Tom Holland

So that, of course, makes sure that there will be no negotiations.

And Scipio Aemilianus 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 kind of launch pad.

And so the Romans are able to, it's an amphibious attack.

They go through the outer harbor into that inner harbor that the Carthaginians had just been built.

And from there, there is easy access to the great marketplace in the center of the city.

And 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 on.

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 um kind of 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 the 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 kind of narrow streets below.

And from there they can pass into the next story.

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 corpses 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.