Rome and Carthage

Two Powers, One StraitRome crosses the water for the first time

By 264 B.C. Rome governed the Italian peninsula through a web of alliance and citizenship it had built over the previous chapter's wars. Carthage, an old Phoenician trading city on the North African coast, governed something larger still: a maritime empire of coastal Africa, western Sicily, Sardinia, and southern Spain, held together not by shared citizenship but by tribute, treaty, and a navy the Mediterranean had not seriously challenged in a century. The two powers had coexisted through three earlier treaties of friendship. Neither had ever fought the other.

Map · Beyond the Pillars, c. 500 B.C. Click to enlarge

The spark was a gang of Italian mercenaries, the Mamertines, who had seized the Sicilian city of Messana and now faced destruction at the hands of Syracuse's king Hiero II. Besieged, they appealed to both great powers at once. A Carthaginian garrison arrived first and occupied the citadel; then the Mamertines, unhappy with their new protectors, appealed again to Rome. The Roman Senate, by Polybius's account, saw the danger of a Carthaginian foothold at the toe of Italy but balked at defending men who were themselves pirates and city-thieves; it was the popular assembly, weighing plunder and glory against the Senate's caution, that voted to send a consul across the strait. It was the first time a Roman army had ever campaigned outside Italy.

What began as a local rescue became, almost by inertia, a war neither side had planned for on this scale. Carthage would not simply concede Sicily; Rome, having intervened once, found withdrawal more costly than escalation. Within a year both powers were committed to a war that would run for nearly a quarter-century and would be decided, in the end, not on land but at sea — an element in which Rome, a case can be made, had no business competing at all.

Map · The Sicilian theatre Click to enlarge

A Land Power Goes to SeaThe First Punic War

Rome's armies could match Carthage's on Sicilian soil, but Carthage's navy could land troops and cut supply anywhere on the island's long coastline at will. Rome's answer, as the ancient sources tell it, was to copy a wrecked or captured Carthaginian warship timber for timber and build a fleet from nothing — reportedly some hundred vessels in a matter of months, their crews drilled to row on benches set up on dry land before ever putting to sea. To offset Carthaginian skill in naval maneuver, the new fleet carried a hinged boarding ramp, the corvus ("crow"), that let Roman legionaries turn a sea battle into the kind of infantry fight they already knew how to win. It worked: the consul Gaius Duilius won Rome's first naval victory at Mylae in 260 B.C.

Plate · Sicily and the strait Click to enlarge

The war see-sawed for two more decades — a Roman invasion of Africa under Regulus that began in triumph and ended in his defeat and capture by a Spartan mercenary general, Xanthippus, in 255 B.C.; grinding sieges in Sicily; catastrophic fleet losses to storm as much as to battle on both sides. Later Roman writers built Regulus into a legend of iron word-keeping — sent to Rome on parole to negotiate an exchange of prisoners, he is said to have urged the Senate to refuse it and then honored his oath by returning to Carthage and a martyr's death. The story is moving, and it is almost certainly embroidered well past anything Polybius, writing closest to the events, actually reports; this chapter repeats it as the legend later Romans told about themselves, not as verified fact.

Rome finally forced the issue at sea again, destroying Carthage's last relief fleet off the Aegates Islands in 241 B.C. Carthage, unable to supply Sicily any further, sued for peace: it surrendered Sicily outright and paid a war indemnity over ten years. Sicily became Rome's first possession outside Italy — and, tellingly, was not absorbed as allied territory in the Italian pattern but organized as a provincia, a defined sphere of command governed by an annual Roman magistrate and taxed for Rome's benefit. A second blow followed within a few years: while Carthage was consumed by a savage mutiny of its own unpaid mercenaries — the so-called Truceless War — Rome seized the moment to occupy Corsica and Sardinia as well, on pretexts Polybius himself calls unjust. Carthage, prostrate, could only submit. It was a grievance the Carthaginians did not forget.

An Oath at the AltarHamilcar, Hannibal, and the new Carthaginian Spain

Stripped of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, Carthage rebuilt its power where Rome was not yet watching closely: Spain. Hamilcar Barca, the one Carthaginian commander to leave the First Punic War with his reputation intact, spent the 230s and 220s B.C. conquering and administering the Spanish interior, extracting silver that refilled Carthage's treasury and manpower that rebuilt its army. He took his young son with him. Hannibal later told the story himself, as an old man at the court of King Antiochus, and Polybius set it down: before the army sailed, Hamilcar led the boy to the altar, made him lay his hand on the sacrificial victim, and had him swear never to be a friend to Rome.

Plate · The Barcid province Click to enlarge

“…his father took him by the hand, led him up to the altar, and bade him lay his hand on the victim and swear that he would never be the friend of Rome.” Polybius, Histories, III.11 — trans. W. R. Paton (Loeb Classical Library, 1922; public domain)

Hamilcar died campaigning in 228 B.C.; his son-in-law Hasdrubal extended Carthaginian Spain further and, to fix a boundary with Rome's own allies on the peninsula, agreed a treaty setting the river Ebro as a limit on Carthaginian expansion northward. South of the Ebro, though, sat the city of Saguntum, bound to Rome by an older treaty of friendship that predated the Ebro line and sat awkwardly inside Carthage's now-legitimate sphere. When Hasdrubal was assassinated in 221 B.C. and the twenty-six-year-old Hannibal took command by acclamation of the army, the contradiction was still unresolved. In 219 B.C. Hannibal besieged and took Saguntum after an eight-month siege the Saguntines themselves are said to have fought to starvation and self-destruction rather than surrender. Rome demanded Hannibal's surrender for trial; Carthage's assembly refused; a Roman embassy in Carthage is said to have gathered its toga into a fold and offered the Carthaginian senate the choice of peace or war folded inside it. The senate answered that Rome could choose. The Second Punic War had begun.

Over the AlpsA war Rome expected to fight in Spain arrives in Italy instead

Rome planned to fight this war the way it fought the last one: on someone else's territory, with Roman fleets carrying Roman armies to Spain and Africa. Hannibal made that plan obsolete before it began. In the late spring of 218 B.C. he marched a mixed army of Africans, Spaniards, and Gauls — with a contingent of war elephants — out of Spain, across the Pyrenees, through hostile Gallic territory, and over the Alps into Italy in late autumn, in a crossing ancient writers already treated as one of the most punishing marches in memory. He arrived in the Po valley with a fraction of the force he had started with, but with the local Gallic tribes, recently and resentfully conquered by Rome, ready to reinforce him.

Plate · The Po valley and the passes Click to enlarge

Two consular armies met him in quick succession and were broken in quick succession. At the Trebia river in December 218 B.C., Hannibal lured a Roman army into a freezing river crossing before ambushing it from concealed ground. The following June, at Lake Trasimene, he trapped an entire consular army in a defile between hillside and water and destroyed it in a single morning so complete that, Livy says, a nearby battle-sized earthquake went unnoticed by the combatants. The consul Gaius Flaminius died in the rout. Rome, twice defeated in eighteen months by an enemy operating deep in its own homeland, had never faced anything like it.

The Senate's response was itself an admission of crisis: it named a dictator, Quintus Fabius Maximus, under the old emergency procedure last needed against real existential threats. Fabius's strategy — refuse pitched battle, shadow Hannibal's army, strangle it by attrition and Italy's scorched fields rather than confront it — was correct in hindsight and humiliating in the moment. Soldiers and political rivals alike mocked him as Cunctator, "the Delayer," a coward hiding behind Rome's hills while Italy burned around him.

CannaeRome's greatest defeat, and the choice that made it survivable

Fabius's term expired, and Rome's patience with delay expired with it. For 216 B.C. the Senate raised the largest army it had ever fielded — perhaps eight legions with allied contingents, on ancient figures that modern historians treat as approximate but roughly credible — and gave joint command to the consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro, the second of whom favored the decisive battle the electorate now demanded. At Cannae in Apulia, Hannibal let the Roman center push his own line into a deliberate crescent-shaped bow, then closed his African infantry around both Roman flanks while his cavalry, having already routed its Roman counterpart, struck the Roman rear. The result, whatever the exact numbers, was annihilation: ancient sources put Roman dead in the tens of thousands in a single day, among the worst one-day losses any army suffered in the ancient world. Paullus was killed; Varro survived and, remarkably, was thanked by the Senate for not despairing of the Republic.

Plate · Latium, Samnium, Apulia Click to enlarge

What Rome did next mattered more than the defeat itself. Several southern Italian cities and the important city of Capua defected to Hannibal; the Macedonian king Philip V opened negotiations with him against Rome; by any conventional measure of the time, the war was lost. Rome refused to act as though it were. The Senate declined to ransom the thousands of Roman prisoners in Hannibal's hands — a hard, controversial decision meant to signal that the state would not bargain — raised fresh legions from citizens previously exempt, including slaves promised freedom for service, and kept the field. Crucially, the core of Rome's Italian allied confederation, unlike Capua, did not break: most of the Latin and central Italian communities that had fought beside Rome for a century calculated, correctly, that their future was safer tied to Rome than to a foreign general far from his own base of supply. Hannibal, victorious in every battle, had no siege train capable of taking Rome itself and no reinforcement Carthage was willing or able to send in strength. He would range across Italy for another decade, undefeated in the field and unable to end the war he had already, in every tactical sense, won.

“One man, by delaying, restored the state for us; he did not put popular opinion before the safety of Rome, and so his glory shines out now, and will keep growing, more and more.” Ennius, as preserved by Cicero, De Senectute, X.32 — trans. Andrew P. Peabody (1887; public domain)

The Student Outfights the MasterScipio in Spain and the battle of Zama

Unable to break Hannibal in Italy directly, Rome fought the war at its edges. In Spain, after both the elder Scipio brothers were killed in battle in 211 B.C., command passed unconventionally to Publius Cornelius Scipio, not yet twenty-five and holding no office higher than a special proconsular commission voted him by the popular assembly rather than the Senate — itself a sign of how far the old rules were bending under the war's pressure. Scipio took the Carthaginian capital in Spain, New Carthage, by a surprise assault in 209 B.C. and, over the following three years, drove every Carthaginian army out of the peninsula.

Plate · Spain, 218–206 B.C. Click to enlarge

Elected consul for 205 B.C. against the caution of Fabius Maximus, now an old man still arguing for patience, Scipio proposed to carry the war to Africa itself and force Hannibal's recall. He won the argument, crossed to Africa in 204 B.C., and by 203 B.C. had inflicted enough damage — allied crucially with the Numidian prince Masinissa, who defected from Carthage's cause to Rome's — that Carthage recalled Hannibal from Italy after fifteen unbroken years on Roman soil. The two commanders met at last, and only once, at Zama in 202 B.C. Scipio had studied Hannibal's own tactics for over a decade; he neutralized Hannibal's elephant charge by opening lanes in his infantry line for the animals to pass through harmlessly, and Masinissa's cavalry, superior in numbers for the first time in the war, broke the Carthaginian horse and returned to crush Hannibal's infantry from behind — the same envelopment Hannibal had used at Cannae, now turned against him. It was Hannibal's first and only major defeat in the field.

Carthage sued for peace on terms that ended it as a Mediterranean power without ending it as a city: surrender of the war fleet and the elephants, abandonment of Spain, an enormous indemnity payable over fifty years, and a binding promise to make no war anywhere without Rome's permission. Scipio returned to Rome and the honorific that would outlive him — Africanus. Hannibal, remarkably, remained at Carthage for several years afterward as a civil reformer before Roman pressure forced him into exile in the East, where he would end his life rather than be handed over to Rome.

Numismatics · Carthaginian Spain · c. 237–209 B.C. Click to enlarge

Delenda EstA rebuilt city, an engineered war, and an ending Rome chose

Stripped of its fleet, its army, and its foreign policy, Carthage nonetheless rebuilt itself over the next half-century as a wealthy trading city, paying off its enormous war indemnity ahead of schedule and provoking, in the process, a Roman anxiety that had little to do with any real military threat. The elder statesman Cato, who had served in the Second Punic War as a young man, visited Carthage on a senatorial mission in 153 B.C. and returned alarmed at its recovered prosperity. Ancient writers agree that he made a habit, for years afterward, of ending every speech in the Senate — on any subject at all — by declaring that Carthage must be destroyed. The precise Latin tag posterity remembers, Carthago delenda est, does not appear verbatim in any surviving ancient source; Plutarch gives only a Greek paraphrase of the sentiment. What is well attested is the refrain itself and the deliberate political campaign behind it, not the three tidy words later ages carved onto it.

Plate · Africa after Zama Click to enlarge

Rome found its pretext in a border war between Carthage and Rome's Numidian ally Masinissa, which Carthage's peace treaty technically forbade it from resisting by force. When Carthage nonetheless armed itself in self-defense, Rome declared this a treaty violation and, through a sequence of escalating demands, required first full disarmament and finally the abandonment of the city itself, to be rebuilt inland away from the sea — a demand no Carthaginian government could accept and survive politically. Carthage chose resistance. The siege that followed (149–146 B.C.) was brutal even by the standards of the previous wars; the city, commanded in its final Roman assault by Scipio Aemilianus, adopted grandson of Africanus, fell street by street after building-to-building fighting that lasted days. The population that survived the siege and the sack was sold into slavery, the city was burned, and its territory was annexed as the Roman province of Africa.

In the same year, 146 B.C., a Roman army under Lucius Mummius destroyed the Greek city of Corinth after crushing a revolt of the Achaean League — an entirely separate war, fought on the opposite side of the Mediterranean, that this chapter's companion piece on Rome's eastern expansion takes up in full. That the West's oldest rival and one of the East's proudest cities fell in the same twelve months was no coincidence of unrelated wars; it was the same Roman Republic, fighting on two fronts across two generations, arriving at the same conclusion in both theatres at once. Master of Italy at this chapter's opening, Rome ended it master of the western Mediterranean outright — and, as the next chapter shows, already deep into the conquest of the Greek world in the east.

Shepherd plate · Roman expansion Click to enlarge · zoom