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AFP/Corbis

The Italian silent film Cabiria (1914) dramatizes the Second Punic War (218–201 B.C.), in which the Romans under Scipio Africanus defeated the Carthaginians under Hannibal. The movie features a huge statue of a bronze god (shown here in Italy’s National Museum of Cinema), modeled on a description by the first-century B.C. historian Diodorus Siculus: “There was in [Carthage] a bronze image of Cronus, extending its hands, palms up and sloping towards the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a gaping pit filled with fire.” Although there is evidence that Carthaginians sacrificed children to the gods, the bronze statue was a creation of Diodorus’s imagination.