Punic Wars

• 1. Introduction

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  The Punic Wars were three conflicts between the Roman Republic and the Carthaginian Empire, fought across the western Mediterranean between 264 and 146 BC. Together they amounted to forty-three years of warfare on land and sea, reshaping the entire ancient world. At the outset of the first war, Carthage was the dominant force in the western Mediterranean, its maritime empire stretching from North Africa to Sicily, Iberia and the Balearic Islands. Rome, by contrast, had just finished absorbing the last Greek cities of southern Italy and possessed no navy to speak of.

  By the end of the third war, Carthage had ceased to exist. Its population was slaughtered or sold into slavery. Its streets were pulled apart stone by stone. A curse was placed on anyone who might attempt to rebuild it. How a city that once rivalled Rome in wealth and power came to be erased from the map is the story these three wars tell. Who decided to fight? Where did things break? And what kind of machine did Rome become in the process?

• 2. Two Empires, One Sea

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  Long before war broke out, Carthage and Rome had formalized their relationship in writing. They signed treaties of mutual friendship in 509 BC, 348 BC and around 279 BC, and maintained strong commercial links. During the Pyrrhic War of 280-275 BC, Carthage supplied Rome with materiel and ferried Roman troops by sea. The two powers shared a border only in the abstract sense, their spheres of influence butting up against each other. As they drew closer together that arrangement became unstable.

  By 270 BC Rome had conquered all of peninsular Italy south of the Arno River. Carthage, meanwhile, controlled a thalassocracy: a maritime empire taking in southern Iberia, the North African coast, the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia and the western half of Sicily. Between 480 BC and 264 BC Carthage had fought a series of inconclusive wars against the Greek city-states of Sicily, led by Syracuse, and by 264 BC held much of the island. When a dispute over the Sicilian city of Messana pulled both Rome and Carthage in, neither side anticipated a prolonged conflict. Polybius, the most reliable ancient source for these wars, concludes they stumbled into war more by accident than design.

• 3. Fighting on Land and Sea

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  Roman citizens who met a property requirement were obligated to serve in the legions, with most fighting as heavy infantry and a wealthier minority supplying cavalry. A standard Roman army paired a Roman legion of 4,200 infantry and 300 cavalry with an equally sized allied legion, the allied contingent usually carrying more cavalry. Roughly 1,200 of the legionary infantry served as skirmishers called velites, equipped with javelins, a short sword and a circular shield. The rest wore body armour and carried large shields with short thrusting swords. The front rank also carried two javelins; the second and third ranks carried thrusting spears instead.

  Carthaginian citizens only fought when Carthage itself was directly threatened; the city relied almost entirely on hired foreign soldiers. From North Africa came close-order infantry, light skirmishers, heavy cavalry and the fast Numidian light cavalry. Iberia and Gaul supplied fierce but sometimes unreliable infantry and cavalry. Slingers came from the Balearic Islands. The Carthaginians also deployed war elephants, drawn from the indigenous African forest elephant population of North Africa.

  At sea, both sides relied on the quinquereme, a large warship crewed by 300 men: 280 oarsmen and 20 deck crew and officers, with up to 120 marines aboard before battle. All warships carried a ram: a triple set of bronze blades, each blade 60 cm long and the set weighing up to 270 kg, positioned at the waterline. In 260 BC the Romans built their fleet using a shipwrecked Carthaginian quinquereme as a blueprint. Their early ships were heavier and slower than Carthaginian ones. To compensate, they invented the corvus, a boarding bridge 1.2 m wide and 11 m long with a spike that anchored into an enemy vessel, letting Roman marines fight on deck rather than try to ram. The device was effective until rough seas made it dangerous, at which point the Romans quietly stopped using it.

• 4. The First War and Its Aftermath

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  Fighting in the First Punic War lasted twenty-three years, 264-241 BC, and was decided not on Sicily's rugged interior but on the surrounding seas. On land the island's terrain made large-scale manoeuvring difficult; in all that time there were only two full-scale pitched battles on Sicily itself. In 262 BC a Carthaginian force of 50,000 infantry, 6,000 cavalry and 60 elephants tried to break the Roman siege of Agrigentum and was badly defeated; the Carthaginian garrison escaped at night and 25,000 inhabitants were sold into slavery.

  Financial and human costs mounted on both sides. Carthage requested a 2,000-talent loan from Ptolemaic Egypt and was refused. Rome's adult male population, which provided the navy and legions, fell by 17 per cent during the war. When the Senate could no longer fund a new fleet, it approached Rome's wealthiest citizens for loans to build one ship each, repayable from future Carthaginian reparations. That fleet destroyed the Carthaginian navy at the battle of the Aegates Islands in 241 BC, forcing the surrender of Carthaginian troops on Sicily. By the Treaty of Lutatius, Carthage paid 3,200 talents of silver and Sicily became the first Roman province.

  The peace lasted barely a generation. Carthage's unpaid mercenaries from Sicily mutinied immediately after the war, joined by 70,000 Africans from Carthage's dependent territories. This Mercenary War, as it came to be called, took until 237 BC to suppress. In its immediate wake Rome demanded Carthage cede Sardinia and Corsica and pay an additional 1,200 talents, threatening war if Carthage refused. Polybius called this demand "contrary to all justice"; modern historians have labelled it shamelessly opportunistic. That seizure planted the resentment that would break into open war less than twenty years later.

• 5. Hannibal's Long Campaign

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  Hannibal left New Carthage (modern Cartagena) in May or June of 218 BC at the head of an army that included 37 war elephants. He crossed the Rhone, evaded a Roman fleet docked at Massalia (modern Marseille), and crossed the Alps in 24 days, arriving in what is now Piedmont in early November with 20,000 infantry, 6,000 cavalry and an unknown number of surviving elephants. The Romans were still in winter quarters.

  What followed was three years of catastrophe for Rome. At the battle of Trebia late in 218 BC, only 10,000 of 42,000 Romans escaped the field; most were killed or captured. At Lake Trasimene in 217 BC, Hannibal killed 15,000 Romans including their commander and took another 15,000 prisoner. A separate Roman cavalry force of 4,000 was wiped out in the same engagement. The Romans appointed Fabius Maximus as dictator, who avoided pitched battle and harried Hannibal's flanks. The approach was unpopular.

  In 216 BC the Roman Senate authorised raising 86,000 men, the largest Roman force assembled to that point, and sent it south under consuls Varro and Paullus. At Cannae, Hannibal's line absorbed the Roman push in the centre, then Libyan infantry swung around the Roman flanks while Carthaginian cavalry encircled them from behind. At least 67,500 Romans were killed or captured. The historian Richard Miles calls Cannae Rome's greatest military disaster. In the weeks that followed, a Roman army of 25,000 was ambushed and annihilated by Boii Gauls at the battle of Silva Litana.

  Yet Hannibal could never convert battlefield victory into strategic collapse. He received reinforcements from Carthage just once during the entire Italian campaign, when the port of Locri defected to his side in 215 BC. New allies in southern Italy brought obligations but few fresh troops, and those troops refused to operate away from their home cities. By 207 BC Hannibal had been pushed into the extreme south of Italy. His brother Hasdrubal crossed the Alps with 35,000 men trying to join him, but the Romans used a bold deception to reunite two armies and destroyed Hasdrubal at the battle of the Metaurus. Hannibal learned of his brother's death when the Romans threw Hasdrubal's severed head into the Carthaginian camp.

• 6. Scipio Takes the War to Africa

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  Publius Cornelius Scipio arrived in Iberia in 210 BC and changed the strategic picture. In 209 BC he captured New Carthage in a carefully planned assault, seizing a vast quantity of gold, silver and siege artillery and liberating Iberian hostages the Carthaginians had held to ensure the loyalty of local tribes. At the battle of Ilipa in 206 BC he fielded 48,000 men, half Italian and half Iberian, against a Carthaginian force of 54,500 men and 32 elephants, and won decisively. The last Carthaginian-held city in Iberia, Gades (modern Cadiz), defected to Rome shortly after.

  In 205 BC Scipio was given command of the legions in Sicily with permission to invade Africa. His preparation was meticulous: soldiers were trained intensively, food was stockpiled in Sicily, Sardinia and southern Italy so the army would not need to forage, and war materiel was assembled in large quantities. He landed in Africa in 204 BC, allied with the Numidian prince Masinissa, and destroyed two large Carthaginian armies in 203 BC.

  Carthage recalled Hannibal. He arrived with 15,000-20,000 veterans and faced Scipio at Zama in October 202 BC. Hannibal deployed 80 elephants to break the Roman infantry line, but the Romans channelled them harmlessly through gaps in their formation. Carthaginian cavalry fled the field; the infantry fought to a standstill until Roman cavalry returned and struck from the rear. Hannibal escaped but the Carthaginian formation collapsed. The peace terms Scipio imposed stripped Carthage of all overseas territory and much of its African land, required an indemnity of 10,000 silver talents paid over 50 years, limited the Carthaginian fleet to 10 warships, banned war elephants and required Rome's permission for any future military action. Scipio received the honorary name Africanus.

• 7. The Destruction of Carthage

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  For the next 48 years after Zama, the Numidian king Masinissa repeatedly seized Carthaginian land and Rome consistently backed him. Whenever Carthage appealed for redress, Rome refused. By 151 BC Carthage had paid off its entire war indemnity and was prospering economically; it was no military threat to Rome. When Carthage finally raised an army to defend itself from Numidian raids that year, the campaign ended in total defeat at the battle of Oroscopa. Rome used the violation of the treaty as a casus belli and declared war in 149 BC.

  A Roman army of approximately 50,000 men landed near Utica, 35 km north of Carthage. Rome initially offered peace on condition the Carthaginians surrender all their weapons: 200,000 sets of armour, 2,000 catapults and a large number of warships were duly handed over. Rome then demanded the Carthaginians abandon and burn their own city and rebuild at least 10 miles from the sea. The Carthaginians broke off talks and began rebuilding their arsenal.

  The siege lasted three years. Carthaginian Hasdrubal the Boetharch based a field army 25 km south of the city. Fire ships destroyed many Roman vessels in 148 BC. The Roman camp, set in a swamp, suffered disease outbreaks. In early 147 BC Scipio Aemilianus, an adopted grandson of Scipio Africanus, was elected consul and took command. He tightened the blockade, built a mole to cut off the city's sea supply, and in spring 146 BC secured a foothold near the harbour.

  The final assault took six days. Roman soldiers worked through the city block by block, killing everyone and burning buildings behind them. At times they progressed across rooftops to avoid missiles thrown from below. Hasdrubal had Roman prisoners tortured to death on the walls in view of the Roman army to harden Carthaginian resistance; he then executed city councillors who condemned his actions. The last holdouts burned down the Temple of Eshmoun with themselves inside it. There were 50,000 survivors, a small fraction of the pre-war population, all sold into slavery.

• 8. What Rome Became

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  After the fall of Carthage, the Senate sent a ten-man commission to oversee further demolitions and placed a formal curse on anyone who might resettle the site. The former city's land became ager publicus, public land. Its territories were reconstituted as the Roman province of Africa, with Utica as its capital, and the region became a major source of grain for Rome. Larger Punic cities in areas such as Mauretania kept their Punic systems of government and culture. The Punic language itself survived in North Africa until the 7th century AD.

  The wars also permanently transformed how Rome fought. Sustaining unprecedented numbers of soldiers across decades of multi-front warfare forced Rome to build increasingly effective logistics networks. In the final years of the Second Punic War Rome was supplying Scipio's entire army by sea from Sicily, transporting almost all requirements for a large force fighting in Africa. Those logistical capabilities made the subsequent Roman campaigns of overseas conquest possible in a way they had never been before.

  A century after the last Punic War ended, Julius Caesar ordered Carthage rebuilt as a Roman city. It grew to become one of the principal cities of Roman Africa. In 1985, the mayors of Rome and Carthage signed a symbolic peace treaty and pact of friendship, a gesture made possible only because both cities still existed to make it: Rome as the capital of Italy, Carthage as ruins lying 24 km east of Tunis on the North African coast.