David Durham - Pride of Carthage

When they departed for the south a fortnight later, they traveled in haste, troops marching double time, Laelius and the ships shadowing them offshore, cavalry riding out in small units, hunting any who might betray their movements. Publius had yet to reveal their goal to any but a select few, no more than the fingers on a hand. He was so intent on secrecy that he refused to tell the twenty thousand men of his army anything more than necessary to get them through the day. If his plans for Iberia were to succeed, this first effort must not fail. He left nothing to chance, but this did not stop him from mingling with the men daily. He rode up beside his troops during marches and harangued them from the saddle. Everything was about to change, he declared. The gods themselves had told him so. Never again would they make small war in Iberia. Never would they fight skirmishes for no real gain. Never would they divide their forces and rely so heavily on Iberian honor. They would strike only decisive blows, well timed, perfectly placed, and so effective that the brothers Barca could not recover even from the first attack. Hannibal might have rewritten the rules of warfare; now it was their turn to take up the stylus and inscribe the rest of this history.

They marched around Acra Leuce without a sideways glance, forded the river Segura, and strode out onto the cape of Palus. There were seven days like this, but still they were each of them stunned when they caught their first glimpse of the city. None of them believed it a reasonable destination, so they sought some other explanation for why their route took them close to it. More than one of them sat down to behold the madness that had brought them to the teeth of the enemy's maw. They had marched to New Carthage.

Their arrival caught the inhabitants by complete surprise. Shepherds rose up from drowsing no more than a stone's throw from the advance guard. It took them only a glance to know that these troops were not their own. They ran, but not one of them escaped the cavalry's darts. Slaves looked up from the near fields and dropped their work where they stood. Soon the watchtower sounded a great horn that drew everyone into the city like rabbits scurrying to their burrows. Just before the gates slammed shut, a band of six horsemen galloped out. Messengers. Each curved off in a different direction, gone to cry warning to the Barcas. Publius quietly ordered patrols to fly out after them, with simple orders:

“Hunt and kill them,” he said. “Let none of them get through.”

That evening they camped at the base of the isthmus and Publius spoke to his assembled troops. “The city behind us stands as the greatest monument to the rule of the Carthaginians in Iberia,” he said. “Out of it flows all the wealth of the continent; into it, the desires of its far-reaching masters. Inside are whole chambers piled high with silver, with amber and gold, storerooms of weapons and siege engines, warehouses of raw iron and the great furnaces that fire it into tools of war. Inside stretch palaces worked by servants, fountains that flow with wine on festival days, temples where they sacrifice to their dark gods, and an ancient wood filled with exotic animals imported from Africa. There are many thousands locked within those walls, but there are merchants and sailors and aristocrats, priests and magistrates, Iberian prisoners, slaves, the old, the young—not fighting men. And there are women, a great many of them. Isn't Hasdrubal himself rumored to keep a court of a thousand beauties?”

Publius had made up this last detail on the spot but enjoyed the effect it caused and spoke into the building enthusiasm. “All this inside that city,” he said. “But who protects it? I'll tell you—a scant thousand soldiers. Yes, one thousand alone. This may seem impossible to you, but consider their thinking. They'd never have imagined that we'd aim for this target, just as many of you never did. They've been safe here and taken their destruction elsewhere for so long that they do not see their vulnerability. They're like Achilles, who had only a single weakness but went to war with it exposed to his enemy's arrows. Where is the wisdom in that? Why not fashion greaves to cover the spot, and therefore become invincible? There is, of course, one reason. We're not alone in our struggles here but act on the small stage overseen by the gods, and the gods have never yet allowed any single people perfection. I believe that Apollo offers us this city as a gift. Tell me this is not so. Tell me you do not care to dine!”

Laelius later commented that Publius had a growing gift for oratory. To which the commander smiled and said that Laelius had a growing knack for noting the obvious.

They were two days at planning and shifting troops and reconnoitering the land and outer bay, the reefs in the shallow water, and the breathing of the tides into and out of the inner harbor. Publius spent the whole of the second day alone with a fisherman who had once called New Carthage home but had fallen foul of a few important people and been cast out. He had reason to despise the city, and an intimate knowledge of details Publius was very interested in.

The attack began on the fourth morning, much as any might have guessed. The bulk of the Roman troops rose early and clamored out onto the isthmus, laden with tall ladders. They walked forward flanked by archers who set up a steady barrage of arrows, many of these set aflame and aimed far beyond the walls themselves. A detachment from the city poured out the front gate to meet them, but pulled back just as quickly, no match for what they saw coming toward them. Publius strode with the front ranks of soldiers, protected by three shield bearers and to all appearances completely unafraid. He urged his men on from right in among them. He shouted reminders of their duty, but also fed their desire for revenge. It was in this city that Hannibal had grown into a man. Here he planned the murder of Roman men, the rape of Roman women, the conquest of their homeland . . . it was inside these very walls that he had dreamed of making them all into slaves!

The citizens of the city, however, had no intentions of making this easy. What they lacked in soldiers they made up for by enlisting all able bodies. Over the walls they tilted giant logs that wiped whole ladders clean. They dropped rocks the size of ostrich eggs, heavy enough to dent helmets, knock men unconscious, crush fingers, snap limbs, and dislocate shoulders so that men clung to the ladder one-armed, howling with pain and able neither to ascend nor to retreat. The walls themselves were smooth and in many places taller than the ladders placed against them, a fact that some of the anxious soldiers only discovered at their upper reaches. Other ladders snapped under the attackers' weight and crashed down in a jumble of fractured wood and broken bodies.

The defense of New Carthage was furious. If not for Publius' presence, his men might well have broken. Few of them believed they could win the city this way—but that was not their young commander's intention. What none of them knew was that as soon as the frontal attack began, Laelius with several ships had entered the harbor. The transports maneuvered as close as they could to the shallow shelf of rock and coral that distinguished the bay from the open current of the sea. The boats perched on the vast blue water, but next to it the men could see the stones they were meant to walk upon, clearly visible and solid, but submerged almost to a man's height in water. Laelius shouted his orders, but for some moments the soldiers did not understand the apparent madness of what was being asked of them. They knew they were meant to be the first inside the city, but they knew no more than that.

As the boats pitched on the swells, the captains added their voices to Laelius' and got the men off quickly, for the rocks threatened to gouge in the hull and end this for all of them at any moment. Few of them could swim, so it was an act of faith or courage or—for some—resignation to step from the boat, falling through the stilled oars, splashing down into the water, heavy in their armor. They fought to keep their heads above the surface. Some fell into depressions and dropped their weapons and clawed at the feet of their companions until they were lifted up. Two of their number were unfortunate, jumping at the wrong moment in the boat's pitch and missing the rocks. They slipped into the depths, clawing for purchase on the water, fading into the blue until they were swallowed by the color and lost. More than one imagined the jaws of some beast rising up from the depths beneath the boat and clamping down on them, and many would say afterward that the hardest part of the day had been that first hour of waiting.