Tom Holland

Hasdrubal, who has clashed with Scipio Aemilianus before, I mean, 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 Aemilianus' hands because now all the Carthaginian forces are trapped inside the great city.

And Aemilianus 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.

And so he orders his men to start constructing a massive mole across the entrance of the harbour, which to the Carthaginians 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 harbour is now blocked off and there is no possibility of food coming into Carthage.

And so Scipio Aemilianus knows that he can now sit back and wait.

And with each day that passes, the noose will tighten.

Well, Carthage has always been run by a Senate in that sense.

It's always had a kind of civilian government.

But Hasdrubal, he feels that the only way that Carthage survive is if he institutes a military dictatorship.

And so this is what he does.

He's got all the soldiers at his back.

There's no one to stop him.

And 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 corpses of those who no longer have access to food begin to litter the streets of the dying city.

And Hasdrubal 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.