sacked it, slaughtered or enslaved most of its population, and completely demolished the city. The Carthaginian territories were taken over as the Roman province of Africa. The ruins of the city lie east of modern Tunis on the North African coast. Primary sources The most reliable source for Punic Wars is the historian Polybius ( – ), a Greek sent to Rome in 167BC as a hostage. He is best known for The Histories, written sometime after 146BC. Polybius's work is considered broadly objective and largely neutral between Carthaginian and Roman points of view. Polybius was an analytical historian and wherever possible interviewed participants, from both sides, in the events he wrote about. Modern historians consider Polybius to have treated the relatives of Scipio Aemilianus, his patron and friend, unduly favourably but the consensus is to accept his account largely at face value. The modern historian Andrew Curry sees Polybius as being "fairly reliable"; Craige Champion describes him as "a remarkably well-informed, industrious, and insightful historian". The details of the war in modern sources are largely based on interpretations of Polybius's account. The account of the Roman historian Livy is commonly used by modern historians where Polybius's account is not extant. Livy relied heavily on Polybius, but wrote in a more structured way, with more details about Roman politics, as well as being openly pro-Roman. His accounts of military encounters are often demonstrably inaccurate; the classicist Adrian Goldsworthy says Livy's "reliability is often suspect", and the historian Philip Sabin refers to Livy's "military ignorance". Other, later, ancient histories of the wars exist, although often in fragmentary or summary form. Modern historians usually take into account the writings of various Roman annalists, some contemporary; the Sicilian Greek Diodorus Siculus; and the later Roman historians Plutarch, Appian, and Dio Cassius. Goldsworthy writes "Polybius' account is usually to be preferred when it differs with any of our other accounts". Other sources include coins, inscriptions, archaeological evidence and empirical evidence from reconstructions, such as the trireme Olympias. Background and origin The Roman Republic had been aggressively expanding in the southern Italian mainland for a century before the First Punic War. It had conquered peninsular Italy south of the Arno River by 270BC, when the Greek cities of southern Italy (Magna Graecia) submitted after the conclusion of the Pyrrhic War. During this period of Roman expansion Carthage, with its capital in what is now Tunisia,