Rome against Carthage for control of the Mediterranean: Hannibal's march over the Alps with elephants, his crushing victory at Cannae, and how Rome fought back, won at Zama and finally destroyed Carthage.
Stop 01 · 264 BCE
Two Powers, One Sea
By the 260s BCE, Rome ruled most of Italy: it had conquered the peninsula south of the Arno by 272, after the war against Pyrrhus. Carthage, a city founded by Phoenicians in what is now Tunisia, ruled a trading empire across the western Mediterranean, from southern Spain and the Balearic Islands to Corsica, Sardinia and western Sicily. The two had signed treaties of friendship. In 265 Italian mercenaries holding Messana, on Sicily's north-eastern tip, appealed to both for help, and in 264 Roman troops crossed the strait. So began the First Punic War (264–241 BCE), fought over Sicily. Rome built its first real navy and won. Carthage then built a new power base in Spain, rich in silver.
Detail from the second century BC Ahenobarbus relief showing two Roman foot-soldiersUnknown artist · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
By the 260s BCE, Rome ruled most of Italy: it had conquered the peninsula south of the Arno by 272, after the war against Pyrrhus. Carthage, a city founded by Phoenicians in what is now Tunisia, ruled a trading empire across the western Mediterranean, from southern Spain and the Balearic Islands to Corsica, Sardinia and western Sicily. The two had signed treaties of friendship. In 265 Italian mercenaries holding Messana, on Sicily's north-eastern tip, appealed to both for help, and in 264 Roman troops crossed the strait. So began the First Punic War (264–241 BCE), fought over Sicily. Rome built its first real navy and won. Carthage then built a new power base in Spain, rich in silver.
To beat a great naval power, Rome built a fleet in 260 BCE, copying a wrecked Carthaginian warship, and fitted its ships with the corvus, a boarding bridge that turned sea fights into infantry battles. That year the consul Gaius Duilius won at Mylae. In 256 about 680 warships clashed off Cape Ecnomus, possibly the largest naval battle ever fought. Rome won, landed an army in Africa under Regulus and took Tunis, but in 255 a Carthaginian army trained by the Spartan Xanthippus destroyed it, and a storm sank most of the returning fleet. Rome kept rebuilding. Off the Aegates Islands on 10 March 241 it won the decisive battle; Carthage left Sicily and agreed to pay 3,200 talents.
Unable to pay its mercenaries after the war, Carthage faced a savage revolt by them and its Libyan subjects. Rome used the crisis to seize Sardinia and Corsica in 238 BCE and demand 1,200 more talents, fuelling resentment. Hamilcar Barca, who crushed the rebels, took his army to Spain in 237, with his nine-year-old son Hannibal, who had sworn never to be a friend of Rome. He carved out a semi-independent realm whose silver paid Carthage's debts. After Hamilcar died fighting in 228, his son-in-law Hasdrubal founded Qart Hadasht, 'New City', the Romans' Carthago Nova, and agreed the Ebro as a boundary with Rome. In 221 Hannibal took command; in 219 he besieged Saguntum, Rome's ally, for eight months.
Rome declared war in spring 218 BCE, and Hannibal, Carthage's general in Spain, did what no one expected. Leaving New Carthage in May or June, he led an army of perhaps 50,000 men, with cavalry and 37 war elephants, over the Pyrenees and through Gaul. He fought his way across the Rhône against local Gauls and slipped past a Roman army that had landed at Massalia. Then he crossed the Alps in about 15 days, in autumn snow, harassed by mountain tribes. Which pass he used is still debated. He reached northern Italy in November with only about 26,000 men left, but with Gaulish allies ready to join him. Rome had to cancel its planned invasion of Africa.
BattlesSaguntum: the siege that started the war, 219 BCE · Taurini (near Turin): first city taken in Italy
In three battles Hannibal destroyed three Roman armies. After a cavalry victory at the Ticinus, he lured the Romans into battle at the Trebia in December 218; only 10,000 of 40,000 escaped. At Lake Trasimene in June 217 he ambushed the Romans in the morning mist, killing 15,000, including the consul Flaminius. Rome turned to Fabius Maximus, mocked as 'the Delayer' for avoiding battle, then raised 86,000 men. At Cannae on 2 August 216 Hannibal's outnumbered army let the Roman centre push forward, then closed around it from both sides while his cavalry struck from behind. Some 50,000 or more Romans were killed in a single day. Capua and much of southern Italy went over to Hannibal.
BattlesTrebia, December 218 BCE · Lake Trasimene, June 217 BCE · Cannae, 2 August 216 BCE
The war spread. Philip V of Macedon allied with Hannibal in 215 BCE, and that year Hiero II of Syracuse, Rome's ally, died; his grandson Hieronymus took the city over to Carthage. From 213 the Roman commander Marcus Claudius Marcellus besieged Syracuse by land and sea, but its defences were directed by the mathematician Archimedes, whose cranes, the 'claws', lifted attacking ships out of the water, while his catapults kept the Romans back. In 212 the Romans finally broke into the outer city. Archimedes, about 78, was killed by a soldier who did not know him, against Marcellus's orders. The citadel fell months later, the city was looted and many people enslaved, and by 210 all Sicily was Roman.
Rome would not make peace. It enrolled even slaves and criminals, and avoided pitched battles with Hannibal, who stayed in Italy for fifteen years without the siege equipment or reinforcements to take Rome. In 211 he marched on Rome itself to draw the Romans away from Capua, but they held on and took the city. Meanwhile the young Publius Cornelius Scipio struck at Spain, taking Carthago Nova in 209 BCE. When Hannibal's brother Hasdrubal crossed the Alps with a relief army, the consul Claudius Nero slipped north by a forced march to join his colleague, and the Romans destroyed it at the Metaurus River in 207. At Ilipa in 206 Scipio ended Carthaginian rule in Spain.
BattlesCarthago Nova taken by Scipio, 209 BCE · Metaurus, 207 BCE · Ilipa, 206 BCE · Capua retaken by Rome, 211 BCE
In 204 BCE Scipio invaded Africa. Carthage recalled Hannibal, who sailed from Croton with 15,000 to 20,000 veterans. At Zama in 202 BCE each side had perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 men, and Hannibal led with 80 war elephants. Scipio's infantry opened lanes to let the elephants charge harmlessly through, while bugles and clashing shields panicked many of them. His Numidian cavalry, now Rome's allies under Masinissa, won the day, returning to strike Hannibal's veterans from behind. By Polybius's count 20,000 Carthaginians died and as many were captured. Hannibal himself urged peace. Carthage surrendered its fleet, keeping just ten warships, and its empire outside Africa, and agreed to pay 10,000 talents over 50 years. Scipio took the name Africanus.
Carthage recovered its wealth, and in Rome the senator Cato is said to have ended his speeches with 'Carthage must be destroyed'. When Carthage, raided for decades by Masinissa's Numidians, fought back in 149 BCE in breach of the treaty, Rome sent an army and then demanded that the Carthaginians abandon their city and move inland. They refused. In the Third Punic War, Rome besieged the city behind its 35 kilometres of walls for three years. In spring 146 BCE troops under Scipio Aemilianus, adopted grandson of Africanus, fought street by street for six days and razed it; the 50,000 survivors were sold into slavery. The same year Rome destroyed Corinth in Greece. The Mediterranean was becoming a Roman lake.