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The three Punic Wars make up possibly one of the most intense chapters in Roman history,
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so if you want the full story, please check out this video on the Roman Republic.
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The short of it is that over the centuries the tiny town of Rome grew and grew until it conquered the entire Italian peninsula.
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Basically they leveled up, and Carthage was the next level.
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The first war can be roughly attributed to a miscommunication with some Sicilian pirates.
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While Carthage and Rome may have been destined to fight each other at some point or another,
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they ultimately came to blows on account of both being called in to Sicily
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to settle a fight between the city of Syracuse and some rowdy pirates.
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Rome and Carthage kind of just tripped face-first into war,
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and spent most of the 23-year-long war not actually fighting each other.
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The issue was Carthage had been a long-standing naval power in the Mediterranean
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but Rome had no navy to speak of so Rome really needed a navy, and quick.
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This is another of many instances of Rome adapting to situations really well.
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Say what you will about Rome – they were immensely clever
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and had a great habit of taking good ideas, methods, technologies and techniques from other cultures
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and using them to great effect.
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In this case the Romans found a few beached and sunk Carthaginian triremes and quinqueremes
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and proceeded to reverse-engineer an entire fleet of ships.
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You know, just casually, as you do.
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Rome's first aquatic outings weren't all that fruitful,
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but at battles like Cape Ecnomus, which is arguably one of the biggest naval battles in history,
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Rome pulled out wins.
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Ultimately, Rome won the war, claiming Sicily for itself and forcing heavy reparations on Carthage.
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They also decided to take Corsica and Sardinia, because screw you, Carthage, these are mine now.
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In the decades following, the Carthaginians, led by the general Hamilcar Barca,
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colonized the seaside coast of Spain, largely for the purposes of mining silver to pay their Roman reparations.
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Little did Rome know Hamilcar, his son Hannibal and the other Carthaginians in Spain
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were furious over losing Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia
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and had been casually scheming to completely destroy Rome for almost two whole decades.
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In 219 BC Hannibal sacked the Roman allied Saguntum in Spain and Rome, defensively of course, declared war.
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Hannibal – the madman – proceeded to rather famously Leroy Jenkins his way across the goddamn Alps
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with over 40,000 soldiers and 37 elephants.
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Elephants!
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And while elephants aren't particularly scary to us,
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if you're an ancient Roman who's never seen an elephant before,
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that thing is a four-legged giant with two spears and a snake coming out of its face.
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Bottom line, they're monsters.
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The Romans thought they were
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MONSTERS!
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Granted, most of Hannibal's elephants died while crossing the Alps, perhaps unsurprisingly,
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but it doesn't take a lot of elephants to have a scary amount of elephant on the battlefield.
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I genuinely can't convey how viscerally terrifying the mere mention of Hannibal's name would have been to a Roman.
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Now, to change the topic away from the Carthaginian bogeyman,
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since we're talking about Roman military history here,
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I'll refer you to my video on classical warfare for some context.
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It mostly talks about hoplite warfare but I cover the classic Roman republican army in the later portion,
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although as it turns out the Roman army that conquered the Italian peninsula was basically a hoplite army,
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so honestly the whole video is probably relevant to Roman history.
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Anyway, after arriving in Italy, Hannibal demonstrated his tactical brilliance
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by immediately winning two battles in northern Italy through guerrilla and ambush tactics.
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Hannibal and his armies would proceed to stay in Italy,
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effectively behind enemy lines with next to no means of supply or reinforcement for 16 years.
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The Carthaginians went up and down the peninsula setting fire to farms left and right,
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hoping above all else for Rome to simply surrender.
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Two years into the campaign, Hannibal said "all right, screw this, I'm gonna destroy the entire Roman army"
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and proceeded to make plans for his next battle at the Roman supply depot at Cannae in southern Italy.
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At the battle the Carthaginians advanced in a U shape
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with 40,000 infantry forming the front line
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and 10,000 cavalry on the wings.
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The Romans however had almost twice as big an army
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so they felt pretty good about their chances.
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The armies met and as the fighting progressed,
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the center of the Carthaginian line fell back
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and the Romans pushed forward hoping to break the retreating line.
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Except at that moment when they all rushed in,
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the Carthaginians' African infantry and famed Numidian cavalry
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advanced on the flanks and effectively enveloped the whole Roman army.
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From there it was a bloodbath.
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Estimates are all over the place,
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but the gist is that most of the 80,000 strong Roman army was killed outright and the rest were imprisoned.
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The slaughter went on until nightfall, and in one version of the story I've heard,
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the Carthaginians only started taking prisoners because their arms got tired from all the killing.
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It was the single greatest defeat that Rome ever suffered in its history
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and Hannibal hoped that a shattered and dismayed Rome,
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having lost 16 legions and the entire south of Italy, would surrender at once.
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Rome's response was simply "see you next year"
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and it spent the entire winter raising more armies to go out the following summer.
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For the next several years the Roman army pursued the strategy of "just bother him"
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and shadowed Hannibal around the Italian countryside.
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He was still being annoying, but he wasn't a direct threat to the city of Rome, so...
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good enough for now.
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But jumping back, can we take a second to appreciate the sheer quintessential Roman badassery it takes
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to hear that you lost at least 50,000 soldiers and then turn around and tell the guy who killed them
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to shove it and wait for round 2?
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Because holy crap, that takes some serious cogliones
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serious and massively suicidal cogliones.
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And speaking of, in 211 the young Publius Cornelius Scipio took up a generalship for the Spanish campaign
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which was widely considered to be a suicide mission.
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To the surprise of basically everyone he spent the next five years successfully de-Carthageifying Spain to great effect.
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Following his campaign he hatched a brilliant plan to take the fight back to Carthage.
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The Senate, thinking this was another suicide mission, told him he could do it
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but they wouldn't finance his armies.
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So Scipio raised a couple of legions in Italy and Sicily and hopped over to north Africa.
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Now, while Hannibal is absolutely a brilliant general and that he did impossibly crazy stuff,
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like crossing the Alps, campaigning in Italy for 16 years and wiping out an entire Roman army,
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Scipio's brilliance came from his quintessentially Roman ability to adopt and adapt.
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The Romans, above all else, knew a good idea when they saw one and they almost never made the same mistake twice.
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Scipio studied Cannae and he knew what he had to do to defeat Carthage.
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since the Numidian cavalry was critical to the Carthaginian army,
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Scipio played into a Numidian civil war to get some of their cavalry for himself.
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In doing so he had massively weakened Carthage on their own soil
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and had nearly orchestrated their surrender
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when, oh snap, Hannibal's back.
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And on that day history nerds from all around the world and across time busted out the popcorn
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because this is gonna be good.
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The night before the impending battle of Zama,
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Hannibal and Scipio actually – supposedly – had a meeting.
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It's detailed in Livy's History of Rome, book 30, chapters 30 and 31.
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There's a link in the description, it takes five minutes.
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Just read it, okay? For me.
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Read it. It's incredible.
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First they're simply in awe of each other.
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Then Hannibal waxes philosophical about fortune, gives Scipio life advice and asks for peace.
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Scipio responded, "Well, I was going to make peace, but then you brought an army here. I can't just leave now.
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Look, Hannibal, I respect you, I really do, and you're leaving me no choice here, man.
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I've just got to kick your ass, dude. I'm sorry, there's no other way, I have to kick your ass."
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And on the following day, some asses were certainly kicked.
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At the battle of Zama Scipio's Numidian cavalry put the Carthaginian cavalry to flight,
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and fighting between the infantry lines was actually very close
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until the Roman cavalry returned from behind the Carthaginian line to ultimately win the day.
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It was a hard-fought and super tense battle but with that, the Second Punic War was won.
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Half a century and a lot of Cato the Elder ending all of his speeches with "Carthago delenda est" later,
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Rome returns to raze Carthage to the ground.
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To rub more salt in the wound the Romans also literally rubbed salt in the earth
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to make sure the Carthaginians would never rise again.
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Wow.
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Okay, so there's regular bitter, there's Taylor Swift writes a song about you bitter
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and then there's Rome hates you so much they wipe you off the face of the Earth forever bitter.
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Moral of the story is Rome does not screw around
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so don't screw with Rome.
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And that's the Punic Wars.
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If you'd like to see where the rest of the story goes,
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give this video a click in the description and hop on back to the Roman Republic,
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and remember:
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Carthago delenda est.
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