Episode 353 - The Death of Carthage

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Hello and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.

We're Roman legionaries serving the glorious Republic as Hannibal and his soldiers come over the Alps.

Their army is arrayed out in front of us, and in the front rank is a beast that we've never seen before.

Taller than any building with a weird long wiggly nose that several legionnaires make designs on what they would do after a long night of drinking.

Another legionnaire says it looks like my mom.

Before I could say a cutting retort, the animals charge at us, their strange dick noses trumpeting a war cry.

Our centurion, Nadius Ginguricus, steps forward, sword drawn, and bellows an order we were waiting for.

Pre-Zet!

Tom and I in the front rank reach into the pockets at our hip and draw out the weapon issued to us to combat the trumpeting dick noses.

A crisp can of white monster.

Nadius gives us the next order.

Open?

We crack the cans.

Pour!

We dump the monster into the dirt.

The smell of the nectar of the gods floods the senses of the trumpeting dick noses and drives them mad.

They turn and charge back into the ranks of the Carthaginians.

We didn't die this cold open, boys.

It's a rare one.

Yeah, how's everybody doing?

i'm so happy that i have jerry rigged white monster into being part of the lore of this show i have seen multiple people say like i just went and tried my first one after listening to the show i'm like all right i didn't know it was like a rarity they were such a a wonderful invention when they came out because previously all you had was green monster which like just gives you diabetes yeah yeah green monster is disgusting I can give myself a heart murmur, but I'm not going to get diabetes from it anymore.

So yeah, it just became a, you know, you had to take a razor blade and scrape off the green monster sticker from the back of your car.

Put a white monster one.

Olympus has fallen.

It's the predator like handshake meme between like middle-aged podcasters and trans women.

Like we all love cans of white monster.

And shift water.

I don't actually drink energy drinks anymore because they just fuck me up too bad and like my sleep is distressed as is.

But there was a time.

I rarely have them.

Back when the show started, you know how due to my job, I was living off of them.

And then Bang came out, which was way, way worse for you, but also cheaper than a white monster.

So they're the nectar for people that have to work 24-hour long shifts.

So yeah, I don't recommend it.

I'm sure it does something horrible to your body.

You probably shouldn't drink it.

It was like when the show started, we had a bit about old crow whiskey because it was disgusting and Nick kept buying it.

And, you know, people went out and bought it.

And I'm like, why are you doing that?

The whole joke is that it tastes like shit.

You know, it's funny you should mention it because for some reason, one of his bits re-entered my brain and it won't leave, which is, I can't even remember the point of it, but you did something about somebody sounding like Eddie Vetter, and Nick just started doing Eddie Vetter voice throughout the episode.

And we even ended the episode with a smash cut of him going, Event, and all.

Like, we just ended the episode with David.

Oh, man.

You know what?

Like,

rest in Valhalla, Nick.

You're still alive.

You're just not on the show anymore.

It was good.

And speaking of Valhalla, I'm just laughing at the idea of, well, the combination of fucking, you know, European,

you know, ancient, your classical militaries versus North African and the idea of like elephants being weird, but what if you had had a stranger mashup?

What if you had like a 13th warrior style situation between like Hannibal and the Vikings, but he also picked a different animal from Europe or from Africa to bring as like a weapon?

So it's like the Vikings having to conceive of a hippopotamus.

It's not that weird versus compared to what they're dealing with here.

A hippo would have done so much more damage, but they also would have just burdered everyone around them.

Yeah, that's the problem.

You kind of can't keep them in control.

I love the idea of someone really trying hard to domesticate zebras and failing or unleashing cheetahs of some kind.

So it's just like a house cat.

It runs around, doesn't listen to anybody, knocks your shit off the counter, and then you just regret ever getting it.

Yeah, yeah, I do.

I like the disconnect when it comes to, I mean, elephants definitely fall into this category too, and we're about to talk about them, but the hippos too have sort of like the disconnect between how cuddly and approachable they appear versus how they actually are in nature.

And it's like hippos, insanely violent, will bite a boat in half.

Also, gigantic.

Elephants, when they enter adolescence, this horrible shit leaks out of their eyes and goes in their mouth.

They just run around eating shit with their tusks non-stop.

I bet I can cuddle it, though.

They cry goth tears when they're teenagers and it makes them go insane and head-butt things.

They're basically just like us.

Man, I would have loved that when I was 16, to be fair.

I bet a hippo would let me cuddle it.

This is that poll that said most men feel like they could probably fight a wolf but i'm like no that animal would probably let me snuggle it yeah also if you've ever seen a wolf you realize that they're like

it's been drawn by somebody with no sense of the proportions when you see one for the first time because they're gigantic so it's just like yeah i wouldn't want to fight that uh a lot of Russian dudes who have, you know, spent their entire lives fighting entire barrels of vodka didn't last against a wolf.

I don't think I'm going to be able to stand up to it.

Yeah, but I feel like I could probably snuggle it.

You know what I mean?

Like, it'd probably recognize my game and be like, you know, you can come in here.

You can come into my den and I will murder you.

Joe, you have the approach to danger that is similar to that of a middle-class white woman.

It's like, oh,

elephant.

I'll be able to cuddle it.

It will love me.

The Carthaginians would have had a better chance if they had just a battalion of white women to neutralize the elephants.

Look, my dad may not have loved me, but that hippo will.

Yeah, in a way,

you're creating the fodder for an entire season of like Steve Irwin true crime podcasts.

Oh, rest in peace, big guy.

I'm doing the work for the true crime podcasters, and not when we just both accidentally cover the same topic at the same time.

David Attenborough is narrating the true crime podcast about a guy who just wanted to cuddle a hip-hop.

I mean, this is just Grizzlyman, but me.

Like, that's what happened to the Grizzlyman guy.

And then Werner Herzog will fucking show us the recording.

He's like, you must not put this on the podcast feed.

Yeah, exactly.

It would be something the offensive like yeah but this is funny as fuck yeah

boys i've gathered you here today because we're we've talked about the punic wars before uh not in a series but in the set piece battle episodes how hannibal went to war against rome nearly bring it to its knees by engineering some of the largest most embarrassing defeats in roman history in general But another thing we could all agree upon here, Hannibal, limit break, elephant.

Yeah, yeah.

this is a side note, but Joe, do you know how sometimes we're talking about officer voice and people love putting stupid quotes in their signature block on emails in the military?

And I recall seeing a lot of people with their inspirational quotes, and I was like, I've got an even better one.

And I just made my inspirational quote at the end of my email signature, like, well, what if we use an elephant?

You know, quotation, Hannibal.

And it's like, it's such a great idea, man.

There's probably someone that's like, wow, I didn't think that's how we came up with it.

That's brilliant.

I realized not enough people were getting annoyed by it.

So my next one was, it's so cold, signed Napoleon.

Yeah, they resurrected him, actually.

It was like a prophet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like the daguerreotype version of Wolfenstein is they brought back Napoleon, but he's in a robot.

I was going to say, what blows my mind about this is, yeah, Hannibal then being like, we're going to take them over incredibly hostile terrain that crucially elephants are not suited to.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

What if we take these African elephants and make them climb the Alps?

They'll love it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Plus, there wasn't, there there wasn't the.

They didn't have those fucking big tunnels at those points.

You just had to go over the mountains.

That's what Hannibal needed.

Infrastructure week.

Yeah, he's like, well, the elephants will be driven by their hatred of the Swiss enough that they'll want to fight the Romans.

Actually, the Swiss were fighting the Romans at the time.

They were Celtic tribes at that point.

Unfortunately, the concept of the Swiss haven't been invented yet, therefore, and either had the Italians.

And so they had to teach them how to hate Latins, which was really hard.

It was like training police dogs, but how to only attack when you smell olive oil.

I got to tell you something, and I know we have to start the episode, is that we had a temporary, like, like, sort of relief stand-in child minder, and it was this Italian lady, and she was talking about my daughter having a coffin.

Like, what you need to do is warm up olive oil and put it on her chest, like fucking Vic's vapor rub.

And I was just like, you know, I feel like we aren't hard enough on the Italians.

Like, you've known me for two hours, and you're already like, like, dunk your child in olive oil.

Like, just slather that shit.

That's harsher than any shit I would have come up with based on my stereotypes of Italians.

However, despite all of that, each time Carthage ran into one big problem that they simply couldn't figure out how to overcome.

That is, no matter how many times they kicked the Romans in the teeth, the Romans simply refused to quit and would, over time, win in an extended war.

The most famous case of this, undoubtedly, is the Second Punic War, where most of the things that you think of when you think of Hannibal happened.

He smashes Roman

one apocalyptic defeat after another, like Travia, Trezamine, and of course Cannae, defeats that's so infamous that Rome resorted to human sacrifice to please their gods, a practice which they had abandoned before this and then brought back just to be on the safe side because Hannibal's whooping that ass so hard.

And to this day, pretty much all of these battles remain some of the most notorious defeats in military history.

But even after all of that, people generally leave out the part where Hannibal lost that war.

The war went on for years upon years after all of that, and slowly Rome rebuilt.

Its armies marched on, ready and willing to continue a long, long war far beyond the capabilities of the Carthaginians.

Logistics, manpower, the willingness to feed generations of Italians into a wood chipper, the likes of which nobody has ever done since.

They had a willing population who'd go be soldiers and get ground up non-stop.

What I'm basically saying was they had the world's first cadre of three doors down fans willing to enlist.

Scipio Africanus is like, I'm cutting a single.

I'm calling it kryptonite.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

The Roman version of Creed wrote the first sort of like...

Roman popular music that invoked the gods and it inspired a generation of like no-luck having-ass dudes to join the legion and then they had to go fight.

Instead of human clay, it's human oil.

I mean, human clay would probably resonate with Romans, too, in the sense that it's what all their friends got turned into.

I mean, you know, you got to appreciate their dedication to being turned into human bolognese by elephants.

Yeah.

I mean, you got to respect the grind.

Not all grind sets end in success.

Sometimes they just end with you getting, you know, stampy from The Simpsons stomping on you repeatedly.

That is a very funny concept of repurposing the term grind set to be like, I'm throwing myself into more elaborate forms of of meat grinders.

Yeah, sometimes a grind set is a literal grind of you just being fed into it.

Yeah, I've got this grind set.

I'm going to eliminate at least two battalions of Roman legionnaires.

I'm on their side.

On that grind set, and by that I mean my bones into bread.

Yeah, a Roman grind set guy who's like, no, you need to cut out all wheat.

You just need to survive on drinking nothing but garum.

We've given you a gallon of mottled wine, a pair of sandals, and this weird skirt, and we now want you to march 50 miles in a day.

I mean, one time in Ranger school, I sneaked my hand into my bag to grab food when we were forbidden from eating because I was so exhausted.

I'm like, I'll eat the first thing I get my hands on.

And I got a packet of A1 steak sauce and I just downed that shit like nobody's business.

And that's the closest I've been to a Roman legioneer downing a thing of Garum.

And you know what?

It does give you some salt and some fucking electrolytes and a little bit of a little bit of zest in your life.

Yeah, exactly.

And normally to get that kind of resources, you just have to swallow the man next to you.

And that's frowned upon.

That was frowned upon back when we were in, Nate.

I was going to say, that's why the Romans actually, we have to return with a V back to Roman military prowess because they had that stuff figured out.

They knew how to make their buddy smile.

We just made jokes about it.

They actually did.

Yeah, if you ain't clapping cheeks, your feet ain't clapping the cobblestones.

You know what I'm saying?

Anyway.

Where the war really started and exists still in the popular narrative of Hannibal crossing the Alps and smashing Roman ass all across the boot of Italy, it ended with Hannibal and Carthage fighting for their very survival on their home turf in Africa.

Eventually, Eventually, all this came to a head at the Battle of Zama, where Hannibal's army was absolutely crushed so severely that Hannibal was one of the very few people to actually get away from it alive on his side.

The Second Punic War ended shortly thereafter with a peace treaty that gutted any dreams of a Carthaginian empire.

They're forced to surrender all of their overseas territories, some of their holdings in Africa.

forced to pay Rome a massive haul in treasure over the course of 50 years, and the keeping of war elephants was banned, as was owning a navy and going to war without Rome's permission was also banned.

So they said they had to dedicate themselves to getting revenge on Rome by inventing Harissa.

Yeah, they had to invent things called spices.

We're going to have banging food and we're going to humiliate you, but unfortunately, we're not going to be able to have a navy or elephants.

That's going to be an elephant.

Yeah, exactly.

We're banning elephants just because we don't like the idea of it.

Just a Carthaginian dude hanging out outside a gambling house with two XL bullies on chains?

He's actually a sweetheart.

He wouldn't hurt a fly.

He's just crushing a child.

Just picking up a Robin and dashing his brains across the road.

Like, he's actually a sweetheart.

Yeah, I was going to say Robin XL bully.

Yeah, they love the idea.

They're like, oh, we've banned war elephants, but they don't ban them in like a different adjoining province in Libya.

So there's like a guy taking a convoy of elephants across the desert to get them.

This is my elephant.

He's two times babe, two times bippy.

There's a guy with a Facebook page dedicated to selling illegal elephants.

He's like, oh, message me on Roman WhatsApp.

To be fair, that 100% exists today, and it's coming out of Dubai.

Like, 100%.

Yeah, I was going to say that guy's entire fucking yearly haul of animals has been intercepted by the customs at Chardegal Airport.

They're like, you can't really, you can't check an elephant in your check bag, dude.

It doesn't work that way.

But, like, you joke about that.

There's literally a guy I follow on TikTok who lives in Dubai who has a servile as a pet.

And I'm like, I'm just counting down the days until that eats you.

Yeah, I hope that mauls him or someone that he loves.

I've been to the Emirates, and I'm just thinking about, like, yeah, I'm sure he's in a high-rise building, and like, he just has a room in his apartment you don't go into unless you want to

experience a fate that no one has experienced since like a Belgian explorer.

There's three places in the world where this could happen: Dubai, random parts of Russia, and strange Midwestern gas stations in the middle of nowhere.

I was going to say a fourth one, which is just going for a walk in Colorado.

You know, it won't be a servo.

It'll be an equivalent North American cat that eats you, but it can happen.

But the treaty was so brutal that most of the Carthaginian government wanted to reject it, but Hannibal urged them to accept it.

Otherwise, Rome would just destroy them.

The treaty was accepted, but left Carthage all but subservient to Rome.

And despite this, Carthage, as always, continued to make a killing in the trade game.

I mean, it's a perfect location for it.

And they paid off their debt to Rome pretty quickly.

Their economy continued to hum.

And in reality, this was actually only helped by the fact that they were prohibited from going to war, building a large army, or a navy.

It's like what the American economy would look like if it didn't have the Department of Defense.

You know, suddenly it's like, oh shit, we can just put all this money somewhere else.

They're creating the Carthaginian welfare state.

You know, they're just maxing out.

They're like, the counters in, you know, Caesar II doesn't let you count any higher resources because they've got this.

And meanwhile, Rome is like building the, you know, first century BC MRAP.

We've put Oshkosh in a time machine to go back in time to give Robin Legionnaires TBIs.

No, it's got a V-hole, you see?

Like it won't actually like the spears will

wooden MRAPs?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wooden MRAPs with the, you know, they've got, I'm trying to think of like

they've got terracotta tiles on the top of them.

Somehow, this costs so much money.

I mean, the Trojan horse was just like a wooden MRAP when you think about it.

Well, I mean, it wasn't, that horse wasn't V-shaped.

And in fact, I encourage no horses that be V-shaped because they should be blown up.

You know how I feel about this?

I agree with you in the sense that both an MRAP and the Trojan horse disgorge a cargo of the stinkiest dudes on the planet.

A whole bunch of dude just writhing around in each other's sweat, listening to the worst music on earth.

Yeah, I was going to say that the two guys splitting, each one has an air pod or like an earbud for an old iPod, listening to

Allison Chains, but it's like 96 kilohertz fidelity.

Okay, okay, that's enough direct attacks on my last deployment.

There's just a soldier like standing outside the horse.

Is there noise coming out of the?

I can hear like some movement and very faintly hear, Can you take me high?

pop open the bob of the horse like with arms wide open i knew it nixon here oh they just hear a crack of a white monster kind of inside the horse and did check us up

yeah exactly you know what i mean that is a good point though that that lane staley walked so scott stapp could run i mean let's be perfectly

And Ed Kowalchik walked so Scott Scapp, everybody, it all comes back to either Allison Chains or Life, but we all need to be honest here.

Lane Staley didn't walk much.

He was more of a sitting sitting and nodding off kind of guy.

Now,

you know, there's a lot of other problems with this treaty.

They lacked any military capability to confront Rome, but that didn't mean that Rome would stop fucking with them through proxies.

The king of the Numidians was a Roman ally and bordered Carthage, and the king kept raiding across and fucking Carthaginian lands.

When Carthage petitioned Rome for permission to march out and stop the Numidian king, Rome was like, nah, nah, but continued to tell the Numidian king, fuck their shit up.

Carthage and Rome were always bound to hate one another, though.

It didn't matter if Carthage was put to heel or anything.

No matter how much under Rome's thumb Carthage was, they were always going to be at each other's throats, specifically in whoever was dominant.

Carthage and Rome were both technically republics, but not really.

Both were empires built around a central, strong city-state.

Both Both were geographically going to square off.

It didn't matter if both of them became very strong.

We'd have the first and second Punic Wars.

And if one eventually dominated the other, it was only a matter of time before one swallowed them in the constant march of expansion.

So now with Carthage kind of existing in this weird gray area, it was only a matter of time before something really kicked off.

And so that meant even with Carthage disarmed and dominated, there was still a faction within Rome that championed any reason, even bullshit ones, to go back to war against Carthage and finish them off for good.

One was Consul Marcus Porcius Cato, also known as Cato the Elder, because he was in his 80s, which is impressive for back then.

I was going to say Roman Tom Cotton, but now you're telling me it's Roman John McCain.

To be fair, I don't think John McCain lived that long.

I think Cato the Elder kind of outlived him.

Yeah, he might have.

Did Cato ever crash a boat into another boat multiple times?

Cato actually impressively invented a jet so he could crash it into the aircraft carrier he also invented to make this point.

Cato was famous for two things, hating the Greeks and Carthage.

The Greek thing is weird.

He was very much against the creep of Greek culture into Rome, but the Carthage thing was even weirder.

Because for years, even before the outbreak of the Third Punic War, he would end his speeches with, quote, Carthage must be destroyed.

Even when the speech had nothing to do with Carthage.

I'm also just imagining the sort of like great replacement theory of a Roman politician who thinks the Greeks are going to like, they're making Rome too woke or something.

Yeah, exactly.

The Greeks are making Rome too woke and will all be replaced by Carthaginians.

This is just the tallied politics.

This is just the camp.

Yeah, this is just the camp of the saints or like the Liga Nord, except like the original Liga Nord, the OG Liga Nord.

Some people believe that this was more of a reflection of Cato's concept and theory on foreign relation, which is Rome doesn't need foreign relations.

We'll simply dominate everybody with our military.

That is how our foreign relations should work.

And even the factions that didn't want to go to war against Carthage still kind of wanted to go to war against Carthage for different reasons.

According to the book The Fall of Carthage by Adrian Goldsworthy, the anti-war faction saw keeping Carthage alive as as this weird, like declawed rump state a key to keeping Romans in line?

Because Romans remembered the devastating First and Second Punic Wars.

And if you always had this outside threat, people would be worried about it and, you know, not cause too much internal unrest and start wondering, you know, why this shit getting fixed and, you know, why is my olive oil chunky or whatever?

You know, if everybody's constantly worried about their front door being kicked in by an elephant, they don't tend to protest too much.

Yeah, this was famously reused between 1918 and 1939.

And French people were like, Yeah, no problems emerged from this.

No issues whatsoever.

I can't think of any other countries ever ever doing this.

See, of course.

That's the thing is, everyone's like, oh, yeah, we were drawing inspirations from the Roman Empire.

It's like, for all the bad stuff, you should do the good stuff.

You should just have carvings of dicks on your wall for good luck.

You know what?

That's a part of their culture that I feel as though we could, you know, we would desensitize to it.

People wouldn't be as weird.

Or they would just draw cock and balls on more things.

But instead, they're like, no,

we have to imitate these guys who apparently, even for their time, were cranks.

Like they were, they were like the Mark Wayne Mullins or the Jim Lankfords of, I can't believe it, but there's an American center named Mark Wayne Mullins.

Yeah, it's not Mark Space Wayne either.

It's Mark Wayne.

One word.

Mark Wayne.

Yeah.

Hell yeah.

Mark Wayne sounds like a very, very early brand of microwave that just had such a bad, it had like a tolidomide level of bad track record.

And so Turnada turnada just blasts you with so much radiation you immediately get super cancer

oh fuck i get mark waned yeah exactly yeah however cato and his pro-war faction was more powerful and for political and economic reasons there were people who thought that no matter what they did no matter how much they put Carthage under their thumb, Carthage would eventually rise up and become an issue.

There'd be another horrible war on Roman territory.

To them, a preemptive war made sense before any of that could happen.

There was also the people who point out, well, if we delete them off the map, well, the trade that's doing their economy so well, we'll just take that over.

So the pro-war faction soon kind of absorbed the anti-war faction because

the undying art of securing the bag.

However, they still needed a legit reason to go to war because the facade of legality has always been important to dickhead empires.

They finally got the reason reason in 151 BC after another spat between the Numidians and the Carthaginians.

Carthage finally said fuck Rome and went to war against the Numidians without asking for permission to do so, which was bad.

And to make matters worse, their campaign against the Numidians went terribly wrong.

It went so wrong, it might be one of those things that happened to the Romans during the Second Punic War.

Like the Carthaginians are lured into a giant trap on a hilltop, they get surrounded, and they just kind of get starved to death.

Very few of their soldiers make it out alive.

It goes really, really badly.

And then Rome is like, well, you broke the treaty, making everything a hundred times worse.

The Carthaginian government quickly backpedaled, trying to, you know, assuage things with the Romans by publicly condemning the commander of the army, a man named Hasdrubal.

But it didn't work because the Romans knew that Hasdrubal wouldn't have gone on the march without approval from the government.

It did not take the Romans long to approve of a punitive expedition against Carthage for breaking this agreement.

And then if that wasn't bad enough for Carthage, the port of Utica, less than 40 miles away from the city of Carthage itself and their main port, switched sides.

Just like, you know, we're actually, we're Roman now.

We see what's coming and we really don't want to catch those hands.

I feel like there are some things that are such parallels with modern geopolitics and, you know, sort of the way wars are fought or instigated.

And you look at that and you're like, wow, it's just just like today.

But then other things happen in the story that the only way we can conceive of them is like the AI glitching.

Like the gameplay is like clipping through walls, like your city just decided to become Dutch overnight.

Pulling down the Coliseum and like running up a windmill overnight.

Like, sorry, we're not Roman anymore.

It's like Azerbaijan dumping money into like New Caledonian separatism.

But what if like New Caledonia actually went and declared itself part of Azerbaijan?

It's like

a weird total war game

with

some weird mod that is like that, the wacky weird West mod from Fallout that just makes insane shit happen in the desert.

Yeah, I remember something, a tabletop game they played during lockdown for the TF stream, and they wound up with like Stalinist Australia.

It was like expanding across the world.

Bloody truth, mate.

You're going to a gulag.

Here we go, Alice Springs, mate.

There's plenty of room.

Steve Irwin's been strapped in the gulag for 20 years.

You leave Steve Irwin out of this.

No, fuck Steve Irwin.

Northern Queensland is fucked with crocodiles because of the Irwins, because they're like, oh, we need to protect them.

And like.

You do need to protect them.

Are you becoming like the opposite of climate Stalinism because you hate crocodiles for some reason?

No, what do you have to do with Bob Cater?

I was going to say, you are basically like, you are a viewer catarite.

You have absorbed Bobbist Bobbist Katterist thought.

Every single one of those crocodiles needs to be disappeared into the basement of the Australian KGB to be shot in the back of the head.

Joe, I don't know if you're familiar with this, but there's an Australian politician from Queensland named Bob Katter, and he famously gave a thing where they were asking about gay marriage or gay rights.

And he was like, he's like, oh, this doesn't really bother me.

The people are entitled to their own proclivities.

Let a thousand

blossoms blue.

But I'm not going to spend too much time on it because every 20 minutes, someone is torn a pot to pieces by crocodiles in Northern Queensland.

But it's true.

The crocodiles were there first.

No, but the Irwins have like pushed for like they're not, the population isn't being culled.

And now you just have a massive overpopulation of crocodiles.

Give the crocodiles guns.

That kind of implies that like when you think about Steve Irwin's fate that like they waged a punitive campaign and exterminated all the manta rays who were the only natural predators of crocodiles.

Look, now this I agree with.

They know what they did.

Okay.

So at this point, Utica has switched sides, and that is a very big problem because Rome can take its navy, load a full fucking army up on it, roll it right into Utica, and it's not like Carthage has a navy to oppose them anymore.

So before long, 80,000 Roman soldiers are landing at Utica, leaving Carthage with really no cards to play.

There's nothing to do.

So they try diplomacy.

They offer 300 hostages to Rome, all of them children taken from the most important families in Carthage, which must have been a really interesting conversation, both at the government and family level.

Even more interesting than that, Rome says, Fuck those kids, we don't want them.

Like, damn, little Billy, you're not even good enough to be a fucking hostage.

Why don't I even have you?

Then Rome gave Carthage its own terms.

That would be the equivalent of like, we're being threatened by a superior force.

So we're like, you can have Megan McCain.

How many of Trump's kids do you want to kidnap?

And if they look you dead in the eyes, like, no, thank you.

We really don't want those.

Well, we will take that one because he's really tall.

He'd be a great porter.

Yeah, we feel like if we sent him to Serbia, he'd be really good basketball in a couple of years.

Then Rome gave Carthage its own terms.

You see, you know, we have so many Roman soldiers on your land now, and, you know, Carthage is under Roman protection, clearly, right?

I mean, nothing bad could happen to Carthage with the 80,000 legionnaires legionnaires parked out front.

That means you don't need soldiers.

You don't need weapons.

You don't need armor.

You don't need any of that shit anymore.

So why don't you just load all that up into wagons and just deliver it to Utica for us?

Disarm your entire society.

I'm just imagining Carthaginian molon Labe guy who's just got a ton of elephants in his backyard.

He's like, come and take them.

Come and take my elephants.

You can't take stompies one through six.

His pedigree is incredible.

Yeah, he's

grapefruit vape X.

I don't fucking know.

X3 Stompy, X4, no.

The X3 Stompy matched up with Alexandra Wang Streetwear.

I don't know.

The dog names just kill me.

I imagine the elephant names must have been similarly weird.

Or alternatively, that is the best day of that guy's life because his business has just been ruined by these putative measures.

Can't have elephants.

I have all these elephants and I can't sell them.

Oh, there's 80,000 Legionnaires.

I guess there's a market for them now.

Yeah, they weren't paying for them, unfortunately.

And so those situations.

They would be paying in blood for them if they pissed off the elephants.

So, you know, like you do kind of win a little bit.

Yeah, it would be a shame if someone let all these elephants on the loose.

It's like that guy.

I forget where he was from, but the United States.

He had like an incredibly illegal personal zoo, unleashed them all onto the town, and then shot himself.

It's like, man,

don't piss off the weirdos who build their own zoos, even if it is, you know, in Carthage.

And this works.

Like, Carthage immediately caves to Rome's deal.

They don't have another option.

So they load up all of their weapons and armor, thousands upon thousands of weapons, all of their catapults and ammo that goes with them, and just drag them over to the Roman camp.

And Rome takes them.

That is when Roman consul Censurius gathers a group of Carthaginian envoys, sits them down, and tells them, you know what?

Now that we have all your weapons and armor and all that guy's elephants that are weird and deformed because he's inbreeding them for Instagram ads,

we actually, we want you to pick up Carthage and just move it into the middle of the desert.

You can have Carthage, but you can't have it near the sea.

You have to just move it into the desert.

And we think that would be lovely for you.

You have to be the inspiration for a book that some guy is going to write called Dune.

And it has to happen now.

I'm still laughing at that thing about the guy with the illegal zoo.

It's like, yeah, that's what Carthage needed was a crazy guy who was willing to do like murder-suicide via altered beast, just like unleashing everything out into the wilderness.

We really need some Carthaginian elephant animorphs.

And instead, we just got Frank in his weird backyard zoo.

Obviously, these terms are insane.

Carthage cannot agree to...

picking up its city and moving it into the middle of the Tunisian desert.

It would be signing their own death warrant.

So now Carthage was forced into a third Punic War, one that Rome was perfectly happy to have one way or another.

Like, Carthage could move into the desert and die, or they can fight us in a war and die.

We're kind of really hoping for the war part.

Meanwhile, the Carthaginian envoys are forced to bring that news back to Carthage from Utica, like we have to go to war.

Like people realize from like their body language that something went very, very badly during negotiations.

So they just start getting their asses beat on the street as they try to get back to the People's Assembly to tell the assemblymen of the Carthagine government, like, we have to go to war.

And while they're trying to tell the Carthaginian government, civilians just burst into the assembly house and start beating the shit out of people, both in the government, their fellow citizens.

There's just so much anger for two reasons.

You had gotten us into another war with rome and you gave rome all of our fucking weapons and they would never have noticed if that one guy wasn't carrying a book entitled idiot's guide to surviving in a desert that you die in

idiot's guide to relocating your entire city under threat of arms like okay i mean i don't blame them yeah i i feel like the You kind of knew the Romans were going to, I mean, if they were already playing this game where they were sort of like paying vassals to mess with you, and then you're like, oh, but they'll definitely respect us and make sure to honor the terms of the treaty if we give up all of our weapons this seems a bit foolish looking at the roman council who's sitting on top of a pile of thousands of armor and weapons and catapults and shit like you know he's got trustworthy eyes i like this guy i looked i i i saw into his soul you know yeah he's a good dude so The citizens of Carthage just start fist fighting their own government.

A few of them are killed, but then they calm down.

They realize war is coming.

We need to prepare ourselves.

Now that the government gave away all of our weapons, we have to start slapping some shit together.

People run back home.

They start building forages, weaponsmiths, siege workshops in their kitchens, in their living rooms, and in their backyards, all to crank out anything and everything they could that could feasibly be used to kill another human being.

I don't want to make a glib comparison, but I'm like, oh, Carthaginians, spiritually Armenian?

I was going to say, unfortunately for them, the catalytic converter hadn't been invented yet.

Yeah, I was going to say, you know, Maoist because the backyard forages, but thanks.

Thanks, guys.

According to The Siege of Carthage and the Death of an Empire by David Norris, quote, women joined men in running workshops, which operated night and day without ceasing.

Lead roofing was seized, and whatever iron could be scrounged was melted down for new weapons.

Appiah noted that, quote, each day they made 100 shields, 300 swords, and 1,000 missiles for catapults, 500 darts and javelins, and as many catapults as they possibly could.

He also notes that women cut their hair off to bind together in order to make rope to make siege engines, which two things, that's not going to work great, and you know it's no crazy in there.

When you've pissed the people off enough that they're like, we're going to bind a siege engine together with dreadlocks, like, I'm just saying, like, these people have resolved.

Look, this is the opportunity that you guys could put some stinging Armenian jokes in, and we could build the biggest sea ginjit the world has ever seen due to the amount of hair we could cultivate.

Yeah, I was going to say, it would be perfectly soundproof because you shave you guys' head and it's basically rock wool.

And Carthage, despite years of Roman boot on their neck, was not exactly like a tiny, easily bent place.

It had been demilitarized, and people were making hair catapults, sure, but it was still a massive city, home to probably up to a million people.

There's a lot of human capital in there that's now suddenly grinding out weapons out of their cooking pots and armpit hair.

Well, no, it's like it's

to steal a bit from November Kelly.

It's sort of like you just assume that the Finns are docile and the Swedes are docile, but when you activate the sort of like Scandinavian Protestantism gene that says you have to kill Russians now, all of a sudden it's like everyone's an expert wood carver.

They're like tearing down stave churches to make pungy steaks.

Like, just they flip a switch and it goes into overdrive.

And it feels like the Carthaginians must have had it.

Yeah.

They had a recent history of reasons to hate Rome.

Yeah, it's like Carthaginian like teens or whatever, people in their early 20s, like, oh boy, I get to get into the family business killing Italians.

Yeah, they just put in the cheat code into Age of Empires 2 to speed up the development of weapons.

Yeah, they just faster and faster elephant.

We're elephant moxing.

Yeah, it's like the GTA mod where everything, all cars are on 9999, but it's for elephants just

crashing.

It's like two leech dairy about your idea about like the deformed, inbred, you know, XL bully versions of elephants.

They're just like wide bolsonaro, but for elephants.

If someone could make one of those Instagram ads for fake Carthaginian elephants, I would love to see it.

Yeah, I mean,

I'm just saying, man, I mean, they have to spin up some propaganda to make them hate Romans more.

It's like, do you know that they rub olive oil all over their babies and they think that it's good?

They're just naturally slippery.

Whenever they need to go someplace, they don't walk.

They just get on their bellies and slide down the street like a bunch of savages.

Now, Carthage also has the benefit of being easily defensible, both human-built with massive walls and towers, and also naturally.

Carthage is on a peninsula, the best of all landforms.

This message brought to you by Michigan.

But the isthmus of the peninsula, that being the part that makes a peninsula not in fact an island, was quite large, making it hard to block.

It's over three miles long.

It's very, very hard to feasibly think of digging some kind of three-mile-long earthwork or building a three-mile-long wall back then for a campaign.

And Hasdraubal, the guy who got shit on for leading a very, very bad campaign against the Nomidians, was still outside of Carthage, meaning they had an army in the field.

And the Romans, when they moved in to try to cut off the Isthmus of Carthage, they did such a bad job that Hasdabal could come in and out of Carthage at will, resupplying the city.

And the Roman plan for the siege was half-assed.

At no point did they try to corner Hasjabal's army in the field.

Instead, they ignored it and tried to surround Carthage and did a very bad job at even doing that.

So Hasjabal is left active, able to raid Roman lines, get through the porous blockade, pick off Roman forging parties, you name it.

They made the mistake of installing Roman Paul Bremer to run the Roman CPA in Carthage.

They've got a bunch of like 19-year-old interns there, just, you know, just like,

wait, they, they, what the fuck is a sardine?

I've never seen this before.

Make way for Haliburt Dicus.

Yeah, I mean, fluor, but spelled with a V instead of a U.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, I'm sure the Romans had the equivalent of the, like, in their way of the sort of, you know, military-industrial complex.

It's just the entire patrician class, mostly.

Well, yeah, but it was just like, I mean, I guess if your thing is, like, we're just going to eliminate Carthage once and for all, I feel like you might be like, hey, these guys might fight back.

And if you, like, you know, if you leave a big comical opening in your defenses, they might be like, hey, they might, they do kind of want to win.

Yeah, they don't really want to die, you know?

There was no Carthaginian Yukio Mishima kicking around that we're aware of.

So nobody was really waiting to catch a javelin at the time.

I mean, that's the thing, though, is that Carthagidian Yukio Mishima would still have wanted to, you know, defeat the enemy, defeat the barbarians.

He just would want to get killed in the process.

So that effectively is saying, like, he would want to basically do the elephant limit break and just get stomped in the process.

So long as you're not.

So much.

Yeah, exactly.

Now, while all of this is going on, Roman forces began to cut down trees to make siege weapons, but their camp was too small to actually do all of this.

So they simply filled in massive swaths of the lake of Tunis with sand and rocks to make more land for their camp.

Hold up.

Don't they have like infinity siege weapons they've already taken?

No, uh, they didn't like them.

Uh, they so uh Carthage turned in a lot of catapults, and Rome wanted battering rams, uh, like cartoonishly massive battering rams because they're going to use them to literally smash holes in the walls of Carthage.

These are battering rams that are so large, it requires 6,000 men to use.

What?

Yes.

What?

Yeah, they're huge.

What the fuck?

Not just to swing, but also to move because they're cartoonishly huge.

This is very funny because you look back in Roman society and it's like you have, yeah, a battering ram the size of like, you know, like a like a bundle of sticks tied together from giant redwoods.

And they're, you know, they have like two brigades worth of guys swinging it.

But then you show them a three-story building and they're like that's a fucking skyscraper like the proportions here are just so messed up what if we turned that three-story building on its side and smashed it into another three-story building that's what we're talking about well you know what if what if you found some kind of weird land creature from very very far south that you know could stand in place of a building size battering ram well you did but hitting that elephant button repeatedly banning the elephants as a jobs work program because those 6,000 guys that need to operate the battering ram what are they going to do if you have an elephant?

Goddamn elephants are stealing all of our Roman jobs.

Eventually, one of these battering rams succeeded.

They broke right through the wall, but the Carthaginians were able to stop the Roman attack and stop them from pushing into the city.

Then the defenders counter-attacked, launching a torchboard suicide rush out of the Carthaginian walls.

to light the battering rams on fire and put them out of service, and they succeeded.

But this gap in the wall was so big, it couldn't be filled the following day.

The defenders knew the Romans were going to attack again, and when they did, they would go through the giant yawning gap in the wall.

So they set a trap for them.

Row after row of men, the ones with the best weapons at the front, the ones at the back, you know, you got rocks and farming tools and shit, and then people on rooftops nearby armed with anything they could drop on a Roman head, from anything from a brick to a pot of boiling piss.

My personal favorite weapon.

I was just thinking that at least one dude got killed by olive oil and he's just like i just cannot believe i'm being betrayed like this of all the ways i could die truly a live by the sword die by the sword moment live by the oil die by the oil but you know his lungs were clear as fuck right as he died there you know what i mean the bananas were right and the trap worked romans burst into the gap and immediately started getting butchered but the roman commander scipio recognized ah this is probably bad and instead of sending in reserves to fully commit to the attack he pulled them out and avoided what probably would have been an outright slaughter.

However, things were not going great in the Roman camp.

As we often say on this show, it's never a good time to go camping in the woods with 10,000 of your homies, especially next to a lake that was quickly getting backed up with nasty shit like literal shit, piss, and garbage that the Romans were just throwing out there.

Romans doing land reclamation like they just decided to automatically respawn as Dutch people, but doing it very, very poorly.

But turning it to a disease bog.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Oh, no, we've turned the stretch of Tunisia into Britain.

So disease swept through the Roman ranks.

And since Rhenus's answer to this problem was, well, we have to relieve this crowding that's happening at camp, but we can't move too far away.

What can we do?

We have boats.

Let's load these men up on ships and move them out to the sea.

It'll give them fresh air.

Now, of course, these just turned all the Roman boats into plague ships.

Also, it puts a huge amount of their soldiers just bobbing out in the open ocean.

The Carthaginians saw that and saw an opening.

They slapped together some very shoddy ships, loaded them with flammable material, and then kicked these fire ships towards the Roman fleet, burning thousands of men alive.

It must be, I mean, like, you know you're fighting for your life, but you must really take a lot of inspiration from getting ready to conduct some sort of offensive op against them.

And you just see like, you know, a flotilla of dudes and you can hear all the cries, just be like, oh, this fucking sucks.

I'm so sick.

It's just the sound of people shitting and vomiting into the water.

That must hearten you a bit.

And then you, Jesus Christ, and then you just, you do full-on like surprise Viking funerals.

The olive oil made them extra flammable.

Yeah,

they were returning to the only medicine they knew.

Then, as if that wasn't bad enough, the Carthaginians launched an attack on the Roman camp that was still on the shore.

This almost certainly would have succeeded if it was not again for Scipio, rallying the soldiers together and stopping what possibly could have ruined the entire Roman campaign right then and there.

It seems like Scipio's pretty good at his job.

His name seems to come up.

If a guy like me who knows almost nothing about this period, knows Scipio Africanus, then it's like...

This is where

he gets the title Africanus

of Africa, which does not mean what people, you know, what you would think it means.

It means he conquered it.

It's like Monty of El Alamein kind of thing.

He's not from El Alamein.

They just called him that because he's like, yeah, he did good there.

He did some other bad stuff later, so let's remember that only.

And this is where Rome hits the Rome button.

When facing catastrophic losses, they just keep coming.

Rather than give up with thousands of men and most of their fleet being burned at sea, they build a fucking fort in the ocean.

It gives ships cover while they pull into the Carthaginian shore.

When the supply situation goes south, thanks to Hashibal's army slaughtering Roman foraging teams that are meant to supply the Roman legion with food, the Romans simply deploy an entire army of foragers, making it so no one can stop them.

It's the kind of like logistics go-burr type shit that we often say.

Like, you can't kill as many people as we're willing to kill.

I mean, I guess if you need to deploy a brigade of locusts, it's good to have it on your side.

Yeah, exactly.

Like, I see you're willing to kill thousands of men.

I see you're willing to murder us while we're trying to eat.

I assure you, I'm willing to send more of my men to their deaths than you are to kill them.

The military equivalent of all those Amazon reviews are the people who are like, we'll shift you a hundred crickets in a box.

And they're like, oh my God, I opened the box and there's no rapping.

There's just fucking crickets.

Surprise, Italians.

It seemed no matter how many times Carthage thought of some clever way to stick it to the Romans, Rome would just strike back because you couldn't keep them down.

Another reason for this was despite many of Carthage's allies abandoning them, the Numidians who kind of sort of caused all this to begin with wanted nothing to do with helping the Romans, for example.

So far, Carthage was only fighting Rome and a limited contingent of Romans as well.

None of the Roman proxies had been, you know, joining in.

oh no

it's kind of an interesting reason for that because the numidian king had flat out refused to help the romans in any way once they showed up the reason for this was he was pushing 90 his brain wasn't working so great and he was pissed that the romans never told him that they planned to invade carthage because he believed Carthage was his territory.

And he clearly did not understand the actual relationship he had had with Rome.

Yeah, it's like, oh, well, yeah, Carthage is mine.

What the fuck are you doing in my back garden?

Yeah, like Rome is going to have to sit him down and have one of those conversations.

It's like, you don't realize that you're doing what you're doing because we let you.

But instead, he dies.

It's like, I am in control of the trade of elephants named Bumpy X4.

Know your place, Romans.

And they're like, you're, I'm just going to kill you.

Yeah, I mean, thankfully, before the consul would have to kill the Numidians, because that is what Cincerinus was thinking of doing, the Numidian king simply drops dead.

He is replaced by a man named Gulusa, who fully understands the actual relationship between Numidia and Rome.

He wanted to benefit from what was happening.

Like, he knew that Rome was going to win.

And if...

Numidians sat on the sidelines, they wouldn't benefit from Carthage getting smoked.

So soon Numidian cavalry is raiding out, smashing into Hajerbal's army, and setting the last Carthaginian field army into a defensive mode for the first time.

And then the council's terms ran out.

The government of Rome has to go back home.

Scipio also went back home to Rome for the coming elections.

One of the new consuls, a guy named Lucius Copernicus Piso and his admiral Lucius Hostilius Manicus, then move into the theater and take command.

I'm sorry, Lucius Hostilicus Manicus.

Hostilius Manicus?

Like, I'm sorry.

That's just too much nominative determinism in one place.

Because he's an admiral.

His name should have been the Lucius boat guy to be even more on the nose, you know?

But over the course of the next year, things just kind of drag on.

Rome can't crack Carthage.

Carthage isn't beating Rome.

And worse still, Piso decides to attack other Carthaginian cities.

And these attempts also fail.

This led to a pretty big problem for Rome.

Their consuls, their elected leaders, there's two of them, civil and military, were failing horribly.

And the only Roman field commander that was showing any promise in scoring victories was Scipio, and he was legally too young to be elected consul.

Instead, he was working his way up through the Roman political ladder, the cursinorum, which, you know, you work your way up slowly.

through all of these established roles and titles.

Like, for example, because of his standing and his age, he was running for a political position that his whole job was managing government buildings and festivals, because that was what was fitting to him at that point of his life.

He couldn't stand to be elected for council.

He was too young.

He hadn't made his way up through the ladder yet.

That's how things worked in the Roman Republic.

So faced with this technicality that their best military leader could not become consul, Rome just made him consul anyway.

I mean, I have to admit that technicality getting in the way is a problem problem you can solve.

And if for some reason your MWR coordinator is just full-on Audi Murphying shit, not

like you're just like, you know what?

We can make an exception here.

Exception to policy memo.

Imagine if America is failing and the best possible military leader that we could elect is like, well, he is only the guy that coordinates the local county fair.

But

randomly, this Kosovar guy who runs the fucking like computer lab that people use, you know, on the FOB just has revealed himself to be kosovar rambo and he technically has american permanent residency so like yeah to be fair say the term kosovar rambo sounds like there's a building near where i'm sitting right now that has a warrant out for him

but rome wasn't the only country going through some

things within the walls of carthage despite you know carthage still holding things were going badly The government was at each other's throats and the city's commander, also named Hasdrabal, was catching a lot of blame for the war effort.

To make matters worse, he was the nephew of the new king of the Numidians, who are now slowly picking apart their field army, also commanded by a guy named Hasdrubal.

It did not take long for rumors to begin to swirl that the city commander was about to betray the city over to his uncle, the king of Numidia.

So, Carthaginian assemblymen simply beat him to death with their own chairs and then named the other Hasdrabal, the field army commander, the new city commander and new reigning Hasdrabal.

This is like the eternally recurring principle of Mistoslav.

It's just like

it's all Mistoslavs all the way down, baby.

It's like when you have more than like two guys with the same name, it just like, okay, one of them just has to be either beaten to death, exiled, or just explode.

Yeah, once again, it is the jetly film the one, but for a guy's name Hasdrabal.

The other one has to be beat to death with like folding chairs so he can absorb his powers.

Inside you, there are two Hazrabals.

One is leading an army in the field, one is being beaten to death with a chair.

By the time Scipio, now consul, arrived back in Carthage, the war had been going on for two years, and those two years were pretty much full of nothing but failure.

The Roman legions had collapsed under a pile of military defeats, desertion, drunkenness, banditry, and gangsterism.

A lot of them had just gone and joined Carthage for better pay.

I mean, the Mistoslav principle might be eternal, but the more dominant principle here is the principle of being Italian.

Scipio took over and brutally began to punish everyone who stepped even a little bit out of line.

He then launched his first mission as overall commander, and it quickly turns into the largest success Rome had.

in Carthage in a very long time.

A Roman assault stormed the walls of a place called Megara.

It's something of a suburb of Carthage that was so close that their watchtowers were like butted right up against the Carthaginian city walls.

From there, Rome seized one of those towers and then assault-roped down into the city.

Roman air assault before the concept of flight.

Yeah, Scipio was the one Roman whose grandma didn't put olive oil on him because she knew it had lead poisoning.

And so, like, for some reason, he's just able, he's able to invent like fucking, yeah, Roman fast roping when everybody else is just sort of like, hey, hey, look, we had to go all the way back to Roman times to find a use for the 101st airborne in the modern age.

Hey, look at that.

You guys suck.

All the rest of the commanders are just sort of like basically treating building a fortification like, well, I can't see past that point on the horizon, so it doesn't exist.

We don't have to connect our wall.

And meanwhile, this dude is just merely like, I'm going to be William Fickner and Blackhawk Down, just fucking fully, just 2,000 years beforehand.

Yeah, it's I gotta hand it to him.

A Carthaginian man leans out from the wall and shoots one of the Robins horses with an RPG.

We get a horsehawk down.

We get a horse hawk.

It kind of feels so good, though, to be the first soldier to discover the Y axes.

Oh my fucking God.

I do have to point out, though, that this fast rope attack into Carthage doesn't go great.

Like, they smash open the city's gates.

They open a pathway for thousands of Roman soldiers to storm inside.

And as all of that is happening, the defenders of Carthage think, oh, we're fucked, right?

They're inside the city walls.

Hasdrabal orders everyone to withdraw into the central citadel of Carthage.

But as like they're in this, I guess it's not a Mexican standoff because that hasn't been invented yet.

Undetermined standoff, staring at one another down this suburban Carthage road.

Scipio realizes after sending scouts ahead that this Megara area is a maze of small roads, moats, alleyways, ditches.

You know, it's a small suburb.

And he realizes sending his legion into that is asking for the bloodiest ambush I could possibly dream of.

So he doesn't do it.

He pumps the brakes and he doesn't send his army in.

Hasdrabal is so pissed about losing this suburb that he orders all Roman prisoners of war to be taken to the city's walls and full view of the Roman army and be tortured to death.

When a few of Hazjibal's aides, members of the assembly, a couple military officers point out, like, you know, seeing how they just kicked in some of our city gates and all, this might not be such a great thing to do in the grand scheme of things.

I feel like we might be writing our own death warrant by torturing all these guys to death.

So Hajjabal also orders them to be tortured to death on the city walls and all of their bodies chucked off the walls to the street level when they're done.

Yeah, it's really celebrating before you've secured like total victory.

It's like doing a touchdown dance when you're losing by 40.

Yeah.

We scored.

Well, I mean, I guess we can all say that now we understand why the North African tradition of the Tagin, e.g., a gigantic pile of meat, has its origins a long time before any of the modern borders were drawn.

Because between the hill where they all died on and this, it feels like there's a lot of really pointy top piles of human meat obliterated, separated from its normal position.

It's really soft and tender because it died in fear.

You could really taste the screams.

Scipio realized any attack would end with piles of dead Romans, adding to the meat pile.

You know, the world's most grim dark kebab, which might be bad for his political career.

So he took the long game option.

Remember before how I said the Carthaginian isthmus was so large, it'd be really, really hard, nearly impossible for any attacker to cut off?

Well, that's what Scipio does.

He orders the Roman army to build a three-mile-long wall complex full of walls, ditches, forts, you name it.

Cut Carthage off from the rest of Africa.

What is the fucking deal with this guy?

He did the boat fort too.

Like, this is just Fortnite.

I swear to God, like, they just build vertically non-stop.

He also builds a whole breakwater across the Carthaginian harbor.

He builds a seawall as well.

Folks, we agreed no build mode, guys.

Okay.

Hacks.

Scipio's hacking.

Scipio's using wall hacks.

Meanwhile, Hazerball is just like, I need to coat this entire city in blood to prove a point that I actually do command Tomato Town.

I will murder so many of my own military officers over Burger Town.

I mean, but like literally on his approach, he saw, you know, the watchtowers.

He's like, okay, guys, I'm marking on the map.

We're We're going to drop from Tilted Towers, and we're going to take the whole town.

I got some bad news.

There's Romans rappelling off of Tilted Towers.

Also, I'm just laughing, too, because it's like, we see this dense warren suburb of canals, alleyways, narrow streets in what is now the Middle East and North Africa region.

And the guy says, actually, it's a really bad idea to go to there.

We'll probably get ambushed and killed.

So we can definitively say the U.S.

Army does not derive its tradition from the Romans.

Yeah, Scipio is a better commander than anyone we ever served with.

Ray Odierno is just like, yeah, yeah, you know what, but but R.I.P.

to Scipio, but I've built different while just like entire battalions getting wiped out inside our city.

Oh, don't worry, Nate, this is where I get to say, hold that thought, because we're getting to the very concept of Roman legionnaire urban combat.

The effects that these land and sea walls had was pretty much immediate.

Before long, the population of Carthage is starving, helped somewhat by Hazdrabal, who turns out is a really shitty city commander.

He takes all of the food away from the starving civilians, So his soldiers would not even have to ration their meals.

They're just like,

food's so good.

You bet you wish you had some of this, don't you?

Um,

sitting down to massive banquets of sick-ass food is like every Carthaginian civilian is wondering how their neighbor's ass might taste and not in the fun way.

The Roman soldiers posting on close friends IG stores like, you wish you lived like this doing like Rick Ross, fucking DJ cala but also it's like all this meat bro when you think about this era of like antiquity and the kind of thing they consider delicious banquet it's like they're eating so many peacocks they probably every single person is gonna have appendicitis like these are things you shouldn't eat

i mean to be fair it's it's north african so it's peacock with like yogurt on top it's delicious

probably probably i bet it tastes good i bet i mean i bet it tastes much better than anything the romans are eating spaghetti hadn't even been invented yet

the carthaginians then slapped together to what amounted to be like a garbage navy, ships made out of anything and everything they could get their hands on that would also float and all in total secrecy under a blockade and launch a complete surprise naval attack on the Romans.

And to the surprise of everyone, this worked.

They smashed into the Roman fleet.

Like Carthaginian soldiers are jumping from one ship to the other because that's how naval warfare generally worked back then, killing the shit out of Romans, sinking multiple ships.

And then they're like, all right, boys, pack it up.

Let's pull the fleet and hit and run attack, you know?

And then the really bad quality of their ships comes into play.

They're really hard to steer.

There's a lot of current in the harbor due to the break wall being built and fucking up the natural flow of everything.

So the ships all just kind of crash into one another.

There's a lot of wreckage in the harbor due to sunken naval vessels.

So they crash into those.

The wake pulls a lot of the ships to just crash into the side of the harbor and sink.

Meaning, the whole thing starts really fast and exciting before ending disappointingly much sooner than you thought, like something else I could think of.

In short, the Carthaginian garbage navy is not long for this world and the Romans win anyway.

Scipio orders his fleet into the harbor, smashing what remained of the Carthaginian fleet and landing his troops at the quay, armed with siege engines.

Then, Carthaginian saboteur swimmers dive into the harbor, surface where the Romans had landed at night, and begin burning their siege engines and ships to the ground.

So, yeah, we've got Carthaginian navy seals now.

They've weaponized you, Nate, as a teenager.

That also implies they're like, yeah, but he's only good at swimming butterfly, so you have to swim the most inefficient strip possible.

That being said,

a military combat swimmer, swimming butterfly actually would be pretty intimidating, quite frankly.

Sir Hostra Ball, City Commander, we have the world's blithest, most baby-faced saboteur for you.

I mean, to be honest with you, I feel as though, like, there's not a side you want to pick in that regard, no matter where you are.

In this case, like, in any situation, you're going to wind up, you're going to wish that you'd gone down with the ship you were setting on fire.

So the Romans looking very confused, like, I'm sure that's a man swimming towards us, but why is he swimming that way?

Once again, we have the first guy to discover the Y-axis and the first soldier to do the butterfly.

I feel like that in combination with elephants going 999 speed is just extreme.

We've painted a picture here.

Elephants go burn right next to Nate the swimmer.

Yeah, exactly.

The combat mission is you have to swim the sickest 400 IM and then set everything on fire.

I mean, that would have made me get to practice more in the morning on time.

I'm going to be honest with you.

Now, this did work.

These saboteur swimmers did burn down a lot of shit, but once again, Scipio just hit the Rome button.

More Romans appear, more soldiers, more siege engines land, and before long, burning trash and boulders are raining down inside the city of Carthage.

Soon, Roman soldiers were bursting through the harbor area and into the lower city.

This means we have Roman legionnaires fighting in close quarters, urban combat, literally clearing buildings.

Everywhere Roman soldiers marched, arrows, rocks, boiling water, piss, shit, burning garbage, you name it, rain down onto them, all while Roman soldiers are kicking in doors and fighting over each room and each house at spear and sword point and knock down drag out battles as groups of soldiers fought civilians defending their fucking houses to the death with anything they had at hand it's just

some dude in there watching carthaginian tv or whatever and a gang of italians kick in the door and you're beating him to death with your frying pan a knife your least favorite son just by the ankle i don't know.

Stay rigid, boy.

Swing in time.

I'm just laughing about like, yeah, like Roman stacking on your door.

There's like three miles back at the training camp, there's like Roman staff sergeant who's got a permanent dip in his lip, just like doing a glass house training guy.

It's got a glob of olive oil in his lip.

Yeah, exactly.

It's any piece of food because it's got the same intoxicating effect as what dip has now.

And he's just like, yeah, you know, just armchair quarterbacking the shit out of everything.

I mean, Roman soldiers stacking up on a door, kick open the door.

The third man, the stack rushes for it, throws it just a glass bottle full of olive oil on the ground.

The other men run inside.

Everybody slips and falls.

So basically, taking white tape and making like the permit, like the inside floor plan of a house and like training people on sort of what they call a glass house to do like a close quarters battle and like door, basically, yeah, going through rooms and room clearing.

It's like, to me, monster dip and fucking E-tape on the ground to do a glass house is just the army.

And so the fact that they've already basically got all of this, it's just like, wow, time is a flat circle, man.

We are all part of one big continuum.

We're all part.

We too are part of Roman entropy.

And just like any other generation of urban combat, like these Roman soldiers are being fed into a buzzsaw.

The bodies were getting stacked up.

And they learned that, you know, they would take over a neighborhood.

Like, haha, those fucking, we took over this street.

Let's move on.

And then Carthaginian soldiers and civilians would just reappear behind them out of hiding and start stabbing them in the back.

Like at least one dude got sharpened by a dagger made out of like really, really matted hair.

Ah, they call that, they gave him the old Armenian.

Yeah,

just giving it to him in the ribs.

You getting a fucking Yerevan surprise.

Yeah, the arm of your Shiv is just a whole bunch of leg hair sawn into a point.

Not a lot of people know that that Xbox game prototype was actually based on Armenians.

I wish.

I mean, this just feels like you're really bad at playing America's Army.

Like, the terrorists are going to be able to get away from it.

Everybody's really bad at playing America's army because that game sucked ass the only thing going for it was free but the romans come up with a revolutionary new tactic when it comes to urban combat they would take a neighborhood secure the neighborhood and then burn it to the ground behind them killing everybody still inside from there the fighting turns into more of a slaughter throughout the week Roman legions butcher and burn their way across the city, and then they'd get all tuckered out and fatigued from all the indiscriminate killing, and Scipio would rotate them out with fresh soldiers to continue the killing.

The Roman short-timers, basically.

Yeah, yeah, there you go.

At one point, Scipio announced safe passage for Carthaginian civilians to flee the city, and 50,000 people took his word for it, only to be captured by Roman soldiers who were lying in wait.

They were all killed or sold into slavery.

As Carthage died, there was one final position, one final redoubt, the temple of Eshmun, the Phoenician god of healing.

Inside was a group of people, civilians and soldiers alike, as well as several hundred Roman deserters who had switched sides a few years before.

And they all knew that surrendering meant just about the worst kind of death the human mind could comprehend.

So they decided a quick death and fighting in battle was a favorable way out, and they were going to use this as their last stand.

Where was Hasdrabald in the middle of all this, maybe?

Well, he was conducting personal negotiations with Scipio to save his own ass.

He came to a deal where he would be allowed to simply go into retirement, live on an estate, and, you know, live on a nice salary somewhere in Rome for the rest of his life.

Scipio agreed and then marched Hasdrabal right out in front of the temple of where everybody was hiding.

And they were so distraught to see their leader in chains.

and surrendering to the Romans that they lit the temple on fire, burning themselves alive.

Oh,

fuck, that is a drastic last resort.

I mean, look, in comparison to being sold into slavery, I would take it.

You know, I would pick a secret third thing, which is really hoping to not be in this situation.

Is it the secret third option of being born in the 20th century?

Yeah, for once, this would be a good era of time to have been born Armenia, to be fair.

When it comes to history, this one wouldn't be so bad.

I mean, I feel like if you lived through the plot of Apocalypto, on average, you'd have seen less violence than someone born in this region, quite frankly.

Yeah.

Hajibal's wife was so ashamed that her husband had knelt and surrendered to Rome, had negotiated his own retirement that she publicly shit-talked him in front of the gathering of Romans and Carthaginians.

grabbed both of their children by the hands, and then sprinted directly into a burning building.

Fucking hell.

Choosing to rather eliminate their whole family than continue to be married to that piece of shit.

Ah, better to be dead than married to a coward.

Yeah, there you go.

What followed was one of the most thorough sackings and pillagings in Roman history.

Everything, everybody, anything was stolen, destroyed, or otherwise removed.

By the time the Romans were finished, virtually nothing survived inside of Carthage.

Art, literature, Carthaginian history, Carthaginian architecture were wiped out.

Though the whole story about the earth being salted, it's not true.

Teams of experts, however, were sent from Rome to look at the wreckage of Carthage and determine if it had in fact been destroyed enough before everything was over.

And since the goal stated from the very beginning was Carthage needing to be destroyed, its people as a body to be wiped out, The destruction of Carthage is thought to be one of the earliest known and best documented acts of historical genocide.

The territory of Carthage was swallowed by Rome, being turned into the Roman province of Africa, and nobody is sure what happened to Hashubal.

He just kind of vanishes, though there's a very good chance that he did live out the rest of his life in that sick Roman estate of his.

It wasn't until a century after Rome destroyed Carthage that Julius Caesar planned to rebuild it, but it wasn't until Augustus that the project was actually completed, and Roman Carthage became one of the most important cities in Roman Africa.

The end.

I

kind of wanted to support the underdog, but I also, my very limited conception of any real historical detail of this era does include Carthago Delenda-esque.

So I'm like, fuck.

It's probably going to be this, isn't it?

This is probably going to be like when they dilendo that shit.

And yeah, sure enough.

Many things were delendoed this day.

Yeah.

I mean, like, Carthage would have done the exact same thing to Rome as well.

So it's like, this probably was how this story was going to end, is one of them needed needed to be eliminated.

And unfortunately, Rome hit the Rome button and Carthage got hit with the ultimate limit break of Delenda.

I'm just imagining that Hajrabal got his Roman estate, but it was in like some other Roman holding in the Mediterranean, which is to say that Hajrabal is actually like his descendants are all Lebanese.

He got sent to Roman, Ohio.

He's like, this is not what I hoped for.

But fellas, we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion.

If you'd like to ask us a question, support the show on Patreon at any level, and you can send us a message on either Patreon or in the Discord you'll also have access to.

Today's question is, in the sack of Rome 410 episode, Joe jokes about sealing folks into the studio and forcing them to listen to the Fall of Rome podcast.

What special interest podcasts would you be most likely to seal friends into a room for 12 hours to listen to?

I don't know.

I do.

I don't really listen to any special interest podcasts, like very technical ones about niche topics, really, anymore.

Me neither, but I have one that I really enjoy, which is I would basically do the cask of a Montiado on people to make them listen to the entire season of Crimetown about Buddy Ciance.

The reason being, my wife is from Rhode Island, and if you were from Rhode Island, you know about Buddy Ciance, but it's not very well known.

outside of America, outside of America.

Now sells pasta sauce.

I only know that because of shocks.

Well, Buddy Ciance actually ran kind of like one of of his sort of things running for mayor in the 70s was kind of being like Jimmy Carter is being racist against Italians.

So like there's a lot of stuff in there.

But specifically, I think the funniest bit is in the first episode, there's a thing where after he died and they're interviewed, they have footage of the news and people interview because Buddy Ciency like committed all sorts of horrible crimes to include like nearly beating a dude to death because he was dating his ex-wife.

He did this in his house and he tortured this guy.

And like while he was there, like the head of the Rhode Island State Police and a federal judge were just in the room with him, just being like, oh, we just got to adjudicate this torture.

they were interviewing people, and a guy, a guy on the street was like, You know what?

He never hurt, no.

And he stops himself and he goes, Well, he helped more people than he hoied.

And it's like, He even had to fucking

fucking like stipulate that.

And so, to me, it's just like there's so much rich detail in that specifically about that I didn't know until I married someone from Rhode Island.

So, yeah, I think it's season one of Crimetown, but it's the one about Buddy Ciency.

I'm not sure if I have one.

Um, I mean, it's not 12 hours.

I will say, like, the first podcast I ever listened to was the hardcore history series of the blueprint to Armageddon about World War One.

And, but that is, it might be 12 hours long, to be completely honest.

It's really long.

I think I might lock someone into a room and make them listen to that.

There is,

well, two answers.

One is a podcast, and one technically isn't.

Joe, one of them is the YouTube channel Lutein09, who just does like hour-long Warhammer lore videos.

Like, that's probably like, it's a Sunday afternoon.

I'm sitting down to eat.

I'm probably going to fall asleep 35 minutes into it and wake up.

And it's going to be like five videos down the line.

Yeah.

Perfect.

The other one is

the complete history of Japan.

And it's going like in minute detail.

I think he's like maybe 250 episodes in and he's like kind of just gotten past the Joe Mon period.

So.

Oh, that's deep.

Yeah.

That seems like, I mean, going at that pace, he never has to worry about running out of content.

Yeah.

Fellas, I believe that's a podcast episode, but you host other podcasts.

Plug those other podcasts.

Uh, should I feature What a Hell Way Did Ad, Kill James Bond, and uh, No Gods, No Mayors.

Um, various degrees of involvement.

Please listen.

They all have Patreons, and they're all good.

So, Benit's getting a show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing.

And I'm also the producer of a new show called This Guy Sucked, hosted by Dr.

Claire Auburn, which will feature some of your favorite historians like Matthew Gabriel, Eleanor Yaniga, and maybe a member of the former former member of the U.S.

government.

But check it out if you like hearing about why people like Voltaire and Jerry Lee Lewis sucked from experts in their field.

It sounds like you've got somebody specifically to hate on the French, which I do respect.

You'll have to dig far for that.

This is the only show that I host.

Thank you so much for listening to it.

If you like what we do here, consider supporting us on Patreon.

$5 a month gets you seven years of bonus content at this point.

It gets you side series.

It gets you e-books.

It gets you audiobooks, gets you videos, gets you discord access,

it gets you first dibs on live show tickets and merch when they're available, and it gets you one horse

hit with a Carthaginian RPG.

It must feel great to be the first guy to do that, though.

Oh, God, it must be so sweet.

Until next time, everybody, lather up and slide down the streets of Rome.

Bye.

Bye.