The 7-Day Fire: The Minute-by-Minute True Story of the Roman Betrayal, the Desperate Siege, and the Final Cataclysm that Erased Carthage (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798278102120)

Not every war ends with a surrender. Sometimes, a war ends with an erasure.

For over a century, the Roman Republic and Carthage fought for absolute survival. But after Carthage was defeated and stripped of its power, the true war began: a four-decade-long campaign of relentless diplomatic betrayal and economic strangulation driven by the Roman vow: Carthago Delenda Est ("Carthage must be destroyed").

In 146 BC, Rome finally manufactured its excuse, launching an overwhelming invasion. But the legionaries did not find a broken people-they found a city driven to suicidal madness.

Historian Robert Cain plunges into the city's final days with the high tension and pace of a modern thriller, reconstructing the incredible drama from the siege lines to the blazing temples:

• The Betrayal: Witness the cunning Diplomatic Trap where Rome forced Carthage to disarm, surrender its sons as hostages, and then delivered the final, impossible order to abandon its sacred city.

• The Resolve: The citizens' desperate race to turn their home into a fortress, melting statues for swords, and cutting their own hair to weave catapult ropes.

• The Executioner: The cold, methodical genius of General Scipio Aemilianus as he seals the city by land and sea, turning the siege into a calculated war of starvation and internal collapse.

• The Inferno: The savage, seven-day house-to-house fight that climaxed in the final citadel, culminating in a horrific double betrayal and a spectacular act of fire and despair.

THE 7-DAY FIRE is an unforgettable, heartbreaking record of how a great civilization was systematically destroyed, paving the way for the ultimate Roman Empire. Prepare to witness the end of everything.