The Punic Wars (Incomplete)

Originally intended to finish this months ago--but lost interest. Maybe will finish it in future:

Few people in the world today know or care much about the 2 great wars of classical Europe—the Second Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, and the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. Though they are remote in time and involved only relatively small numbers of people (by modern standards), it is no exaggeration to say that these two wars had historical impacts equal to that of the two World Wars. To put it simply, if the outcomes of these two wars had been different, the whole course of human history would have been dramatically altered.

This article will briefly describe and comment on the Punic Wars. I will leave the Peloponnesian War to perhaps another article.

Most people know vaguely about Roman civilization and its motifs—legions, gladiators, Caesars, togas, monumental architecture and of course, the very idea of Empire. Few however appreciate how the world today is still very much shaped by the legacy of the long fallen Empire. Let us consider a few examples.

The great European languages that now encompass the globe, whether French, Spanish or English, are descendant languages of Greek and Latin—the two main tongues of the Roman Empire. And our modern political and legal systems are very much shaped by the Greco-Roman philosophy that was taught and transmitted by the schools of the Empire. The very word, politics, derives from the Greek word, ‘polis’ (city), and the word Republic, from the Latin ‘respublica’. And of course, democracy is derived from the Greek word ‘demokratia’. And both the Parliamentary system and the Presidential system of governance have Greco-Roman roots.

In the religious field, the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church will not be what they are without the Roman Empire. Indeed, there would almost certainly be no Christian Europe without the Roman Empire. And without the classical learning preserved by the Eastern Roman Empire, Islamic civilization will not be what it is. To give just one example: the architecture of mosques, with its domes and minarets were derived from late Eastern Roman architecture.

In short, the word will be an extremely different place today if Rome had not conquered Europe, North Africa and the Near East to forge one of the greatest Empires in history.

And yet it was never inevitable. One of the most crucial moments in history was when Rome and Carthage entered into a life-and-death struggle for supremacy over the Western Mediterranean—the 3 Punic wars. They ended in the total victory of Rome and made her the supreme power in Europe. From then on, the path to Empire was clear. Yet it could well have turned out otherwise.

By 264 BCE, through centuries of warfare, most of the main powers in Italy had become the subordinate allies or colonies of the Roman Republic. By a generous and shrewd system of extending citizenship and a superb system of alliance management, she could tap enormous manpower reserves of up to half a million men. Yet she lacked the technological expertise of the Greeks and could only besiege fortified cities with great difficulty. More importantly, she was primarily a land power and had no substantial navy. Economically, she was also not extremely wealthy—she was primarily an agricultural power and while the lands of Italy were fertile but they hardly like the plains of Babylon or the Nile delta.

Carthage too was a Republic like Rome. Both city states were in fact renowned in classical times for their extremely stable constitutions. Some Greek philosophers, like Aristotle, attribute such stability to how the two city states mixed the elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. For instance in Rome, the Consuls embodied the elements of the monarchy, the Senate, that of aristocracy, and the Tribunes, that of democracy.

But other than this one similarity and the fact they were both great powers, Rome and Carthage were practically the antithesis of each other. Carthage was perhaps the greatest naval power in Europe. She was after all founded by Phoenicians settlers (in Latin, 'Punic') from Tyre (in present day Lebanon). Rome on the other hand was the supreme land power of Italy, but had little to no naval capacities. It was the classic struggle between the elephant and the whale. Yet the Punic wars were interesting precisely because the elephant would learn to swim and the whale to walk.

The first Punic war started in 264 BCE, when