Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The Rise and Fall of Carthage About this episode In this episode, we tackle the Punic Wars - three epic clashes between Rome and Carthage for control of the Mediterranean. From naval battles to Hannibal’s daring Alpine crossing and Carthage’s final destruction, we uncover how these wars reshaped the ancient world.
Joining us is Eve MacDonald, ancient historian and author of Carthage: A New History of an Ancient Empire, to explain why these two rising powers collided in a fight for supremacy.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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Transcript 15,225 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:28 Dan Snow? Hi everybody, welcome, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Today I'm going to take you all the way back to the 3rd century BCE. It's the ultimate clash of the titans. It's the alien versus predator of the ancient world. Whoever wins, well, everybody else loses. It is Rome versus Carthage. Two city-states turned regional empires, powerhouses and champions of Europe and Africa respectively, locked in a struggle for supremacy that spanned more than a century. These weren't just wars over specific bits of territory. They are battles to the death between two ancient superpowers,
3:10 Dan Snow? fighting for dominance over the Mediterranean world. You're going to hear about war elephants trudging through the snow of high alpine passes. You're going to hear about the biggest, probably naval and land battles to that point in European history. There are year-long sieges, there are scorched earth campaigns. It's the Punic Wars, folks. Some of the most savage conflict the ancient world ever witnessed. There are the commanders, men like Hannibal, men like Scipio Africanus, men like Quintus Fabius Maximus Guntator, men who became the stuff of legend for their campaigning brilliance in this period.
3:52 Dan Snow? And in the end, in the end, only one of those two empires will be left standing. We now know who came out victorious, I don't mind telling you. It's Rome, if you listen to this podcast, you really should know that. But at the time, at many stages during those Punic Wars, it could have gone either way, it was not a foregone conclusion. Today, we're going to unpack those legendary clashes between Rome and Carthage. Why did they end up fighting? And what made these wars so long-lasting, so devastating? And why finally did Rome emerge as the undisputed master of the Mediterranean? Joining me is the very brilliant Eve McDonald. She's senior lecturer in ancient history at Cardiff University and author of Carthage: A New History of an Ancient Empire. Enjoy.
4:36 Speaker 01 T minus ten.
4:37 Speaker 03 The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
4:40 Speaker 01 God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.
4:56 Dan Snow? Eve, thank you so much for coming on the show. Tell me, at its height, should we think about Carthage as a global empire, one of the world's great ancient empires, sort of up there with the Chin and the Romans and the Persians, perhaps the Inca in South America? Is that the kind of scale we're talking about?
5:11 Speaker 01 Well, hello, Dan. Thank you for having me on the programme. I actually think so, I really do. I mean, in the sense that it's very early in the history of the Mediterranean that Carthage is at its height. And so because of that, we don't have the same amount of evidence that we do for the Romans, but they were certainly a comparable power to the Romans in the third century B.C., when the Punic Wars were fought, when you have this big clash between these two really important city-states. Whether Carthage was an empire in itself is something that people debate on and on about. And I think that you can, certainly in the third century B.C., call Carthage an empire. It has allied territory in Sicily, all of the southern part of Spain and Portugal, along
5:54 Speaker 01 the coast of Africa, all the way through what we consider to be Libya, all the way through to Morocco. So it's got a big landmass of people that are allied to it. So I think it's fair to think of it as a big empire.
6:06 Dan Snow? I can see you as allied there, and I can tell as an academic, you're trying to make things simple for me to understand here, but this is the problem, that empire doesn't mean what it means in the 19th century. It's not like the British Empire painting everything pink, does it, or red? We're talking about tributary arrangements and sort of alliances, which are a bit one-sided, and different in different places.
6:24 Speaker 01 Absolutely, and that's so important, too, because what we think of as empire is so heavily tainted by what comes hundreds of years after the wars between Carthage and Rome. And so in many ways, what we have are these big city-states that are gaining more and more power and using their influence, their soft and hard power, really to acquire more and more territory, more and more land, and more money, more economic gains, all that sort of stuff. So in the sense of Roman Carthage as big imperial powers, in the time that they fought, they probably wouldn't technically be called empires. They're building towards that almost. So we're seeing this idea of empire in formation, which is really interesting,
7:09 Speaker 01 both from the Roman perspective and the Carthaginian perspective. But yes, they're having more of a dialogue with the people they're engaging with most of the time, although of course not always, and sometimes it's very much a hard power conquest situation.
7:22 Dan Snow? Okay, so I don't want to get too much into the weeds here, but for example, in southern Spain, you might get a situation where a local city, they keep their local magistrates, their local elites, but everyone knows that actually they have to do what the Carthaginians tell them.
7:33 Speaker 01 They do, or they might face destruction. They have choices to make. We all have these ideas of people doing this voluntarily. But in many ways, when you're dealing with these two bigger powers that are taking over the whole of the Western Mediterranean in this period, everybody's making some pretty difficult choices. Choices about which side you pick in what is almost a century-long war. All that sort of stuff.
7:55 Dan Snow? And everyone knows they've got to pick a side.
7:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:58 Dan Snow? Okay, so I've got way ahead of myself here. Let's go back to the beginning. What is the, because I'm always so struck, but Carthage, it comes from the east, doesn't it?
8:05 Speaker 01 It does, it comes from the east. And the name Carthage itself is just a Roman Latin term for the Phoenician language word for the new city.
8:15 Dan Snow? Oh, really?
8:16 Speaker 01 It just means, like Naples or Neapolis in Greek means the new city. It's the new city. It's the new city founded from a city in Lebanon called Tyre that was part of a group of Phoenician-speaking urban settlements along the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean that began to move out into the Western Mediterranean really early in the first millennium BCE. So from the 10th century to about the 8th, 7th century.
8:43 Dan Snow? So the Greeks were at it famously, they're going to southern Italy, they're pushing to southern France, what is it, southern France? These Phoenicians are at it too?
8:50 Speaker 01 The Phoenicians are at it. In fact, the Phoenicians are probably the The first to do it, and we think that the Greeks come later. The evidence points to very, very early settlements of Phoenician colonies all the way to the very edge of the Mediterranean at Cadiz, which is outside on the Atlantic coast of Spain today.
9:09 Dan Snow? So these are maritime, you've got me at maritime in person, I'm very excited. That's my happy place. So they're using their shipbuilding, superb shipbuilding, they're wonderful materials on that coast to build ships as well, and building these little, they found these little nodes all around the Mediterranean world.
9:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're working on the idea of trade and sort of exploration and searching for new resource bases all the way around the Mediterranean. So we know they first go to Cyprus, the Phoenicians, then they go to Crete and Greece, then they move even further west, they continue on to Sicily, they found cities in the Balearic Islands on Corsica and Sardinia on the southern coast of Spain and Portugal, and then all the way along the coast of Africa back. And it's following the trade winds and the natural currents in the Mediterranean that you know all about. You know, that's how you would go if you're keeping always land in sight, you need a sort of port by port by port movement across the sea. And that's what the Phoenicians do.
10:05 Speaker 01 So Carthage is just one of many Phoenician cities all around the Mediterranean. And Carthage becomes the most famous, the most powerful, but it's just the new city.
10:16 Dan Snow? Okay, so it's the new city, it's got a cool sort of natural harbour going on there. And it's quite, we don't want to get too technical about geography, but the North African coast is bad for sailing, not many natural harbours, unlike the southern European coast. But Carthage's got a real natural advantage, hasn't it?
10:29 Speaker 01 It does, and the Greek historian Polybius describes in this minute detail how perfect the location of Carthage is. It's protected on the bay of what we call the Bay of Tunis today, it's protected in this big bay, but it's also on the southern part of a peninsula, so it's protected. From winds within the bay itself. So you can pull up and harbor safely at the place that Carthage was founded. And it maintains its importance all the way through well to today because Tunis is basically just inland from where ancient Carthage was. So it has been an important city since it was founded in the ninth century B.C.
11:06 Dan Snow? And now let's just deal with Dido, this mythical figure. Everyone seems to want to have some connection with the origin myth, the Trojan War, the Iliad. So this is like an extension of the sort of Marvel franchise, the Marvel Universe. We get Carthage drawn into this story as well. Explain that.
11:21 Speaker 01 Dido is just a Roman construction and she was imagined in the first century B.C. So many, many centuries after Carthage was founded as the mythical founder of Carthage. We know there was a princess from the city of Tyre who did exist in the time that Carthage was founded and she's called Elishat or Alyssa in Greek. And she had a brother whose name was Pygmalion, a bit more famous than she is in some ways. And that there was a disruption in the city and then there was an expedition that was sent out to the west of the Mediterranean. So we think there is some basis in this story of Dido. She becomes known as Dido by the Romans because it means it's like an epithet.
12:04 Speaker 01 It's a nickname. They call her that because it means the wanderer. And she wandered with her group of nobles from Tyre before they founded the city itself, where Carthage stands. And so she was known as this woman who wandered the Mediterranean. She founds a city, ninth century B.C., on the north coast of Africa. And in the Roman mythology, it's Aeneas, who was the Trojan prince who left burning Troy with his father and sailed to the west of the Mediterranean and is really destined by the gods to found the Roman people, to become a founding part of the Roman people. That's all a little bit confusing. It's like, wait a second, what about Romulus and Remus?
12:46 Speaker 01 Hang on here, there's some confusion. But the fact is, is that the Roman foundation myths have two different points of entry. One is the sort of bigger Mediterranean and one is the sort of local italic version. So Dido is founding her City on the north coast of Africa and Aeneas sails by with his Trojans. And they meet and they become the ultimate star-crossed lovers in the story in the Roman myth of their foundation. And it is really an important story because it is the way that the later Romans are explaining. The Punic Wars and what happened between Roman Carthage and why it happened. And so they use this Dido character and the city of Carthage as a way of.
13:29 Speaker 01 Explaining how and why the Carthaginians and the Romans went to war and it is all about star-crossed lovers and Aeneas. Jilt his queen and leaves North Africa and moves off to Italy. And she takes her own life. And when she does that, she hurls a curse down on her. Leaving lover and it's this sort of hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. And it's a curse that conjures up some avenger of her blood. And this, of course, leads us directly to the Roman story around Hannibal. So it's all part of a big myth. But underlying that myth, we have evidence that. Something did happen in the ninth century B.C. at Carthage and the city was founded and we have other versions of this myth too. We don't just have the one story.
14:14 Dan Snow? Right. So let's come forward. Are these Phoenician states all bound? Well, obviously, language and customs and trade. Is there any kind of political integrity or do they all just set off on their own and found their new things?
14:24 Speaker 01 Not that we know of. And the thing is, is that we also know that there are really mixed cities at this point. So you have, you already mentioned the fact that there are lots of Greeks. In the mix as well at the same time, founding cities, Marseille, Syracuse, all kinds of places are being founded at the same time in the Western Mediterranean. And we have Etruscan cities and we have Rome becoming a city at the same time. So all these places are. In the mix and at play and they're also, we know now. Way more mixed populations than we used to think. So it's not just like one group of Phoenicians who speak Phoenician, go to Carthage and live there. They're mixed with the Numidian people of North Africa, the people called Amazior today, or used to be called Berber. There's lots of Greeks in Carthage. And we know there's people from all over the Mediterranean.
15:09 Speaker 01 And that's true, actually, of all the different cities in the Mediterranean, in the West. I always sort of think of it like a colonial sort of, you know, new land that's being settled, you know?
15:21 Dan Snow? Like Singapore and the height of the British Empire, all sorts of people.
15:24 Speaker 01 I'm from Canada, I know lots of cities, you know, so are you in in origin at some point. And yeah, this idea that it's like Toronto might have been, or all these places might have been. These are new cities, people are coming for opportunities, it's not just one group of people. But, back to the question, there is a connection between people who speak Phoenician and are part of that Phoenician cultural heritage in the Western Mediterranean. And certainly, we see when Carthage becomes a more established city and goes out into the Mediterranean, more as itself, rather than just a colony of Tyre, we see people from Carthage interacting in the west of Sicily, where there's a lot of Phoenician settled cities and things like that. So we assume that's what's happening.
16:07 Speaker 01 We have early treaties between Carthage and Rome that go back to the sixth century B.C. And they talk about the spheres of influence of the two cities.
16:15 Dan Snow? Really, already?
16:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, right when Rome becomes a republic, almost dating to the first year of the Republic, we have a treaty between Carthage and Rome. So it's so interesting, because Rome was a very important city, even in the sixth century B.C., although the Romans kind of downplay that in their myths and stories. And Carthage was active all across the sea, all around Sardinia, Corsica, the coast of Italy. And so they interact right away. And we don't know if it's the Romans who go, we're a new republic, we want to be acknowledged by other powers, or if it's Carthage saying, oh, new kids on the block, we better figure out who they are and what they're doing. So, yeah.
16:54 Dan Snow? And these are what organizing, how they can trade with each other and, yeah.
16:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's really around trade. It's like, where can Romans go to exchange goods? And where can the Carthaginians go? And which allies are connected to which city and things like that? So we have a good idea that Carthage is pretty well established and entrenched in the southern part of Sardinia and Sicily at this point in the sixth century. That makes sense geographically if you just, you know, look at a map of where it is.
17:20 Dan Snow? And do these two growing powers, they coexist for a couple of centuries then?
17:23 Speaker 01 Centuries.
17:24 Dan Snow? Really?
17:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:25 Dan Snow? Periods, little bits of war or on the whole?
17:27 Speaker 01 No, no, they're allied.
17:28 Dan Snow? Living, allied.
17:29 Speaker 01 Allied all the way through until the third century B.C. It's really amazing. They spend hundreds of more years at peace than they do at war and they know each other really well. And again, we only get the narrative of later wars, but we understand underneath that there's a lot of connection between the two cultures.
17:48 Dan Snow? Fascinating. Now Rome is embarking on a period of conquest in Italy. Is Carthage extending its sphere of influence, its conquest, if you like, its overlordship? Now what through Spain and other areas of the?
18:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, the first war happens just over Sicily and it happens in the mid third century B.C. and it's really Pyrrhus. I don't know if you've ever done a story about Pyrrhus.
18:12 Dan Snow? We've never done the Pyrrhic victories on the pod.
18:14 Speaker 01 Pyrrhic wars, Pyrrhic victories, Pyrrhus who brings elephants into Italy and fights the Romans on behalf of Greeks in southern Italy. Actually is the person who sort of lights the spark of a war between Carthage and Rome.
18:26 Dan Snow? Okay.
18:27 Speaker 01 Because Rome has conquered into southern, the very south of Italy, fights with Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus wins Pyrrhic victory. He goes to Sicily, he fights the Carthaginians, he does better against the Carthaginians.
18:39 Dan Snow? So he's fighting both Rome and Carthage?
18:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, and then he just scarpers back to a Pyrrhus where he's from across the Adriatic because something at home is a problem. And Rome and Carthage are just left there looking at each other right across the Straits of Messina, where the toe of Italy meets the very tip of Sicily.
18:56 Dan Snow? So he's just thrown a huge match into the barrel of gunpowder?
18:59 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
19:00 Dan Snow? And so those wars against Pyrrhus, they've sort of entrenched Roman control of southern Italy and Carthaginian control-ish of Sicily?
19:08 Speaker 01 Yes, more or less.
19:09 Dan Snow? More or less, more or less.
19:09 Speaker 01 With the city of Syracuse at play as well.
19:11 Dan Snow? Okay.
19:12 Speaker 01 So there's really three city-states in the beginning of the Punic Wars. And then Rome turns up with this huge military force. It's classic Roman behavior. Both consuls, all their soldiers, forty thousand troops. I mean, for the time, it's extraordinary. So they really mean business and the Syracuseans are like, they had first allied briefly with the Carthaginians, who they had fought with a lot, but were also allied with. And then they looked at the writing on the wall, almost of what Rome was coming to Sicily with and just said, no, I'm going over to the Roman side. And so it becomes Rome with the power of navy of Syracuse against Carthage.
19:50 Dan Snow? Syracuse had been a powerful state in its own right.
19:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:54 Dan Snow? Important city.
19:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, we forget about it sometimes, but we shouldn't because it really is. It of course gets sucked into this whole thing and conquered eventually, but it's such an important city at the time and a cultural presence of the Greeks in Sicily.
20:06 Dan Snow? Is this a sort of stumbling into war back then? Or for a few generations now, have people on both sides been like, there is an end game approaching. We are going to end up fighting Rome for, had these two imperial entities just got too big to get along?
20:20 Speaker 01 That's a really good question. I don't know that we would all agree. So I'm going to give you my view.
20:25 Dan Snow? Well, that's what you're here for.
20:26 Speaker 01 And there's lots of people who might disagree with this. So my instinct on this is that they are a little surprised by what happens. And often, you know, people compare this to the First World War, the First Punic War, that it's a war that everybody gets into. And then it's like, oh, what have we done? Sort of thing. And that seems to be the case with the First Punic War. Rome is very, very successful in the beginning of the war. And it's a war that's literally fought in a clockwise motion around Sicily, inland and on sea, and these huge battles, and it's massive. The expenditure for the navies, for the soldiers must have just, and did, we know, almost bankrupt both cities by the time it's ended, over 20 years later.
21:10 Dan Snow? What?
21:10 Speaker 01 So it's just madness that they both went into it. The Romans were better prepared in the beginning, but Carthage really dug deep. And it shows us how much they could draw on the resources they had, that they could continue to resist the power of Rome for all that time.
21:25 Dan Snow? And the Romans, what did they hope? Was they, they want, presumably like all wars, it began with a great idea, we'll just do a short, sharp little thing down here and seize a bit of useful territory. So it's about the city of Syracuse, is it?
21:36 Speaker 01 It's about the Straits of Messina.
21:38 Dan Snow? Okay.
21:38 Speaker 01 And that area between Italy and Sicily, that's where it starts. It starts with these great group of people called the, the Men of Mammores, which is the Oscan word for Mars, the god of war. So these are mercenary soldiers who've seized the city of Messina, which is right on the Sicilian coast. And they are there, and the Syracuseans are giving them a hard time because they're not enjoying. These mercenaries disrupting everything around them. So they turn to both Carthage and to Rome and invite them in to help them against the Syracuseans. So it's really Carthage and Rome answering the call of these mercenary soldiers.
22:14 Dan Snow? Interesting.
22:14 Speaker 01 And that's how it starts.
22:15 Dan Snow? I don't want to make clumsy parallels, but you know, thinking about little Serbia, little local difficulty with Austria. And before you know it, the great powers of the world are all piling into it. Yeah. Crazy. Okay, so it's a 20 year brutal war all around Sicily. Fought on land and sea. Who wins?
22:30 Speaker 01 The Romans win. And the amazing thing is that they win in a sea battle in 241 B.C. Off the west coast of Sicily, near the island of Levanzo, which is one of the Agati Islands. And we have the battle site. That's what's so extraordinary. We have the bronze rams from the ships that fought this sea battle. It's absolutely extraordinary. So we know almost exactly what happened. And we have the archaeological evidence. It's just unbelievable. So on the seabed off of the west coast of Sicily lies the battle site from this huge sea battle that took place. And it was the last battle. It was honestly a step too far for Carthage. It was the new fleet had been raised and the Romans pulled together a force
23:15 Speaker 01 and were able to surprise the Carthaginians and defeat them in this massive sea battle off of Trapani, the city of Trapani in Sicily.
23:24 Dan Snow? What effect is this gigantic war having? If you look at the great wars of the 18th century, we talk about the emergence of these fiscal military states. Britain and France gets more powerful as they're investing and discovering new bits of technology. Is that what's happening here with the Romans? Are they, is it just the expenditure and the longevity and the nature of this war giving even more strength to the Romans?
23:45 Speaker 01 It is. It really is. And it's showing them their own resources. I think that's essential too. If anything, the Romans are almost undefeatable because of their manpower resources from Italy. And the way that they negotiate manpower with their allied citizens and cities in Italy. So it shows the Romans incredible resource in just pure manpower, people power. And it also, the Romans become a sea power in the First Punic War. Of course, and they hadn't really been before, although we think that they. Certainly were more advanced than they like to claim. The Romans always kind of undersell themselves in their own story to kind of show that it was destiny rather than their true grit that wins them their big empire.
24:29 Speaker 01 And yes, the technology, the sea power, there's all kinds of different attempts at different weapons in these naval battles that takes place. So yeah, Rome becomes in its way, it's the first time it goes off of the Italian peninsula in war, so it's a huge step. And really, they don't stop after this. I mean, they go on and in 150 years conquer the whole Mediterranean.
24:52 Dan Snow? They learn how to sail. The Romans are bad enough before, now they've got ships. Okay.
24:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
24:57 Dan Snow? So even though it's this massive 20-year, it seems quite geographically confined just to Sicily. Why doesn't it break out right across the Western Mediterranean?
25:05 Speaker 01 Well, it's interesting because it does. The one thing that happens in the first Punic War that I think is so important is that the Romans invade Africa. And nobody's done this to the Carthaginians before, except for Agathocles briefly in the century before that, a Syracusean tyrant. And the Romans, of course, who are allied with the Syracuseans, must have learned from them that Carthage is quite vulnerable at home. And that if you invade Africa, you can cut Carthage off from its allies and therefore the city itself becomes quite isolated. And nobody has thought about this in the centuries beforehand, but they certainly do. By the third century, and the Romans use this with an invasion and the consul Regulus
25:51 Speaker 01 invades Africa and really the Carthaginians are put under an enormous amount of stress and strain at home. And they almost lose everything. And it's only with this recruitment of new soldiers from the east and a Spartan general, whose name is Xanthippus, comes to the rescue and a lot of elephants. And the first Punic War is when we see Carthage using elephants for the first time in battle. And we really have this invasion of Africa as almost a playbook for the way in which to defeat Carthage. And so it'll be used, it was used by Regulus in the first Punic War, it'll be used by Scipio. In the Second Punic War and then it's of course used when Carthage is destroyed. So it's an important thing that happens and it tells the Romans and everybody in the Mediterranean how to defeat Carthage.
26:36 Dan Snow? So isn't that interesting? It's funny that Carthage is so powerful, but it has this essential vulnerability, which is strike at the heart of it, the empire itself.
26:43 Speaker 01 It does, and some people would argue that that seems to be because of the way in which they deal with their allies in Africa, who are really important. And you mentioned sort of 19th and 18th century wars, where we get bigger imperial wars that help to define new peoples and local peoples that come into the historical record really in the time. And this happens in the First Punic War and in the Second Punic Wars. We start to get the development of the Numidian people in North Africa as a historical entity. They've been there before in kingdoms, but they start to appear in the historical record for the first time in this moment and as allies and also as enemies of the Carthaginians.
27:20 Dan Snow? And if you're clever, if you're a clever enemy, you can cause trouble right in the backyard of the Carthaginians, split them from those North African allies. Okay, fascinating. That invasion of North Africa is destroyed. They do enjoy success in naval battles. And yet, what is it with the Romans? Roman history is littered with catastrophic defeats, but they don't know when they're beaten, those guys.
27:39 Speaker 01 I know. It's so amazing. I think any other power would have packed it in many times against the Carthaginians in the First Punic War, in the Second Punic War, and they didn't. They don't, and they're not using the same conventions as everybody else's. In what we call, you know, it's the Hellenistic world really this is. It's a post Alexander the Great world, in which we're talking about limitless conquest. And the Romans really embrace this idea of never say defeat almost. And they always, always come back with more power. And again, I think resting on the fact that they can draw on this enormous resource from Italy.
28:17 Dan Snow? It's the Soviet way of war.
28:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, it is, absolutely. Kutuzov and Napoleon.
28:23 Dan Snow? Just keep throwing new armies at it. So that's fascinating. So in the end, though, the Carthaginians suffer this decisive naval defeat. What, they go and bend a knee? They offer a peace treaty? What's the mechanics of the end of the war?
28:34 Speaker 01 So the mechanics are quite interesting. The city of Marsala is the sort of last holdout of Carthaginian power in Sicily at the time of the defeat in 241. And the Roman consul, who is charged with dealing with the aftermath, is named Lutatius, and that's this peace treaty that's signed is called the Peace of Lutatius. We know that the Carthaginian commander in Sicily at the time is a man whose name is Hamilcar Barca.
28:58 Dan Snow? Ah.
28:59 Speaker 01 So that is the father of the famous Hannibal Barca. And he is charged with making peace with Lutatius. And they meet, they have a peace treaty, and that's the end of the war. Sicily is lost, and the Carthaginians have to withdraw completely from Sicily. So that's a huge loss for them.
29:19 Dan Snow? And the Carthaginians, there is then trouble at home.
29:21 Speaker 01 There is. It's a classic sort of interaction between a civic or civilian government at home and the military in the field. The commander of the city of Marsala, which was known as Lillibaeum, his name is Gisco. And Gisco takes all the troops that have been fighting in Sicily and sends them unit by unit back to Carthage so that they can be paid and disbanded. So it's a demobilization, basically. But the Carthaginians in Carthage don't have the money, we think, which is part of the problem. And they just let all these mercenary soldiers or paid soldiers build up in the city of Carthage over the whole summer of 241. And it becomes a really unruly situation and what eventually turns into a civil war,
30:06 Speaker 01 what's called the Mercenary Rebellion. The Greek historian Polybius calls it the truceless war. And it really is both a rebellion of the allies in North Africa as well as sort of an engagement with the mercenary soldiers too. And it's pretty catastrophic for Carthage. It takes three years for them to defeat the soldiers that had been fighting for them who are now fighting against them.
30:28 Dan Snow? But the Carthaginians must come back in some way because we then get the Second Punic War, which is one of the greatest wars in the history of the ancient world.
30:36 Speaker 01 Absolutely. I mean, this is, again, we talk about Roman resources, but obviously the Carthaginian resources are equally impressive and that they can come back and come back so quickly. It's absolutely amazing. So from the end of the mercenary war until the beginning of the Second Punic War, our friend Hamilcar Barca takes his young sons and they go off to find new lands to conquer. And they go to Spain and Portugal, they go to The city of Cadiz and to what we call in antiquity the Iberian Peninsula. And it's there that they extend the Carthaginian territory. So Carthage has lost the territory of Sicily and southern Sardinia. And so they need to gain more territory. So they do that in inland Iberia.
31:20 Speaker 01 And it's so, so important because it's one of the wealthiest mineral resources anywhere in the Mediterranean. So there's this incredibly rich silver mines there. And they start to gain a huge amount of power and wealth by conquering in Spain.
31:34 Dan Snow? Slight sidetrack here. What is going on in Spain? Are there settled communities? Are there people using written words?
31:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:41 Dan Snow? Okay, fine. So this is.
31:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, there are. And so there's the coastal areas are settled by Phoenician speaking peoples. Places like Cadiz and Malaga and along what we think of as Andalusia today. And then the inland towns are hilltop fortified cities. And they're very sophisticated sort of urban centers and they trade. And they are the ones who are in control of the silver mines and the resources and they trade with the coastal areas. And there's all kinds of really interesting culture that grows up there. That is a mix of an indigenous Iberian and Phoenician culture there. And that's been going on and developing over the hundreds of years since the cities were founded by the Phoenicians.
32:21 Dan Snow? And Hamilcar sets about, he does a good job.
32:23 Speaker 01 He does. He becomes this sort of famous commander, Hamilcar Barca. And he conquers a big chunk of southern Spain for Carthage. Sets up a Carthaginian, perhaps when we talk about a Carthaginian empire, this is when we begin to talk about it. It's in the third century.
32:41 Dan Snow? Military control.
32:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're in charge, they're in control. Some people argue they're also very much in charge or the people who support them are very much in charge in Carthage too. And it's very quick and easy to go back and forth across the coast there. And so it's a, it's a very successful part of the world. They found new cities. New Carthaginian cities in Spain are founded in this period. In fact, Cartagena, the second Carthage is founded during this period of the sort of conquest of Spain by the Carthaginians, by Hamilcar. And Hamilcar dies. In two twenty nine, and then his son-in-law takes over because his young sons, Hannibal, Hasdrubal, and Maggo are not yet old enough to take control of the area,
33:24 Speaker 01 the military control in Spain. And then his son-in-law rules for a couple of years, and then eventually he dies. He's killed by local tribes, and Hannibal takes over in two hundred and twenty one B.C.
33:37 Dan Snow? And Hannibal has grown up in a military camp.
33:40 Speaker 01 Yep.
33:41 Dan Snow? He's had it with his mother's milk.
33:43 Speaker 01 Exactly. From the time he's nine years old, he goes with his father to Spain.
33:47 Dan Snow? Okay.
33:47 Speaker 01 And he grows up there. Now, he's had tutors. We know he has Greek tutors. He has tutors who teach him philosophy. He's very well educated, he and his brothers, as most Carthaginians would be. They would have spoken Greek, which was the language that everybody in the Mediterranean spoke at that time. He also obviously spoke Punic, Iberian. We think he might have had an Iberian wife. He's grown up fighting. He's grown up learning to fight, but also to study strategy and to be taught the skill of war, not just sort of random fighting. But it's a very, very considered education for the boys, these barkid boys, who are going to become the leaders of the Carthaginian military.
34:26 Dan Snow? Now, Eve, why do we see war break out again between Rome and Carthage? Is it because powerful neighbors get jealous of each other throughout history and tend to go to war? Is that the biggest strategic context? Or is, again, is there something that really impels people to conflict here?
34:43 Speaker 01 So I think we can honestly say we don't know, honestly, because the Roman sources and the Roman story is so confused and muddled and mixed and makes so little sense that even sources who were writing just after it happened called their own sources the common gossip of a barber shop.
35:00 Dan Snow? Okay.
35:01 Speaker 01 So we don't know. This story has been deeply constructed by the Romans. But that doesn't mean we can't kind of assume that what happens is, you know, Hannibal comes to power in two two one and continues his father and his uncle's conquests, pushing north into Spain.
35:17 Speaker 01 There has been a treaty signed between Roman Carthage in 226 B.C. And this is really important because it says there was an agreement that the Romans' sphere of influence would be everything north of what's called the Ebro River. And the Carthaginian sphere of influence would be south. It's called the Ebro Treaty.
35:34 Dan Snow? Roughly speaking, Barcelona's on the Ebro today.
35:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
35:37 Dan Snow? So we're into northern Spain now.
35:38 Speaker 01 Northern Spain.
35:39 Dan Snow? So the Romans get southern France into that Panamá Spain. Carthage gets everything else. So divided up the world.
35:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, or Roman allies too, because it's not even Rome. It's more Marseille or the Messalians, who are the Roman allies in southern Gaul, in southern France, who really are the ones. But then we have this event that happens out of the blue over a city called Saguntum, which is well south of the Ebro River.
36:02 Dan Snow? Okay.
36:02 Speaker 01 Well, south of the Ebro River, but all of a sudden in 219 B.C. Saguntum becomes this big issue. And that is where the war starts. It starts over the city of Saguntum. The Romans warn Hannibal, the leader of the Carthaginians, to leave the Saguntines alone. That's what they do. They have an embassy and Hannibal's like, but wait a second. That's in my territory. We have rumors and some of our more obscure sources about Romans interfering in internal Saguntine affairs and getting rid of pro-Carthaginian people within the city of Saguntum. We were talking about this at the very beginning, about what happens for allies and making choices over two big powers. And this is what happens to the people of Saguntum.
36:46 Speaker 01 They are having to choose. And naturally, as you do, I think, you don't always want to choose the powers that be who are bullying everybody around you. You want to stand up for yourself. And Saguntum is a really big, incredibly well-defended city, just off the coast of Spain today. And you can go to it and the walls, I mean, that anybody could take this city is extraordinary. And it really hasn't, I think it fell in the Peninsular War once, and that was it since Hannibal took it in 219 to 18. So this is where the war starts. The war starts over Saguntum.
37:17 Dan Snow? Is your gut telling you that there are people in Rome at this point who are thinking, A, we're worried about the, we're worried about the Barker family, worried about the Carthaginians, Hannibal seems quite useful? And B, You know, we want a war. These people are in our way. We've got manifest destiny to conquer the whole Western Mediterranean. It's going to suit me personally and politically and I'm a young man who wants to fight. Like, is, do you think there's a war party in Rome?
37:40 Speaker 01 Yes, definitely. I know, absolutely. And there is no question, because you know, the way Roman magistracies worked, when you became the consul, you were given a sphere of influence to operate in militarily, and you had one year to do the best you could with the conquest. I mean, it was a military machine. So definitely, there's that. We know that. And I would say that exactly the same thing about Hannibal. I think perhaps we also have to think about this idea that for 20 years after the end of the first Punic War, Carthage had been paying a war indemnity to Rome. So it's just after the end of that 20-year period that this happens. So there's definitely some connection here between the payments and the Romans going to war with Carthage. Who starts the second Punic War?
38:25 Speaker 01 Well, the Romans blame Hannibal 100%. It's Hannibal, Hannibal, Hannibal. It seems to be, both sides are pretty willing to fight this war. And it takes place over the city of Saguntum, who really suffer for it. Because Hannibal goes and lays siege to Saguntum. It's a long siege. It's six months, we think, it takes. And he eventually takes it and completely sacks and destroys the city. The Romans do nothing to help their so-called allies. So they claim they're allied to the Saguntines, but they don't do anything at that point. Nothing happens. So we don't know, again, was this a bit of a trap for Hannibal to make the moves that he did that give the Romans then the legitimate opportunity to declare
39:06 Speaker 01 war on Carthage? Maybe. That could be what happens. We don't really know. It's very much debated, but really interesting to consider. Trying to figure out what happened when you only have one side of the story is really, really difficult. But fascinating, we know what happened, and we know that's what starts the war.
39:24 Dan Snow? Listen to Dan Snow's History here, talking about the Punic Wars, more coming up.
39:34 Dan Snow? This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery. A detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.
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42:39 Dan Snow? So in 218, Rome declares war.
42:41 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm, in January of 218.
42:44 Dan Snow? Is there a plan, do you think, to land in North Africa again?
42:46 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
42:47 Dan Snow? Well, you know, again, like all great wars, short, sharp, shock, it'll be over by Christmas. We'll bring the boys home.
42:51 Speaker 01 They do two things, two-pronged attack. They're going to send one of their consuls with an army to Spain to take on the Carthaginians in Spain. And they're going to send their other consul, send him to Sicily, raising an army and a navy, and they're going to invade Africa. And that's all set in January. So by March, when the consuls take up their positions, they head out and they're starting off to raise their armies and do what they need to do. And so everybody knows this is coming, including Hannibal, of course, who lays siege to and destroys Saguntum and then takes all the spoils of the war down to deposit it at the temple of Heracles in Cadiz, who is Hannibal's patron god. And he goes back to New Carthage and he sets up his own plan,
43:36 Speaker 01 which he must have planned in advance as well, which is to take the war to Rome, rather than let the Romans come to Carthage and to Hannibal.
43:44 Dan Snow? Just to quit on that, though, it doesn't seem like Hannibal's spending much time in Carthage proper. Is there a certain tension there? So this is a war party, an engine of war that seems to be beginning and being sustained out of Iberia.
43:56 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And to what degree the barkits are in charge in the Senate in Carthage, Carthage is a republic like the Romans. We assume that they're on the ascendancy and they're really getting whatever they need from Carthage passed through the Senate and things like that.
44:12 Dan Snow? It's funny. So just as Carthage has outgrown its base entirely, it's almost like Carthaginian power in Iberia is almost outgrowing and becoming more important than that original base in Carthage.
44:20 Speaker 01 It is. And I think that the degree to which that is reflecting some dysfunction in the state of their republic is pretty clear. You know, at the same time, we see it in Rome, and there's always this danger of making parallels where none exists. But we see as Rome becomes more and more powerful, extends its territory more and more, its political system can't really sustain that. And it's the same with the Carthaginians.
44:44 Dan Snow? Okay, so you mentioned Hannibal's got the Carthaginians not going to sit back and take it. And instead Hannibal launches one of the great, surprising, ambitious, strategic counterstrokes in military history that everyone knows and talks about. And what is it?
45:00 Speaker 01 It is so audacious. And I think it's very difficult sometimes for us now to really even understand how crazy and bold it is, what he did. So instead of waiting for the Romans to attack, Hannibal launches a land attack on Italy. And to do that, of course, as we all know, he has to leave Spain, cross all of southern France.
45:23 Dan Snow? So through the Pyrenees Mountains.
45:25 Speaker 01 Fight right through the Pyrenees.
45:26 Dan Snow? Fight right through enemy territory, cross southern France, and then there's the Alps.
45:30 Speaker 01 Yep, and cross over the Alps and descend into Italy to take the fight to Rome. It's this sort of surprise attack, but of course, it takes six months, so it can't be a total surprise. But it is so bold. It is so extraordinary at the time that people, when it happens, almost don't believe that he's doing it. They cannot believe that this man and his army of almost 50 Thousand soldiers and horses and thirty seven elephants and pack animals and baggage and all the rest are moving themselves across all of Europe and up and over the Alps into Italy. It's just unbelievable achievement across the Rhone River, which is massive,
46:12 Speaker 01 to move elephants across the river and all the animals. And they're doing that under some pressure as well, knowing that the Romans are heading to Spain and heading to Africa too, so.
46:22 Dan Snow? It's a huge gamble in terms of it. They could have just died in the snows of the Alps.
46:27 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
46:27 Dan Snow? They could have drowned in the Rhone, but also a huge gamble because there's enemy counterattacks going, or there's enemy attacks going the other way.
46:32 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And the Romans and the Carthaginian armies pass each other at Marseille. Hannibal's about four days north of Marseille and Publius Scipio, the elder is in Marseille where his allies are, and they almost contact on the Rhone. But Hannibal knows that he cannot fight Scipio and Marseille together in France, in Gaul. That would just be insane. So he needs to get to Italy. The reason he wants to get to Italy is because he knows that the Romans aren't the most popular people among the Italians at this point. They have conquered all of Italy and we have to always remember that, that Italy was not Rome. And so Hannibal knows that he can get allies in Italy. He can draw
47:15 Speaker 01 the Italian allies away from the Romans.
47:18 Dan Snow? Just as the Romans did in North Africa. In the first Punic War, he's thinking, well, hang on, we can do the same.
47:22 Speaker 01 And that's his plan. But to do it, he has to get his army across the Alps. And the Alps at that time are where monsters live. They're the place of myth and legend. The High Alpine Passes all are over two thousand meters. By the time he gets there, it's October, so there's snow, of course, on the High Alps at this point. It's an absolutely extraordinary feat how he fed his army across this huge march. It's just really shows us how little perhaps we understand of the technicalities and also the the food supply, the food chains of these towns in Iberia, in Gaul at this time. It's not an area we know a lot about and it's really interesting. Shows us more and more.
48:05 Dan Snow? Because we should be clear, you say Scipio is moving the other way, but he would be on a boat. He'd be on a ship, right?
48:09 Speaker 01 He's on a ship and he's coming from Pisa.
48:12 Dan Snow? So you're sort of harbor hopping along the coast. Okay.
48:14 Speaker 01 Stopping in at allies and...
48:16 Dan Snow? And so no one's, as far as we know, no one ever marched an army across this stretch of territory in European history to that point.
48:22 Speaker 01 To that point, only the Greek god Heracles or Hercules has done it. And that's what Hannibal is channeling at his point is this mythical story of the very last labor of the Greek hero Hercules, who had gone to the west of the Mediterranean and then marches the cattle of Geryon back into Greece. He's the only one who supposedly did this. And even the road that Hannibal's following was called in ancient times, the way of Heracles or Hercules. So Hannibal very consciously knew what he was doing. He's channeling this story. He's using the myth and he's using that kind of PR. You really need your soldiers to believe in you in order to get them to do this, you know, because you're staring at these massive mountains.
49:04 Speaker 01 And so he's channeling this idea that this god, who is a Carthaginian god, Melkart, who's equated to the Greek Heracles, is with them on this journey. And it's a labor, it's a quest almost, it's like a mythical quest.
49:17 Dan Snow? And so suddenly, you, a Roman policymaker, is thinking, we're going to fight a war against Carthage, not in Italy, but we're probably going to be fighting maybe Sardinia, maybe Spain, Corsica, Sicily, maybe North Africa. Suddenly, a thunderbolt arrives in your backyard in northern Italy.
49:35 Speaker 01 Yep.
49:35 Dan Snow? I mean, just the opposite to where you think you're going to be fighting.
49:38 Speaker 01 Exactly. It's unbelievable. And actually, you know, for the first few years of this war, it's really Hannibal's war, he's in charge, the Romans are on the back foot almost the whole time. They have so miscalculated or underestimated their enemies at this point that they just continually seem to be making bad decisions and causing chaos. One of the best decisions, though, made by a Roman commander at this point is this Publius Scipio, the elder. He sends half of his army on to Spain and he returns to Italy with the other half of his army so that he knows Hannibal's going over the Alps. He sails back to Pisa and marches up to the north of Italy to meet him. So... That's probably one of the big moves that saves Rome in this period because first of all,
50:20 Speaker 01 he sends the half of his army on to Spain and that does destabilize Hannibal's supply. And also then there's troops in the north of Italy to face Hannibal when he comes down. So those two things are really important, but Hannibal marches up the Alps. He decimates his army in doing this as well. I mean, his numbers, if we believe what he wrote on a bronze tablet in the south of Italy, a decade or so later, he really almost lost half of his army in crossing the Alps and fighting abandonment and also to the elements as well. So it's an extraordinary sacrifice.
50:57 Dan Snow? Because these local people of the Alps are rolling rocks down on them and they're not happy about this.
51:01 Speaker 01 So you can imagine you're a local chieftain in the Alps and this huge army comes baggage train filled with silver and metals and all the weapons. I mean, the sheer value of these soldiers to local chieftains in this area are just extraordinary. So they're really vulnerable. They have a guide. The Romans in the south of France means they can't take the easier southern route, so they have to go up further north and cross over one of the higher passes. And they have to rely on guides and they do that. And it really is just such an amazing tale. And we have these great descriptions of it. And you can really imagine the way in which the soldiers who made it down from the Alps must have believed they had been guided by a hero, not just anybody.
51:45 Dan Snow? He then wins a string of victories, doesn't he?
51:48 Speaker 01 Massive victories, yeah, one after the other. He outmaneuvers out things and out sort of Romans, the Romans. And that's the way I like to think about it. He really does think, what are they going to do? And I'm going to counter it. And his strategic brilliance in this period is extraordinary. And so he wins four, one small, and then three big battles, one at the river Trebia in the north on the winter solstice in December of 218. And it's just an amazing description of winter warfare, again, something we hardly ever see in the ancient world, fighting in the wintertime. And we have descriptions of it like people Boiling up their skin and eating porridge, how Hannibal takes good care of his soldiers to make sure they're capable of fighting.
52:31 Speaker 01 And how unprepared the Romans are for fighting in the cold. And it's a bit of a wipeout. The consul who's come back from Marseille, Publius Scipio is pretty seriously wounded at this time. They have to wait for reinforcements and all these sorts of things happen. So it's a big disaster. And then the winter sets in and fighting stops for the winter. And then in this early spring, Hannibal sets out south. Heading into Etruria, so the land of Tuscany and Umbria. And he fights another enormous battle in two hundred and seventeen at Lake Trazimeno. It's actually an ambush. He destroys one of the Roman legions of the consul, Gaius Flaminius, and kills the consul. And then he defeats the other consul's cavalry.
53:15 Speaker 01 And so Rome is left completely in turmoil and chaos. They elect a dictator at that point to take over their state because their consul has been killed. The other consul is cut off from Rome. So he's in, really, in two seventeen B.C., Hannibal's in pretty great military control of the north of Italy.
53:35 Dan Snow? And so I'm fascinated by that, Saito, because he's got a different strategy for dealing with Hannibal, hasn't he?
53:40 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly. His name is Fabius Maximus, and they call him Fabius Cunctator in Latin, which means the delayer.
53:46 Dan Snow? Initially, it's a bit of an insult, right?
53:48 Speaker 01 Exactly. He's considered to be a bit timid and, you know, this idea of bold Roman leadership at this point. We're undefeatable, we're great, is being shattered. And so Fabius decides to hold back and just basically track Hannibal around Italy. The Romans have superior numbers. They still have a huge amount of allies. They can try and contain him. They follow him around into the area of La Marca, which is on the east of the Apennines, down into Puglia, into Campania. And Hannibal's going around trying to gain allies. He really knows that he needs to win another big victory in order to get what he needs from the southern part of Italy at this point.
54:29 Speaker 01 And so Fabius's don't take Hannibal on and no, you know, Romans want to take Hannibal on at this point.
54:36 Dan Snow? He must be sort of shadowing him.
54:38 Speaker 01 Shadowing him.
54:39 Dan Snow? Quite threat.
54:40 Speaker 01 But Hannibal's taunting the Romans. So while Fabius shadows him, Hannibal's burning fields and he's, he's causing all kinds of mayhem and the Romans are shown as not being able to protect their allies in these regions. And so it's causing all kinds of turmoil. And again, all these local city states have to make big decisions at this point about who to support.
55:00 Dan Snow? Oof, stop, you're in a rock and hard place.
55:02 Speaker 01 Very hard place. But the winter of two seventeen, two sixteen is really the political pressure in Rome changes and Fabius, his policies are overturned. They elect new consuls and they decide to take Hannibal on in a huge battle and muster all their resources and go down to the south of Italy and fight Hannibal. And that happens in two sixteen.
55:26 Dan Snow? And that's exactly what Hannibal wants.
55:28 Speaker 01 Exactly. He just cannot wait for that. He has scouted all winter long for the perfect place to fight a battle. He chooses a city called Cannae, which is near the river Ophidus in Apulia today. And that's where he sets himself up and waits for the Romans to come. And they come. They come down from the center and north of Italy and supposedly, and again, we, we know that we can't always believe numbers in ancient warfare, but supposedly eighty thousand soldiers with them. Hannibal has maximum, probably fifty, forty would be a likely number, but it could be as high as fifty. So half the number almost than the
56:09 Speaker 01 Romans. So he has a battle to fight and he has to outthink his opponents. He can't possibly outstrengthen them. He can't win by might. He has to win by strategy.
56:21 Dan Snow? And the Romans oblige by seeing the trap and then just hurling themselves into it.
56:25 Speaker 01 Hurling. And, and it's so brilliant. People have studied Hannibal for centuries and centuries since then, but they really do. He's been testing what the Romans will do in the previous battles. And you can see that at Cannae. So he's literally been setting up his lines and seeing how the Roman soldiers react to different maneuvers. And we see him playing out all of these different things in the Battle of Cannae. And he is able to draw basically this. Huge, long, extended Roman front line into a centre and he surrounds them, outflanks the cavalry and they surround them and slaughter them. I mean.
56:59 Dan Snow? Possibly the bloodiest day in human history to that point.
57:01 Speaker 01 Possibly. And when they kill people in these kinds of close combat, it's it's cutting your hamstrings and doing that kind of thing. So a lot of people are wounded fatally, but not dead. And the stories of this scene the next day is really amazing, where it's like this just bloody battlefield with steam rising up off all these half-dead bodies. And it's an extraordinary event. The Carthaginians lose a lot of soldiers too, though. That's one of the big things, and they have less to lose. So although it's a great victory.
57:37 Dan Snow? Almost a epic victory.
57:38 Speaker 01 It's almost a.
57:39 Dan Snow? But it's weird because military historians can't agree. Sometimes they say it's the great decisive victory of all time, even though, as we'll discover, it doesn't win them the war. So it's not decisive in that respect. Depending on the historian's point of view, it's anything they want it to be that battle. It's a fascinating thing.
57:51 Speaker 01 It's an extraordinary battle. It's a battle of Roman resilience because it shows just how much they could suffer and come back from. It's strategic brilliance, absolutely extraordinary that he manages to survive it. But it takes a huge toll on both sides. So, yeah, it doesn't actually have the impact it should.
58:11 Dan Snow? One Roman consul kills.
58:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, one active consul is killed and the other flees and heads to a town with about 10,000 survivors. But on the field of that battle are many ex-consuls and many of the high elite serving magistrates of the Roman state. I mean, it is absolutely devastating to the elite culture at Rome.
58:33 Dan Snow? Shame for the Carthaginians that young Scipio wasn't there. But anyway, so after the battle, it's always talked about as one of the great tactical victories of all time. And then strategically after the battle, with hindsight, Hannibal mishandles the advantage, would you say? I mean, people want him to just march on Rome and capture Rome at that point, but he doesn't do that.
58:50 Speaker 01 No, he doesn't. And one of his lieutenants famously says, Maharbal famously says, "Hannibal, you know how to win a battle, but not the war," sort of thing. Hannibal probably isn't in a position, it's almost 600 kilometers to Rome from where Canai is, to march on Rome and take a huge fortified city at this point. He knows how difficult that is. So he sends an ambassador, along with some prisoners, to negotiate a peace. Because any general in the third century B.C., anywhere in the whole Mediterranean, having won a victory of this proportions, yeah, would expect the opposing side to sue for peace. And they don't.
59:28 Dan Snow? Wow.
59:28 Speaker 01 The Romans are like, "No way, no peace, get out of here."
59:31 Dan Snow? And that is one of the most extraordinary decisions in the ancient world, isn't it?
59:34 Speaker 01 It is, it really is.
59:36 Dan Snow? They've lost virtually their entire field force, effectively.
59:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, they've lost, I mean, enormous number of soldiers, of allies. Many, many, many of the allies are dead on the field. They refuse to give in. They refuse to make peace. They refuse to accept that they've lost.
59:52 Dan Snow? Just go and get some more soldiers.
59:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, get some more soldiers, do all kinds of weird things. They sacrifice a couple of people, human sacrifice, human sacrifice at that point in Rome. They send envoys to the oracle of God Apollo in Delphi at this point. We have all these amazing things happening. But they gather together more forces and they gather together more armies. And they are able to then continue to return to Fabius's strategy of isolate Hannibal, of track him around Italy, of never, ever fight him again in the field, in Italy.
1:00:32 Dan Snow? Don't go away, more Punate Wars coming up.
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1:02:11 Dan Snow? But they also have the courage, don't they, to send what few troops they do have to keep causing trouble for Hannibal elsewhere in this Mediterranean world? So it's a temptation to withdraw everything just to protect Rome, but they don't. And those counterattacks are probably quite important.
1:02:26 Speaker 01 Very important. And another thing that we always forget, and I think that we, you know, all eyes on Hannibal for this whole period. And that actually belies what's going on in the Mediterranean. It's a war of different theatres. And the theatre in Spain is just as important as the one in Italy, and perhaps more so in the end. So it's actually the fact that we talked about at Marseille, the good decision made by the elder Publius Scipio to go off and send his brother with half of his forces to Spain, and they continue to fight there. And they fight all the way through the period that Hannibal's in Italy. And it's really that, it means Carthage is distracted, it means Carthaginian resources are really thinned out, and it means Hannibal can't necessarily get resupplied in Italy.
1:03:08 Speaker 01 Hannibal does not win a port on the west side of Italy as an ally. And that's really, really important, too, because they can't, then Carthage can't supply Hannibal by sea. So yeah, there's all kinds of problems that happen, but... It takes a long time and it's a huge fight. I mean, the battle over cities like Capua, over Tarentum and Syracuse are absolutely fundamental in the way that the war is won. And these cities go over to Hannibal's side, these big important cities that are Greek and Oscan, Capua is, which is in the, near Naples.
1:03:43 Dan Snow? Yeah, we say Greek, they're of Greek origin.
1:03:45 Speaker 01 Greek origin, yeah.
1:03:46 Dan Snow? Yeah, they've been conquered by the Romans, yeah.
1:03:48 Speaker 01 And they go over to Hannibal. So Hannibal wins big important allies in this period from two sixteen down to about two oh nine. He wins and then loses these allies in battle after battle. From the Roman perspective, they outmaneuver him and really manage to bring back the allies to their side.
1:04:08 Dan Snow? Well, and when the Romans, when the Romans recapture an ally that's betrayed them, it's pretty ugly.
1:04:14 Speaker 01 It's very ugly.
1:04:15 Dan Snow? Yeah. So these Southern Italians like, I don't know, geez, their choice is pretty grim.
1:04:20 Speaker 01 It is really grim and the impact of Hannibal and the Second Punic War in Southern Italy is felt for centuries and centuries afterwards. And we forget that as well. Later, the Romans will fight a civil war, they call the Social War in around ninety B.C. And many people connect that to the Hadebalic War as well because of the way that the allies are treated in the south of Italy is so harsh. And so these massive sieges take place of these cities and the Romans eventually are able to take them back and it's pretty brutal.
1:04:50 Dan Snow? And Hannibal can't be everywhere at once, can he?
1:04:52 Speaker 01 No. He has maybe fifty thousand soldiers. He can't compete. You know, in two hundred and twelve, I think, I mean, pulling this number off the top of my head, I think it's twenty seven legions. The Romans raised twenty seven legions. So when Augustus, when Octavian becomes the emperor of Rome in the first century B.C., he has twenty five legions. So they are able to raise more troops in this period than even two centuries later with Augustus. So it's incredible. The resources they win as well by taking these cities, reboots the whole Roman economy. So the denarius, the most famous of all the Roman coins that we have, is first founded in two eleven B.C. after the sack of the city of Syracuse.
1:05:34 Speaker 01 And so it's a really, really important economic moment for the Romans. It's a moment where they muster their full potential in terms of abilities, man powers. They also train a whole new generation of soldiers. In fighting and they fight like Hannibal. I mean Hannibal trains and makes the Romans better.
1:05:54 Dan Snow? Yeah, it's a savage apprenticeship. You either you either die or you learn how to do it. There's so many places we could alight on, but let's get to the end of the Second Punic War because the Romans, well, they play the hits from the First Punic War. They at some stage, they must feel confident enough to threaten Carthage in its backyard again.
1:06:09 Speaker 01 Yes, that's exactly it. So Hannibal is hemmed in in the south of Italy and he's really not able to maneuver much outside of what we think of as Calabria, I guess, today in parts of the boot of Italy. And the war in Spain has been won and it's been won by a young commander whose name is Scipio, Publius Scipio the Younger, whose uncle and father had been fighting the Carthaginians in Spain in the early part of the war. And the young Scipio, who is a survivor of Cana and is a survivor of many battles, takes on the challenge of fighting the Carthaginians in Spain and he wins. He wins and he takes
1:06:50 Speaker 01 new Carthage, the Carthaginian city there. And then he comes back and he's given the command to go to Africa to take Carthage. And basically Hannibal's still in Italy. So we have to imagine Hannibal's still in Italy. Hannibal's brother, the youngest brother Mago, is in the north of Italy, in the area around Genoa. And his middle brother, Hustrbo, has been killed in 208. So Scipio launches attacks and he does it from Sicily and he does it from launching sea raiding all this time along the coast of Africa. And then he basically takes an invasion into Africa, following along the footsteps of what we've already talked about from Regulus and everyone else.
1:07:30 Dan Snow? And it certainly works because Hannibal does go home to protect his.
1:07:33 Speaker 01 He does. It's interesting. He's a bit of a reluctant warrior at this point. I think he's more of somebody who, and it's more biased, we don't know if it's true or not, but who are sort of like, you should be making peace with Rome here. We have no legs to stand on. But yes, Hannibal goes back reluctantly. He leaves southern Italy. It's obviously part of a negotiated deal. There's no question that this is some kind of negotiated deal. Scipio has been marauding around Africa very successfully. Really important to Scipio's success are the Numidians who have joined the Romans. So they had been allies of Carthage. They've seen the writing on the wall and they've switched sides, especially a king whose name is Massanissa, who is from the Massili tribe and is just an extraordinary guy who lives to be ninety something years old,
1:08:16 Speaker 01 has forty eight children and fights really right through this whole period. He's just unbelievable. So Scipio has these great allies and he's able to really force Carthage's hand and they negotiate some kind of deal in which Hannibal is returned from Italy. And he sails from Italy down to the region of modern Seus, which is on the east coast of Tunisia today, which seems to be where his family may have had an estate or something. And he camps out there and Scipio and Massanissa eventually come together and they meet Hannibal at a place called Zama, which is in Tunisia today.
1:08:54 Dan Snow? I remember my dad reads about this when I was a kid. They found a way to negate the effect of the Carthaginian elephants at this point, don't they?
1:09:00 Speaker 01 Yes, that's right. That's right. There's some great scenes around Zama. You know, Scipio, the young Roman hero, meets Hannibal, the old Carthaginian general, the day before the battle and they have a discussion.
1:09:11 Dan Snow? Through the great military minds of ancient history.
1:09:13 Speaker 01 Absolutely. It's an epic scene, repeated over and over again. And they don't agree on making any peace and then they fight a battle. And Scipio has the superior fighting force at this point. Hannibal's is a bit pulled together, but he has elephants. And the elephants are of almost no effect because Scipio spreads out his front line and the elephants just run by and they're not very maneuverable. Of course, you can't turn an elephant around very quickly. And so they really become obsolete in the battle at all. There's all kinds of chaos within Hannibal's ranks. It's a bit of a mess, a bit of a bloody mess. But even the Roman sources say Hannibal did a pretty good job fighting Scipio, but it's hard to really know. That's what the accounts of battles are difficult to understand.
1:09:52 Dan Snow? Sure, especially at 2000 years range. So that is the end, that Zama is the end.
1:09:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, 201, peace treaty is signed. This time it's a 50-year war indemnity.
1:10:03 Dan Snow? That indemnity, right.
1:10:04 Speaker 01 That has to be paid from Carthage to Rome. For 50 years, they have to pay the Romans a certain amount every year. Hannibal doesn't die on the field of battle, as we might assume. Hannibal lives on. He becomes a magistrate at Carthage in the years after the war, in the 90s B.C., 190s B.C. He also then has to flee Carthage because of internal turmoil in the city. So he's exiled from the city of Carthage. He goes to the eastern Mediterranean. He sits at the court of Antiochus, the great seleucid king, and continues to advocate fighting the Romans from a different place. And eventually, eventually, eventually, his options are all narrowed down and he takes his own life in 182 B.C. Lives to be pretty old for a guy who fought the way he did.
1:10:49 Dan Snow? Yeah. And now the Romans, after the Second Punic War, like the First Punic War, they've increased in strength and knowledge and capabilities. They don't stop there. They're now charging across the Mediterranean. We're starting to see the Roman world really evolve here, as we might recognize it, those maps of the Mediterranean world.
1:11:06 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
1:11:07 Dan Snow? More in Spain, Orkens, Greece.
1:11:10 Speaker 01 All of it, and into Syria and the Kingdom of Antiochus.
1:11:16 Dan Snow? And is that Second Punic War kind of a launchpad for that? Is that, is the timing, it's not coincidental?
1:11:20 Speaker 01 Not at all. And the Second Punic War connects Greece and Carthage against the Romans, because there's an alliance that's formed between the Macedonian king Philip and Hannibal in 216.
1:11:33 Dan Snow? So the Romans, okay, you're next.
1:11:34 Speaker 01 Yes, and they've also already been fighting in Illyria, so Croatia and down the coast of the Adriatic Sea. They've been fighting that whole time, and they fight against the Macedonians as well in 205. So during the end of the Second Punic War, they're actually fighting a war in Greece already, and they just continue to fight and win and expand. The interesting thing is Carthage really thrives in this period.
1:12:04 Dan Snow? Bounces back.
1:12:05 Speaker 01 Bounces back in a way that is really interesting. So physically, we see the city growing, we see real visible prosperity in the city. We see it in the archaeology, we can see big villas being built. We hear about a lot of political chaos in the city as well, and we know there's the aftermath of the war is hugely traumatic for so many people. So there's this juxtaposition between political chaos and material wealth, but we know that Carthage is very wealthy. They're so wealthy that they offer to pay the entire war indemnity
1:12:37 Dan Snow? What?
1:12:38 Speaker 01 off ten years after the war.
1:12:41 Dan Snow? Wow.
1:12:41 Speaker 01 So yeah, in one ninety-one B.C., they say to the Romans, oh, we'll pay you everything we owe you, just leave us alone. And the Romans are like, eh, no, we're not doing that. They want that idea of a yearly tribute from Carthage to Rome because they think that's a way of keeping Carthage in its place. And they're managing all these other cities that they've just conquered and places that they're fighting battles with. So it's really a way of trying to settle their Mediterranean holdings. But it's a difficult time for Rome. It's a really chaotic time for the city of Rome and for the political situation in Rome too. So it's a really interesting period. We don't know very much about Carthage because literally, as you can imagine, our sources are all following Rome as they conquer and Greece as they conquer against the Seleucids in Syria, and they're not necessarily paying
1:13:24 Speaker 01 attention to what's happening in Carthage. So we don't have the historical evidence that we do for the Second Punic War. So we have to rely a lot more on archaeology really for that kind of thing.
1:13:33 Dan Snow? And yet Rome does discover it has the bandwidth for one last war against Carthage. Is this unfinished business? What's going on here?
1:13:40 Speaker 01 Yeah. Fifty years of war indemnity being paid from Carthage to Rome ends in
1:13:49 Dan Snow? Not this whole thing again?
1:13:50 Speaker 01 One fifty-one B.C.
1:13:51 Dan Snow? You're kidding.
1:13:52 Speaker 01 And just two years after that, the Romans are there laying siege to Carthage. So it's a complicated situation in Africa because Massanissa, the Numidian ally who had joined the Romans against Carthage eventually, has been given a big chunk of territory. He's the strongest Roman ally in Africa. And so he constantly takes Carthaginian land away during this whole fifty years and the Carthaginians have to kind of suck it up because they are not allowed to wage war in Africa without Roman permissions. The Romans never give them permission. So it's kind of just like that. So when the war payments end in one fifty one, there's a group of Roman senators who go to Carthage and they
1:14:34 Speaker 01 look around at what's happening there. And they're like, wow, things are really nice here in this beautiful city on the sea and it's with this huge wealthy port and, you know, the Mediterranean trade has expanded over this whole period despite constant warfare. And they're like, Carthage is really thriving. And so some of those old Romans, people like the very famous Cato the Elder, who are hawks, they they're the war party are just like, no, that's it. We have to destroy Carthage.
1:15:06 Dan Snow? So can he remember the depredations, the Second Punic War? Does he remember?
1:15:10 Speaker 01 Yes. Yeah. Yeah, he would. Definitely. He would very much.
1:15:14 Dan Snow? He's like, we need to stamp this out.
1:15:15 Speaker 01 We need to stamp this out. And it's an internal political situation that's happening. It's not about Carthage really itself. This is about competition within Rome's elite and how and what kind of Rome it's going to be. Now, Rome is very imperial in these periods. It's not like a friendly, nice, oh, let's, you know, make nice provinces and make everybody feel happy. In Roman, this is a period of incredible, hard conquest and warfare. Cato believes that Carthage has to be destroyed, that Carthage will never, ever be able to sit within a Roman dominated Mediterranean. But other people who are directly related to it as well, like a man whose name is Scipio Nasica, so of this great Scipio family who fought Hannibal,
1:15:59 Speaker 01 believes Carthage must be saved. And so we know this debate is going on. So Talenda es Carthago is the more famous Latin phrase of Carthage must be destroyed.
1:16:08 Dan Snow? Which Cato says again and again.
1:16:09 Speaker 01 Over and over.
1:16:10 Dan Snow? Annoys everyone.
1:16:11 Speaker 01 Yes. And while Scipio responds, Carthage must be saved. So it's a political split, it's a military split. It's again about individuals getting military glory and lots of them are willing to take on Carthage. Carthage one more time to live the dream of defeating Carthage because that had in the Roman mind. That's where their greatest victories were. And so they go and a little skirmish war breaks out between the Numidians and the Carthaginians. After the peace treaty ends and the Romans use that as a pretext to lay siege to the city.
1:16:43 Dan Snow? And it's not easy.
1:16:44 Speaker 01 It's not easy. It's an unbelievable scene where you have the Roman consul sitting just up the coast from Carthage. And he brings the Carthaginian envoys and he's like, well, you have to give up all your weapons. And so the Carthaginians are like, okay, well, we better do this. So they give up all their weapons. They have to hand over three hundred of their children as hostages to the Romans. And we have eyewitness account of this almost from the Greek historian Polybius. And we have this like scenes where the mothers are watching their children being put onto Roman ships and sailing away to Sicily. And they're jumping in the water and swimming after them. I mean, the emotional intensity of the descriptions of what happens at Carthage in this period are just extraordinary.
1:17:27 Speaker 01 Considering it's from a Roman perspective, but they give up their children, they give up all their arms. They go back to the Roman consul and he says, no, that's not going to work. We actually need you to move from your land. You have to move from your city. You have to give up your city and move fifteen kilometers inland. You're no longer allowed to live where Carthage is. So you're telling people to give up your religion, your identity, your family, your history, your everything about you when you do that. And the Carthaginians are like, no, we can't do that. And they say no. And the siege happens and they last for three years. It's unbelievable how resilient they they show themselves to be.
1:18:07 Speaker 01 They build new fleets, they defeat the Romans, they do all kinds of crazy counter siege work. But eventually, eventually, eventually, under the leadership of a man whose name is Scipio Amilianna. So there's Scipio is all through this story. He breaks through into the port, which is thought to be the weakest area of the city walls that surround Carthage. And the Roman soldiers break in after three years and they fight their way. Through the city, street by street, the people in the city are still resisting. They're doing everything they can to stop the Romans, but all the people are killed. The city is burnt, it burns to the ground. And Carthage, as we know it, is an ancient Punic city and in one forty six B.C.
1:18:53 Speaker 01 And the ground is consecrated at that moment. It's not sown with salt, which is one of these great rumors that gets started. Somebody has done a paper about this and the first time that turns up is like in the seventeenth century. And it just appears, but they never saw Carthage with salt, but they consecrate it. So they curse anyone living there again.
1:19:12 Dan Snow? Although you do get a Roman Carthage.
1:19:14 Speaker 01 Well, you do.
1:19:15 Dan Snow? So, yeah.
1:19:15 Speaker 01 So the curse seems to be overturned.
1:19:17 Dan Snow? Okay, okay.
1:19:17 Speaker 01 Not too long after.
1:19:18 Dan Snow? If it's salt, why the Romans build a lovely city there?
1:19:21 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:19:22 Dan Snow? But it's what's called a Carthaginian peace, which is seen as this resolving a situation by just annihilation.
1:19:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, it's absolute annihilation. It's considered by many people as one of the most egregious destructions by any power of another. And I guess it's because the Carthaginian people disappear. Whereas the city of Corinth is destroyed in exactly the same year by the Romans in Greece. But the Greek culture of Corinth lives on, and so it doesn't disappear in the same way. But because Carthage itself is an outpost of this long Phoenician, long held Phoenician culture. The destruction of it, the selling into slavery of all its people, this sort of burning to the ground of the whole city itself. Means that Carthage itself is lost, it's gone in any way.
1:20:08 Dan Snow? Is that one of the reasons you're talking about these sources? We only have Roman sources. Do we think there might have been archives and libraries and texts that were there that were destroyed in that great?
1:20:14 Speaker 01 Yes, not only are there, do we think there were libraries and things? And we know some things were given to be translated, agricultural treatises of all things, telling us about how the Carthaginians grew things.
1:20:25 Dan Snow? Important info.
1:20:26 Speaker 01 Very technologically advanced people, but also we know there were lots of pro Carthaginian histories written by people in Sicily, by Greeks and things like that and others, that some of our sources had access to and talk about. But we don't have any evidence of.
1:20:43 Dan Snow? Bestsellers under the Roman Empire.
1:20:44 Speaker 01 No, exactly.
1:20:46 Dan Snow? Didn't get propagated, yeah, went out of print.
1:20:48 Speaker 01 And also this idea, as you say, the Romans found a new city on the city of Carthage, because it's too strategically important not to. It's right at the centre of the Mediterranean. And so this new Carthage that's built there has to somehow engage with this old story. And that's when we get what we were talking about at the beginning, the story of Dido and Aeneas coming together. It's in this newly founded Roman city that tells the story of the old Carthaginian wars and the Trojans and the mythological foundations. So it's a way of rationalising almost the reoccupation of this incredible place. And they build a big prosperous city there. And it becomes, again, this really important city in the Mediterranean.
1:21:30 Speaker 01 It becomes the centre for Western Christianity in the late Roman Empire. And it's got an extraordinary history. And then, of course, with the Arab conquests, the city of Tunis becomes the centre of another important empire in the Middle Ages, the Hafids. So the area is so strategically important that it thrives on. But the little bit that was ancient Carthage is gone.
1:21:50 Dan Snow? What a tour de force. Thank you for taking me through the whole history of Carthage. Eve, thank you. What's your book called?
1:21:56 Speaker 01 My book is called Carthage: A New History of an Ancient Empire.
1:22:00 Dan Snow? Go and get everybody. Thank you so much for coming on.
1:22:01 Speaker 01 Thank you. A pleasure.
1:22:07 Speaker 01 Hello, everyone. Tristan here from the Ancients Podcast. I hope you enjoyed that awesome conversation between Dan and Eve. And if you did, well, I've got good news for you because Eve and I are doing a special Ancients live show all about this civilisation. Dido, Hannibal, the epic struggle with Rome for supremacy in the Western Mediterranean. We're covering all that and so much more. It's happening on Friday, the 5th of September at 7pm at King's Place in London. Get your tickets now. I'd love to see you there.
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