Rome and the Western Mediterranean · Part 4 · The rise of Rome · B2
The Punic Wars: Rome against Carthage
Part 4 of Rome and the Western Mediterranean: for more than a hundred years, Rome and Carthage fought three wars for the western Mediterranean. Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants and destroyed Roman armies in Italy, but Rome never surrendered, and in the end Carthage was wiped off the map. Time clauses (as soon as, once, until, by the time, after crossing), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, the war that decided who would rule the west: Rome against Carthage.
Hannibal, his elephants, the Alps, and the worst day in Roman history. And then, much later, the end of a city.
A Greek, Polybius, who knew the Roman generals and watched Carthage burn.
The First Punic War (264–241 BCE) was fought over Sicily. Rome had never had a navy, but it built one, and after twenty-three years of war at sea, Carthage gave up Sicily. (The Romans called the Carthaginians Poeni, Phoenicians: hence “Punic”.)
In the Second Punic War (218–201 BCE), the Carthaginian general Hannibal marched from Spain over the Pyrenees and the Alps into Italy and defeated the Romans again and again. But Rome refused to make peace. A Roman general, Scipio, attacked Spain and then Africa, and defeated Hannibal at Zama in 202 BCE.
Carthage became rich again. In the Third Punic War (149–146 BCE), Rome besieged the city for three years, destroyed it, and sold its survivors into slavery. Most of what we know comes from Polybius, a Greek who lived in Rome, and from the Roman historian Livy.
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