During the same night and the following day, the besieged repaired their wall and erected towers there from place to place. But Scipio, in front of the towers, raises mounds from which his soldiers throw vases filled with sulphur, pitch and burning pieces of wood. The Carthaginians must evacuate this first wall and the Romans are masters of the landing stage. They then build near the great perimeter wall, another brick wall of the same height from which they launch lines which this time reach the interior of the city. Hasdrubal would like to negotiate The noose is tightening more and more around the besieged, and it is at the end of this year - 147 that Hasdrubal, wishing to obtain peace, asks for an interview with Gulussa. Polybus who recounts the scene ridicules the Carthaginian. He depicts him as a big, fat man who hardly set an example of privation; Dressed in a ceremonial cloak, he advances towards the Numidian general and asks him to ask Scipio to spare the city. “How naive! replies the latter. The Romans have you besieged by land and sea and you imagine you will get from them what they refused when your forces remained intact? Hasdrubal then invokes the help of the gods and the fact that a Punic army still holds the region of Nepheris.
However, Gulussa urges Scipio to put an end to a war whose twists and turns cannot be foreseen. "What," replied the Roman leader, "that is what the man who inflicted such unworthy treatment on our prisoners is asking for. And, after this crime, he hopes that the gods will assist him? Despite everything, he makes him say that if the city surrenders, he will be saved, as well as his wife, his children and ten families of his parents. He will be able to take away a hundred slaves and sine part of his wealth; Hasdrubal haughtily replies that "Never will the day come when he will see both the sunlight and the burning of Carthage".
Scipio then decides to neutralize once and for all these Punic troops who are still in the countryside. During the winter - 147-146 he sent many detachments to fight them and decided to besiege Nepheris, the central point of this resistance. After the victory of his ally Gulussa, who wreaks havoc on the enemy army, Scipio becomes master of the city. The siege of 22 days was made very painful by a fairly sharp cold.
The success of this expedition discourages the last allies of Carthage. The city no longer receives any supply convoy; no one can help it anymore and many inhabitants are starving or going to give themselves up to the enemy.
Theoretically, the new consul elected in Rome in November - 147 should have come to replace Scipio at the head of the army of Africa. But he understood, like the senate, that Scipio had to be left to complete his task in Africa. The Roman general waits in this year - 146 for the return of good weather, and in the spring he decides to put an end to it.
Before beginning the fight, in front of the entire assembled army, he addressed the enemy's deities according to custom:"If there is a god, if there is a goddess who has the people and the city of Carthage, I beg you and conjure you and ask you in favor to desert the city, the temples and the sacred places and to move away from them; and leaving them to come to Rome to my home and mine. While he speaks, victims have had their throats cut and their entrails examined. The haruspices find no fatal sign there. Then Scipio addresses the infernal gods of his homeland:"All of you, spread flight, dread, terror, pestilence in this city of Carthage and in this army of which I want to speak... May these men, these enemies and their cities and their fields be routed by you and deprived of the light of heaven...”
The enemy cities being the object before the attack of such a devotio became obligatorily doomed to the `total destruction. Scipio thus hints at his '; legionnaires that pillage will be allowed, which is certainly for them the best of stimulants. The final assault is launched from the landing stage taken the previous year. The ports, badly defended by Hasdrubal and by combatants undermined by hunger, were taken quite easily, which opened access to the city to the Romans; they enter a large square, that of the. market...deserted. Night having come, Scipio prefers to postpone the march until the next day. Nearby is the "Tophet" of Salammbô, which is the cemetery where the urns containing the ashes of the firstborn the city,! according to the Carthaginian custom inherited from the Canaanites.Near this place are many Punic sanctuaries; a temple, dedicated to Apollo and whose walls are covered with gold plates, is entirely plundered by the legionaries who ignore the profane the sanctuary of a god they also honor.
From the bottom of the city start three narrow main streets, lined with multi-storey houses and which climb steeply to the citadel of Byrsa, the heart of the city. Then begins a horrible fight, house by house, described at length by Appian. From all the windows and from the roofs a cloud of projectiles falls on the Romans, buckets of boiling water and they progress only very slowly. They are forced to take each house, piece by piece. Arrived at the top of a building, they launch beams above the street which allow them to reach the one opposite where one fights from the cellar to the attic. The bodies tip over in the void and are impaled on pikes and swords raised towards the sky.
The legionnaires arrive painfully to the citadel and Scipion gives the order to burn the three streets, and to level the ruins to facilitate the passage of the troops. So we knock down the walls that are still standing. Many corpses fall at the same time as the stones, but also the bodies of poor unfortunates, wounded and half burned, old men, women and children, whose groans are horrible to hear.