Destroy Carthage! : the death throes of an ancient culture

For Punic Carthage, glory of the ancient Mediterranean, a metropolis of vast wealth and culture, centre of an empire, rival of Greece and precursor of Rome, doomsday arrived precisely 2,091 years before the atom bomb. More than a century before Christ, its culture and its people were blotted from the earth, not by natural disaster but by the cynical design of her enemies. Even our age, with its weapons of mass destruction, had yet to witness so complete an obliteration of a city at the whim of a rival state.