First Punic War (264–241)

War broke out between the Romans and the Carthaginians as a result of a three-way struggle between Carthage, Rome, and Syracuse over the strategic city of Messana (modern Messina), which controlled the straits between Italy and Sicily. During the chaos that set in following the death of Agathocles of Syracuse in 289, a band of Mamertines, Campanian mercenaries of the deceased king, had seized Messana for themselves and began to plunder the surrounding countryside. Early in the 260s, Hiero, the commander of Syracuse’s army, defeated these Mamertines in battle and advanced on their city; his victory in fact gave him the opportunity to proclaim himself king. Meanwhile a Carthaginian admiral came to the Mamertines’ aid, installing a garrison in Messana. As a result, Hiero abandoned the siege he had begun.

Roman armies soon became involved. The presence of a Carthaginian force within their city provoked dissension among the Mamertines. Some apparently hoped for a treaty with Carthage that would give them greater freedom of action, but others preferred to seek Roman assistance and protection. The Roman senate was divided on the issue, but one of the consuls of 264 (in all likelihood Appius Claudius Caudex) successfully proposed to a citizen assembly that the Mamertines be given Roman protection. Claudius was certainly the consul who then set off for Sicily with his army. Meantime the Mamertines—perhaps with the assistance of no more than a Roman advance guard—expelled the Carthaginian garrison from Messana; for this failure, the garrison commander was supposedly crucified later. Claudius then arrived and entered the city. Both King Hiero and the Carthaginians responded: A Carthaginian fleet blockaded Messana, while Carthaginian and Syracusan armies each set up camp outside it.

 

More intensive warfare broke out in 263, when Rome sent out both consuls, with a large force of Romans and allies. The consuls advanced into Hiero’s territory, seized some towns there, and received the surrender of others. Hiero then made peace, and became an ally of Rome. The consuls of the next year advanced into western Sicily and besieged the Greek city of Agrigentum (modern Agrigento), where the Carthaginians had concentrated their forces. They tried to force the Roman commanders to abandon the siege. However, after a battle in which both sides appear to have lost heavily, the Carthaginian generals managed to evacuate their forces from the city without further loss. The citizens of Agrigentum suffered much more severely. On the next day, the Roman army entered the city, plundered it, and sold thousands of the citizens into slavery. Meanwhile the Carthaginians replaced their unsuccessful commander with Hamilcar Barca, who would continue to command the Carthaginian forces on the island for the remainder of this long war.

After the sack of Agrigentum in 262, the Romans and Carthaginians entered a period of stalemate. Some cities that had previously defected to the Romans now resumed their alliance with Carthage, while others joined Rome for the first time. Both sides faced extraordinary difficulties. Carthage possessed one of the most powerful war fleets in the Mediterranean, but it depended upon mercenaries to fill out its armies. Because of this strength at sea, Carthaginian forces were able to hold towns on the coast, where reinforcements could easily be landed. Rome, on the other hand, had a large army, though only a small fleet, with its Greek allies providing many of the ships and crews. Roman commanders were able to bring armies across the narrow straits between Sicily and Italy, but the strength of the Carthaginian fleet made it impossible for them to expel Carthaginian forces from Sicily.

 

The Romans responded by building warships to challenge Carthage at sea. This was not an easy task. Shipbuilding was complex and expensive. Commanding ships and fleets, moreover, was a skilled operation that differed greatly from the leadership of an army, and warships by definition required large numbers of skilled oarsmen to propel them and maneuver them in battle. Here, the Carthaginians, with their long naval tradition and large fleet, had a great advantage, but the Romans were able to adapt remarkably quickly. Copying Carthaginian methods of construction, the Romans began by building about one hundred large warships, and over the course of the war, they would build many more. For sailors and oarsmen, they turned to their allies and also recruited Roman citizens too poor to serve in the army. Roman fleets soon began to win battles at sea, although they also lost many ships, failures which Roman authors (and Greek ones friendly to Rome) often attributed to inclement weather. Gaius Duilius, consul in 260 and commander in one of the earliest of Rome’s naval victories, celebrated the first triumph gained at sea; as a striking monument to his victory, he set up a column in the Forum decorated with the bronze rams of captured ships.

 

For a time, Rome and Carthage both won victories and suffered defeats, and neither side could gain a decisive advantage. In 256, both consuls took the further initiative of crossing to North Africa with an army and a fleet, so as to attack Carthage itself in the hope of bringing the war to a quick conclusion. One of these consuls, Marcus Atilius Regulus, duly defeated the Carthaginians in battle, captured the city of Tunis (near Carthage), and provoked a rebellion among some of Carthage’s Numidian allies. Early in 255, however, Xanthippus, a Greek mercenary commander in Carthaginian service, defeated and captured Regulus.

Roman writers would later turn this humiliation, so offensive to Roman sensibilities, into a patriotic myth that contrasted the supposed virtues of the consul and the vices of his captors. Later, according to the tale, the Carthaginians allowed Regulus to return to Rome in order to negotiate either a peace or an exchange of prisoners, making him promise to return if his efforts were to prove unsuccessful. When the senate refused to negotiate, Regulus returned to Carthage where he died, exhibiting in the process the good faith (fides) that members of Rome’s elite thought to be a defining characteristic of their class and their city. Some versions, moreover, would maintain that the Carthaginians tortured Regulus to death—Roman authors thought cruelty to be one of the chief traits of Carthaginians—but this may well have been an attempt to counter reports that Regulus’ wife tortured Carthaginian prisoners.

 

After the failed invasion of North Africa, warfare continued on land and sea for fifteen years. In Sicily, Roman commanders slowly gained the advantage, since the Carthaginians lacked sufficient resources to fight simultaneously against the Romans and against their former Numidian allies in North Africa. In the process, much of Sicily was devastated. In 254, for example, the Romans captured Panormus (modern Palermo), the most important city on the north coast of Sicily; many of its citizens paid a ransom, but those who could not afford the payment set by Rome were enslaved. In 241, the Carthaginians gave Hamilcar, their commander in Sicily, authority to negotiate a peace. The result was that they agreed to leave Sicily and pay Rome a large indemnity.

Hostilities did not end here, however. At the end of the war, the Carthaginians had insufficient funds to pay their mercenaries, who were owed for many years of service. So the large mercenary army assembled in North Africa mounted a revolt, which soon spread to some of Carthage’s Libyan and Numidian allies. The whole conflict here led to atrocities by both sides, until 237, when the Carthaginian army finally succeeded in gaining the upper hand. Meantime elsewhere, mercenaries serving Carthage in Sardinia joined the revolt and killed their general. When Carthage dispatched more mercenaries to the island, these too revolted, killing their general and massacring Carthaginians indiscriminately. Eventually, after victory had been achieved in North Africa, the Carthaginians planned to send another army to Sardinia, but before they could, the mercenary commanders there begged Rome for assistance. Disregarding earlier agreements with Carthage, Roman officials now chose to intervene, threatening war and insisting that Carthage abandon the island and pay a further substantial indemnity. The Carthaginians, exhausted by interminable warfare, agreed.

Although Roman magistrates and senators may not have realized it at this point, it was in fact victory in the First Punic War that led to the creation of Rome’s first permanent commitments outside Italy. In the decade following the assertion of Roman claims to Sardinia, nine consuls and at least one praetor campaigned against the inhabitants of the island, as well as against those of the neighboring island, Corsica. Campaigns in the interior of both islands would continue intermittently for a further century. While fighting Carthaginian forces in Sicily, Roman commanders had already granted protection to communities there, and had probably even made arrangements of a more permanent nature with some. Previously, when the Romans had forged alliances and granted protection to communities in Italy, they had made few commitments that required the permanent presence of Roman officials and Roman forces. Now, the senate may at first have intended that friendly cities in Sicily should enjoy the same sort of undemanding relationship. By 227, however, the decision had been made to station a commander and troops permanently in Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica. In that year, the Centuriate assembly elected four praetors for the first time, with the intention that one of them should regularly be sent to Sicily and another to Sardinia-Corsica. Thus these islands became the first of Rome’s “provinces” outside the Italian peninsula.

 

The First Punic War, and to a lesser degree the war with Pyrrhus that preceded it, marked an important stage in Rome’s imperial development. In Rome’s traditional pattern of warfare, consuls and praetors raised armies each spring and discharged them in the fall after the end of the campaigning season. Consequently, Roman soldiers could be self-supporting, since they always returned home in time to plant their crops and provide for themselves and their families in the following year. In some of the wars of the third century, however, this long-established practice no longer met Roman needs. Although they did still raise armies and fleets for less than a year’s service during the Pyrrhic War and the First Punic War, they also kept some armies in the field over the winter and maintained garrisons in distant towns and forts. In part, this modification to traditional practice may have been a response to the greater distances that Roman armies now had to travel in order to reach their enemies. But Rome had also begun to compete with cities and kings who raised their forces in a different way: In particular, the mercenary armies of Pyrrhus and the Carthaginians typically remained in the area of operations over the winter, and were quite capable of seizing towns and forts during the Romans’ absence.

 

In response to the new forms of warfare, Roman practices underwent some adjustment. Fleets required money for the construction and supply of ships; their crews could not live off the land as an invading army could. Soldiers kept through the winter in garrisons or camps distant from their farms also needed some means of support. Traditionally, Roman commanders had for the most part sought to supply their armies either by living off the land, or by demanding the necessary funds and provisions from allies and subjects in the vicinity. Rome’s administrative organization, like that of most city-states, was rudimentary, and its ability to direct a range of activities correspondingly limited. Elected officials arranged and performed the major rites and ceremonies of the city, they raised and led its armies, and they heard complaints and granted judgments in legal cases. These core functions apart, the Roman state possessed little in the way of a permanent apparatus. To be sure, from time to time the state needed supplies and labor for religious rituals, for public building projects, and for the army. In these circumstances, however, Roman officials would typically turn to private contractors or publicani (singular, publicanus) to fulfill needs that a more bureaucratized society would accomplish with state officials. Some publicani were undoubtedly involved in equipping and supplying Roman fleets and armies.

 

By the middle of the third century, there are clear signs that the Romans were expending public funds on a larger scale than they had in the past. Roman citizens were not subject to regular taxation, but when some exceptional, urgent need arose, a citizen assembly could authorize magistrates to collect a special payment or tributum, assessed on the basis of the census. It was when ancient communities faced the necessity of making regular payments on a large scale—either for war or for other public projects—that they usually began to mint coins in silver. When the Romans first made use of such high-value coins, late in the fourth century, they relied on ones produced at irregular intervals by Campanian mints. During the Pyrrhic War, however, they began to mint their own, using Greek weights and designs. Eventually, in the last two decades of the third century, they introduced a complete range of denominations with Roman weights and designs. Rome’s traditional style of warfare had not called for substantial sums of money. Now, however, Roman officials and the senate would face a steady need for cash, especially in the largest wars.