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Dead Empires

Dead Empires

Written by: Jacob McFarland
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Dead Empires is a narrative history podcast covering the rise and fall of collapsed civilizations. Long-form main series episodes deliver systems-driven, multi-sourced historical storytelling; what happened, how it happened, and why. Battle Room and Bio episodes drop listeners directly inside the decisive battles and lives of history's most consequential figures. Hosted by Jacob and produced by Bad Optics Media.Copyright 2026 Jacob McFarland Art World
Episodes
  • Carthage: Punic Apocalypse II

    Carthage: Punic Apocalypse II
    Jun 20 2026

    In October of 218 BC a twenty-eight-year-old marched the last of his elephants over a 10,000-foot Alpine pass that no Mediterranean army had ever attempted. He came down into Italy with roughly 26,000 men, half of what he’d started with, and over the next eighteen months he handed the Roman Republic the three worst military disasters in its history. At Cannae alone, more Romans died in a single afternoon than Americans died in the entire Vietnam War.

    His name was Hannibal Barca, and this is the complete story of his war and everything it set in motion: the crossing, the slaughter, the thirteen-year stalemate in which he never lost a battle and never won the war, the day his own tactics were turned against him at Zama, and the long, cold patience of a Republic that decided one defeated rival still wasn’t dead enough.

    This is a single long-form telling: the back half of Dead Empires’ Carthage season assembled into one continuous show. It runs from the snow of the Alps to the ashes of a half-million-person city burning for six days while the Roman general who ordered it stood on the hill and wept, quoting Homer. It is a story about military genius and the limits of genius; about a state that gave its greatest soldier everything and a state that gave its greatest soldier nothing; and about what it means when the winners get to write, and then physically destroy, the loser’s entire record.

    Carthage was richer, older, and in many ways more sophisticated than the caricature Rome left us. The harbor engineering, the grid-plan city, the agricultural science: all of it survives only in fragments, because the point of 146 BC was to make sure nothing survived at all. This is the war that earned that ending, told in full.

    Featuring: the Alpine crossing · Ticinus, Trebia, and Lake Trasimene · the double envelopment at Cannae · Fabius and the strategy of exhaustion · the war in Spain and the rise of Scipio · Hasdrubal’s march and the Metaurus · the invasion of Africa · the only face-to-face meeting between Hannibal and Scipio · the Battle of Zama · Hannibal’s exile and death · Cato’s fig · the siege and destruction of Carthage.

    Chapters

    0:00 I. OVER THE ALPS: the crossing & the first three victories (218 to 217 BC)

    2:37 The Army Assembles

    14:08 The Mountains

    32:06 The Three Blows: Ticinus, Trebia & Lake Trasimene

    55:40 Reflection

    58:15 II. CANNAE: the perfect battle (August 2, 216 BC)

    1:00:44 The Ground and the Armies

    1:14:52 The Killing

    1:29:34 The Aftermath

    1:49:39 III. THE LONG DEFEAT: thirteen years that led nowhere (216 to 207 BC)

    1:51:32 The Strategy of Exhaustion (Fabius)

    2:07:16 The War in Spain

    2:26:55 Hasdrubal’s Crossing: the Metaurus

    2:38:50 The Lion in the Cage

    2:44:36 Reflection

    2:48:00 IV. ZAMA: the student beats the master (202 BC)

    2:48:00 The Invasion of Africa

    2:58:23 The Return

    3:02:41 The Meeting: Hannibal & Scipio, face to face

    3:05:49 Zama

    3:19:27 The Peace and the Exile: Hannibal’s last years & death

    3:33:29 Reflection

    3:36:42 V. SALT THE EARTH: the destruction of Carthage (149 to 146 BC)

    3:38:25 The Fifty-Year Peace & Cato’s Obsession

    3:50:06 The Arsenal

    3:53:05 The Siege

    4:03:53 The Fall: six days

    4:14:03 The Erasure

    4:24:03 Epilogue: What Came After

    Sources & Further Reading

    Ancient sources

    • Polybius, Histories (the march, Trebia, Trasimene, Cannae, the African campaign and Zama; fragments for the Third Punic War)
    • Livy, History of Rome, books XXI to XXX; XXXIII & XXXIX (Hannibal as Suffete and his death); Periochae (summaries of the lost books)
    • Appian, Punic Wars / Libyca
    • Plutarch, Fabius Maximus, Marcellus, Flamininus, Cato the Elder
    • Cornelius Nepos, Hannibal (exile and death)
    • Pliny the Elder, Natural History (Cato’s fig; Mago’s agricultural treatise)
    • Pausanias, Description of Greece; Strabo, Geography (the parallel destruction of Corinth, 146 BC)

    Modern scholarship

    • Adrian Goldsworthy, The Fall of Carthage (2000)
    • J.F. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War (1978)
    • Richard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed (2010)
    • B. Dexter Hoyos, Mastering the West: Rome and Carthage at War (2015)
    • Eve MacDonald, Hannibal: A Hellenistic Life (2015)
    • Gregory Daly, Cannae: The Experience of Battle in the Second Punic War (2002)
    • Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture (2001)
    • P.A. Brunt, Italian Manpower, 225 BC to AD 14 (1971)
    • Serge Lancel, Carthage: A History (1995)
    • A.E. Astin, Scipio Aemilianus (1967)
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    3 hrs and 58 mins
  • Carthage: Punic Apocalypse I

    Carthage: Punic Apocalypse I
    Jun 6 2026
    In the spring of 146 BC, Roman soldiers spent seventeen days burning the wealthiest city in the Western Mediterranean. When the fires went out, they plowed the ground and burned the libraries. Seven hundred years of accumulated knowledge: histories, philosophy, poetry, law, science, gone. Almost everything we know about Carthage today comes from the people who destroyed it.This is the story of how that city was built. The full rise, told end to end. Phoenician origins on the coast of Lebanon, a refugee queen who tricked a Libyan chief with an ox hide, a circular military harbor that could launch 220 warships invisibly, an explorer who sailed past the equator two thousand years before the Portuguese, and the greatest generation of a family, the Barcids, who would carry their father's grudge against Rome all the way to the gates of Rome.This is Part I of the Punic Apocalypse — roughly four hours covering five hundred years, from the founding of Carthage to the eve of Hannibal's crossing of the Alps. We move through four chapters:THE PURPLE CITY (c. 815–550 BC) — The Phoenician homeland. Tyrian purple, the dye extracted from sea snail glands that cost more than gold. The 22 characters that became every Western alphabet. Tyre, the island fortress that resisted siege for thirteen years. The murder of a high priest, the flight of a princess named Elissa, and the founding of Qart Hadasht on a hill encircled by a single ox hide.MASTERS OF THE SEA (c. 550–264 BC) — The living city. A double harbor unlike anything else in the ancient world. A constitution Aristotle praised alongside Sparta's. Hanno the Navigator's voyage past the equator. Himilco's expedition to Britain. The Mago farming manuals; the only Carthaginian text Rome preserved. And the question Greek and Roman authors would not stop asking: did the Carthaginians really sacrifice their own children?BLOOD AND SILVER (264–241 BC) — The First Punic War. Twenty-three years of continuous fighting between a maritime empire and an agrarian republic that had never built a warship. The corvus. The Battle of Cape Ecnomus: 680 warships, 290,000 men on the water, the largest naval battle in human history. The sacred chickens of Publius Claudius Pulcher. The loss of over a hundred thousand Romans to storms alone. And the slow, grinding Roman discovery that they could lose major battles and still win the war.THE TRUCELESS WAR (241–238 BC) — The reckoning. Twenty thousand unpaid mercenaries land in North Africa and nearly destroy Carthage from within. Polybius calls it the most impious war ever fought. Hamilcar Barca emerges from the rubble as the most feared man in the state, builds a new empire in Spain on Tartessian silver, and raises three sons who will become Rome's worst nightmare.CHAPTERS00:00:00 Open — Seventeen Days of Fire00:03:00 Chapter 1: The Purple City00:45:00 Chapter 2: Masters of the Sea02:05:00 Chapter 3: Blood and Silver03:11:00 Chapter 4: The Truceless WarPRIMARY ANCIENT SOURCESPolybius, Histories (Books I–VI, comprehensive coverage of First Punic War and Truceless War) • Livy, History of Rome and Periochae • Diodorus Siculus, Universal History (Books XI–XX, XXV) • Appian, Punic Wars and Iberian Wars • Cornelius Nepos, Lives (Hamilcar, Hannibal) • Cicero, De Natura Deorum • Plutarch, De superstitione • Aristotle, Politics (Book II) • Herodotus, Histories • Strabo, Geography • Pliny the Elder, Natural History • Justin, Epitome of Pompeius Trogus (Book XVIII, the Dido narrative) • Josephus, Against Apion (Menander's Tyrian king list) • Virgil, Aeneid (Books I and IV) • Hanno the Navigator, Periplus (Codex Heidelbergensis 398) • Avienus, Ora Maritima (Himilco fragments) • Suetonius, Nero • Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds • Columella and Varro, De Re Rustica • Kleitarchos fragments • Duilius inscription, CIL VI 1300 • Diocletian's Price Edict (301 AD) • I Kings 5–7; II Chronicles 2–4; Ezekiel 26–29 • Papyrus Anastasi I • Mishnah Ketubot 7:10MODERN SCHOLARSHIPRichard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed (2010)Adrian Goldsworthy, The Fall of Carthage (2000)Serge Lancel, Carthage: A History (1995)Donald Harden, The Phoenicians (1962)B. Dexter Hoyos, The Carthaginians (2010)B. Dexter Hoyos, Truceless War: Carthage's Fight for Survival (2007)B. Dexter Hoyos (ed.), A Companion to the Punic Wars (2011)J.F. Lazenby, The First Punic War (1996)J.F. Lazenby, Hannibal's War (1978)Josephine Quinn et al., "Phoenician Bones of Contention," Antiquity (2013)Jeffrey Schwartz et al., "Skeletal Remains from Punic Carthage," PLOS ONE (2010)Lawrence Stager & Samuel Wolff, "Child Sacrifice at Carthage," Biblical Archaeology Review (1984)Patricia Smith et al., "Aging cremated infants," Antiquity (2013)Dead Empires is written, narrated, and produced by Jacob for Bad Optics Media.https://www.youtube.com/@DeadEmpiresPodcasthttps://www.tiktok.com/@deadempirespodcasthttps://deadempirespodcast.com/
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    4 hrs
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