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Hello, the North African City of Carthage was rich and powerful, but in the second century BC it suffered a terrible fate.

The Greek historian Appian wrote about it. Then came new scenes of horror. As the fire spread and carried everything down,

soldiers didn't wait to destroy the buildings little by little, but all in a heap.

So the crashing grew louder, and many corpses fell with the stones into the midst.

Others were seen still living, especially old men, women and young children who had hidden in the inn most nooks of the houses,

some of them wounded, some of them more or less burned, and uttering pitious cries.

Carthage was destroyed by Rome and destroyed utterly. Its people scattered and its library broken up.

The Romans removed Carthage from history with such a fact that it's hard to know the city is saved through Roman eyes.

But the ghosts of Carthage haunted the citizens of Rome for many, many centuries, and the destruction of the opulent and civilized Carthage was not a moment of triumph, but seemed to be a harbinger of Rome's own fate.

The women who discussed the destruction of Carthage are Joe Crawley Quinn lecturer in ancient history at Oxford University.

Eleanor Gorman, senior lecturing classics at the University of Bristol and Marybeard, professor of classics at the University of Cambridge Marybeard.

We think, if we think, or people like you think, that Carthage was founded in about the 9th century BC, can you explain the myths around the foundation of Carthage?

Yeah, they're great myths. Or at least the ones Romans told are really vivid.

The story goes that there was a glamorous, beautiful princess who came from the ancient city of Tyre in the modern Lebanon, a Phoenician city, a trading nation, a Semitic nation, that she fell out with her home city because her brother, the king, murdered her husband.

And in reaction to this, she decides to leave town, and she gets on a boat, and she hits the African coast.

She decides she wants to found a new place for herself, and she comes to land, and she does a deal with the people living there, that they will let her have enough land that is in can be enclosed by an ox hide.

So if they think of that simple, she just wants a picture tent, but actually what she does, because she's a clever old thing, is she cuts up the ox hide into strips, and makes it in circle a vast tract of land, where she finds her new city of Carthage, which means in the Punic Town new city.

What happens then is that she has this city, but she's eventually, the other members of the town, try to marry her off to a local Libyan, and rather than do this, she throws herself on a burning pyre and dies.

And that's the earliest version, and in that, you're talking about the 9th century BC issue.

You're in, well, you know, in mythic 9th century.

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