46 Fun Facts About The Punic Wars

In which modern country do the ruins of ancient Carthage lie?

Tunisia: Rome wiped the city out in 146 BC, yet about a century later Romans rebuilt it on the same spot, and the new Carthage became the capital of the Roman province.

The Romans' word 'Punic' for the Carthaginians originally meant what?

Phoenician: Carthage was founded by settlers from Tyre, on the coast of what is now Lebanon, and the Romans went on calling their descendants Poeni for centuries afterwards.

Which Greek historian of the Punic Wars watched Carthage fall in 146 BC?

Polybius: brought to Rome as a hostage, he befriended its leading generals, questioned men who had fought Hannibal and went over an Alpine pass himself to check the route.

At the start of the First Punic War, what did Rome conspicuously lack?

A navy: Rome had to borrow ships from Greek cities in southern Italy just to ferry its legions across the strait, while Carthage was the leading sea power of the western Mediterranean.

Control of which Sicilian city, on the strait facing Italy, sparked the First Punic War?

Messana: the Mamertines, Italian mercenaries who had seized the city, begged both Rome and Carthage for help against Syracuse, and their two rescuers ended up at war with each other.

What did the Romans copy to build their first fleet of heavy warships in 260 BC?

A shipwrecked Carthaginian quinquereme: it had run aground while attacking Roman transports, and without that lucky wreck, the main ancient account says, Rome could not have built a fleet at all.

What was the corvus?

A spiked boarding bridge: dropped onto an enemy deck, it pinned the ship so legionaries could storm across, and at Mylae in 260 BC it won Rome's first big sea battle by turning it into an infantry fight.

How did Rome's first naval crews learn to row?

On land: the recruits sat on benches set up ashore in ship order and practised the stroke together to a caller's beat, so the crews were drilled before the hulls were launched.

In Roman legend, what did the captured consul Regulus do when sent home to negotiate?

Kept his oath and went back: the story has him urge the Senate to reject Carthage's terms and then return to face death, though the main surviving account of the war never mentions it.

What was the huge Roman fleet at Cape Ecnomus in 256 BC setting out to do?

Invade North Africa: Carthage threw 350 ships in its way and lost, in a clash of some 680 warships and nearly 300,000 men, and a Roman army was soon ashore within reach of Carthage itself.

Whom did Carthage hire to retrain its army in 255 BC?

A Spartan officer: Xanthippus told the Carthaginians they were being beaten by their own generals, not by Rome, then moved the fight to open ground and destroyed the army of Regulus.

About how many men drowned when a storm wrecked Rome's fleet off Sicily in 255 BC?

About 100,000: the pilots had warned again and again against that exposed coast in the season of storms, but the consuls overruled them, and only about 80 of 364 ships came through.

Why did Roman armies in Sicily avoid open battle in 252 and 251 BC?

They feared the Carthaginian war elephants: word had spread that the beasts broke the Roman ranks outside Carthage, and the dread lasted until 250 BC, when javelins at Panormus stampeded them through their own army.

At Drepana, what became of the sacred chickens that refused to eat?

Thrown overboard: the consul Claudius Pulcher is said to have pitched them into the sea with the quip that if they would not eat they could drink, before a battle that cost him 93 ships.

How did Rome pay for the fleet that won the First Punic War?

Loans from wealthy citizens: with the treasury empty, rich Romans each paid for a warship, alone or in twos and threes, to be repaid only if the fleet won.

The First Punic War ended with a Carthaginian naval defeat where in 241 BC?

The Aegates Islands: the Roman ships went into action stripped of everything but their fighting crews, while Carthage's were overloaded with supplies for its garrisons and short of marines.

Sicily became Rome's first overseas province after the First Punic War; what did it mainly supply to Rome?

Grain: the island fed the city of Rome for the rest of the Republic, so keeping its harvests flowing stayed a fixed concern of Roman government for centuries.

What crisis hit Carthage straight after the First Punic War?

A mercenary mutiny: some 20,000 unpaid veterans joined with rebellious Libyan subjects in a war so savage that it was called 'truceless', and it took more than three years to crush.

Which two islands did Rome seize from Carthage in 237 BC, an act called 'contrary to all justice'?

Sardinia and Corsica: Rome also squeezed a further 1,200 talents out of a Carthage too weak to refuse, and the humiliation is counted among the causes of Hannibal's war.

Which Carthaginian general, Hannibal's father, built a new power base in Iberia from 237 BC?

Hamilcar Barca: before sailing he is said to have led his nine-year-old son Hannibal to an altar and made the boy swear never to be a friend of Rome.

Which river did the 226 BC treaty set as the northern limit of Carthaginian Iberia?

The Ebro: the treaty kept Carthage from crossing the river in arms, yet Rome soon made a friend of a city far to the south of it, and that friendship became the spark of the next war.

Hannibal's capture of which city in 219 BC led Rome to declare war?

Saguntum: the city held out for some eight months while Rome sent protests but no army, and only once it had fallen did the Senate carry an ultimatum to Carthage itself.

At which river in northern Italy did Hannibal win his first major battle against Rome, in 218 BC?

The Trebia: Hannibal goaded the Romans into wading the icy river before they had eaten, then sprang a force his brother Mago had led out overnight to fall on their rear.

What killed most of Hannibal's elephants after they crossed the Alps?

Winter cold: the beasts that had survived the mountains died in the rain and snow after his first great victory in Italy, leaving him, in one ancient account, a single animal.

Which river did Hannibal's army cross on rafts, elephants included, in autumn 218 BC?

The Rhône: the rafts were heaped with earth to look like solid ground, two female elephants were led on first so the rest would follow, and the terrified herd was then cut loose and towed across.

At which lake did Hannibal ambush and destroy a Roman army in 217 BC?

Trasimene: his army hid overnight in the hills above the lakeside road and charged down at dawn, in a mist the ancient accounts describe, trapping the Roman column against the water before it could form up.

Whom did Rome appoint dictator in 217 BC, with a strategy of avoiding battle?

Fabius Maximus: he shadowed Hannibal through the hills and refused every pitched battle, a way of winning slowly that is still called 'Fabian' and gave Britain's gradualist Fabian Society its name.

After Cannae, what did Hannibal's cavalry commander vainly urge him to do?

March on Rome: his cavalry commander Maharbal, turned down, is said to have told him that he knew how to win a victory but not how to use one.

At Cannae, how did Hannibal trap the Roman legions?

A yielding centre and closing wings: the legions drove his thin centre back until the Libyan infantry on either side wheeled inward and the cavalry sealed the ring from behind.

To prove Cannae's scale, Mago heaped what before Carthage's senate?

Gold rings: only Rome's knights wore them, so the heap taken from the dead showed Carthage how much of the Roman ruling class had fallen in a single day.

Which wealthy Campanian city, soon Hannibal's winter quarters, went over to him after Cannae?

Capua: a Roman general later jeered that the city's comforts had done to Hannibal's army what Cannae had done to Rome's, and Rome took it back in 211 BC.

Which Macedonian king made a treaty with Hannibal in 215 BC?

Philip V: the alliance was exposed almost at once, when a Roman squadron caught his envoys sailing home with Hannibal's officers and the text of the treaty on board.

Which famous inventor was killed when the Romans took Syracuse in 212 BC?

Archimedes, whose war machines had frustrated Marcellus's siege, was killed by a Roman soldier when Syracuse fell in 212 BC; the city had gone over to Carthage after Hiero II died in 215 BC.

How did the Romans raise new legions after Cannae?

Enrolling slaves, criminals and the poor: the state bought 8,000 slaves who volunteered to fight, and armed freed prisoners and debtors with Gallic trophies taken down from an old triumph.

Which battle in 207 BC killed Hannibal's brother Hasdrubal after his own Alpine crossing?

At the Metaurus the consuls Livius Salinator and Claudius Nero crushed Hasdrubal, Nero having marched north in secret from Hannibal's front; Hasdrubal's severed head was thrown into Hannibal's camp.

Which Roman captured New Carthage in 209 BC and later won at Ilipa?

Publius Cornelius Scipio: still in his mid-twenties, he is said to have been the only man willing to stand for the Spanish command, where his father and uncle had both just been killed.

Which Numidian prince, driven from his kingdom, joined the Romans against Carthage in 204 BC?

Masinissa: he had first fought the Romans in Spain as an ally of Carthage, then changed sides, and after the war he ruled Numidia for more than fifty years.

How did Hannibal die, some twenty years after his defeat at Zama?

He took poison: in the usual account he was cornered by Roman envoys at the court of Bithynia and remarked that it was time to free Rome from its long dread of one old man.

What blunted Hannibal's first charge at Zama?

Open lanes: the Romans left gaps through their ranks, and Hannibal's 80 or so elephants ran harmlessly down them or, panicked by trumpets, turned back into his own cavalry.

After 201 BC, what did Carthage need Rome's permission to do?

Wage war: the clause left Carthage unable to answer the raids of its Numidian neighbour, and when it finally struck back half a century later, Rome had its pretext for a third war.

What honorary surname did the Roman victor over Hannibal at Zama receive?

Africanus: the fashion caught on, and later Roman generals with far smaller victories took surnames from their own conquests, among them Asiaticus, Macedonicus and Numidicus.

Which Roman senator ended his speeches with 'Carthage must be destroyed'?

Cato the Elder: sent to Carthage as an envoy in the 150s BC, he came home alarmed at how rich the city had grown again, and from then on he is said to have closed every speech, whatever its subject, the same way.

What final demand did Rome make in 149 BC after Carthage had surrendered its weapons?

Abandon the city and move inland: a people who lived by sea trade were told to resettle out of reach of the coast so that Carthage could be razed, and they chose to fight instead, almost unarmed.

How did Rome finally cut besieged Carthage off from supply by sea?

A mole built across the harbour mouth: the trapped Carthaginians answered by secretly cutting a second exit to the sea and sailing out a makeshift fleet, but could not break the blockade.

What became of the 50,000 survivors of Carthage's fall in 146 BC?

Sold into slavery: they had surrendered from the citadel after six days of house-to-house fighting, and the city behind them was burned and left in ruins for a century.

Roughly how long after the Third Punic War did Rome and Carthage make peace?

2,000 years: Rome destroyed its enemy in 146 BC without ever making peace, so in 1985 the mayors of Rome and modern Carthage signed a symbolic treaty, 2,131 years late.