Carthago Delenda Est

Carthago Delenda Est

of Note

The second war with Carthage came 20 years later, and it had nothing to do with Kindred at all. It began in faraway Spain, where only a few Brujah neonates resided with the cruel Lasombra. The mortal Hannibal and his fellow Carthaginians set the city to war on their own by capturing the Roman allied colony of Saguntum.

Hannibal then marched east and south across the Alps to invade Italy itself, where he and his army remained for the next 15 years. While Romans and Carthaginians involved themselves in the bloodiest fighting they had ever seen, most Kindred remained silent and stunned.

Many Italian Cainites were too scared to leave their cities, and the Sicilian Malkavians and Toreador had their hands full with fresh Carthaginian incursions. The Brujah sat back in Africa and let their human allies do most of the fighting.

Eventually, the Romans turned the tables and forced Hannibal back to Africa. The Roman legions followed along soon after, invading Africa and defeating Hannibal on his home ground.

Camilla and the other Kindred stayed in their havens for this last fight, still recovering from nearly two decades of war in their peninsula. Carthage surrendered and agreed to Roman terms, ceding Spain and making other concessions to the Roman victors. Although upset by the defeat, Carthage itself remained a secure city so the Brujah were content, for the time being.

Romans, Ventrue and the loosely allied Toreador and Malkavians in Sicily alike were not so pleased with the outcome. Lysander urged for a final end to the conflict.

The mortal army might have been defeated, but the immortal enemies remained as powerful as ever. Other clans came to Camilla as well, led by the Malkavian Prince Alchias. The wanted Carthage eliminated for good. Meanwhile, the Roman people were being encouraged to fight as well. The famed Roman orator Cato the Elder had an obsession with Carthage. For years he ended every speech he gave in the Senate with the same phrase: Carthago delenda est — Carthage must be destroyed. Lysander picked up the refrain and echoed it in Camilla’s ear.

Whether it was Cato or Lysander rallying the cause, the result was the same. Camilla agreed to ally with the Chapter One: The Kings of the Kindred other clans and eradicate the Assamite-Brujah menace in Carthage for all time. In one of the few instances in which the Ventrue actually provoked a mortal world conflict, Rome once again declared war on Carthage in 150 B.C., five full decades after the end of the last great struggle. The Roman fleets and armies attacked Carthage and lay siege to the city, surrounding it with a wall of troops and ships.

The Third Punic War amounted to not much of a battle for the Romans: a quick siege and capitulation.

For the Ventrue, it was the greatest, largest battle they had ever fought. While Roman legions razed the city, Ventrue, Toreador, Malkavian and a few Gangrel officers helped lead the charge and did battle in the streets with the Carthaginian Brujah for five nights. Scores of Kindred died on both sides, along with several thousand mortals. Never before or since has such a titanic battle taken place openly between Kindred. Any lucky enough to have survived those nights can testify that it was a blood-soaked horror beyond all others.

The invaders won the night, albeit at a terrible cost.

Artemis herself had led the first foray into the city, and she was torn to shreds by a pack of frenzied Brujah berserks.

Prince Alchias was so badly hurt that he slipped into a torpor from which he might never have recovered — his fate remains a mystery. Lysander emerged from the battle scarred but otherwise intact, having taken the final Brujah head himself. Camilla had remained in Rome, but his fledgling progeny Tiberius Carnifex slew an entire cell of Assamites before succumbing to their envenomed vitae.

The city surrendered soon thereafter, and the legions began the sack proper. On Lysander’s orders, they razed the city to the ground, killing thousands and enslaving the rest. They salted the earth so that nothing would ever grow there again — and so that no torpid Cainite could rise. The war with Carthage was over.

The Senate’s Failure Rome’s place in the world grew by leaps and bounds after Carthage’s destruction. Next came Greece, then Asia Minor, then the Near East, then Gaul, then Egypt.

The Roman Empire dominated most of the known world, and Camilla and his fellow Ventrue sat in the center of it all. Of course, so did a great many Kindred from other clans. The Malkavians, the Toreador, the Gangrel and even the Roman Nosferatu had all played roles in defeating Carthage, so they claimed a share of the spoils. Many of these clans already held influence within the newly conquered Roman provinces, and they were not about to give up just because the mortal government had changed.

For the first time since the fall of the Second City, Ventrue had to learn how to exist in peace with the other clans. Doing so proved more difficult than it would have seemed since the Ventrue themselves had fallen to squabbling with one another. As the Prince of Rome and one of the architects of the Empire, Camilla was without a doubt the most influential Ventrue — if not Kindred — in the world. He decided that such power deserved recognition and that the individual Ventrue scattered throughout the Mediterranean should pay him heed.

This desire for dominance ground against everything individual Ventrue had practiced for thousands of years.

Each was used to being his own master, beholden to none, with the possible exceptions of sires or patrons chosen at their own discretion. Certainly they recognized a kinship, but clan hierarchy was more a question of social standing than temporal rank even in those nights. Ventrue held what power and position they could, and damned be the rest of the world. They had no friends, only allies of the moment. As a clan, they came together semi-regularly in a deliberative body not unlike the Roman Senate. This Ventrue assembly body proved even more ineffective than its less-than-impressive mortal counterpart. Factions tore the Senate apart and prevented any real decisions from Clanbook: Ventrue being made, while many Ventrue seemed more inclined to make deals and alliances with other clans than their own brethren.

As before with the Punic Wars, Camilla ended up making one of his greatest decisions not by his own design, but rather after inspiration from his mortal counterparts. Together, Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, Marcus Antonius and Octavian busied themselves with eviscerating the Roman constitution and the Senate’s power. Strong men, tired of working within the constraints of an elected government, dragged the empire into a bloody civil war. Decades of fighting later Octavian, emerged as victor and renamed himself Augustus, Emperor of Rome.

Camilla liked what he saw. In the chaos of the civil wars, Ventrue authority within Rome had slipped even further. Members of other clans claimed domains in important cities and isolated the Ventrue position, but individual Ventrue were too divided to do anything about it. The Ventrue assembly had not met for three decades, and it showed no signs of ever meeting again.

With the help of his blood-bound brood and his trusted ally Lysander, Camilla set about enforcing a clan unity — at which the two anticipated no end of rankling strife.