Background
Rome and Carthage were the dominant powers of the western Mediterranean by the mid-3rd century BC. Rome controlled the Italian peninsula south of the Po. Carthage — a Phoenician colony founded in modern Tunisia around 814 BC — controlled North Africa, parts of Iberia, Sardinia, Corsica, and western Sicily, and had the largest navy in the Mediterranean. The two states had previously been allies through three formal treaties. The trigger for war was a dispute over the Sicilian city of Messana in 264 BC.
The First Punic War (264–241 BC)
The First Punic War was fought primarily in and around Sicily, with major naval engagements in the western Mediterranean. Rome had no significant navy in 264 BC; it built one from scratch (reportedly modeled on a captured Carthaginian quinquereme) and won the decisive naval engagements at Mylae (260), Ecnomus (256), and the Aegates Islands (241). Carthage sued for peace. The terms ceded Sicily — except for the Syracusan kingdom of Hiero II — to Rome and required substantial reparations. Rome subsequently annexed Sardinia and Corsica in 238 BC, exploiting Carthaginian weakness during the Mercenary War.
The First Punic War lasted 23 years and killed approximately 400,000 people. It was the longest continuous war in classical antiquity.
The Second Punic War (218–201 BC)
The Second Punic War was the more famous of the three, driven primarily by the campaigns of Hannibal Barca. Hannibal commanded the Carthaginian armies in Spain in the 220s BC, captured the Roman-allied city of Saguntum in 219 BC, and crossed the Alps into northern Italy with approximately 50,000 troops and 37 elephants in the autumn of 218 BC. Over the next three years he destroyed three successive Roman field armies at the Trebia (218), Lake Trasimene (217), and Cannae (2 August 216 BC).
Cannae was the worst military defeat in Roman history — approximately 50,000 to 70,000 Roman troops killed in a single day, including most of the Senate’s military leadership. Carthage’s Italian allies (Capua and several Greek cities of southern Italy) defected. Rome was, by all reasonable measures, militarily broken.
Rome did not surrender. The senate elected Quintus Fabius Maximus dictator, adopted the Fabian strategy (avoid pitched battle, shadow the Carthaginian army, exhaust it), recruited slaves and the underage into the army, and continued the war. Hannibal could not take Rome (he lacked siege equipment) and could not force a political collapse. Meanwhile, the Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio destroyed Carthaginian Spain (210–206 BC), and the Romans sacked the Sicilian capital Syracuse in 212 BC — the siege at which Archimedes was killed.
Scipio invaded North Africa in 204 BC. Hannibal was recalled from Italy to defend Carthage and was defeated by Scipio at Zama in 202 BC. Carthage capitulated. The peace terms reduced Carthage to a small North African state, prohibited it from waging war without Roman permission, and imposed reparations over 50 years.
The Third Punic War (149–146 BC)
The Third Punic War was a one-sided affair. Carthage had recovered economically through the 2nd century BC and had paid off its 50-year reparations in 151 BC. The Roman senator Cato the Elder, who had served against Hannibal, ended every speech (on any subject) with Carthago delenda est — “Carthage must be destroyed.” A Roman expedition besieged the city in 149 BC.
The siege lasted three years. The final assault in spring 146 BC was directed by Scipio Aemilianus (Africanus’s adoptive grandson). The city’s population — approximately 200,000 to 500,000 — was either killed in the fighting or sold into slavery (the conventional figure of 50,000 survivors enslaved is from Polybius, who was present). The site was systematically destroyed (the traditional Roman claim of ploughing it with salt is post-classical legend). North Africa became the Roman province of Africa Proconsularis. Carthage itself was eventually refounded as a Roman colony by Julius Caesar.
Legacy
The Punic Wars made Rome the dominant power of the western Mediterranean and the substantial naval power of the entire Mediterranean. They produced two of the most studied military careers in history (Hannibal’s and Scipio Africanus’s), the Roman political-cultural commitment to the obliteration of strategic rivals that would shape Roman foreign policy for the next four centuries, and the proverbial Carthago delenda est that has been recycled in Western political speech ever since. They are also the standard case study in how a militarily inferior power can be brought down by sustained strategic resilience and the political capacity to absorb enormous losses without collapsing.