First Punic War Begins
Rome and Carthage went to war over Sicily in 264 BC and fought for twenty-three years, the longest continuous conflict in ancient history. The pretext was small. A band of Campanian mercenaries called the Mamertines had seized Messina, fallen out with Syracuse, and appealed to both Carthage and Rome for protection. Carthage got there first; the Mamertines then changed their minds and asked Rome to expel them. Rome's senate hesitated and put it to the assembly, which voted for war. The problem was that Carthage was a naval power and Rome had almost no fleet. Polybius says the Romans copied a wrecked Carthaginian quinquereme, built a hundred of them in sixty days, and trained rowers on benches set up on land. Their answer to superior seamanship was the corvus — a boarding bridge with a spike, dropped onto an enemy deck to hold it fast so that Roman infantry could fight the battle they were good at. It won Mylae in 260 and Ecnomus in 256. It also made ships unstable, and Rome lost entire fleets to storms — perhaps 100,000 men over the war, which Polybius calls the greatest losses at sea in history. An invasion of Africa under Regulus was destroyed by a Spartan mercenary commander in 255. Rome built a final fleet on private loans and won at the Aegates Islands in 241. Carthage paid an indemnity and gave up Sicily, and Rome seized Sardinia three years later on no pretext. That seizure is what Polybius names as the cause of the second war.
- Category: Military
