264—146 BCE
A LENGTHY AND SAVAGE CONFLICT FOUGHT BETWEEN ROME AND CARTHAGE FOR DOMINANCE OF THE ENTIRE MEDITERRANEAN BASIN
The city of Carthage was founded in what is now Tunisia, probably in the eighth century BCE, by Phoenicians, the great sailing adventurers of the ancient world (indeed the name Punic comes from the Latin Punicus, which derives from the Greek Phoinix, meaning “Phoenician”). At first, Carthage was a Phoenician mercantile outpost, but by about the third century BCE, Carthaginians, ambitious and excellent traders, had founded trading settlements in North Africa, Spain, Sardinia, Cyprus, Malta, and on the west coast of Sicily (Greek settlements dominated the east). Carthage thus became the preeminent power in the western Mediterranean.
Carthage itself was not just a trading center; it also had an agricultural base of rich land (which was apparently much more fertile than it is today). The city was a wonder of engineering, with an extraordinary circular inner harbor and numerous temples and fine homes. But Carthage had a dark side. Corruption was endemic, and any high political office could be obtained by bribery. And among the numerous gods worshipped by the Carthaginians were some with a hunger for human flesh: indeed, although the evidence is still controversial among scholars, infant sacrifice may have been practiced.
In character, Carthage was almost the exact opposite of the young republic of Rome, a considerably more staid place, at least as compared to the Rome of later centuries. Founded in about 750 BCE, Rome occupied a position astride several important trade routes, at a defensible position on the Tiber River. It was at first ruled by kings, but eventually became a republic. The Romans were strong, family-oriented, deeply conservative, and set on continually expanding their territory. By the end of the fourth century BCE, Rome had annexed much of Italy, and during the third century BCE it conquered the last Greek strongholds in southern Italy as well as other Greek settlements in Sicily. This brought it into direct competition with Carthage.
The spark that set the First Punic War (264—241 BCE) ablaze was the Carthaginian attempt, in 264 BCE, to seize Messana (modern-day Messina) in Sicily, which occupied a strategically vital position close to the Italian mainland. Fearing that control of Messana would give Carthage a stranglehold on Sicily and allow it to mount an invasion of Italy, Rome sent troops to fight the Carthaginian initiative. Then, in the kind of escalating warfare we are familiar with today, each side sent in more and more troops. At the battle of Agrigentum in 262, Rome soundly defeated the Carthaginian army.
Thereafter, Carthage decided to rely on its superiority at sea, which was initially a successful strategy, for Rome, at the time, had almost no navy at all. But after Rome hastily built a fleet, it won a series of naval engagements, practically destroying the Carthaginian fleet. However, a Roman attempt to invade North Africa ended in defeat at Tunis in 255, and in 241 a peace treaty was signed between the warring nations, which gave Rome complete control of Sicily.
No longer able to challenge Rome at sea, Carthage sought other venues for expansion. The Carthaginian commander Hamilcar Barca conquered much of the southern Iberian Peninsula, creating a power base that Rome saw as a threat. When Hamilcar’s son, Hannibal besieged the Roman city of Saguntum (now Sagunto) in 218, the Second Punic War (218—201 BCE) began. Going on the offensive, Hannibal led an army of mercenaries across the Alps and down through the Italian Peninsula, defeating the Romans at the battles of the Ticino River, Trebia River, and Lake Trasimene. In 216, at Cannae in southern Italy, Hannibal famously enveloped and destroyed a Roman force, killing upward of fifty thousand Roman soldiers—the most killed in combat in a single day until the battle of the Somme during World War I.
Hannibal’s intention was not to conquer Rome—he knew his vastly outnumbered forces could not achieve this—but to break up the relatively new confederation of Roman states by blooding and weakening it in numerous battles. And indeed, as a direct result of his resounding victory at Cannae, most southern Italian provinces went over to the Carthaginian side, as did Greek cities in Sicily, including the largest, Syracuse. But the large Italian provinces of Latium, Umbria, and Etruria remained loyal to Rome, and gradually, the tide turned as the Romans learned how best to fight Hannibal—essentially, by avoiding pitched battles with him and letting him run out of supplies. Meanwhile, the Roman commander Scipio Africanus conquered Spain. Lacking reinforcements from Carthage, Hannibal retreated to North Africa, where he was defeated by Scipio Africanus at the battle of Zama in 202. Carthage sued for peace; Rome agreed, but forced its enemy to pay a huge indemnity over fifty years and stripped it of all its foreign colonies.
But in 151, having finished paying its debt, Carthage started to prosper again. Roman mistrust of an independent Carthage was fueled by alarmists, notably Senator Marcus Porcius Cato who, after a visit to the North African port, returned to Rome full of tales of the city’s resurgence. Thereafter, Cato ended every single speech he delivered, no matter what the topic, with the words “Carthago est delenda!”—“Carthage must be destroyed!” Finally, Cato’s supporters found an excuse to declare war when Carthage, in a technical breach of its truce with Rome, armed itself to resist an encroachment on Carthaginian territory by the Numidian king Masinissa, a Roman ally.
The Third Punic War (149—146 BCE) lasted three years, with all the fighting taking place around Carthage. There was never any doubt about the outcome. Still, the Carthaginians held out for two years, until Scipio Aemilianus, Scipio Africanus’s adopted grandson, took over in 147 BCE and, mounting a final assault, managed to breach Carthage’s walls and reduce the city to ashes.
In September of 202, two men rode slowly out to meet each other on a dusty North African plain. Although the meeting was a private one, it took place in the full view of thousands of armed men—Carthaginians and Romans—all of whom held their breath as the legendary Carthaginian leader Hannibal and the thirty-seven-year-old Roman consul and general Publius Cornelius Scipio the Younger halted their horses at the center of the plain. Sitting astride their mounts, the two longstanding and bitter foes sized each other up. Older and more grizzled, Hannibal wore an eyepatch where he had lost an eye to conjunctivitis during his Italian campaign. Scipio was young, not tall, but clean-cut and stoic.
Tantalizingly, no verifiable record exists of their conversation. We know from later developments that these men had enormous respect for each other, but we cannot know, for sure, even the gist of their exchange. Legend has it that Hannibal reminded Scipio that fate took a hand in every encounter of war—perhaps the older man wanted to caution the younger that victory was by no means certain in any endeavor. If so, Scipio would no doubt have nodded at this, for these words applied to Hannibal as equally as himself.
Whatever they said, after a few moments, each of the leaders turned back, heading for their waiting armies. Nothing would be settled by words that day.
The fateful meeting of these two great rivals had its origins in a late spring day in 204 BCE, when a Roman army of thirty thousand men, headed by Scipio, stood on the coast of Sicily. Riding the waves offshore were some four hundred transports and forty quinquereme warships (ships with five banks of oars), ready to carry this huge invasion force to Carthage. Before any legionnaire could move to board the ships, sacrifices to Mars, the Roman god of War, and Victoria, the goddess of Victory, had to be made. So a sheep was brought forward, and its throat and belly were cut. Scipio reached inside the sheep’s belly, pulled out the animals steaming entrails, and flung them into the choppy waves of the Mediterranean. At this, the thousands of soldiers watching cheered and beat their shields and moved to board the ships.
By this point, the Second Punic War had been going on for fourteen years. Despite the fact that Hannibal, Rome’s mortal enemy, was still in southern Italy, still undefeated, and still dangerous, and that Romans still remembered an earlier disastrous invasion in 255 BCE, Scipio, fresh from victories that had won back the Iberian Peninsula, was determined to take the battle to the Carthaginians and secure victory for Rome.
After successfully crossing to North Africa, Scipio’s forces ravaged much of the abundant Bagradas valley and, in the late summer of 204, successfully laid siege to Utica. Scipio had help in this, for the all-important allies of the Carthaginians, the Numidians, had a new leader named Masinissa, who had switched his allegiance to Rome, bringing his considerable cavalry forces with him. At the same time, there was a power shift in Carthage. Wealthy landowners and merchants ousted the Barcid dynasty (Hannibal’s family), which had been in power since the beginning of the war, and sent a delegation to Scipio to beg for peace. Cravenly, they blamed Hannibal and the Barcids for the entire war.
Scipio agreed and gave them terms: all Roman prisoners of war were to be released; all Carthaginian armies were to be withdrawn from Italy; all claims to Spain, Sicily, and the Mediterranean islands were to be renounced; and a large indemnity was to be paid each year to Rome. In addition, Carthage was to provide supplies for the Roman army in North Africa. The Carthaginians agreed. Hannibal’s army was recalled from Italy. It appeared peace had arrived.
But then Carthage blundered. In the spring of 203 BCE, a Roman supply fleet ran aground off Carthage. The Carthaginians, whose own supplies may have been running low, could not resist the temptation to loot the ships and take them as prizes. When Scipio heard the news, he was enraged. He began campaigning again, ruthlessly capturing town after Carthaginian town. Even if the towns surrendered, he sold their citizens into slavery. Meanwhile the Carthaginians begged Hannibal to come to their aid, and, in the summer of 202, he did so, with an army of perhaps forty thousand men. Marching five days, or about 100 miles (160 km), west of Carthage, he encountered Scipio’s force on a great plain near what would later become the Roman town of Zama (though the exact location of the battlefield has not been discovered).
THE CARTHAGINIANS, HEADED BY THEIR WAR ELEPHANTS, COLLIDE WITH THE ROMAN ARMY AT THE BATTLE OF ZAMA, AS IMAGINED BY ITALIAN PAINTER GIULIO ROMANO (1492—1546)
The Battle of Zama, 202 BCE, 1570—80 (oil on canvas), Romano, Giulio (1492—1546) (school of) Romano, Giulio (1492—1546) / Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia / The Bridgeman Art Library International.
When the two leaders returned to the ranks of their armies, each of them surveyed his forces carefully. The Carthaginian army outnumbered Scipio’s force by some ten thousand men and included in its ranks many hardened veterans of Hannibal’s Italian campaigns. But it also included many newer, untried soldiers recently recruited in Carthage—this was not same superb force that had destroyed the Romans at Cannae. Hannibal did, however, have eighty war elephants (although some sources suggest that such a great number would have meant that some of the elephants were poorly trained) and had bought himself a small force of Numidian cavalry.
The Romans were, in contrast, almost all veterans, mainly of the war in Spain. Scipio was Rome’s finest tactician and had made sure that his men were superbly trained. And his Numidian cavalry under Masinissa—who had ridden dramatically into Scipio’s camp at the last minute, throwing up huge clouds of dust, their faces painted and javelins gleaming—numbered perhaps three times as many as Hannibal’s Numidian force.
The two sides faced off against each other, blowing on bugles and shouting and banging on their shields—the usual din that preceded ancient combat. Having insufficient men to attempt the kind of pincer movement he had used so effectively at Cannae, Hannibal decided to send his elephants straight at the Roman lines. Startled by the noise, some of the animals charged prematurely—perhaps a sign that they were poorly trained—and then the rest followed, trumpeting.
Their approach must have been terrifying—war elephants could kill five men in an instant by trampling them or tossing them high with their tusks—but Scipio was prepared. As the elephants reached them, the Roman soldiers formed narrow corridors, which the elephants naturally raced down. Most of them were speared to death at the rear of the Roman army; some turned and charged back into the Carthaginian lines.
While this was taking place, Masinissa’s Numidians charged Hannibal’s Numidian force, chasing them off the battlefield. The fight then turned into a hard, bloody struggle between opposing infantries. The first two lines of the Carthaginian infantry, made up mainly of Gauls and Ligurians, advanced across the plain—Hannibal kept his most experienced troops in reserve for the moment—where they clashed with the Roman front line. The fight was fierce, with men colliding, battling in small clumps, retreating slightly to rest, then coming on again, all the time shouting to keep their spirits up and to frighten the enemy.
Using their heavy shields and armor and supported by the arrival of an experienced backup force, the Roman infantry gradually managed to push the Carthaginian first line back. But the Carthaginians’ resistance was stiffened by the veterans of Hannibal’s reserve, and the Romans were forced to sound a recall and reform their lines—a difficult and risky maneuver in the middle of a battle. The Carthaginians then attacked en masse, and the armies joined in a ferocious bloody melee, hacking each other with swords and spears. Soon the ground was covered with corpses and slick with gore.
While the outcome of the fight was still in doubt, Masinissa’s Numidians returned and charged into the rear of the Carthaginian forces. It was a devastating attack, and the Carthaginians broke and ran off to the flanks. The victorious Romans sped after them, cutting them down even as they pleaded for mercy. The Carthaginian camp was sacked; cries of Roman triumph, as well as the screams of the wounded and dying, rang out over the plain.
Perhaps twenty thousand Carthaginians died in the battle; thousands more were killed, wounded, or captured. The Romans lost only fifteen hundred men.
Hannibal was able to escape back to Carthage with his staff, but the war was now at an end, and even the most bitter Carthaginian had to accept it. Perhaps because he knew his relatively small force could not besiege Carthage easily, Scipio—who would return to Rome in triumph, to be dubbed Scipio Africanus—agreed to a peace treaty. It was harsher than before, however, and included the confiscation of all Carthaginian warships except for ten light triremes, and a heavy indemnity of ten thousand silver talents, to be paid annually over fifty years.
In a final scene of humiliation, five hundred of Carthage’s great quinquereme warships were rowed out into the Bay of Tunis and there burned, the fires sending a great pall of smoke over the ancient city—one that presaged its ultimate fate almost fifty years later.
It’s fair to say that Hannibal Barca inherited the Punic Wars, the way one might inherit property or a particularly troublesome set of personality attributes. His father, Hamilcar, was particularly bitter after the Carthaginian defeat in the First Punic War. Just six years old at the time, Hannibal must have sensed his wrath; it’s said that when he was nine Hamilcar had him swear an oath on an animal sacrifice that he would “never be a friend of the Romans.”
After Hamilcar died during an ambush in 229, he was succeeded by his son-in-law Hasdrubal, who conquered much of northern Spain but was assassinated in 220. At the age of twenty-five, Hannibal was elected as the Carthaginian army’s new commander by the soldiers themselves, which shows how much faith the troops already had in the young man. Hannibal continued the Carthaginian course of expansion in Spain, which in turn triggered the Second Punic War. He then famously marched his forces over the Alps and into Italy in 218, beginning an extraordinary campaign that would last seventeen years and display his genius as a commander.
Famously, he brought together a polyglot force and commanded it with both strict discipline and an understanding of its strengths and limitations. He also—unlike many Roman generals—led from the front, and there was no hardship he would not share with his troops. Yet he also knew how to delegate, relying on skilled generals such as his brothers Hasdrubal and Hanno, and his great Numidian cavalry leaders Carthalo and Maharbal, who were instrumental in the victory at Cannae.
Many Roman sources portray Hannibal as a cruel man, a liar, and a cheat. But these allegations could just be Roman propaganda, and little is known about Hannibal’s personality.
After his defeat at Zama in 202, Hannibal involved himself in internal Carthaginian politics, but made enemies, who accused him of plotting against Rome. Whether or not this was true, Hannibal deemed it wise to flee Carthage in 195 and headed for the court of the head of the Syrian Empire, Antiochus III, in Asia Minor. He commanded a fleet for Antiochus in the latter’s war against Rome; when Antiochus made peace with Rome, one of the stipulations was that he turn Hannibal over. But by then Hannibal was on the run again, this time to the kingdom of Bithynia, near the Black Sea. There, as the Greek historian Plutarch has it, he was trapped “like a bird that has grown too old to fly” and, with the Romans closing in, killed himself by taking poison. It was 183 BCE and he was sixty-four years old.
IT WAS SAID THAT AT JUST NINE YEARS OF AGE HANNIBAL SWORE AN OATH OF ETERNAL ENMITY TO ROME, AS DEPICTED IN THIS PAINTING BY JACOPO AMIGONI (1675—1752).
Hannibal swearing eternal enmity to Rome (oil on canvas), Amigoni, Jacopo (1675—1752) / Private Collection / Photo © Agnew’s, London, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library International
At the time of the First Punic War, the Romans had little or no experience of fighting at sea, whereas the Carthaginians were experienced seafarers and naval fighters. The Romans tended to look down upon naval power—as the Greeks had done before the Greco-Persian Wars—and considered pitched land battles far more noble. But it became evident that the Carthaginian superiority at sea had to be dealt with or Carthage would have the ability to simply blockade Roman ports and carry troops deep behind Roman lines.
Once this was realized, the Romans acted with Roman practicality and efficiency. Having captured a Carthaginian quinquereme—an oar-powered battleship that had five banks of oars, as opposed to three in the earlier Greek trireme—they constructed one hundred of these ships within two months, an amazing achievement that would have required, historians estimate, the efforts of thirty-five thousand men.
The Carthaginians remained more adept, however, at maneuvering their craft in close battles. But then the Romans came up with the idea of the corvus. Essentially a moveable wooden bridge, roughly 4 feet (1.2 m) wide and 36 feet (11 m) long, with railings on each side, it was attached by pulleys to a long mast at the front of each warship. At its tip was a huge three-tipped spike, which looked something like a corvus, or raven, hence the name. When a Roman warship was able to get close enough to a Carthaginian vessel, it would drop the corvus onto the opposing vessel so that the spike embedded itself in the deck. Roman soldiers would then charge across the bridge and engage the enemy, much as they were used to doing on land.
Although the corvus made vessels unstable in rough weather and was eventually abandoned as Roman naval tactics and experience improved, it helped turn the tide of the First Punic War and make the Romans masters of the sea. As Nigel Bagnall, a noted historian of the Punic Wars, has written, the corvus was “an example of a technical innovation which led to a precipitous reversal of battlefield superiority that had endured for centuries.”
THE ROMAN AND CARTHAGE EMPIRES ARE SHOWN DURING THE BEGINNING OF THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. AFTER THE PUNIC WARS, ROME WOULD OBLITERATE CARTHAGE IN WHAT HAS BEEN CALLED “THE FIRST GENOCIDE.”
While Hannibal is revered by military historians for his tactics, most people remember him for taking his army, with elephants, across the Alps. This was truly an extraordinary undertaking—no large body of men had ever made this perilous journey before—and it was a sign of Hannibal’s boldness, vision, and self-confidence that he was even willing to attempt it.
With an army of between forty and fifty thousand men, including ten thousand cavalry and perhaps forty war elephants, Hannibal set off from New Carthage (Cartagena in present-day Spain), crossed over the Pyrenees into Gaul (present-day southern France), and fought and finagled his way past hostile Gallic tribes to reach the foothills of the Alps. Here he made an epic speech to his men, seeking to reassure them in the face of this daunting obstacle. “What do you think the Alps are?” he asked them. “They are nothing more than high mountains, [and] no height is insurmountable to men of determination.”
Encouraged, the army began its climb, most likely via the forbidding, 9,000-feet (2,750 m)-high Col de la Traversette. They were ambushed by a hostile tribe, the Allobroges, causing numerous casualties. Avalanches, the severe cold, and treacherous tracks were other dangers. Men, horses, and elephants tumbled, screaming, from narrow paths, were swept off the mountains by avalanches, or froze to death on icy slopes. All the while, Hannibal moved among his men, urging them on.
At last, after fifteen long days, the fertile valleys of Italy appeared before them like a mirage. The entire march from Carthage had taken five months; Hannibal had lost twelve thousand men and most of his fabled war elephants. But he was now in Italy, ready to bring the war to Rome.
The final conquest of Carthage in 146 was a brutal affair. After surrounding the city, the Romans, led by Scipio Aemilianus, launched a major assault from the harbor area, eventually breaking through the city walls and swarming into the vast dock areas. The Carthaginians set the buildings here afire and retreated into the inner city. In six days of street-by-street, house-by-house fighting, most of it uphill, the defenders made the Romans pay for every bit of ground. At one point, tired of fighting on the narrow streets, the Romans leveled rows of houses to create a wide road leading up to a holy citadel that was the Carthaginians’ last refuge; the Carthaginian dead were simply built into the road as paving material, according to Polybius—something recent archaeological finds, which have uncovered human bones in this area, seem to confirm.
Finally, on the seventh day, the Carthaginians offered to surrender if Scipio Aemilianus would spare their lives. This he agreed to do, and fifty thousand gaunt and starving men, women, and children were taken into slavery. But the fight wasn’t over. Left in the citadel were nine hundred Roman legionnaires who had deserted to Carthage; they knew that to be taken captive would mean certain crucifixion. So they fought on until, surrounded on all sides, they decided to burn the citadel down, immolating themselves.
After plundering the city, the Romans set about with a will to make sure that Carthage was not just defeated, but obliterated. To ensure that Scipio did this properly, a commission of senators (not including Cato, who had died a few years before) was sent out from Rome. Large areas of the city had already been burned in the fighting. Now more of it was set ablaze, and any remaining structures demolished afterward. There is a famous story that the ground was ploughed and sown with salt so that nothing would ever grow there again, but this probably a later invention. Whatever the case, the destruction of Carthage was complete.
