The First Punic War

The incident which set Rome on the path to becoming a Mediterranean power was a relatively insignificant one. A group of Italian mercenaries, who called themselves the Mamertines (after the Oscan name for Mars, the god of war), had seized the city of Messana (modern Messina), which overlooked the straits between Sicily and Italy. In 265 the ruler of Syracuse, Hiero, had tried to dislodge them. While some Mamertines looked to Carthage for help, others appealed to Rome. The senate hesitated. It was reluctant to condone the seizure and risk direct confrontation with wealthy Syracuse but a Carthaginian takeover in Messana would threaten Roman control of the straits, of new importance following Rome’s conquest of the south. The debate was taken to the popular assembly (the comitia centuriata), and, after speeches by the consuls stressing the threat to Rome and the hope of plunder (a catalyst which was growing in importance), it was the assembly who committed the state to action, the only example known when the citizen body, rather than the senate, set in hand a war.

Faced now with a Roman response, the Carthaginians meekly withdrew their garrison from Messana and the Romans occupied the city. Although Carthage and Syracuse were long-standing enemies, the occupation was sufficiently provocative to force them into an alliance. When they jointly besieged Messana the outbreak of war, the First Punic War (264-241 Bc), was the inevitable result. (Punicus is the

Latin for Carthaginian and refers to the joint culture of the Phoenicians and local African natives formed at Carthage.)

Carthage owed its wealth to its position. Set on a commanding site on a peninsula on the north African coast the city had begun life in the ninth century as a colony of the Phoenicians. As the Phoenician coastal cities were overrun in the seventh century, in turn by Assyrians, Egyptians, and Persians, Carthage emerged as an independent city ideally suited to act as the focus for the commerce of the other former Phoenician colonies of the western Mediterranean. Her dominance over them was gradually established. She expanded into north Africa, Spain, Sardinia, Sicily, and the other islands of the western Mediterranean, successfully protecting her interests against the Greeks despite a series of debilitating wars in Sicily with Syracuse and the other Greek cities. In north Africa she may have ruled over three to four million subjects. In southern Spain she had access to some of the richest silver mines in the known world. Her wealth came from trade in metals but also from the successful exploitation of fertile land in north Africa, western Sicily, and elsewhere. Her seamen were expert and there are (unsubstantiated) reports of Carthaginian voyages around Africa and as far north as Britain and Ireland. (See Richard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization, London and New York, 2010, for an excellent study of events from a Carthaginian perspective.)

Carthage’s predominant interest was the preservation of her commercial empire, and Rome, without a navy, could offer no threat to this. The earlier agreements between the two states were now swept away as Sicily became the focus for the struggle. Carthage, with a history of 150 years’ occupation of the western half of the island, was determined to hold on to her possessions. For the first three years (264-261) the campaigns were concentrated here. There were some Roman successes. Rome managed to prise Hiero of Syracuse away from Carthage and make him an ally and to take the wealthy city of Acragas, famous for its set of temples stretched along a dominant ridge, which had been held by a Carthaginian garrison. (The entire Greek population of the city—possibly 25,000 individuals—was sold into slavery.) However, the campaigns ended in stalemate. Rome’s chances of subduing the coastal cities were limited so long as Carthage was in control of the sea, and it was immediately after the capture of Acragas that Rome decided to build a fleet.

No better proof could be given of the self-confidence of the city and its determination to win. There was no naval tradition, no experience of shipbuilding, no trained crews. According to Polybius, a grounded Carthaginian quinquireme had to be used as a model with crews being trained on land as the first hundred were being built. Greeks played a large part in training the new crews and remained an important element in the earliest Roman navies. The quinquiremes, which originated in Syracuse, had two superimposed banks of oars with each unit consisting of three oarsmen on the lower oar and two on the upper (so quinque, five, oarsmen). They were broad and not easy to manoeuvre for an effective ram but carried troops who hoped to board their opponents. (Maritime archaeology is now finding remains of some, and these show the sophisticated and efficient way in which they were built.) The Roman

Equivalent was heavier than the Carthaginian ships and their crews, of course, without experience, but they contained one significant improvement, a wooden gangway that could be hauled up like the jib of a crane and then dropped on to an enemy ship so that soldiers could cross over into it. Its shape earned it the nickname corvus, ‘crow’.

The war could now be fought by Rome at sea and possibly even taken into the heart of the Carthaginian empire. The first encounter of the two fleets at Mylae off the coast of Sicily in 260 was a Roman victory, the corvus coming as a complete surprise to the overconfident Carthaginians. It was followed by an even more crushing success off Cape Ecnomus (on the southern coast of Sicily) in 256 when eighty Carthaginian ships were sunk or captured. In each case the corvus gave the Romans the advantage. So long as the Romans avoided being rammed as the ships closed they could get troops on to an enemy deck and capture it. The way was now open for an invasion of Africa. Despite having to maintain supply lines over 600 kilometres of sea, Roman troops were landed there in 256 and at first moved successfully towards Carthage. However, the Carthaginians imported a Spartan mercenary, Xanthippus, to train their army and, using their cavalry to surround the Roman infantry, destroyed the Roman invaders in 255. Further disasters struck Rome when a fleet sent to rescue the survivors was destroyed in a storm and many thousands of trained oarsmen drowned. The year 249 was again disastrous for Rome with a major defeat at the Battle of Drepana off the west coast of Sicily and the loss of almost all the remaining fleet in a storm later in the year.

The war now became one of attrition, symbolized by a nine-year siege by the Romans of the Carthaginian fortress of Lilybaeum on the west coast of Sicily. Carthaginian resources began to run low, as coins of increasingly debased silver show, while the Romans continued to draw on the immense wealth of Syracuse. Yet the attacking Roman forces were harassed by the only outstanding commander of the war, the Carthaginian Hamilcar, who successfully tied them to their bases. By 242, Rome seemed exhausted but a final effort was made to raise a new fleet from the contributions of private citizens. At a battle off the Aegades Islands in March of the following year the Romans met what was also the last of the Carthaginian forces, a fleet heavily laden with supplies for Sicily but whose crews were poorly trained. A great Roman victory in which most of the Carthaginian ships were sunk or captured finally decided the outcome of the war. (Among the most exciting finds in the past ten years are rostra, the bronze rams, from sunk ships that have been dredged from the site of the battle.) Carthage could no longer protect Sicily and in the peace that followed Carthage ceded Sicily to Rome. Syracuse survived as an independent ally of Rome.

The Beginnings of Provincial Administration

The victory confirmed Rome as an extraordinarily resilient and determined power, now with a foothold outside Italy and a fast maturing naval tradition. Within three

Years Rome had taken advantage of a mutiny among Carthaginian mercenaries to seize Sardinia and Corsica from the Carthaginians. This was seen, even by many Romans, as unjustified, but the opportunism of an ever more confident and expansionist state now prevailed. The possession of overseas territories presented Rome with a new challenge. Her first concern may have been to protect them against a Carthaginian counter-attack, and troops were probably left on each island for this purpose. At some point Rome must also have become aware that there were local systems of taxation, in Sicily at least, whose fruits could be diverted to Rome. The form of the earliest administration is unknown, but from 227 the number of praetors elected annually in Rome was increased to four and two of these were selected as governors, one in Sicily and the other in Sardinia and Corsica. It was already the custom when magistrates were sent out of Roman territory for the senate to assign them a provincia, a defined responsibility (the pacification of a tribe, for instance). A magistrate sent overseas was similarly given a defined provincia, perhaps the collection of tribute or the defence of the area. Gradually the word provincia came to refer to a specific territory rather than just the task the magistrate was expected to achieve within that territory and so the English ‘province’ and ‘provincial’ (although the earlier sense of the word can still be found in English).