Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 353 - The Death of Carthage

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

Liveshow tickets are now available for April 11th in London: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-london-11th-april-2025-tickets-1266997737339?aff=oddtdtcreator Livestream tickets are also available for those who can't make it: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/livestream-lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-london-11th-april-2025-tickets-1266999251869?aff=oddtdtcreator PRE ORDER YOUR EMU JIMA SHIRT HERE: https://llbdmerch.com/products/llbd-emu-jima-shirt SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Joe, Tom, and Nate talk about time the people of Carthage wove their own hair into weapons to defend their city from the Romans. Spoiler: It didn't work. Sources: Adrian Goldsworthy. The Fall of Carthage: The Punic Wars 265–146 BC David Norris. The Siege of Carthage: Death of an Empire. Military Heritage. Volume 26. No 1. https://www.historynet.com/romes-final-war-against-carthage/

Hey everybody, our merch store is restocked. So if you missed any of the live show specific merch at wherever date that we went to and you couldn't make it to, it's all on our merch store. LLBDmerch.com. So get your orders in while they last. We only have certain sizes and certain numbers and whichever one it happens to be. So if you want something, get your order in. Once again, that is LLBDMerch.com and the link will also at Bydonkeys podcast. Where Roman legionary is serving the glorious republic is Hannibal and his soldiers come over the Alps. Their armies are right out in front of us and in the front rake 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 Gingur, kiss steps forward, soren, drawn and bellows an order we were waiting for. Preset. Tom and I in the front rank reach into the pockets at our hip and drop the weapon issue to us to combat the trumpeting dick noses, a Chris can of white monster. Nadias

gives us the next order. Open. We crack the cans. Poor! 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. That'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 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. Like, I didn't know it was like a rarity. There was such a wonderful invention when they came out because previously all you had was green monster, which like just gives you diabetes. 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. Oh, this is falling. 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 workers. I don't actually drink energy drinks anymore because they just fucked me up too bad. And like my sleep is distressed as is, but uh, there was a time. I rarely have them. Back when the show started, you know, due to my job, I was living off of them. And then bang came out, uh, 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 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 reentered my brain and it won't leave, which is I can't remember the point of it, but you did something about somebody sounding like Eddie Vedder and Nick just started doing Eddie Vedder voice throughout the episode. And we even ended the episode with a smash cut of him going even the episode. Oh man. You know what? Like, like rest, rest in Valhalla. Nick, you're still alive. It was good. And speaking of Valhalla, I'm just laughing at the idea of a, well, the combination

of fucking, you know, European, uh, 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 murdered everyone around them.

Yeah. 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. But 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 nonstop. I bet I could cut it though.

They cry goth tears when they're teenagers and it makes them go insane and headbutt things. They're basically just like, Man, I would have loved that when I was, 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've like, no, the animal would probably let me snuggle it. Yeah. Also, if you ever see 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. A lot of Russian dudes who've, 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 you'd probably recognize my game and be like, you know, you can come in here, you can come into my den and I will, you know, you can come in here, you can come into my dad and I will murder you. Joe, you have the approach to danger that is similar to that of a like middle-class white woman is like elephant. I'll be able to call it. It will love me. The car. The junions would have had a better chance if they had a, 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 finding 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 hippo. This is just grizzly man, but me like that's what happened to the grizzly man guy. And then verter hurts. Og will fucking show us the recordings. Like you must not put this on the podcast feed. Yeah, exactly. It would be something, but the offensive like, yeah, but this is funny as fuck. Boys, I've gathered you here today because we're we've talked about the Punic Wars before, not in a series, but in 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 it 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 talk 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 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 he 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 precursor to Wolf and said he tortured again. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like the daguerreotype version of Wolfenstein is, 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? The love it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Plus there wasn't, there wasn't the, he 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, they were Celtic tribes at that point. They were unfortunately the 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, they were Celtic tribes at that point. Unfortunately, the concept of the Swiss haven't been invented yet. Therefore, it 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 relief sort of relief stand in child minder. And it was this an 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 Vicks Vicks vapor rub. And I was just like, you know, I feel like we aren't hard enough on the Italians. Like, 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 up. That's harsher than any shit I would have come up with based on my stereotypes of Italians. Now, 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, Tresemumine and of course Cannae, defeats that 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 woodchip or the likes of which nobody has ever done since they had a willing population

who'd go be soldiers and get ground up nonstop. 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 asked dudes to join the Legion. And then they had to go fight.

So the human clay, it's human oil. I mean, human clay would probably resonate with Romans too in the sense that like 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 grid. Not all grind sets ended success. Sometimes they just end with you getting, you know, stampy from the Simpsons stopping on you repeatedly. That is a very funny concept of re repurposing the term grind set to be like, I'm throwing myself into more elaborate forms of meat grinders. Sometimes the 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 mean my bones into bread. Yeah. 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 a one steak sauce. And I just down that shit like nobody's business. And that's the closest I've been to a Roman Legionnaire downing a thing of garum. And you know what? It does give you some salt and some fucking electrolytes and a little I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like,

I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, back when we were in date. I was going to say that's why the Romans actually may 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, all of 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 were 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 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. I love that the elephants got the extra bully treatment.

Yeah, exactly. We're banning elephants just because we don't like the idea of mean. Like you're not allowed to keep bully treatment. 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 shades. He's actually a sweetheart. He wouldn't hurt a fly. He's just a crushing a child. Just picking up a robot and dashing his brains across the road. Like he's actually his sweetheart. Yeah. I was going to say Roman XL bully. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love the idea. They're like, oh, we've, 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. There's a guy with a Facebook page dedicated to selling illegal elephants. It'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 hall of animals has been intercepted by the customs at shardigal airport. And 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 was literally a guy I follow on tick tock who lives in Dubai, who has a serval as a pet. And I'm like, I'm just counting down the days until that eats

you. Yeah. I hope that malls 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, 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 can 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 servile. 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 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. Suddenly it's like, oh shit, we can just put all this money somewhere else. They're creating the Carthaginian welfare state. They're just maxing out. They're like the counters in Caesar II doesn't let you count any higher resources. Cause they've got this. And meanwhile, Rome is like building the first century BC MRAP.

We've put Oshkosh in a time machine to go back in time to give Roman Legionnaires TBIs. No, it's got a V hall. You see like it would actually like the Spears will deflect. Wooden M wraps. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wooden M wraps with a, you know, they've got to try to think of like they've got terracotta tiles. Somehow this costs so much money. I mean, the Trojan horse was just like a wooden M wrap. When you think about it. Well, I mean, yeah, it wasn't that horse was at V shaped. And in fact, I encourage no horses to 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, just gorge a cargo of the stinkiest dudes on the planet.

Just ride that around in each other's sweat sweat listening to the worst music on her. Yeah. I was going to say that there are two guys splitting. Each one has an air pot or like an earbud for an old iPod listening to like Alison 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. Does it's like, is there noise coming out? I can hear like some movement and very faintly here. Can you take me? Pop open the bob of the horse like with arms wide open. I fucking knew it. Nixon here. Oh shit. Crack of a white monster cat inside the horse. The jig is up. Yeah, exactly. You know what? I mean, that is a good point though,

that that Lane Staley walks with Scott staff could run. I mean, let's be perfectly and at Koal chick walked. So Scott's got everybody. It's all comes back to either Alison chains or life, but we all need to be honest here. Lane Staley didn't walk much. She was more of a 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 riding across and fucking Carthaginian lands.

When Carthage petitioned Rome for permission to march out and stop the Numidian King, Rome was like, 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 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 eighties, 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. Yeah, he might've. 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. Kato 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 is 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 like that.

Yeah, exactly. The Greeks are making Rome too woke and will all be replaced by Carthaginians. This is just Italian politics. It's just the camp. Yeah. This is just the camp of the saints or like the league of Nord except like the original league of Nord, the OG league of Nord. Some people believe that this was more of a reflection of Cato's concept and theory on foreign relations, 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 this weird, like, declawed rump state a key to keeping Romans in line? Because Romans remember 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 the shit getting fixed and you know, why is my olive oil chunky or whatever, you know, if they're, 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 re reused between 1918 and 1939. And French people were like, yeah, no problems emerged from this. No, no issues whatsoever. Yeah. Thank you. Any other countries ever, ever doing this 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 just have carvings of dicks on your wall for good luck that I mean, what, that's a part of a pro culture that I feel is that we could, you know, we would get desensitized to a 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, 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 Lankford's of a, I can't believe it, but there's an American center named Mark Wayne. Yeah. It Wayne. Mark space Wayne either. It's Mark Wayne. One word Mark. Yeah. Hell yeah.

Mark Wayne sounds like, like a very, very early brand of microwave that like just had such a bad, it had like a tallitamide level of bad track record. And so like it's not, it just blasts you with so much radiation. You immediately get super cancer. Oh fuck. I got Mark cancer. Oh, fuck, I got 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 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 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 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 a punitive expedition against Carthage for breaking this agreement. And then if that wasn't bad enough for 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, switch sides. Just like, you know, we're actually, we're robin' now. We see what's coming and we really don't wanna 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, you're like, wow, it's 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 roped anymore. It's like, it's like Azerbaijan dumping money into like new Cal Donnie and separatism. But what if like new Cal Donnie actually bought into cleared itself part of Azerbaijan?

It's like a, like a weird total war game with the, 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 tabletop game they played during lockdown for the TF stream and they wound up with like Stalinist Australia. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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? I hate to agree with Bob Catter. But I was going to say you are basically like you're a fewer cataract. You have sort of Bob, Bob is cataract thought every single one of those crocodiles needs to be disappeared into the basement of the Australian KGB to be shot 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 Catter and he famously gave a thing where they were asking about gay marriage or gay rights. And he was like, he's like, Oh, that's not really bothered me. The people are entitled to their own proclivities. A little, a little thousand. A thousand blossoms. Blue, blue. But, but I'm not going to spend too much time on it because every 20 minutes someone is torn apart 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 called and now you just have a massive overpopulation of crocodiles. Give the 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, 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. 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 that Rome says, fuck those kids. We don't want them like damn little Billy. You're not even gonna have to be a fucking hostage. Why do I even have you? Then Rome gave Carthage its own terms that would be the equivalent of like we're being threatened by superior force So we're like you can have Megan McCain

How many of Trump's kids do you want to kidnap and that 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'll be a great porter. Yeah, we feel like if we sent him to Serbia, he'd be really good basketball in a couple years. Then Rome gave Carthage its own terms. You see, we have so many Roman soldiers on your land now

and Carthage is under Roman protection, clearly, right? I mean, nothing and you know, Carthage is under Roman protection. Clearly, right? I mean, nothing bad could happen to Carthage with the 80,000 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 Labé 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. X, X three Stompy X four nose. Stompy matched up with Alexandra Wang street where like fucking the dog names just kill me. I imagine the elephant names must've been similarly weird or alternatively. It, that is the best day of that guy's life. Cause his business has just been ruined by these putative measures. I 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. Uh, you know, it's all those situations paying in blood for them if they pissed off the elephant. So, you know, like you do kind of win a little.

It would be a shame if someone let all these elephants on the loose. It's like, it's like that guy, I forget where he is from in 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 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 breeding 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. Then 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 you Carthage needed was a crazy guy who was willing to do like murder, suicide via altered beasts, 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. And 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. 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 like their body language at 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 Carthaginian 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 over fucking weapons. And they would never have noticed if that one guy wasn't carrying a

book entitled idiots guide to surviving in a desert that you die in idiots guide to relocating your entire city under threat of arms. Like, okay. I mean, I don't blame them yet. 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 paid, 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 saw into his soul, you know, 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 a hell 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 backyardsyards 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. Now I was going to say, you know, Maoist because the backyard forages, but thanks. Thanks guys.

According to the Siege of Carthage or 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. Appian noted that, quote, each day they made a hundred shields, 300 swords, and a thousand 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, 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, some stinging Armenian jokes and if we could build the biggestingin, the world has ever seen, due to the amount of hair we could cultivate. Yeah, I was gonna 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, it's, it's a 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 woodcarver. They're like tearing down stave churches to make punji stakes. 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. So it's like Carthaginian like teens or whatever people in their early twenties 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 too, to speed up the development of weapons. Yeah. Faster and faster elephant. Elephant maxing. Yeah. It's like the GTA mod where everything, all cars are on 9 9 9 9, but it's crashing into the bleach and airs about your idea about like the deformed inbred, you know, XL bully versions of elephants.

They're just like wide Bolsonaro, but for elephants, someone can 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. So do you know that they rub olive oil all over their babies and they think that it's good? They're just naturally slippery. Whatever 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

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 Hasdrubal, the guy who got shit on for leading a very very bad campaign against the Numidians, 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

ithsmas of Carthage, they did such a bad job that Hasdrabal 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 Hasdrabal'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 Hauserbal's 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. They're just,

you know, just like a wave. They, they, what the fuck is a sardine? I've never seen this before. Make way for Halliburton. Yeah. I mean, I'm flu or, but spell 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 a fear 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, 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, there was no Carthaginian Yukio Mishima kicking around that we're aware of. So like nobody was really waiting to catch a javelin. I mean, that's the thing though, is that Carthaginian 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 killed in the process. So that effectively is saying like he would want to basically do the elephant limit break and just get stopped in the process. So that's so much. Yeah, exactly. Now, while all of this is going on, Roman forces began to cut down trees that 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, they didn't like them. So Carthage turned in a lot of catapults and Rome wanted battering ramps, like cartoonishly massive battering rams because they're going to use them to literally smash holes in the walls of Carthage. These are batting rams that are so large, it requires 6,000 men to use. What? Yes. Yeah, they're huge.

What the fuck? Not just to swing, but also to move because they're cartoonishly huge. They're very funny. You look back in Roman society and it's like you have, yeah, 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 turn that three story building on its side and smashed 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, you did, but hitting that elephant button repeatedly, banning the elephants as a jobs work program because those six thousand guys that need to operate the battering ram, what are they going to do if you have an elephant? God damn elephants are stealing all of our Roman jobs.

Eventually, one of these battering ram 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 counterattacked, launching a torch board suicide rush out of the Carthaginian walls to light the battering ramps 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 though, you know what I mean? The Donnas 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 respond as Dutch people, but doing it very, very poorly. But turning into a disease bog. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Basically, we've turned the stretch of Tunisia into Britain. So disease swept through the Roman ranks.

And since Arenas is 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 a set of people shitting and vomiting into the water. Like that, that you must, you know, that must hearten you a bit. Yeah. And then you, Jesus Christ. And then you just, you, you full on like surprise Viking funeral. Yeah. The olive oil made them extra flammable. Yeah, they were, they were, 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 is 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, okay.

This is where he gets the title Africanus, uh, it'd be, uh, uh, of Africa, which does not mean what people, you know, what you would think it means. It means he conquered it. It's like Monte of Al Alamein kind of thing. He's not from Al Alamein. They just called him that cause 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 to Hajiobal'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.

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, but 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 and you are to kill them. The military equivalent of all those Amazon reviews of the people who like will ship you a hundred crickets in a box and they're like, Oh my God, I opened the box. There's no wrapping. It'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 of 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 at 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 with Rome. Yeah. It's like, Oh, well yeah. Carthage is, is mine. What the fuck are you doing in my back garden? Yeah. Like Ro Roam is going to have to sit them 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 was like, I am in control of the trade of elephants named bumpyumpy X4. Know your place, Romans. And they're like, I'm just gonna kill you. Yeah, I mean, thankfully, before the council would have to kill the Numidians, because that is what Censurinus was thinking of doing,

the Numidian king simply drops dead. He is replaced by a man named Gullusa, who fully understands the actual relationship between Numidia and Rome. He wanted to benefit from what was happening. 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 Hagerbal'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 councils, a guy named Lucius Capernacus Piso and his Admiral Lucius Hostilius Manicus then move into the theater and take command. I'm sorry, Lucius Hostilius Manicus. Hostilius Manicus. Like, I'm sorry, that's just like too much nominative determinism in one place. Cause he's an admiral, they should be 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 councils, 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 Cursus Annorum, which 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 based with this technicality that their best military leader could not become council, Rome just made him council anyway. Fuck it. I have to admit that technicality getting in the way is a problem you can solve. And if for some reason your MWR coordinator

is just full on Audie Murphy and shit, not exactly like you just like, you know what we can, we can make an exception here. Exception to policy memo. Imagine if like America is failing and the best possible military leader that we can elect is like, well, he is only the guy that coordinates the local county fair. Yeah. Randomly this Kosovar guy who runs the fucking like computer lab that people use, you know, on the fobs just has revealed himself to be Kosovar Rambo.

And he technically has American permanent residency. So like, yeah, to be fair, the term Kosovar Rambo sounds like there's a building near Oram Siddique right now that has a warrant out for him. But Rome wasn't the only country going through some shit. Things within the walls of Carthage, despite Carthage still holding, things were going badly. The government was at each other's throats and the city's commander, also named Hasdrubal, 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 has your ball, the field army commander, the new city commander and new rating has your ball. This is like the, the eternally recurring principle of Mr. Slav. It's all this slavs 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. Once again, it is the jet Lee film, the one, but for guys named has your ball, the other one has to be beat to death with like folding chairs so he could absorb his powers. Inside you, there are two Hasrabals.

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 watch towers 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-era 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 me. Like I'm going to be William Fickner and black Hawk down just fucking fully just, just 2000 years beforehand. Yeah. It's I got to hand it to him.

A car that Gideon man leans out from the wall and shoots with her Robins horses with an RPG. We got a horse talk down. We got a, I got to feel so good though to be the first soldier to discover the Wally axis. Oh my fucking God. I do have to point out though that this fast rope attack into Carthage doesn't go great. 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. They're inside the city walls. Hajdrabal orders everyone to withdraw into the central citadel of Carthage. But as like they're in this,

I guess it's at 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. 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. Hasdrubal is so pissed about losing this suburb that he orders all Roman prisoners of war to be taken to the city's walls in full view of the Roman army and be tortured to death. When a few of Hasdrubal'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 Hajjbal 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 Tajin,

EG 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 in 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, Any attack would end with piles of dead Romans adding to the meat pile. The world's most grimdark kebab. Which might be bad for his political career.

So he took the long game option. Remember before how he 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 just build vertically nonstop. He also builds a whole breakwater across the Carthaginian Harbor. He builds AC wall as well. We agreed. No build mode guys. Okay. Hacks. Skip EOS hacking. Skip EOS using wall hacks. Meanwhile, meanwhile, hasher ball is just like, I need to coat this entire city in blood to prove a point that I actually do command tomato town. So many of my old military officers over burger town. I mean, but like literally on his approach, he saw, you know, the watch towers. There's

like, okay guys, American on the map. 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 repelling off of tilted towers. I was 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. Skip. Yo is a better commander than anyone we ever served under.

Yeah. Ray Odierno is just like, yeah, yeah, you know what, but RIP to Scipio, but I've built different ones. Just like entire battalions getting wiped out in Sadr city. Oh, don't worry, Nate. This is where I get to say, hold that thought. Cause 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 Hasdrabal, 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 mmm food 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 neighbors ass might taste They're not in the fun way The Roman soldiers posting on close friends IG stories like you wish you lived like this doing like Rick Ross, fucking DJ Khaled shit. But also it's like 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 fucking peacocks. They probably every single person is going to have appendicitis. Like these are things you should eat. To be fair, it's it's North African. So it's peacock with like yogurt on top. It's

delicious. Probably, probably. But it tastes good. I bet. I mean, I bet it tastes much better than anything the Romans are eating. Spaghetti had 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 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 disappointinglyointingly much sooner than you thought like something else I could think of. In short, the Carthaginian garbage Navia 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 key 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 butterflies. So he has some of the most inefficient strip possible. That means a military combat swimmer,

swimming butterfly actually would be pretty intimidating. Quite frankly, sir. Hostage ball city commander. We have the world's live. I suppose the 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, 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 it swimming that way? Once again, we have the, 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 I am and then set everything on fire. I mean, that would have made me get to practice more in the morning on time. I gotta 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, raining down onto them, all while Roman soldiers are kicking in doors and fighting over each room and each house at spirit's 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.

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 them 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 Romans stacking on your door. There's like, 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 guys. It's any piece of food. Cause 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, Robin soldiers stacking up on a door, kick open the door. The third men, the stack rushes for throws it up. Just a glass bottle full of olive oil on the ground. The other bed 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 or like a close quarters battle and like basically yet 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're 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. Their bodies were getting stacked up and they learned that, you know, they would take over a neighborhood like, ah, those fucking we took over this street, let's move on. And then Carthaginian soldiers and civilian to 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. Oh, they call that. They gave him the old Armenian. Yeah. Just giving it to him in the ribs. You're getting the fucking Yerevan surprise. The arm of your Shiv is just a whole bunch 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 terror. 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, 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 in fighting and battle was a favorable way out and they were gonna use this as their last stand. Where was Hasdrubal 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 Hasdrubal 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. The secret third option being born in the 20th century. Yeah. For once, this would be a good era of time to have been born in 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've seen less violence than someone born in this region, quite frankly. Yeah, Hajjbal'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 buried to that piece of shit. Better to be dead than married to a coward. Yeah, there you go. What followed was one of the most thorough sackings and pillages 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 is 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 has your ball He just kind of vanishes though There's a very good chance that he did live out the rest of his life and that sick Roman estate of his it wasn't until

A century after Rome destroyed Carthage that Julius Caesar planned or rebuilt it But it wasn't until Augustus at the project was actually completed and Roman Carthage became one of the most important cities in Roman Africa. The end. I, uh, 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 asked. So I'm like, fuck, it's probably going to be this, isn't it? This is probably going to be like when they Delenda that shit. And yeah, sure enough.

Many things were Delenda this day. Yeah. I didn't 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 and as one of them 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 Hajarbal got his Roman estate, but it was in like some other Roman holding in the Mediterranean, which is to say that Hajarbal 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. 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 podcast 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 interests podcasts, like very technical ones about like niche topics, really anymore?

Me neither, but I have one that I really enjoy, which is I would basically do the casque of a Monteato on people to make them listen to the entire season of Crime Town about Buddy Cianci. The reason being, my wife is from Rhode Island, and if you were from Rhode Island, you know about Buddy Cianci, but it's not very well known outside of America. He now sells pasta sauce. I only know that because of shocks. Well, Buddy Cianci actually ran kind of like one of his sort of things running for mayor in the seventies was kind of being like Jimmy Carter's 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 interviewed because buddy CNC 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 be like, Oh, we just got to adjudicate this torture. Um, 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 goes, well, he helped more people than he 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 hoy. And it's like, he even had to fucking, he had to fucking like stipulate that. And so to me, it's just like, there's so much rich detail in that, as specifically about that. I didn't know until I married someone from Rhode Island. So yeah, I think it's season one of Crime Town,

but it's the one about Buddy CNC. I'm not sure if I have one. 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 Lutene09 who just does like hour long Warhammer lore videos. Like that's prime. 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. The other one is it's the complete history of Japan and it's going like in my new detail. I think he's like maybe 250 episodes in and he's like kind of just gotten past the Joe man period. So, oh, that's deep. Yeah. That 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, trash future. What a hell did dad 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 but each skin 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 Aubin, which will feature some of your favorite historians like Matthew Gabriel, Eleanor Yaniga, and maybe a member of the former, former member of the US 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. So 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, gets you ebooks, 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. Oh God, must be so sweet. Until next time everybody, lather up and slide down the streets of Rome. Bye. Bye.