trying to make their excuses, but all these excuses are dismissed. Then one of the consuls, Lucius Marcius Sensorinus, he informs the envoices that there will be no more negotiations until Carthage has handed over all the weapons in the city, all the armor, all the war machines. The envoices go back to Carthage and shortly afterwards, great wagon loads of weapons and armor rumbling up to the Roman camp, and also in their train, over 2,000 catapults. So these are all handed over to the Romans. And then the envoices come back and they stand in front of the consuls again. And now, at last, the terms are delivered, and I will quote them. Bear bravely the remaining commands of the Roman Senate, the envoices are told.

You must evacuate your city and surrender it to us. You will be allowed to settle where you Please, within the limits of your own territory, provided that it is at least 10 miles from the sea. As for us, we are resolved to level Carthage to the ground.

I just mean, the Carthage in an envoy is listening to that. I mean, terrifying. And of course, what can they do? There's no way that the Carthageans can possibly accept this, you would think.

I mean, just to emphasize for people, talked about how people are identified with their mother city. And in a sense, to lose your mother city is to lose your identity. That city, it's not just about the history, it's also about the temples, the gods, whatever. You lose everything. And of course, on the economic sense, if you no longer have a port, you no longer really have a way of making a living. So as you say, it would seem impossible for the Carthage Indians to accept these terms. And so it proves, because when the ambassadors from the Roman camp return to Carthage, the people of the city refuse to accept it, even though they We know that in effect, by doing so, they are signing their own death warrant. Anyone who speaks up saying, Actually, I think we should accept these terms. We've got no chance of keeping the Romans at bay, they are lynched, they're stoned, whatever. There is a mass effort to try and steal Carthage for the horrors that are to come because, of course, they've handed over their catapults, their weapons, their armor, all of that. What measures do they take? All the slaves in the city are freed to the degree that the Carthage Union still have arms.

Arms are given to these slaves. People rush out to quarries outside the city and haul in stones because they're going to try and make more catapults. We're told all the shrines, the temples, and every other public space were turned into workshops where men and women worked day and night without pause, taking turns to eat according to a fixed schedule. Basically, equivalent of munitions factories popping up across the city in their temples. In these workshops, of course, people are busy making swords spears, shields. Anything made of metal in the city is being melted down, and women donate their hair so that it can be used as rope for the catapults, twine it. Hasdrabal, their general who'd lost the battle at Orascoppa and is still on death row. He's reprieved and he's given back his old command, and he leads out a makeshift army and prepares for a guerrilla war against the Romans. It is war. For the third time, Rome and Carthage are locked in what really is this time a death struggle. It's not a death struggle for Rome, but it absolutely is for Carthage.

It's the war. It's a bit like, I don't know, when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, and the Germans had such a preponderance of forces, but Allied sympathizers with Poland said, Oh, they will have all the pluck. They've got such spirit. They're fighting for their homeland. The people will rise and they will see off the invaders, all of this thing. Actually, that turned out to be complete wishful thinking because the balance of forces was such that the attacker could not but win. In this case, well, actually, it's not an immediate walkover, is it, by any means?

The Carthageanians do actually manage to hold out for much longer than the Poles do against the Nazis, as it turns out, for several years. They're able to do this because even though the Carthageanians have been tricked into handing over so much of their weaponry, the city is still pretty well-prepared for a siege. It has these great triple walls, and these walls in turn are buttled with ditches and banks. I mentioned the grain silos. They have a lot of food inside the city. They've also built huge systems for collecting rainwater. Again, water shouldn't be a problem. Meanwhile, the Romans, as they advance up to the city, they camp beside a stagnant lake, and it's summer. So predictably, they all start catching various horrible diseases. Actually, Hasdrabel, he proved an absolute dud in open combat. When it comes to guerrilla warfare, he's actually pretty good. He's very successful at attacking Roman supply lines, masterminding sallies. All that year, 149, the siege carries on. 148, Roman setbacks continue. They are going around trying to mop up Carthage Indian strongholds beyond Carthage. But these two are able to hold out. And again, sallies are launched out from the walls and they burn Roman siege engines and so on.

And then in 148, Massanissa, the old warhorse, the man who had once been a Carthaginian ally and then become their great enemy, he dies at the fabulous age of 91. And that might have offered hope to the Carthaginians, perhaps, that this inveterate enemy of theirs has gone. And then There comes news from the Balkans that a pretender to the Macedonian throne has emerged. People remember that the Kingdom of Massodon had been divided up into these four cantons. A pretender has emerged, and he wants to reunite these cantons. And make himself king. He defeats a Roman army and sends messages to the Carthaginian saying, Will you enter into an alliance? Of course, the Carthaginian say, Yes. So suddenly they do have an ally. Now, the Romans, They're not despondent. They're still fully expecting to win. But I think there's a certain sense of alarm developing. And so they start to look around for a savior, someone qualified to step into the breach and prove himself a hero. And there is, of course, really only the one candidate.

So the obvious person, I guess, the adoptive grandson of Scipio Africanus, it's the person we've already talked about, Scipio Emiliana. It's not just that he has got the right bloodline or the right heredity. He has experience, doesn't he? He has already fought the Carthaginians.

He has. I mean, he's a very, very good soldier. He'd been an observer at Horoscopy were where Massanissa had defeated the Carthage Indians. And so he had seen Hasdrupal, the Carthage Indian Commander-in-Chief, up close. He knew what made him tick. And then for the past two years, he'd been serving before the walls of Carthage itself, where he was basically the only senior officer to have emerged with any credit at all. I mean, he'd had a very good war. The only drawback is that he's still in his 30s, and people will remember that the minimum age to serve as counsel is 40. That had been waived for Scipio Africanus against the opposition of Roman Conservatives. But the people hadn't cared. They'd forced it through. The same thing happens this time. The people, and I quote, declared that he was the only worthy successor of his father, Emilius Paulus, the conqueror of Massodon and of the Scipios. The Senate, recognizing the force of public opinion, perhaps just a little desperate themselves, agree to waive the Prohibition and say, Yeah, Scipio can run for council and he's duly elected. The intriguing thing is that even the absolute spokesman for conservatism, Cato, even Cato gives Scipio Emilianus the nod.

I mean, he really is the right man for the job.

Now, at last, we come to the final chapter in the story. The siege of Carthage, the end of the Punic Wars, and indeed, the end of this great ancient city itself. The Romans have put all their hopes in Scipio Emilianus. When he arrives in Africa as council in 146, Tom, he has the vigor and the dynamism and the ambition that his predecessors have lacked, and he more than bears out the hope that the Senate had in him.

Yes. And Hasdrabel, who has clashed with Scipio Emilianus before, he's very respectful of his reputation. And so he, rather than continuing with his guerrilla war, he withdraws all his troops inside Carthage and hunkers down there. But this, of course, is only to play into Scipio Emilianus' hands because now all the Carthaginian forces are trapped inside the great city. And Emilianus knows that if he can only invest the city completely, completely surround it, cut off all supplies of food, then he will be able, in the long run, to starve the city into submission. He orders his men to start constructing a massive mole across the entrance of the harbor, which to The Carthaginian seems an impossible engineering project, but Scipio Aemilianus is a very good engineer as well as a very good soldier and is able to pull it off. And so this mole ends up being constructed. Access to the harbor is now blocked off, and there is no possibility of food coming into Carthage. And so Scipio, Emilianus, knows that he can now sit back and wait. And with each day that passes, the noose will tighten.

And what about the Carthageanians? Well, this noose is tightening. What are they doing?

Well, Carthage has always been run by a Senate. In that sense, it's always had a civilian government. But Hasdrabel, he He feels that the only way that Carthage survive is if he institutes a military dictatorship. This is what he does. He's got all the soldiers in his back. There's no one to stop him. By doing that, of course, he is able to commandeer all the food supplies within the city and ensure that his men are well-fed even while everyone else starts to starve and the corps of those who no longer have access to food begin to litter the streets of the dying city. Hasdrabel is anxious that This experience of starvation on the part of the vast majority of the public may result in civic unrest, may lead to pressure on him to open negotiations with the Romans, and he's not prepared to do that. So he takes Roman legionaries who've been captured in the fighting, and he leads them up onto the walls of Carthage, and there where the Romans, far below, can see what is being done to their comrades, they're tortured to death, and their bodies are dumped into the Roman positions.

That, of course, makes sure that there will be no negotiations. And Skipi Amelianus is waiting for the morale in the city to hit rock bottom, for people really to start dying, for disease to spread. And then when that moment comes, he strikes, and he takes the Carthaginians completely by surprise. And his assault, it's not over the walls, it's through the harbors from the mole. That mole is a launch pad. And so the Romans are able to It's an amphibius attack. They go through the outer Harbor, into that inner Harbor that the Carthaginians have just been built. From there, there is easy access to the great marketplace in the center of the city. Once the Romans have breached the Harbor defenses, they pour into this marketplace and they essentially make it the base for the sack of the city that is now going to happen. First of all, they strip this great temple that is standing there of all its gold, pile that gold up, and then they start literally disassembling the city brick by brick. So what they do, there are very tight, narrow streets fanning off from the marketplace, and there are blocks of housing that reach up six stories.

And these are about the marketplace. And the houses that are adjacent to the marketplace, soldiers go in, they clear all the opposition from all the enemy from each of the stories of these houses. And then once the houses have been cleared, they take planks up to the top story and they lay them out across the narrow streets below. And from there, they can pass into the next block of houses, and they do the same. And the process just goes on and on and on. And once the houses have been cleared and the soldiers have gone from the one block to the next, they then set the houses on fire. And you get masonry, you get beams, you get the corps of the slain, you get Old men, women, children who might have taken shelter inside these houses, they all come crashing down into the streets. And we have a horrific description of what this was like. Once all the the debris has fallen into the streets, cleaners came who had been charged with making the streets passable so that the soldiers can continue up the streets. And these cleaners hauled the dead and the living alike into great pits they had dug, disposing off them as though they were masonry in burning timbers, mere debris.

Some of the living were thrown in headfirst so that their legs stuck out of the ground and they were left to rive where they had been buried a long time. So a hideous, grotesque image.

Do you know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of the siege of Tenochtitland that we talked about in the fall of the Aztecs, the Spanish fighting house by house, destroying the houses to stop the Aztecs from using them as refuges. I mean, it's very similar, isn't it? It's this Stalingrad style battle.

I mean, it's possible that there would have been Spaniards. Of course. In the war who had read these very accounts.

I was thinking that they had classical education, a lot of these people. So they would have known about all this.

And the destruction of Carthage is the archetype of the destruction of a great and famous and beautiful capital. And the process of clearance goes on for six days. On the seventh day, the vast mass of the Carthage Indians who remained alive, surrendered. The only resistance now is from Hasdribal and 900 Roman deserters who held out on the topmost fort, the Carthaginian equivalent of an acropolis. But in time, he, too, is brought to surrender, and he's brought before Scipio Amelianus and Grovels before the feet of the Roman Commander. His wife, who'd been with him, is utterly contentuous of this, and she takes a dagger. She takes a dagger, she slits the throats of their two sons, and she throws the corps of her sons into a fire that is blazing nearby. Then she hurls herself into the flames as well. Very daido. Yeah. I mean, it's a bit sad that women tend only to appear in this series when they're killing themselves.

That's antiquity for you. Yeah. What happens to Hasdrabul, and what happens to the désertors?

Hasdrabul is spared and taken back to Rome, where he walks in Scipio Amelianus's triumph, and then he's allowed to settle in a farm outside Rome, so he survives. The Roman desserts, of course, are put horribly to death. The Carthaginians who have surrender, they are all enslaved, about 50,000 of them. They're led out. Men, women, children, all become slaves. The city is systematically stripped of all its treasures. No respect is shown. The temples of the Carthage Indian gods, they are demolished. Carthage had a rich and venerable literary tradition. All the libraries are emptied and given to the Namedians who promptly seem to have lost them. The Romans do keep one 28 volume treatise on agriculture, which they have translated into Latin, because obviously they're thinking, Well, we want to take over these lands, and this is the guide to how to make the fields flourish. They will keep that But otherwise, all the wealth of Punic literature is gone. So we have nothing. We have no histories written by the Carthageinians. And so as so often in these stories, whether it's the Belgians in the Congo or whatever, or indeed the the Americans in the Great Plains.

We only have one side. We only have the Roman side. The news of Carthage's fall is sent to Rome, and the Senate then send back instructions to Scipio Amelianus that what remained the city was to be razed to the ground and that a curse was to be laid on anyone who in the future might try to settle there. So Carthage is to be left abandoned to weeds.

But here's an amazing thing. They don't sow the the ruins with salt. They don't. Everyone thinks they did that and they didn't.

No, they don't. It was a metaphorical flourish in the Cambridge ancient history, which came out in the 1920s, and it's just spread like wildfire ever since. But there's no reference to that happening in any of the ancient sources at all. But they might as well have sowed the fields with salt because the signal that the destruction of this very famous, very ancient, very beautiful city, the signal sent to the world was unmistakable that the Romans are no longer prepared to brook any rival, any hint of disobedience. That is a message that is rammed home a few months later. People may remember that there's this uprising in Massodon, this pretender to the Masodanian throne has emerged. I mean, he does not last long. He gets crushed. There's an uprising in Greece, and the Romans deal with that very brutally as well. The suppression of that uprising culminates in the anihalation of a second famous, ancient and beautiful city, and that is the destruction of Korynth in Greece, commanding the Isthmus that joins the Pelipanese to Northern Greece. I think that anyone in the Mediterranean in 146 BC, contemplating the destruction in the same year of Carthage and of Korynth are well aware that an era has dawned in which Rome is so preponderant that effectively no one in the Mediterranean has any real independence left at all.

Within a century, the whole of the Mediterranean will become a Roman Lake. But the story of how Rome rises to that position of preponderance, what it means for people in the Mediterranean and what it means for the Romans themselves, I mean, that is a story for another day. But I just thought to end this series, we've done three series in all, and we began the very first series with a passage that derives from Polybius's recollections. Polybius had accompanied Scipio Amelianus to the siege and had witnessed it for himself. So I'll just finish by reading this passage. It is said that Scipio Amelianus, as Carthage was going up in flames, its anihalation almost complete, gazed at the city in its death rose and openly wept for his enemies. He stood wrapped in thought for a long time, pondering how every city, every people, every empire must, as men do, meet with their doom in the the end. For such had been the fate of Troy, once a proud and flourishing city, and of the empires of Assyria, Media, and Persia, each in their own day, the greatest in the world, and of Massodon, which only recently had blazed with such a brilliance.

Then, either deliberately or because he could not help quoting them, Scipio spoke two lines of Homer, A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish and Priam and his people all be slain. When Polybius, speaking to him with the freedom he was granted as Scipio's tutor in Greek literature, asked him what he meant by these words, It is said that without any attempt to veil his meaning, Scipio made reference to his own country. For when he pondered how all things that are mortal must fall, he dreaded how Rome, too, would fall.

Crikey. Well, thank you very much, Tom. At It's a salutary warning, and indeed, one that sets up beautifully our next series on the Rest is History, which we'll be starting on Monday. That series is the tale of the fall of the Incas, one of the longest and largest contiguous empires in world history that came crashing down at the hands of Francisco Pizarro and his conquistadors. On Monday, members of the Rest is History Club will get all six episodes in that mighty series. If you want to join them, if you want to plunge into the streets of Cusco and Cajamarca and the jungles of the Amazon and scale the peaks of the Andes with the Spaniards, then you merely have to head to theresteshistory. Com to sign up and you'll get all six episodes on Monday. But for now, Tom, what an amazing effort to cover that epic story in three mighty seasons. Thank you so much. And that was Carthage.

Bye-bye, everybody. Ave, aquevale.