It was still dark when Hannibal heard the knock on the door. He raised his head from the table top. The firewood crackled in the silence. He stretched out his hand and crumpled the scroll of papyrus. 
Hasdrubal's story of their father's last moments crossed his mind. Hamilcar could at least state his last will to his sons. He, Hannibal, had no heirs. There was no one he could give this scroll of remembrances. Its place was in the fire. 
The knock on the door was repeated. 
"No, it isn't the Romans," Hannibal thought, listening intently. "The Romans would have broken down the door without further ado. But that altered nothing. Whoever the uninvited guests were, Rome was behind them." 
Hannibal raised the scroll over his head as he had raised darts in the past, and threw it into the hearth. The flame eating up the papyrus lit up the haggard face with the mailed grey locks over the forehead, and the black band that had shifted from its place and revealed a gaping empty eye-socket. 
The knocking increased. 
Hannibal lowered his head and pressed it on both sides with his hands. The fin- gers sensed the beating in the temples. During those several instants, while the flames consumed the scroll, all the twenty years since the battle of Carthage flashed across his memory. Deprived of an army, Hannibal had continued the war against Rome alone. 
When he had managed to become adviser to King Antiochus of Syria, Rome a wailed with dread that a Syrian army headed by Hannibal would make its appearance in Italy. But it need not have worried. Antiochus heard out Hannibal s advice gracefully, but invariably acted against it. Blinded by the flattery of his courtiers, reluctant to share the laurels of victor with Hannibal, he had put himself at the head of his large but motley army. Flatterers had promised him staggering victories like those scored by the great Alexander of Macedon in his eastern campaign. Yet the Syrian was routed in two battles, and submissively signed a treaty of peace. Among the terms was loss of territory, a ceiling on the size of his army, payment of indemnities, and the surrender of Hannibal. 
Again, Hannibal had had to flee. For a few years, no one had known where he was. This alarmed the Romans. When King Artaxias began building an impregn- able fortress in the remote Armenian wilderness, Rome was sure Hannibal was be- hind it. And when the Parthian king spoke impertinently to a Roman envoy, the Romans had no doubt Hannibal had something to do with it. To the Romans the sixty-year-old former general was like Briareus with a hundred arms and fifty heads, and wherever the Romans encountered resistance they saw Hannibal's hand. 
Now, Hannibal's hide-out had at last been found: a little house in the village of Libyssa in the provinces of the king of Bithynia. Here, at the entrance to the Pontus Euxinus (the Black Sea), he had lived in solitude, submerged in his memories. Rum- our had turned the house into a citadel with seven underground exits, and the sole boy-servant into a hundred strong bodyguards. Rome demanded that the King of Bithynia should surrender Hannibal, and the demand was backed by the threat that a Roman legion would enter the kingdom. 
Slowly, Hannibal released his head and put his hands on his knees. It was silent on the outside of the door. A silence before a storm? Then he heard voices. 
"Bring a log—"
 "Pile straw beside the wall—"
 "The orders are to take him alive—" 
By the pronunciation of that Greek sentence, Hannibal guessed it had been spoken by a Roman, who had evidently been attached to the Bithynian squad.
 "Probably a centurion," Hannibal thought bitterly. "Once upon a time, the best Roman generals were sent against me. Now they send a centurion." 
The first powerful blow. No, not the log yet, but a caliga, a hob-nailed boot. 
Hannibal saw that Roman boot with copper nails lining the sole in his thoughts. It was after the battle of Cannae —thousands of feet wearing the same boots feet that never walked again. The furious chirring of grasshoppers that re- placed the sound of issued orders, the ringing of arms, the groans of the dying. It had seemed then that no Roman caliga would ever cross the borders of Lacia again. Yet now, Hannibal thought ruefully, it was trampling half the world. 
Suddenly he had a vision of the Alps. The bright snow blinded the eyes. And though nothing could be seen from the snow-covered mountain pass aside from bottomless precipices, a confusion of rocks, and the clear sky, he could now, from the summit of all his life, see Italy with its fields and vineyards, the meandering blue streams, the crimson tiled or yellow thatched roofs of the houses. 
One more picture crossed his mind. Syre, his favourite elephant, sank slowly to the swampy ground. He, Hannibal, had time enough to jump down from its back. "Syre, what's happened to you, Syre?" The animal offered him its trunk for their last handshake... The door shook. The boards bent under the blows. The centurion's encoura- ging voice was saying they should not be afraid, for Hannibal was unarmed. Hannibal chuckled: "Unarmed? Now, I need no arms to win." 
The door shook from the blows.
 Hannibal stood, straightening his back as though he was out in the battlefield, heading an army.
 "Hey!" he shouted. "How many are you? Scipio, answer me. You are not here. Yet no one else can overpower me." 
Hannibal raised the finger-ring with the poison to his lips. 
When the soldiers finally broke into the house, all they found was the corpse of the great general. 
That was how he won his last victory over Rome.

Alexander Nemirovsky, "Tales Of The Ancient World"

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