The Roman commander, belatedly realizing how formidable had become the undertaking on which he had embarked so confidently, sat down before the city walls. For two long years the siege dragged on, the occasional attacks delivered by the Romans doing more harm to the besiegers than to the besieged. But Rome’s determination to end for good and all the threat offered by her great rival never wavered, and in 147 B.C. she intrusted the command of her armies in Africa to her most brilliant general, Scipio Africanus the Younger, then only thirty-seven. Scipio was quick to realize that his most powerful ally in the taking of the city was famine. Up to this time the Carthaginians had succeeded in obtaining supplies both by sea and by land, but Scipio now proceeded to build across the neck of the isthmus a great fortification which effectually cut off the city’s communications on the land side. His next step was to block the entrance to the commercial and military harbors by throwing across the entrance to the little bay on which they opened a gigantic jetty of hewn stones, thus making impossible relief from the sea. Then, the enemy completely hemmed in, he sat himself down and waited with such patience as he could summon for famine to do its ghastly work. So passed the terrible winter of 147-6 B.C. When, early in the spring, Scipio renewed his attacks, he was confronted by an enemy gaunt with hunger and decimated by disease but indomitable still. Every stronghold, no matter how formidable its defenses, has its weak point, and Carthage’s, as Scipio discovered, was at the entrance to its harbors. This, he decided, must be his immediate objective; here he determined to deliver his grand assault. So, utilizing the jetty which he had built, he poured his storm-battalions of seasoned legionaries upon the breakwater and so by the harbor-mouth into the edge of the city itself. Hurling his troops forward in the mass formations for which the Romans were famous, gaining ground foot by foot and then only by sheer weight of numbers, he slowly drove the defenders back upon the Cothon, or military harbor. This also he stormed, and that night his weary legionaries bivouacked in the Forum, within the innermost of the city’s triple walls. From the Forum to the foot of the precipitous Byrsa Hill, from the brow of which the citadel frowned down upon the city, is barely a quarter of a mile, yet so desperate was the house-to-house fighting in the maze of narrow alleys and crowded, high-walled buildings which formed the lower town, so frenzied the resistance of the Carthaginians, that it took the Romans six terrible days to cover that short distance.