1Then for a few days there was a blockade rather than an assault, while the general's wound was being treated. 1During this time, though there was a pause in the fighting, there was no let-up in the preparation of works and fortifications. 2And so the fighting broke out afresh more fiercely, and in more places, some of them hardly admitting works, the sheds began to be moved forward and the ram brought up. 3The Carthaginian had an abundance of men; 3it is believed with good reason that he had as many as a hundred and fifty thousand under arms; 4the townspeople, now beginning to be stretched in many directions, were not enough to guard and man every point.
5And so the walls were now being battered by rams, and many parts had been shaken; 5one section, by a continuous collapse, had laid the city bare: three towers in a row, and all the wall between them, had fallen with a tremendous crash. 6The Carthaginians had believed the town captured by that collapse, and through it, as if the wall had protected both sides alike, men rushed out to fight from either side. 7There was nothing like the disorderly fighting which usually begins in sieges of cities when one side seizes an opportunity, but regular battle lines had taken their stand, as if on open ground, between the ruins of the wall and the houses of the city, which stood a short distance away.
8Here hope, there despair stirs their spirits, the Carthaginian believing that he had already taken the city if he made a little more effort, the Saguntines setting their bodies before their homeland now stripped of its walls, and no one stepping back, lest he should let the enemy into the place he had left. 9And so the more fiercely and the more closely they fought on both sides, the more men were wounded, since no weapon fell harmlessly between arms and bodies. 10The Saguntines had a missile called the falarica, with a shaft of fir, round everywhere else except at the end, where the iron stuck out; 10this part, which was square, as on a pilum, they bound round with tow and smeared with pitch; 11the iron was three feet long, so that it could pierce a body together with its armour.
11But what caused most terror, even if it had stuck in a shield and not penetrated into the body, was that, since it was thrown alight in the middle and carried a far greater flame fanned by its very motion, it forced the soldier to let go of his arms and left him exposed to the blows that followed.