The Punic Wars Trivia
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46 free The Punic Wars trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Punic Wars trivia quiz covers all three wars between Rome and Carthage, from the scrap over Messana in 264 BC to the six-day sack of Carthage in 146 BC. It begins with the basics: why the wars are called Punic, who the main source is, what a quinquereme carried and how the Romans, who had no navy, built one from a wrecked Carthaginian ship and bolted a boarding bridge to the front. It follows the first war through Mylae, Ecnomus, the disaster in Africa, the storms that sank whole fleets and the loans that paid for the last one. The second half is Hannibal's war and its aftermath: Saguntum, the Alps, the eye lost to conjunctivitis, the ambush at Trasimene, the double envelopment at Cannae, Fabius the Delayer, the Metaurus, Scipio in Spain and Africa, the elephants at Zama and the peace that left Carthage with ten warships. Then the third war: Cato's catchphrase, Masinissa's provocations, Scipio Aemilianus's mole, and the 19th-century myth about salt. For the general himself, see our separate Hannibal quiz. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Punic Wars and their battles and commanders, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Fifty questions, free, with an explanation after every answer.
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Q 01In which modern country do the ruins of ancient Carthage lie?
Tunisia
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.
Q 02The Romans' word 'Punic' for the Carthaginians originally meant what?
Phoenician
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.
Q 03Which Greek historian of the Punic Wars watched Carthage fall in 146 BC?
Polybius
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.
Q 04At the start of the First Punic War, what did Rome conspicuously lack?
A navy
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.
Q 05Control of which Sicilian city, on the strait facing Italy, sparked the First Punic War?
Messana
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.
Q 06What did the Romans copy to build their first fleet of heavy warships in 260 BC?
A shipwrecked Carthaginian quinquereme
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.
Q 07What was the corvus?
A spiked boarding bridge
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.
Q 08How did Rome's first naval crews learn to row?
On land
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.
Q 09In Roman legend, what did the captured consul Regulus do when sent home to negotiate?
Kept his oath and went back
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.
Q 10What was the huge Roman fleet at Cape Ecnomus in 256 BC setting out to do?
Invade North Africa
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.
Q 11Whom did Carthage hire to retrain its army in 255 BC?
A Spartan officer
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.
Q 12About how many men drowned when a storm wrecked Rome's fleet off Sicily in 255 BC?
About 100,000
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.
Q 13Why did Roman armies in Sicily avoid open battle in 252 and 251 BC?
They feared the Carthaginian war elephants
Q 21Which river did the 226 BC treaty set as the northern limit of Carthaginian Iberia?
Ebro
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.
Q 22Hannibal's capture of which city in 219 BC led Rome to declare war?
Saguntum
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.
Q 23At which river in northern Italy did Hannibal win his first major battle against Rome, in 218 BC?
Trebia
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.
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.
Q 14At Drepana, what became of the sacred chickens that refused to eat?
Thrown overboard
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.
Q 15How did Rome pay for the fleet that won the First Punic War?
Loans from wealthy citizens
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.
Q 16The First Punic War ended with a Carthaginian naval defeat where in 241 BC?
The Aegates Islands
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.
Q 17Sicily became Rome's first overseas province after the First Punic War; what did it mainly supply to Rome?
Grain
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.
Q 18What crisis hit Carthage straight after the First Punic War?
A mercenary mutiny
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.
Q 19Which two islands did Rome seize from Carthage in 237 BC, an act called 'contrary to all justice'?
Sardinia and Corsica
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.
Q 20Which Carthaginian general, Hannibal's father, built a new power base in Iberia from 237 BC?
Hamilcar Barca
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.
Q 24What killed most of Hannibal's elephants after they crossed the Alps?
Winter cold
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.
Q 25Which river did Hannibal's army cross on rafts, elephants included, in autumn 218 BC?
Rhône
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.
Q 26At which lake did Hannibal ambush and destroy a Roman army in 217 BC?
Trasimene
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.
Q 27Whom did Rome appoint dictator in 217 BC, with a strategy of avoiding battle?
Fabius Maximus
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.
Q 28After Cannae, what did Hannibal's cavalry commander vainly urge him to do?
March on Rome
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.
Q 29At Cannae, how did Hannibal trap the Roman legions?
A yielding centre and closing wings
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.
Q 30To prove Cannae's scale, Mago heaped what before Carthage's senate?
Gold rings
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.