Carthage began as a Phoenician trading post on the North African coast, chosen for a harbor position that let ships control trade routes across the western Mediterranean. This installment of the Metropolis series traces how that outpost grew into a city wealthy enough to rival Rome, built on networks moving silver, grain, and goods from Africa's interior out to the wider ancient world. Historians and archaeologists walk through what made the city work: its twin harbors, its markets, and the agricultural hinterland that fed a population historians estimate ran into the hundreds of thousands. The film also sets up the rivalry that would end it, tracing how Carthage's reach into Sicily and Spain put it on a collision course with an expanding Rome, decades before the Punic Wars would erase the city from the map. Location filming and expert commentary carry the account, reconstructing a metropolis known today mostly through Roman sources hostile to it.