Punic Wars
Three wars between Rome and Carthage from 264 to 146 BCE that decided the western Mediterranean and made Rome an imperial power.
For over a century two cities fought for the western Mediterranean, and only one walked away. Rome and Carthage began as distant trading partners and ended with one of them burned off the map. The three Punic Wars, fought between 264 and 146 BCE, are the hinge on which Rome swung from a regional Italian power into master of an empire. Punic comes from Punicus, Latin for Phoenician, the seafaring people who had founded Carthage on the coast of what is now Tunisia.
Sicily and the sea (264-241 BCE)
The first war began as a quarrel over Sicily and grew into the largest naval war the ancient world had seen. Rome was a land power with almost no fleet, so it built one, reportedly copying a wrecked Carthaginian warship, and bolted on a boarding bridge, the corvus, to turn sea battles into infantry fights it could win. After twenty-three grinding years and appalling losses on both sides, Carthage sued for peace in 241 BCE, gave up Sicily, and paid a crushing indemnity. Rome had learned to fight at sea the hard way.
Hannibal at the gates (218-201 BCE)
The second war was Carthage's revenge and Rome's closest brush with ruin. In 218 BCE the Carthaginian general Hannibal marched an army, war elephants included, over the Alps into Italy. At Cannae in 216 BCE he encircled and destroyed a Roman army far larger than his own, one of the worst single-day defeats Rome ever suffered. Still it refused to negotiate. For years a commander nicknamed the Delayer shadowed Hannibal and dodged open battle while Rome raised fresh legions, and finally it sent the young general Scipio to strike at Carthage itself. Recalled home to defend the city, Hannibal was beaten at Zama in 202 BCE, and Carthage surrendered the next year, stripped of its fleet and its overseas empire.
The cold destruction (149-146 BCE)
By the third war Carthage was no military threat, merely a prosperous rival that Roman hardliners could not stomach. The senator Cato the Elder reportedly ended every speech, whatever its subject, with the same demand: Carthage must be destroyed. In 149 BCE Rome manufactured a pretext and laid siege. After three years the legions broke in, fought street by street, and burned the city to the ground in 146 BCE, killing or enslaving the survivors. The tale that they sowed the fields with salt is a later invention, but the erasure was real enough.
Victory left Rome the unrivaled power of the Mediterranean, master of Sicily, Spain, and North Africa. In the very year Carthage fell, Roman armies also sacked Corinth and tightened their grip on Greece. A republic built to guard a single city now ruled the sea in every direction, and the flood of wealth, slaves, and ambition that poured in would, within a century, help tear that republic apart.