The Punic Wars
, 86)
As Appian certainly assumed his readers knew, a Carthaginian or a
Greek would have offered a very different account of the events of
the previous century and a half. The two earlier Punic Wars between
Rome and Carthage, 264–241 BCE and 218–201 BCE, could equally
well be seen as the inevitable result of two major powers coming into
direct contact with one another, each fearing the other. The first war
broke out after a group of mercenaries seized control of Messana
in Sicily, and appealed to both Rome and Carthage for assistance
against the attempts of the powerful city of Syracuse to re-take
it; the Carthaginians responded promptly by installing a garrison
in Messana, whereupon the Romans feared that Carthaginian
dominance of Sicily might threaten their own hegemony in Italy
and belatedly decided to send their own forces. In Roman accounts,
this was a purely defensive move, in response to a request for help;
the eventual acquisition of Sicily and Sardinia as overseas territories
was more or less an accidental outcome of their concern to defend
justice and protect their own rights. A Carthaginian would have
emphasised the way in which the upstart Italian power was clearly
seeking to extend its reach into areas that were traditionally part of
their own sphere of influence in the western Mediterranean, inciting
proxy wars and finding pretexts for military intervention.
The outbreak of the Second Punic War offers an example.
Carthage was above all a naval power, founded by the Phoenicians
whose ships had traded across the Mediterranean for centuries;
it sought to establish colonies in regions, such as southern Spain,
which could supply timber and metal for its ships. During the uneasy
peace after 241 BCE, it increased its hold on this area. The Roman
response to the threat of a revival in their rival’s power was initially
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ThE roman EmpIrE
to make an agreement that the Carthaginians would remain south
of the river Ebro; then, in the late 220s BCE, they established a
relationship with the town of Saguntum, in the heart of that territory.
With the promise of Roman protection, the Saguntines seized the
opportunity to attack a neighbouring community and were punished
by Hannibal, whereupon the Romans issued a blanket ultimatum:
hand over the general or face war. The immediate consequences were
disastrous for Rome, as Hannibal crossed the Alps and defeated a
series of Roman generals in Italy, but the conclusion of the war was
the reduction of Carthage from a world power to a minor state,
forbidden to make war without Roman permission and required
to pay a hefty indemnity to Rome for 60 years, while Rome added
Spain to its overseas territories and now enjoyed undisputed mastery
of the western Mediterranean.
Carthage remained a prosperous city, with rich agricultural
resources and thriving trade connections; some Romans became
convinced that, despite the loss of its empire, it would always be
a threat to their security. According to the contemporary Greek
historian Polybius (36.2), they simply waited for a suitable pretext
that would persuade other nations that they acted honourably;
the Carthaginians’ breach of the treaty conditions presented the
opportunity to destroy their naval capacity, the basis of their old
empire and of the future empire that the Romans feared or professed
to fear, once and for all. Faced with the prospect of having their city
destroyed in order to save it from itself, the Carthaginian response to
the ultimatum was to fight; despite having given up their weapons,
they successfully resisted the Roman army until 146 BCE. By then,
the majority of the population had died of starvation or in battle; the
remainder – numbers are notoriously unreliable in ancient sources,
but the figure of 50,000 is cited – were sold into slavery, as was
customary. The city burned for days and was then abandoned.
The story that the fields were then sown with salt, to destroy their
fertility and prevent anyone from living there, is a fabrication first
encountered in the nineteenth century; the Romans, rather more
practically, declared the territory to be public land, redistributed it
to a mixture of local farmers and Italian settlers, and established it
as the new province of Africa, paying a regular tribute to Rome.
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approachIng roman ImpErIalIsm
The Third Punic War was one of many fought by Rome in the course
of its rise to the status of a world empire, from the conquest of its
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ThE dynamIcs of roman ImpErIalIsm
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immediate neighbour Veii in 396 BCE, through the subjugation of
the rival empires of Carthage, Macedon (168 BCE), Syria (63 BCE)
and Egypt (30 BCE), to the invasion of Britain in 43 CE. While not
every war resulted in the expansion of its power, let alone in the
acquisition of new territory, the long-term trend was unmistakable.
The obvious line of investigation is the nature of this persistent
aggression and drive to conquer, the origins and dynamics of Roman
imperialism. Surprisingly, however, a number of objections have
been raised to thinking about the subject in these terms.
There is no Latin equivalent of ‘imperialism’.
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The word
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