of such an assault upon
a populous city--a horrid mingling of the vociferated commands of the
officers, and of the shouts of the advancing and victorious
assailants, with the screams of terror from affrighted women and
children, and dreadful groans and imprecations from men dying maddened
with unsatisfied revenge, and biting the dust in an agony of pain.

The more determined of the combatants, with Hasdrubal at their head,
took possession of the citadel, which was a quarter of the city
situated upon an eminence, and strongly fortified. Scipio advanced to
the walls of this fortification, and set that part of the city on fire
which lay nearest to it. The fire burned for six days, and opened a
large area, which afforded the Roman troops room to act. When the
troops were brought up to the area thus left vacant by the fire, and
the people within the citadel saw that their condition was hopeless,
there arose, as there always does in such cases, the desperate
struggle within the walls whether to persist in resistance or to
surrender in despair. There was an immense mass, not far from sixty
thousand, half women and children, who were determined on going out to
surrender themselves to Scipio's mercy, and beg for their lives.
Hasdrubal's wife, leading her two children by her side, earnestly
entreated her husband to allow her to go with them. But he refused.
There was a body of deserters from the Roman camp in the citadel, who,
having no possible hope of escaping destruction except by desperate
resistance to the last, Hasdrubal supposed would never yield. He
committed his wife and children, therefore, to their charge, and these
deserters, seeking refuge in a great temple within the citadel, bore
the frantic mother with them to share their fate.

Hasdrubal's determination, however, to resist the Romans to the last,
soon after this gave way, and he determined to surrender. He is
accused of the most atrocious treachery in attempting thus to save
himself, after excluding his wife and children from all possibility of
escaping destruction. But the confusion and din of such a scene, the
suddenness and violence with which the events succeed each other, and
the tumultuous and uncontrollable mental agitation to which they give
rise, deprive a man who is called to act in it of all sense and
reason, and exonerate him, almost as much, from moral responsibility
for what he does, as if he were insane. At any rate, Hasdrubal, after
shutting up