The Rising Son; or, the Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race

by William Wells Brown

Everything was done to repair the damage already sustained by the surrender of their navy and munitions of war. The pavements of the streets were torn up, houses demolished, and statues broken to pieces to obtain stones for weapons, which were carried upon the ramparts for defence. Everybody that could work at a forge was employed in manufacturing swords, spear-heads, pikes, and such other weapons as could be made with the greatest facility and dispatch. They used all the iron and brass that could be obtained, then melted down vases, statues, and the precious metals, and tipped their spears with an inferior pointing of silver and gold.

When the supply of hemp and twine for cordage for their bows had failed, the young maidens cut off their hair, and twisted and braided it into cords to be used as bow-strings for propelling the arrows which their husbands and brothers made. Nothing in the history of war, either ancient or modern, will bear a comparison with this, the last struggle of the Carthaginians. The siege thus begun was carried on more than two years; the people, driven to the last limit of human endurance, had aroused themselves to a hopeless resistance in a sort of frenzy of despair, and fought with a courage and a desperation that compelled the Romans to send home for more troops.

Think of a walled city, thirty miles in circumference, with a population of seven hundred and fifty thousand souls, men, women, and children, living on limited fare, threatened with starvation, and surrounded by the sick, the dying, and the dead!

Even in this condition, so heroic were the Carthaginians, that they repulsed the Romans, sent fireships against the invaders’ fleet, burned their vessels, and would have destroyed the Roman army, had it not been for the skill of Scipio, who succeeded in covering the retreat of the Roman legions with a body of cavalry.

On the arrival of fresh troops from Rome, the siege was renewed; and after a war of three years, famine reduced the population to a little more than fifty thousand.

The overpowering army of Scipio finally succeeded in breaking through the gates, and gaining admission into the city; the opposing forces fought from street to street, the Carthaginians retreating as the Romans advanced. One band of the enemy’s soldiers mounted to the tops of the houses, the roofs of which were flat, and fought their way there, while another column moved around to cut off retreat to the citadel. No imagination can conceive the uproar and din of such an assault upon a populous city—a horrid mingling of the vociferated commands of the officers, and the shouts of the advancing and victorious enemy, with the screams of terror from affrighted women and children, and the dreadful groans and imprecations from men dying maddened with unsatisfied revenge, and biting the dust in agony of despair.[13]

The more determined of the soldiers with Hasdrubal, the Carthaginian general at their head, together with many brave citizens of both sexes, and some Roman deserters, took possession of the citadel, which was in a strongly-fortified section of the city.

The Romans advanced to the walls of this fortification, and set that part of the city on fire that lay nearest to it; the fire burned for six days. When the fire had ceased burning near the citadel, the Roman troops were brought to the area thus left vacant by the flames, and the fight was renewed.

Seeing there was no hope of successfully resisting the enemy, Hasdrubal opened the gates, and surrendered to the Romans. There was, however, a temple in the citadel, capable of holding ten or fifteen thousand persons; in this, many of the brave men and women took refuge; among these were Hasdrubal’s wife and two children. The gates of the temple had scarcely been closed and securely barred, ere some one set the building on fire from within. Half-suffocated with the smoke, and scorched with the flames, these people were soon running to and fro with the wildest screams; many of whom reached the roof, and among them, Hasdrubal’s wife.

Looking down and seeing her husband standing amongst the Roman officers, she loaded him with reproaches for what she conceived to be his cowardice, stabbed her children, threw them into the flames, and leaped in herself. The city was given up to pillage, and set on fire. After burning for seventeen days, this great city, the model of beauty and magnificence, the repository of immense wealth, and one of the chief States of the ancient world, was no more. The destruction of Carthage, previously resolved upon in cold blood, after fifty years of peace, and without any fresh provocation from the defenceless people, who had thrown themselves on the generosity of their rivals, was one of the most hard-hearted and brutal acts of Roman policy. The sequel of the history of Carthage presents a melancholy and affecting picture of the humiliation and decline of a proud and powerful State.