Sophonisba was a Carthaginian noblewoman who lived in the early third century BC, during the time of the Second Punic War (the same war in which Hannibal Barca fought the Roman Republic). When the Romans took her captive, her Numidian husband Masinissa persuaded her to take her own life to avoid the humiliation of being paraded about in a Roman triumphal ceremony. And so Sophonisba drank a cup of poison that he offered her, scolding him for having their marriage be so short and bitter before rejoining her ancestors at last.