Punic Wars

In 264 bce Rome went to war with Syracuse, but Carthage’s opposition to Roman intervention in Sicily led to a Punic war (Latin Poeni = Carthaginians). Lasting twenty-three years with land fighting chiefly in Sicily and most naval battles off its coasts, the First war ended with Carthage defeated and forced to give up its Sicilian territories. Although the two states largely pursued separate foreign policies between 241 and 219, mutual suspicions prompted a Second war (218–201), in which Carthage’s able general Hannibal invaded Italy to inflict a series of bloody defeats on Roman armies at the river Trebia, Lake Trasimene, and Cannae. Yet he could not win over enough of the other Italian states, while sustained Roman resistance in Italy and Carthaginian Spain led to final victory under the equally able general Scipio Africanus. His defeat of Hannibal at Zama in North Africa (202) forced Carthage to accept confinement to Africa as a Roman satellite. It recovered enough prosperity to excite harassment from its now unified neighbour, Numidia, and in the 150s from Rome too, which declared war on Carthage in 149. A three-year siege ended when Scipio Africanus’s grandson Scipio Aemilianus took, sacked, and burned the city and enslaved its survivors, annexing Carthaginian territory as provincia Africa .