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No verified portrait of me survives from antiquity. This bust from Capua may be me, or may be a Hellenistic general, or may be no one in particular. Carthage was destroyed by Rome in 146 BC — sixty years after my death. The Romans burned the city, and with it every document, every portrait, every archive. My history survives only through the accounts of my enemies.

Livy and Polybius are my historians. Polybius is fair; Livy is hostile; both are Roman. They cannot quite explain how I kept an army of Africans, Iberians, Gauls, and Numidians together for sixteen years in enemy territory, winning every major battle, and yet failing to take Rome. The answer is that I never had the siege equipment, and Carthage never sent it. I was a general without a state. That is what Rome defeated. Not me.