At the age of nine, one of the greatest commanders of antiquity, Hannibal, vowed to destroy Rome. For this reason, he unleashed the Second Punic War and crossed over with elephants! - across the Alps, defeated the Romans in several battles. After the victory at Cannae, his greatest triumph, Rome hung by a thread, but the Romans held out, and Hannibal's oath remained unfulfilled. Then there were more years of war, and a difficult peace for Carthage, and Hannibal’s flight to the East, and command of the fleet of the Seleucid king Antiochus III - again in a war with Rome, and then, after defeat, wanderings from Crete to Armenia and finally suicide in Bithynia , when the local ruler made a deal with the Romans to extradite him. Not long after the death of Hannibal, Carthage was destroyed to the ground by the Romans, and the place where it stood was plowed up so that nothing would any longer remind of the great city that was here. Ilya Korablev (Nast, surname Shifman; 1930–1990) - antiquarian, doctor of historical Sciences, senior researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences.