Tom Holland

And we have a horrific description of what this was like.

Once all the kind of 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 of them as though they were masonry and 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 writhe where they had been buried a long time.

So a kind of hideous, grotesque image.

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

I was thinking that.

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.

And on the seventh day, the vast mass of the Carthaginians who remained alive surrendered.

And the only resistance now is from Hasdrubal and 900 Roman deserters who held out on the kind of the topmost fort, the Carthaginian equivalent of an acropolis.

But in time, he too is brought to surrender and he's brought before Scipio Aemilianus and grovels before the feet of the Roman commander.

And his wife is, who'd been with him, is utterly contemptuous of this.

And she takes a dagger.

She slits the throats of their two sons and she throws the corpses of her sons into a fire that is blazing nearby.

And then she hurls herself into the flames as well.

Very Dido.

Yeah.

I mean, it's a bit sad that women tend only to appear in the series when they're killing themselves.

So Hasdrubal is spared and taken back to Rome where he walks in Scipio Aemilianus' triumph.