The First Punic War

Maps:

Images:

Key Dates:

264 BCE First Punic War commences

264 BCE Battle of Messana (Roman victory)

262 BCE Battle of Akragas/Agrigentum (Roman victory)

260 BCE Battle of the Lipari Islands (Carthaginian victory)

260 BCE Battle of Mylae (Roman victory)

259 BCE Battle of Thermae (Carthaginian victory)

259 BCE Battle of Sulci (Roman victory)

257 BCE Battle of Tyndaris (Roman victory)

256 BCE Battle of Cape Ecnomus (Roman victory)

256 BCE Siege of Apsis (Roman victory)

256 BCE Battle of Adys (Roman victory)

255 BCE Battle of Bagradas River AKA Battle of Tunis (Carthaginian victory)

255 BCE Battle of Cape Hermaeum (Roman victory)

255 BCE Rome loses fleet in storm off of Camarina

250 BCE Battle of Panormus (Roman victory)

250-241 BCE Roman siege of Lilybaeum

249-241 BCE Roman siege of Drepana

249 BCE Battle of Drepana (Carthaginian victory)

249 BCE Battle of Phintias (Carthaginian victory)

241 BCE Battle of the Aegadi Islands (Roman victory)

241 BCE Carthage surrenders

Episode Transcript:

 I am very excited about this episode today. We're going to be talking about war with one of our expert guests. Would you like to introduce yourself?

 Hi, I'm Brett Devereaux. I am an ancient and military historian and teaching assistant professor

 at North Carolina State University. And I write about ancient history, popular culture and military history on my blog, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, ACOUP.blog.

Let's talk about the First Punic War, which I think is it fair to say that the First Punic War

 is like the ugly stepsister to the Second Punic War, Cinderella.

 Yeah, it doesn't get quite the same amount of love. Part of this has to do with the nature of the sources.

 We have a fair bit of Polybius, but also basically all of Livy for the Second Punic War. But for the First Punic War, we're almost wholly reliant on Polybius. We do not have that chunk of Livy to rely on.

 And I think part of it is also that there isn't this sort of dashing figure of Hannibal. The First Punic War is a kind of grinding affair. And, you know, people, I think sometimes think it's kind of boring.

 It's not, I'm going to argue, it's not boring. And it is quite important. But yeah, it does not tend to get the attention that the Second Punic War does. It is also a naval war to a significant degree. And I think that also throws people.

 Well, we're here to correct everyone. This is an exciting war that we're going to be talking about today.

 For the absolute basics, who's involved, what are the dates, when are we talking about?

So the Second Punic War starts in 264. It's going to run down to 241. The primary participants of the Roman Republic, which by this point has pretty complete control of the Italian peninsula.

 And their main opponent is going to be Carthage, city located in North Africa, modern day Tunisia, which controls that whole chunk of North Africa, along with projecting overseas power across much of the Western Mediterranean. So these are the two largest states in the Western Mediterranean going head to head. Albeit, interestingly, in a war that neither of them seem to have expected at the outset to be a big deal. This is not a fully unintended war. But but a war that got out of control for both parties.

The third party in this, and they're going to duck out very quickly, is Syracuse. Syracuse has a key role in starting this nonsense. And then rapidly, the Syracusans realize that they are in very much over their heads and have kicked off a conflict much larger than them and sort of get out while they can.

OK, so let's talk about the prelude a bit more then. We've got Syracuse on the island of Sicily. How on earth are Roman Carthage involved in Sicily at this point?

 There's a lot of background that we have to we have to hit here. The first is we need to talk about the settlement pattern on Sicily. There's an indigenous population on Sicily, the Sicels. They are mostly crammed into the inland center of the island. And most of the coastal area has been colonized.

 The sort of eastern parts of the island are largely Greek colonial settlements. The western parts of the island, you have Punic trade ports, which tend to be smaller. I should know they tend to project less inland, but they are, by this point, significant settlements. And over the course of the 500s BC,

 just about all of the Phoenician settlements in the Western Mediterranean have come under the influence of the largest Phoenician colony in the Western Mediterranean, which is Carthage.

 And so there's a sort of strong Carthaginian presence on the western tip of the island. And then the eastern half of the island are all of these Greek poleis, which hopefully we know about Greek poleis right there, independent by nature.

 So it's a whole bunch of little fragmented Greek states, the largest of which is Syracuse. And Syracuse, if folks are not familiar, Syracuse is a big polis. Syracuse is every bit as large as, say, Athens. And every bit as powerful, which is why the Athenian attempt to conquer them in the late 400s is so harebrained.

 Yeah, but like Syracuse is a very, very large polis. And so it is a major player in the region. And starting the first big conflict comes at the Battle of Himera, which, if I'm remembering correctly, is 480.

 Carthage and Syracuse have this long running conflict over control of the island. And I think the pattern is worth noting because it's going to inform Carthaginian decisions.

For Syracuse, obviously, control of Sicily is the whole shebang because they live there. For Carthage, their key strongholds on Sicily are a set of possessions and a network of possessions, and by no means the most important. The main locus of Carthaginian strength is North Africa, where they have come to dominate the Libyan communities around them. The grain production from that area in this period is significant. It's very wealthy. It produces a lot of their manpower. Like, that's the core of their strength.

And then they also control Corsica, Sardinia. They have footholds in Spain at this point, although only very small footholds. It will not be major control until just before the Second Punic War. So they have a lot of possessions, of which Sicily is one. And so what we see is this cycle where Syracuse will put its act together for a while, usually under the leadership of a charismatic, capable tyrant. Syracusean politics are wildly unstable, so you get repeated emergence of tyrants. You get this tyrant who will emerge, who will be active and charismatic. And he will successfully assert Syracusan control over the rest of the Greek communities and then come gunning for the Carthaginian half of the island. And the Carthaginians will fight some battles. But in part, you get the sense they're trying to sort of limit their investment. The Carthaginians will, if things are going badly, they will just fall back to this handful of very fortified coastal settlements that they can resupply by sea and just wait out Greek unity

 because it never lasts. The Greek alliance always falls apart, in part because you can think about it -

 if you're the Greek settlements in the fracture zone between Carthage and Syracuse... Like a resurgent Syracuse might be good because it keeps Carthaginian power at bay. But if it ever looks like the Syracusans are going to win, that would be bad. And so you would start pushing back the other way.

And so the Carthaginians, if they're getting bested in the field, will just hole up in their fortresses and resupply by sea and wait for the Greeks to fall apart, wait for Syracusan politics to get crazy,

 wait for all the little cities to fragment, and then push back out to where they were before the war,

 sort of dust off their hands and like we're good to go for another decade. 

So it sounds like they've been doing that for quite a while.

 Since 480.

 Wow, okay, so they're quite used to this.

 Yeah, they've been doing this for two centuries. And to understand the sort of immediate political context of the First Punic War, we want to understand that this cycle has played out twice

 in the 40 or so years before the Second Punic War. The first is Syracuse gets its capable, charismatic tyrant. This is Agathocles, a mercenary captain turned petty king. And Agathocles, you know,

 puts Voltron together with the Greek states and makes a run at Syracuse. He even invades North Africa, but it doesn't go great. Folks are going to try to invade North Africa for a while.

 It's going to be a hot minute before it goes great for anybody. But you have to wait to 203 for that to happen. But so initially Agathocles is on the march. He hires a lot of mercenaries, some of whom will be relevant in a minute. He has a problem where his sons and one of his grandsons all think that they should be tyrant and are tired of waiting for the old man to die.

 And this destabilizes his rule. And so by the sort of 280s, Agathocles is on the back foot. He dies in the mid 280s. And once again, like Syracuse in politics goes to hell. And so the Carthaginians are like, okay, reset the board. Syracuse under pressure turns to an outside power. And this is Pyrrhus of Epirus.

 Pyrrhus of Epirus is a figure, right? The greatest general of his generation, at least that's what our sources regard him as, a kind of almost second Alexander. Pyrrhus of Epirus has been playing

 in the five way scrum for power in Macedonia. And the problem is that Epirus is just not a big enough player to win. He's big enough to cause annoyance to all the Macedonians who are trying to seize power there, but he is not big enough to actually succeed. And so what has happened in the late 280s

 is that all of the people who actually have a shot at the Macedonian throne have given Pyrrhus money and mercenaries to please go away. He has gotten money from both the Antigonids and the Ptolemies to please just find somewhere else to be.

 I mean, that's one way of dealing with him!

 I know, right? I mean, he even gets elephants. They're like, here's a bunch of war elephants,

 some troops, here's a bag of money. Go somewhere else.

 It's like when you ask your kids to go and play in the backyard because they're annoying you.

Exactly. You don't usually give them an elephant to do it. But, and the place he chooses to go is Italy.

 He has gotten a request for aid from Tarentum, the largest Greek settlement in Southern Italy.

 And so he decides he's gonna go for the easy task of beating up these weird non-Greek barbarians

 called the Romans. He almost immediately gets bogged down because it turns out that the Roman military system is extremely resilient.

 Who would have guessed?

 So he's able to defeat Roman armies, but he isn't able to actually make much progress against the Romans. He wins battles in 280 at Heraclea, 279 at Asculum in Italy, removes the immediate Roman pressure on his allies in Southern Italy. But, you know, he isn't able to push up into Roman holdings,

 like core Roman holdings in like Latium or Etruria. He makes raids, but that's it. That's the whole second question is why he can't do that. Different podcast. But the upshot is the Syracusans are like,

 oh, hey, here is this champion of Greek liberty in big scare quotes. We should invite this guy over to Sicily and they do. And so Pyrrhus rolls over into Sicily. The Syracusans have two problems.

 The first problem is Carthage. Their second problem is all of the mercenaries that Agathocles hired and maybe didn't pay.

 Yes, always an issue.

 And a key group of these mercenaries were actually Southern Italians, the Mamertines. Mamertine sons of Mamers, which is the Ascan Southern Italian word for Mars. So these guys call themselves the Sons of Mars. It gives you a sense of them. They're Oscan speakers, so they're probably from Samnium, Campania. So the, not Greek, but Italic peoples of Southern Italy. When Agathocles dies, they kind of go independent and they just seize the Greek polis of Messina.

 Because why not? They've not been paid!

 That's one way to get paid. And they basically turn it into a giant pirate base to menace all of their neighbors. And so obviously the Syracusans who are now recovering a little bit are like, well, this sucks.

 So they bring in like Pyrrhus, can you do something about these guys? And also about the Carthaginians. Pyrrhus isn't actually gonna get around to doing anything about the Mamertines

 because he immediately gets locked in a fight with the Carthaginians, who I will note, interestingly, at this point, and we are in the early 270s, conclude a treaty with the Romans, a mutual defense treaty with the Romans. They are friendly with the Romans at this point. Because they have a shared enemy.

 They both hate Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus actually runs into essentially the same problem with the Carthaginians. He ran into the Romans, which is that he can win battles, but he can't actually beat their military system. Once again, they can just fall back to their heavily fortified coastal forts

 and reinforce them by sea and wait him out. Pyrrhus comes to the realization the Romans are gonna have to come to later, which is that you need a fleet to get this done. He tries building one,

 and in a battle just off of Messana, the Carthaginians sink it. They just smash his fleet right up.

 And that's sort of the end of that. And Pyrrhus kind of like, having bailed on his Southern Italian allies, Pyrrhus now bails on his Sicilian allies and heads back to Southern Italy thinking,

 maybe one last run at the Romans will get me somewhere. It doesn't. And he goes back to Epirus in 274.

 And for any listeners who are thinking, I know that name. I know the name Pyrrhus. Is he where we get the word Pyrrhic victory from?

Yes, yes! He is that guy. He keeps winning battles and losing wars. And he is going to end up slain by an errant roof tile.

 What a way to go!

 He's the greatest general of his generation. He's sacking, oh gosh. Is it Argos? I think he's sacking Argos. It's one of the Greek polis. And so they're fighting in the streets. And what we're told is that like, an elderly mother is like up on her roof watching the fighting and she is watching her son fighting Pyrrhus. And she's like, oh no, she picks up a roof tile and chucks it at him and like gets the KO hit on the head and Pyrrhus is slain. And his whole, and of course his whole imperial venture

 was based on him personally. Like it just evaporates when he's gone. So Pyrrhus is one of these things

 where our sources keep telling us he's this great general, he's this great general, incredibly great general. He accomplishes nothing.

Which I think goes to prove there is nothing more terrifying than an angry Greek, yiayia...

 Right?  What really annoys me is that none of our sources give this woman a name.

Oh, of course they don't.

And I'm like, who was this? Tell me who this was.

I like her!

 I know, right? She did what the Romans couldn't. She killed Pyrrhus of Epirus. That's incredible.

 Anyway, the result is by the late 270s, conditions on Sicily are chaotic. So you've got,

 Syracuse is now recovering. They have a new charismatic tyrant figure, Hiero II. So they're recovering in the southeast of the island. The northeast corner of the island is a pirate base run by Italian mercenaries. And then Carthage is putting itself back together on the western tip of the island, right?

 Because Sicily is essentially a triangle. It's a big triangle.

 And the Romans have fended off Pyrrhus. They're feeling pretty good about themselves. And the Romans spend the back part of the 270s and the front part of the 260s mopping up all of the people that had sided with Pyrrhus. So all of the Greek communities in southern Italy are brought under Roman control. The Samnites had rebelled to join Pyrrhus. They're brought back under Roman control. And so in 265, the Syracusans feel secure enough to try and move the Mamertines out.

 And so they form up a big army and Hiero is gonna lay siege to Messina and get the Mamertines out.

 And the Mamertines at this point panic. And here's where we get our unintended war. The Mamertines first thought is, oh no, the Syracusans are coming. We should appeal to an enemy of Syracuse to like, please help us out. And so naturally they ask the Carthaginians, hey, do you wanna go fight the Syracusans? You seem good for it. And the Carthaginians are like, yeah, sure, let me get on that. And they put an army in a fleet in Messina's support town and they sail it right there.

 And it seems to be about the point when the large Carthaginian garrison is setting up shop in the citadel that the Mamertines realize that they have just become a Carthaginian dependency.

 They've not become an ally of Carthage. They've become a subject of Carthage. They're like, oh, that was not their intent. And like, good news, the Syracusans back off.

Not very far, like Hiero still would like to take this place, but like the bad news is that you have avoided being conquered by these people by sort of being conquered by those people without a fight.

 So the Mamertines are like, okay, we need to appeal to somebody else for help. Well, we're from Italy

 and the Romans exercise sovereignty over Italy. We will appeal to our cultural connection to the Romans to ask them to come help. And of course, the Romans don't really have a diplomatic in here,

 but the Romans have never met a fight they didn't want. They've largely finished mopping up Southern Italy. So they feel like they're available for a fight. And the Roman thought clearly

 is that this is not gonna be a big deal, which was also clearly the Carthaginian thought when they sent the garrison.

 Both of these states are kind of moving in as to like, this is a brush fire war. These are both Carthage and Rome. They're pretty aggressive states. They go to war pretty regularly and pretty continuously. And so the idea is like, oh, this is a brush fire war. It's something for the army to do.

 The Romans really legitimately do get antsy if the armies aren't doing anything because an edge stays sharp with use. So in 264, the Romans send one of the consuls with a standard consular army down to Southern Italy. They call up their naval allies. Polybius here is a little bit squirrely because they'll say the Romans have no fleet at this point, which isn't quite true. The Romans have a small fleet of their own, not anything large enough to rumble with Carthage, but they're able to put together about 50 boats, plus or minus. Most of these boats are, Polybius will tell us, undecked, which means they're not really warships. But the good news is you can get, and this is gonna be really important for understanding how the war evolves. You can get across the Strait of Messina in a rowboat. You don't need like big warships to do it. So the Romans show up with their little scratch fleet and their consular army, and the Carthaginians have a larger fleet and a significant army in Messina. The Romans are kind of looking across the strait. The Carthaginians put the fleet out to block them, but it's such a small strait, right?

 It's not like you have like multiple days of passing to intercept them in. So the Romans just make the crossing at night. But they just sneak across. It's such a narrow strait, it's really hard to stop them.

 And then they attack on land, and the Carthaginian garrison is defeated and expelled. And then the Mamertines find out, because nothing goes their way. They've just become Roman dependencies.

 Congratulations. Right, like they keep calling allies and like no one has any interest in you operating an independent pirate base on Sicily. Everyone is just going to conquer you, but it's the Romans.

 And so the Romans set up shop, and now this brush fire war gets out of control for everyone involved.

 And we tend to think, I think the sort of the terror that grips us is the unintended war, in part because we today have such powerful weapons. All right, this is the sort of, it was always the Cold War fear, the nuclear war that nobody wanted. Interestingly, historically, wars that nobody wanted are rare.

 It is very uncommon for states to get involved in wars they don't want, that nobody wants.

 What is very common is for states to get involved in wars that they expect to remain small

 and contained, brush fire wars, frontier wars, that then spiral wildly out of control once they get started. And this is, I would be remiss if I didn't note - this is a classic Clausewitzian interaction.

 These are the reciprocal actions. War tends towards extremes. It tends to get out of control, that is its nature.

And this war starts to get out of control. The Romans figure they'll move in, they'll take Messina,

 and given the forces they sent, they seem to think that once they do that, both Syracuse and Carthage will back down. That does not happen. Carthage raises new forces. The general that retreated from Messina is crucified for his cowardice. By the way, if you're a Carthaginian general, don't lose a battle.

 And if you do lose a battle, don't go home.

Wow. Okay, so that's the kind of culture that they were working in.

Yep, yep. The Carthaginians tend to execute failed leaders. And they tend to do it publicly,

 and it's quite nasty. Interestingly, the Romans do not do this. But so the Carthaginians get an army ready. The Syracusans get an army ready. I think both of them think the Romans are interlopers.

 They sent a single consular army, so about 20,000 men. It's not a huge army. Potent, but not a huge army. They're like, we can move these guys out. And the Romans now realize that they're in a scrap.

 And so for 263, they sent both consuls, which means they're sending both consular armies.

 So the Roman strength on the island suddenly surges up to 40,000. And everybody now kind of realizes like, oh, we have started a major war. The first folks to realize that are the Syracusans,

 who take one look at the Romans and the Carthaginians suddenly rolling up armies in the 40s and 50s of thousands instead of in the 10s and 20s. And Syracuse realizes like, oh, we have miscalculated.

Right, okay, so they're backing out straight away, right?

They're backing out. They make peace with the Romans. They pay tribute. They're like, we're done.

 We're done. We're not in for this. And so Syracuse just drops into the Roman column right away as the Syracusans realize that they have started a war that is much bigger than them. And credit where credit is due, it's impressive that the Syracusans figure this out in 263 because I don't feel like it would have been obvious in 263 how big this war is going to get. This is going to be the largest war fought in the Western Mediterranean up until this point. Arguably the largest war fought in the Mediterranean up until this point. It will be the largest naval war fought in the Mediterranean to the present. World War II is not gonna hit the numbers of men engaged in a naval battle in the Mediterranean as we're gonna get in this. Yeah, this is gonna get big.

 So 263, the Romans have a big army and they start moving. Their problem is the same problem

 everybody fighting the Carthaginians on Sicily has had since forever. The Carthaginians have a series

 of well-fortified coastal bases. The Romans generally can dominate in-land. Their armies don't win all the battles. They do lose a couple actually against the Carthaginians. They win most of them.

 And they generally have that advantage, but the Carthaginians have these key settlements. There are four big ones that are important. There's Panormus, which is modern day Palermo, Agrigentum, which is modern day Agrigento, Lilybaeum, which is modern day Marsala, and Drapana, which is modern day Trapani. And if you have a mental map, you're like, okay, that's one on the top, one on the bottom.

 Two on the west. And those are all the major ports. So if you want to dock a fleet anywhere, you have to ask the Carthaginians very nicely. And so the Romans take a crack at land warfare in 263 and 262 and into 261, and it quickly becomes apparent their problem is there's no way to take these damn

 fortified coastal settlements unless you can complete the siege by blocking the port. Because otherwise, the moment you show up to besiege the place, the Carthaginians are gonna drop their army in it by ship and start counterworking your siege works. And then they're gonna resupply it by sea.

 So you can't starve them out either. And so it's just you building walls and towers with 40,000 guys, and they're building walls and towers with 40,000 guys, and everyone gets nowhere.

So you need someone coming in from the land, and for that you need ships. And for that you need ships.

 Do they have any ships? They've got some rowboats, you told me.

They got some rowboats, yeah. They have some naval allies. And so in 260, the Romans build a fleet,

 a major fleet, 130 ships. Polybius has this just-so story that the Romans captured a shipwrecked Carthaginian ship and then built their entire fleet copying it. That may be true, but the Romans would not have needed Carthaginian shipbuilding expertise. Remember, they just wrapped up a whole bunch of Greek communities in southern Italy. Those guys know how to build warships.

Okay, so it's not necessarily that they've stolen a ship and copied it, they could have been given a ship and copied it.

 Yeah, and it's almost certain that a lot of the technical expertise is coming from those Greek communities. The ranks in Roman naval service for the technical crew, like your helmsmen and so on,

 will be in Greek, unlike the rest of the Roman army, which is obviously in Latin, will be in Greek into the imperial period. So the Roman navy, they're drawing this from Greek communities. It's possible that they copied some innovation in Carthaginian ship design, and that's what Polybius is on about, but it's not like the Romans don't know how to build a boat. They do, they've just never bothered to build 130 of them. And these are 130, Polybius will distinguish between what he will call decked and undecked ships. That your very light warships and your civilian ships are undecked,

 which means the main deck is uncovered. It's open to the air. But your heavy warships, you don't want your enemies throwing javelins and arrows into your rowers. So you put a fighting deck up over their heads to protect them and give your Marines a place to operate. And so these heavier ships are decked ships. This is 130 decked warships. This is a serious fleet. Though things are gonna get bigger.

 This is also the point where the Romans experiment with a fancy boarding bridge called the Corvus.

 It's a big long wooden plank tied up to the mast with a bunch of metal spikes on the front.

 The idea is you get close to the enemy and you drop it on them, and you now have a bridge to board their ship. And this is to make up for the fact that the Romans are pretty bad at naval warfare at this point.

And so most naval warfare, these are oared warships. They're galley warships. They are built around ramming. But right, when you wanna ram the enemy, you want the front of your ship to hit the side of their ship. And that requires a lot of really careful manoeuvering and rowing. And the Romans aren't quite very good at that yet. And so they're like, boarding would be easier. And so this boarding bridge

 is designed to let them do that. I should note, as the war goes on quite quickly, the Romans are going to get experienced enough that they're gonna drop the boarding bridge. Polybius mentions it in 260 and never again. And so the Romans seem to ditch it in the first few years, but it's useful right away.

 And then the Romans start figuring out. And if you look at the balance of ships, captured versus ship sunk, and this is something Christa Steinby has done, it's pretty clear that the Romans shift over

 to ramming by the 250s.

 So for anyone who's listening, if you've played Assassin's Creed Odyssey, you will know exactly what we're talking about with ramming a ship.

Yes, ramming, yes. Although it's worth noting that these ships are bigger than those ships. So, because the warship of the Peloponnesian war era, your AC Odyssey is a trireme, so named because it has three rowers stacked vertically on either side, sort of if you take a cross sectional slice. In the fourth century,

 the Greeks began experimenting with larger ships. So the trireme is a three, the Greeks are like, what about a quadrareme, a four, a quinquireme, a five. We get sixes and sevens and eights and tens and twelves. The Romans and the Carthaginians mostly don't go in for the supersized ships. That's mostly a heirs of Alexander nonsense. One of the Ptolemies will eventually build a 40.

 Bloody hell.

 It's not clear that that could get out of the Nile. It was a showpiece, but they'll do it.

 That's a bit extreme.

 It's a bit much. The Romans and the Carthaginians will use a mix mostly of triremes and quinquiremes, so threes and fives, with sixes and sevens as command ships, as big flagships. And it's interesting that while the Hellenistic states are like tens, twelves, both Rome and Carthage, terribly practical, are like the five represents the best balance of speed and attacking power. We will just build a lot of them. And so these are fleets that usually have, if we are to believe Polybius, and I'll get to the complication on this in a second, these are fleets that have a small scouting screening force of triremes

 because they're really fast and agile. And then the main body of the fleet are quinquiremes or fives.

 There's been some questions. Polybius only gives the ratio of the two types of ships for that very first fleet. After that, he'll just be like, they had this many warships. And it's possible that he's fudging

 that the number of triremes have increased significantly and so some of these ships are much smaller

 than he's implying. The answer to that question is almost certainly in the water off the coast of Sicily.

 This is the Battle of the Aegadi Islands, fought in 242, it's the last naval battle of the war and underwater archeologists for RPM Nautical have found it. They found it about a decade and a half ago.

 And they've been pulling rams up off the bottom of the sea since then. I think they're well over two dozen now. At the rate they're going, we're gonna get to Polybius' lost figures. Like we're gonna get all of them. We're close to all of them, which is gonna be really interesting. And at least initially,

 we thought that the rams were smaller than we were expecting. They looked like trireme rams. I think right now the theory is that they are in fact quinquireme rams and that quinquireme rams are just smaller than we thought they were. But so there's, I wanna note that there's sort of shifting ground and not consensus among scholars on this point. But we can just treat numbers of ships and that will be okay.

 So, 260, the Romans build their first fleet. They roll out. They have an initial skirmish that they lose.

 And then a major battle at Mylae with the Carthaginian squadron operating off of Sicily, which is not the whole Carthaginian Navy. Carthage is keeping most of its fleet kind of in mothballs because the Romans didn't have a fleet. So you don't need all your ships. So the Romans essentially ambush

 the Carthaginian squadron that is operating here. But it's a major naval battle. Carthaginians have, I think, I wanna say 80 ships. I'm remembering that off the top of my head. The Romans have 130.

 The Romans get the better of them. They win the battle. The Carthaginian fleet isn't destroyed, it disengages. We'll see this consistently. The Carthaginians, when they're losing a naval battle, are pretty good at pulling most of the fleet out.

 Okay, that's a useful tactic to have.

Yes, and both sides now begin, they realize like, okay, if we're gonna do this as a naval war, we're gonna need to actually mobilize significant fleets. And so both sides begin building and they begin training crews. And Polybius has this whole story about how the Romans set up platforms on land so that their landlubber Romans can learn to row properly. Like they set up little fake boats. Because to be clear,

 so one, Ben Hur has lied to you. None of the oarsmen on these ships are slaves. These are all free soldiers, often drawn from the poor classes because you have lots of those and then paid a wage.

 Part of that is because actually rowing these ships is a pretty technical job because you have to row in time. Because remember, the rowers, and we now have five of them, probably working three oars per side. And then you have about 30 odd slices of these guys. They're stacked vertically, probably two, two, and one. And you have three oars moving above each other. And then of course, they're oars to the side.

 If you row off time, your very long, very heavy oar will catch somebody else's very long, heavy oar.

 And that weight will kick their oar up. And famously in the 1980s, they built a trireme, the Olympias in Greece. You can go see it. Probably won't be seaworthy for much longer, just because of the way these ships, these ships tend to degrade over time. But they've done sea trials with it. And what happens when you foul an oar is that the back end of the oar kicks up into the face of the person behind you

 and smashes their jaw.

 Ouch.

 Yes, so you need to be rowing in time under battle conditions. Practice is required, is what I'm saying here. The Romans are not nuts being like, let's have these guys practice on land first. But so the Romans are training crews and they're building ships. The Carthaginians are pulling their ships

 out of mothballs and refitting them. Rome spends 259 and 258, mostly trying to seize Corsica and Sardinia. They make some progress, but it doesn't go. They're trying to find a way around these fortified strongholds on Sicily. Some other way to get at their enemy is the war widens and widens.

 And then we get the next major fleet battle in 257 off of Tyndaris. It's, the Romans win-ish, it's a little inconclusive. But it confirms to everyone like, this is a naval war. This war is gonna be decided by fleets.

 And what everybody knows is that the next year, their fleets are coming online. And so the Romans decide for 256, they're like, we are making basically no progress on Sicily.

Of the four fortresses I laid out, they've gotten one of them down, Agrigentum, they've managed to take that. They haven't managed to get any of the others. And the Romans are like, you know what?

 We hate these sort of indirect approaches. What if we attack Carthage directly? We're going to build an enormous fleet. We're gonna put a big army on it and we're going to sail to North Africa.

Bold...

 And we're gonna do that. And so in 256, they do it. The Roman fleet has 330 warships, not counting transports. That's what Polybius tells us. And I have a long article explaining why I actually think we should believe him... That's a big number. And this is clearly, this is the peak effort from both sides.

 They are both going all out. The Carthaginians seem to be aware of this. So they put to see everything they've got, which Polybius tells us is 350 ships.

Right, okay. So fairly equally matched.

 Fairly equally matched. We're gonna have a battle with 700 ships engaged. To give a sense, that's probably something like 300,000 sailors. This is enormous. Representing the lion's share of both sides' military capacity. The battle is the Battle of Ecnomus. It's huge. It is so big that both fleets have to split

 into multiple parts in order to function because they're so large, you can't command them from a single point. That's actually one of the reasons why I think Polybius is not lying to us about the numbers. The Roman fleet is split into four divisions because it is so big. A right wing, a left wing, a front line, and then there's a reserve force guarding the transports. And that actually looks a lot like the command structure of the fleets at the early modern Battle of Lepanto, which is the next largest Mediterranean naval battle. Makes me think that Polybius isn't blowing smoke here. They really are kind of going ham with it. Though again, many of the ships may be smaller than Polybius lets on.

One quick question, because I'm curious. 700 ships, chaos, right? How do you tell whose ship is whose?

 Do they have different flags? Are they painted?

 They certainly would be painted and decorated. These ships are, from a technical standpoint, identical to the point that we know that both sides reuse their opponent's capture ships.

 Okay, why wouldn't you?

 It's because of the Aegadi's rams, and this is fun... So the ram on the front of these ships is a hundred, 150 kilogram hunk of bronze for two societies that are both using bronze coinage. Like it's money.

 You have to make the ram out of money. So naturally, you need an official to sign off on the production of every single ram. And both Carthage and the Romans do this and they do it the same way, which is that there's an inscription on the ram giving the name of the official that has approved the ram.

 We don't know a lot about the Carthaginian officials that show up on their ram inscriptions, but for the Romans, this is a job for the quaestors, the treasury officials, and we occasionally do know who these guys are. And so one of the fun things is the rams we're getting from the Agaedi islands should be on Carthaginian ships based on their positions. And a bunch of them have Latin inscriptions with quaestors, all of which seem to have been quaestors before 249, when the Romans lose a major naval battle and get a bunch of ships captured. And so we're like, we know how these ships got into the Carthaginian fleet. They had been captured and reused. And so they have Roman rams with Roman inscriptions. So yeah, presumably, I think there would have been some trouble. What is gonna make it a little easier, keeping straight who's friend and who's foe, is that these fleets do attempt to engage in formation. Your ship is strong on the front and vulnerable on the sides. So in order to protect your sides, you want friendly ships to your right and left. And so these fleets form in these long lines.

 And they attempt to maintain that formation while disrupting the enemy. One of the arguments as an aside for what the quinquireme is for, for why you build a larger ship, is that it's bigger and heavier.

 And unlike a trireme, it can ram frontally. It's built heavy enough to hit the guy on the front, which makes it more useful in the center of that long line where you can't maneuver anyway. 

 But so you are trying to move in formation, which might make it a little bit handier to tell ships apart.

 It's not clear if they use flags, but they certainly could have. The Romans invent the battle flag,

 so they could have done. Interestingly, you certainly wouldn't have been able to tell by looking at the deck. One of the other fun things about the Battle of the Agaedi Islands, these should be Carthaginian ships, but we keep finding Monte Fortino-type helmets, which is the classic Italian Roman helmet.

 And what that tells you is the Carthaginians at some point during this war looked at the helmet that was common in Italy. They know a good thing when they see it, and they've started wearing them, too.

 So the Carthaginian marines are apparently wearing Roman-style helmets. 

The Romans have copied their ships, and they're like, well, we'll copy your helmet.

 It's a handy little helmet. To be fair, the Romans copied that helmet, too. That helmet's originally from Gaul. And the Romans knew a good thing when they saw it. And they're like, mm, that helmet,

 that's a handy helmet. So, Ecnomus is a huge battle. Absolutely massive forces engaged. The Romans win. They're able to force their way through. And if folks are wondering how the Carthaginians

 are able to intercept a Roman fleet headed to North Africa, the answer here, these oared warships,

 because all of the space in them is taken up by rowers, they have very little space for food or water.

 So they have very short what we call operational range. You need to move along coastlines with them to resupply. And so the result is between that and the winds, there's only one way for the Romans to get from Italy to North Africa. They essentially have to run along the southern coast of Sicily

 because the northern coast is still controlled by Carthaginian strongholds and then make the hop when they hit the end. And so the Carthaginians can just be waiting for them. They've only got one route, so you know where they're coming from. You know where they're gonna go.

But so the Romans win. They land an army under Marcus Attilius Regulus in North Africa.

 And they have some initial land successes in 256. They seize some local Libyan cities. But pretty quickly, Regulus gets into trouble. He is after all fighting on the Carthaginian's home turf.

 They can field a lot of soldiers. People often accept maybe a little bit uncritically Polybius's claim that the Carthaginian army was just a whole bunch of mercenaries. Carthaginians certainly employ

 what we would regard as mercenaries, but the Carthaginians draw manpower from a lot of sources.

 And the core of their army is from North Africa. And these are, they're not Carthaginian citizens for the most part. They're Phoenicians and Libyans from the subordinate communities in North Africa.

 So these are subjects of Carthage. I don't know that we call them mercenaries. They do get paid.

 What Carthage essentially does is it extracts tribute in cash out of the North African communities

 and then turns around and uses that to pay North Africans to do their fighting. But this is, we might say a professional army or a semi-professional army. And then bolted onto that is whatever mercenaries

 the Carthaginians can hire, whatever allies they can get from the nomadic Numidian peoples who are very, very good horsemen in North Africa. The Carthaginians like pulling mercenaries from Spain.

 They'll eventually, that relationship will change for the Second Punic War because they'll go and conquer those people. And then obviously that relationship changes. But at this point, they haven't done that yet, so they're hiring them.

 So the Carthaginian army is kind of a motley, but the core of its strength comes from these North African communities. And that's not now attenuated by the need to make a sea crossing. So like Regulus is in it. The Carthaginians hire some Greek military advisors to reform their army as you do,

 or at least as Polybius says they do, although one feels like Polybius is kind of trying to do a kind of Sicilian expedition vibe here. We're like, you need your Spartan military advisor to turn things around.

 But either way, by 255, Regulus is in trouble, and he needs to get evacuated. And so the Roman fleet,

 when the sailing season comes out, they roll out again. The Carthaginians once again try to block them. The Roman fleet is smaller this time. The Carthaginian fleet is much smaller. They can't do another 350 ship fleet. They send out 200 ships. That's gonna be about the max that they can do.

 The Romans at this point get lucky. Remember I said these fleets need to come up on land to resupply?

 They catch the Carthaginians resupplying. They essentially ambush the Carthaginian fleet, beat the hell out of it, and send it scurrying. This is the battle off of Cape Hermaeum. The Romans capture a whole bunch of Carthaginian ships. They can't get off the coast in time. It is a major disaster for Carthage. And now essentially momentarily without a functional fleet, the Romans are able to sail in.

 They grab Regulus's army. They sail out.

 And now the Romans run into what will be their real nemesis at sea, which is not the Carthaginian Navy, but storms. So one, the Romans are not great sailors. They have hired a bunch of great sailors,

 but the Roman consuls that are commanding these fleets are not Navy men. And I should note here,

 as far as the Romans are concerned organizationally, a fleet is an army that happens to be on boats.

 So the command system works the same. Just as the consuls, the elected magistrates, would command the army on land, they command the army at sea, and the Romans are like, yeah, of course, that's how it works. But so like these guys have their naval experience and Roman commanders are always aggressive. And so the Romans often make gutsy decisions about the sailing season. And then the second problem the Romans run into is, remember, a lot of the key ports are controlled by Carthage on Sicily and inaccessible to them. So Carthaginian ships can generally take the safer routes

 around the island. And the Romans often have to take the riskier one. And this can go very badly.

 These oared warships are built for speed. Because when you're a ramming ship, speed is both offense and defense. And the speed means you wanna get as many rowers as possible in that ship.

 And to get as many rowers as possible in that ship, you wanna push the oars as far down the hull

 as you can. Which means the freeboard above the portholes for those oars is very small.

 Which means rough seas are very bad. And so the Romans get hit by a storm. At this point, the Romans have, there's some argument amongst scholars, something between three to 400 ships

 and an army embarked. And they lose all but about 80 of them.

 Oh, wow. That's an enormous amount of people lost.

It is a catastrophe. Yes.

 Good grief.

 You know, unclear how many people are successfully fished out of the water. I mean, Regulus seems to be alive. His army seems to still exist. But tens of thousands, if not maybe 100,000 or more sailors drowned. You know, this is a disaster, every bit on par with what Hannibal's gonna do to the Romans in the Second Punic War. Just an absolute catastrophe. The Carthaginians are like, okay, we're gonna start rebuilding our fleet because the Romans are busy. It's gonna take them a minute to do that.

 The Romans, not to be deterred, they decide that like, okay, invading North Africa didn't go well.

 We need to recommit to Sicily. But like anything, we're gonna do it big. And so they rebuild back up to, I think it's 250 ships. They're like, we're gonna build a big fleet. We're gonna take a swing at it.

 While they are doing this, I should note the Carthaginians are recapturing Agrigentum. So by the end of 255, the Romans are back where they were in 260, just with a lot of dead Romans. But in 254, the Romans roll out with a big fleet and this time they strike at Panormos and they're able to take it that year. So it's a sort of a big effort. And then their fleet gets wrecked by another storm. They're not praying to the right gods right now. No, no, no, things are not going well. This is the part of the war

 where things are going quite badly for the Romans. They do manage to hold onto Panormus, a Carthaginian effort in 250 to retake the city will fail. And so the Romans are now, they've got the east of the island, they've got the center of the island. And the main node of the war now, the main rub,

 are the two Carthaginian fortresses at Lilybaeum and Drapana on the western tip of the island.

 And these are, nature has favored these places in terms of defense. They are rocks on the coast.

 The Carthaginians have fortified them very heavily and so the Romans begin in 253 to try and take Lilybaeum. They're still trying in 252. They're still trying in 251. They're still trying in 250. And it's just, the siege keeps going.

 Both sides pour new forces in. You know, the Romans build a wall. The Carthaginians counter build.

 The Romans build a tower. The Carthaginians sally and destroy it back and forth. Polybius describes this as like a boxing match where they're just trading hits and neither is getting any advantage.

 In 249, the Romans pull their fleet together. By this point, the Carthaginians have rebuilt theirs.

 They've rebuilt it for a while. And the Romans decide that they are going to, they're gonna finally close the port at Lilybaeum and they'll win that way. So they're gonna send the fleet, they're gonna close the port, complete the siege and then we'll finally finish this damn place off. The Carthaginians know they're coming. They send their fleet and the result is the Battle of Drapana, which goes poorly.

 And this is the famous, I think it's an Appius Claudius, the Roman Admiral with the sacred chickens.

The chickens, I've been waiting for the chickens!!

 The chickens, yes. So of course the Romans have all sorts of rituals about how to commence a battle

 and make sure the gods are on your side and one of them is you bring the sacred chickens. And like, you know, Roman divination is designed to produce a yes answer when it comes to going to a battle.

 And so the Roman practice here is you take out the sacred chickens, you stretch out some feed in front of the sacred chickens and if they peck at it, that's a yes.

 Right, which sounds like they would. 

They, this is, hungry chickens will generally, but it turns out that chickens are not aquatic animals

 and they do not like being on boats.

 Oh, seasick chickens...

 And so the Romans break out the sacred chickens and again, I think it's a Claudius, but I may be misremembering the name of this Admiral. The Romans are watching the Carthaginian fleet taking position in front of them and they're like, they need to go now. And they bring out the sacred chickens

 and the sacred chickens won't do anything. So they try again, the sacred chickens won't do anything

 and the Roman Admiral is getting frustrated because he needs to attack right now. And so famously he declares, well, if the chickens won't eat, let them drink and pitches them overboard.

Big act of sacrilege there, quite a bold move.

Quite a bold move! And then he engages. And so of course, having enraged the gods, he loses and he loses badly. The Roman fleet is badly defeated. The nature of the topography, this battle is happening basically in Drapana's harbour. The Romans are, as they fall back, they're basically driven up against the coast so they have nowhere to go. So the Carthaginians capture a whole lot of ships. Part of the Roman fleet gets out and the Carthaginians run it down. There's a second battle at Phintias and the Carthaginians mop up the rest of the Roman fleet. And so by the end of 249, the Romans have basically no boats.

 Oh, they've built so many and they've got nothing left.

They have built so many. In a minute, I can tell you exactly how many because I have counted.

Yes, please!

 When we get to the end of the war, we're gonna do some numbers. And the combination of losing so many sailors and so many ships and naval warfare being so expensive, naval warfare is hideously expensive. And the Romans had something like 240 ships for this operation off of Drapana. They've lost another big fleet. The Romans say, you know what, you know what? We can't do any more naval warfare. We're not giving up, but it's gonna be a purely land-based operation from here on in

 because the Roman treasury is broke. Remember, Roman soldiers on land, you can like buy their own equipment and you barely pay them. But Roman soldiers at sea, like you need to build ships and rowers need to be paid properly because those rowers are coming from the poor classes. They don't have farms to support them economically. So naval warfare is extremely expensive and the Romans are out of money. Carthage is almost out of money too, I should note. Both of these sides are fighting to exhaustion.

 So from 248 to 243, the Romans attempt to hammer away at Lilybaeum and Drapana on land,

 continuous siege operations, and they get nowhere. Their opponent by this point is a fellow whose last name listeners may recognize. He is Hamilcar Barca. This is Hannibal's dad. This is the start of his career. And he's managing these sieges against the Romans. So the Romans are not making progress.

 Finally in 243, like the Romans accept the strategic reality that there is no way to get Carthage off this island except getting another navy. And please note, we are in 243. This war has been going for 20 years. 

So theoretically there could be some young guys in the army who were babies when this war started?

Were unborn. The Romans start conscription at 17.

Wow, okay. That puts it in perspective.

 Yeah, most of the Roman soldiers here were probably not born when this war started. And it's one of these things where you tell people that the first Punic War last 264 to 241, 23 years. And they assume that it's like the hundred years war where it's like an on again, off again thing. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. 23 straight years of high intensity warfare with large field armies active every year. And fleets operating on a scale that no other power in the Mediterranean can match. Polybius is making a point

 in providing a description of this war. And one of the points he's making is like, and he's speaking to a Greek audience. He's like, you guys were insane to think you could rumble with these people.

 That what the Romans and the Carthaginians can throw at each other is just an order of magnitude larger that would any Greek polity, including the success of Alexander can produce. And this is his argument. He's like the rise of Rome was not due to chance.

 You can almost sort of, he never quite frames it this way, but you can almost sense that what he's saying is basically when Roman Carthage went to war, whoever won was going to dominate the Mediterranean.

And it's worth mentioning, isn't it? I mean, Polybius's histories, just quickly recap for us,

 who is Polybius and what is his overarching theme of his whole history?

Yeah. So Polybius is a Greek. He is from Megalopolis on the Peloponnese. He ends up as a result of Rome's fighting in Greece in the second century as a hostage in Rome. He is kind of an aristocratic Greek. He has military experience. He knows how warfare works, which is nice. He ends up because, you know, when you have diplomatic hostages, they hang out with your elites and you treat them really well, unless you have to murder them. He ends up in the orbit of the Scipiones, particularly Scipio Aemilianus, who's going to be the guy that eventually destroys Carthage. Polybius is there when Carthage is destroyed in 146. He's an eyewitness to its destruction. And he's writing his history in Greek. It seems for mostly a Greek audience. You know, Polybius is doing, he's got a lot of like theory work that he's doing about how states work, this, that, anything. But the core of his contention is that on the one hand, Polybius returns to this idea of tyche, of chance or fate twisting the way events turn out. And then the other, so he's like, so much depends on chance. And it isn't predictable.

But then he's like, the Roman success was not due to chance. The Roman advantages were so extreme

 that even chance was not going to stop them, that the Roman designs were not going to be foiled.

 And he is then trying to pick out like, explain why Roman dominance is so significant. Now I should note, we don't have all of Polybius, but we have relatively little of it. And we mostly have the beginning. There's a lot of speculation as to the themes on the back half of Polybius that we don't have.

 In particular, the Romans of the front half of Polybius often come off very idealizing. They're pretty noble fellows. They're, you know, redoubtable and they can't be deterred. And they're just gonna keep pushing forward and they're gonna keep going at it. And they're eager to adopt foreign weapons.

 They copy everybody's stuff and they're just, they're almost, Polybius' presentation was kind of idealized. And one gets the hint that this impression would have soured over the back part of the history where the Romans might've come off as a little more greedy and rapacious towards the end.

 A sort of moral decline tale. But either way, from what we have, part of Polybius' intervention is basically screaming at his Greek compatriots in Greece, don't rebel against the Romans! You won't win.

 Don't fight these guys. Copy them. Imitate their institutions. Their institutions are good.

 But like, do not rumble with these guys. You will not win. Round two will not go your way. And of course, he's writing in the aftermath not only of the destruction of Carthage in 146,

 but the destruction of Corinth in the same year when the Romans got tired of the Greeks greeking around. And so he's like, don't do that again.

So is it fair to say then that when we're reading what he's writing about events the century before,

 we should still be bearing in mind the message that he was sending as he was writing it?

Yes. Because it's gonna cloud everything that he's writing down. Yes. And Polybius is the sort of source,

 Polybius will never lie to you, but he will selectively interpret facts. Polybius will fudge. But he will not lie. Polybius, of course, the first Punic War, 264, Polybius isn't alive for that. He's an eyewitness for the third Punic War. What he's relying on for the first Punic War, he has two main sources, he's open about this with us. His two main sources, he has a Roman source, the history of Fabius Pictor,

 the earliest Roman history now lost. Fabius Pictor is a contemporary of the second Punic War.

 And he was a senator, he would have had access to all the records, just one reason to suppose

 that Polybius's numbers may be reliable. After all, the Romans would have needed to keep records of all the rowers they were paying. They would know how many they had. And then Polybius also has a history by a fellow named Phalaenus, a Sicilian Greek, who is pro-Carthaginian. So he has one pro-Roman account, and he has a pro-Carthaginian account, and he occasionally uses one to call bullshit on the other.  So Polybius is trying to be pretty careful here. But he will fudge, right? And so you see that, he'd be like, the Romans basically didn't have any ships, because that makes it more impressive

 when they win. He makes them seem a little bit more landlubberly than they are.

 Christa Steinby is also argued that Polybius makes the Carthaginian navy feel more experienced than it is. But Carthage has had these newer, heavier warships for maybe only a few decades before this war.

 They're pretty new at this kind of warfare, too. They've had a fleet for much longer, but it was a trireme fleet, not a quinquireme fleet. And so the Carthaginians are also kind of figuring out how do these heavier warships work? And Polybius downplays that and presents the Carthaginians as a sort of naval masters that Rome must learn to defeat.

 So it's not a David versus Goliath?

 No. No, it's not. I mean, these are two powers that are actually in kind of a similar setup, and they will run out of juice at basically the same time. So that gets us to 243. The Romans build one more fleet.

 The Roman treasury is absolutely broke, so the fleet is privately financed, like a sort of buy war bonds,

 sell your jewelry, and pay for a ship kind of thing. But this gets a Roman fleet together of about 200 ships, which the Romans then send to Sicily. They clearly catch the Carthaginians somewhat by surprise. The Carthaginians scramble to load their own fleet with reinforcements and supplies

 for Lilybaeum and Drapana, and they send that fleet out. And so it's actually, we're pushing into the winter. It's in, gosh, is it March? I think it's in March. We're pushing out of the sailing season

 when the two fleets actually engage at the Aegadi Islands.  They're islands off of the western coast of Sicily. They're like rocks in the sea. They're not big islands. Just because of the way the winds are,

 the Carthaginian relief fleet has to head up to these islands and then wing south, and the Romans are moving up to block them. The Carthaginians had clearly hoped that they could sneak into Drapana, drop their stuff, and then come out to fight, but the Romans intercept them on the way, so the Carthaginians have all these supplies on the deck, and they haven't had a chance to refit, so they're in a bad position. And so the result, the Battle of the Aegadi Islands, 200 ship on 200 ship engagement,

 and it goes very badly for the Carthaginians. They lose about 120 ships. They escape with about 80.

 Most of the ships are captured rather than sunk, so the Romans now have all those ships,

 which amusingly the Romans may be recapturing ships that were captured from them at Drapana.

 And at this point, the Carthaginians have a problem. They have their main army in Sicily under Hamilcar, and others, he's not the only guy, but they're there, and they have no way to resupply it.

 Polybius tells us politically, the Carthaginians want to keep fighting, but they look at it like,

 we have no way to put together a new fleet fast enough to resupply these armies, and we don't have another army.

 And so in order to maintain our hold in North Africa and elsewhere, we do need this army back.

 And so it is that consideration that compels them at last in 241 to come to the negotiating table with the Romans. And say basically, what do we need to give you to get, because we can't get another fleet in

 to get our army out. And so the war finally ends. The Romans impose a huge indemnity on Carthage,

 but Carthage is rich, they pay it off easily. The Romans seize all of Sicily in exchange for letting the Carthaginian army withdraw. There's something of an irony that the Carthaginians will bring their army back, but remember, they're broke, so are the Romans. So they can't pay it. So that army immediately revolts, which is gonna start another major war for Carthage in North Africa,

 a kind of fight for Carthage's life against its own mercenary army and its North African dependencies.

 This is called the Mercenary War. Carthage wins this war. This is where Hamilcar makes himself famous. He is the great Carthaginian leader here. He will then after that go off to Spain. And the impression we get is, his successes have made Hamilcar such a significant figure that basically the entire rest of the Carthaginian political system is like, we need to get this guy out of here, or he's gonna make himself king. So we're gonna pack him off to Spain.

 Safely out of the way.

 Safely out of the way. And then of course he's gonna go conquer a significant portion of Spain,

 because this is what you do. Over the course of the war, Polybius tells us, he totals up at the end,

 he said the Romans built 800 ships over the course of the war. You can actually count. And he's right.

 My total is the Romans built 826 ships, if you run through. Carthage probably built 350 or so.

 Remember they started the war with another 200. So Carthage probably ran through about 550 ships.

 The Romans through about 800 ships.

 So these are staggering numbers. Do we know how much a ship would cost on its own, as in how much wood would you need to buy? How expensive would it be?

We have some sense. So Polybius does not give us figures for the Roman and Carthaginian contact.

 The nearest we have are, we have a bunch of inscriptional evidence and Thucydides for how much Athenian ships cost during the Peloponnesian war. Now those are triremes. So they're smaller,

 but it gives you a sense of the relative cost. Thucydides tells us that it takes a talent of silver to build and kit out a trireme and another talent to pay its crew for a month. Talent of silver, if people aren't familiar with my students, I would do like a block of silver about yay. It's about 50 kilos of silver.

 It's a big, a talent is an enormous unit of account. So these ships are really expensive. A trireme has a crew of around 200 that need to be paid. So your running expenses is 200 wage bills. And it's worth noting something about the relative distribution of that cost. You're gonna be operating these ships

 seven, eight months a year. So the overwhelming majority of your cost is not building them,

 but keeping them active. Worse yet, these ships need to be maintained. In Athens, that job was done by the triarch. The way the Athenians funded their fleet is that the Athenian state paid to build the ship

 and it paid the rowers. But for maintenance costs, the Athenians would just go to rich guys

 and be like, congratulations, you are the captain of a ship. You were not allowed to refuse. As captain of the ship, you must pay to maintain it.

What an honour!

 Yes. This was one of the most burdensome Athenian liturgies. But conveniently, it generates a lot of annoying court cases which give us a lot of data on how much it costs to be a triarch and it was expensive. Not as expensive as building the ship, but the maintenance cost would hit the cost

 of building the ship after about four or five years. So you wanna think, if you wanna think in relative costs, you can build the ship, you can maintain a ship for five years or you can crew a ship for a month

 and all three of those activities cost the same amount.

 Especially if they're getting pieces, getting knocked off or damaged in any way.

Yes, knocked off, damaged, yeah. And then, and also these ships only last on average about 20 years.

 So you're replacing about 5% of your fleet every year. So you're building continuously.

 Can we tell if the civilian population ever felt the pinch of having this enormous expense during the war?

 So Polybius tells us just point blank in North Africa, they do, that the reason when the mercenary army revolts, that all of the Libyans revolt with them is Polybius is like, they are effing done with taxes, pardon my language, is like they have been just taxed into oblivion to pay for this war. And I think we get a sense of how exhausting this war had been on the Roman side too. You know, the Romans have this ritual famously, that when the Roman state is at peace on all of its frontiers, the doors of the temple of Janus are closed. And the joke here is that that never happens. Augustus, when he becomes emperor in the Res Gestae, he makes a big deal of closing the doors of the temple of Janus.

 And he goes and checks. He's like, how often has this happened in the whole of the Republic?

 And so we know that in the whole of the Roman Republic, the doors of the temple of Janus

 are closed for eight years.

Okay! I'm surprised the doors didn't rust open.

 I know, right? Like, did you have to make new doors in order to close them? And those eight years are in a single stretch immediately following the first Punic War.

Okay. So that gives us a big clue.

 The Romans are like, woof. Like, we got through that, but there is nothing left in the tank. They have manpower, they have troops, but presumably the issue is money. Polybius is very clear. The Roman treasury is empty by the end of this war. And the expense of privately financing that fleet, like this is supposed to be loans. Those loans are paid back out of the Carthaginian indemnity, but presumably that leaves like nothing in the tank. And so the Romans adopt very limited levels of warfare for about a decade.

 Against their character, right?

Right, yes. 

Not what they usually want to do. So the Romans, for the first time, seemingly ever, can't afford to go to war, which must really annoy them. Carthaginians have spent so much on this war

 that their own people are rebelling against them.

 Yes.

 The war lasted so long that some of the kids at the end hadn't been born.

 Yes.

 Why did they not just stop earlier? Neither side managed to do much to the other. It seems that for the whole time, it was pretty equal. Why did they not just say a decade earlier, you know what, this is pretty useless, isn't it?

 I mean, you could ask the same question about every European country in 1915, right?

Oh, yeah, that's a good point.

 Once you start fighting, it's hard to stop. I think from the Carthaginian perspective, so Carthage gets quite a bad rap in the scholarship over this war. And I think quite unfairly, to be frank, a lot of this has to do with scholars in the early 1900s who are, pardon me, a little racist against a North African polity

 composed of Middle Easterners.

 Shocker.

 Yeah, what a shocker. And so, you know, I've been pushing for something of a reassessment of Carthaginian strategy. I mean, I think the answer for why don't the Carthaginians give up is they have a playbook for this. And their playbook is you hold your coastal bases and you wait for these guys to run out of steam. And they're used to Greek alliances. And, you know, it could take 10 or 15 years

 for whatever tyrant of Syracuse is here this week to run out of steam for his alliances to fall apart.

 But it had always happened. And so the Carthaginians are probably sitting there thinking like, we're running the playbook. It has always worked. It just worked against Pyrrhus of freaking Epirus.

 And so we just, these guys are gonna run out of juice. And, you know, if you're Carthage in 248 or 247, the Romans can't put together a fleet. Their sieges are failing. You're probably thinking, yeah, any day now, they're gonna run out of juice. And then we'll be able to retake what we've lost, either militarily or at the negotiating table, and we'll reset the board and life will go on. So it takes 23 years for them to say, okay, maybe this is the summer. We should rethink this. And it takes a situation where they have no choice, right?

 Their only army is trapped and they need to get it out and they have no other way to do it than negotiation. If they could have built another fleet, they would have done that. And it would have gone on for another 23 years. Yeah, they would have kept going. And of course for the Romans, right,

 the Romans never backed down. That's just, the Roman political system almost doesn't allow for it.

 You go to elect consuls and then tell them they can't fight the war this year? Like that's not, the Roman political system is just not correctly oriented to kind of take that sort of back down.

 Though it's worth noting that the Romans do trim their aims, right? Like it's clear in 256, 255,

 like the Romans are imagining they're gonna invade North Africa, they're gonna take Corsica and Sardinia and Sicily, and they're just gonna wrap up the whole Carthaginian empire. And like, eventually they're like, we will settle for Sicily. 

So does Sicily become a Roman province at this point?

 Yes, very first. Because Italy is not a province.

 It's often said, isn't it, that Rome was expansionist very early and everything that they did was with the aims of expansion. But it sounds like from what you've told me that they weren't actually intending to make Sicily a province at the start of the war?

 No. They thought it was just gonna be a brush-fire war. A brush-fire war, yeah. And they'd be essentially securing, I mean, one imagines part of the thinking with taking Messina is that

 this is the southern door to Italy. And so you're like, oh yeah, let's secure that. That's a defensive position we need to have. Of course, it's the northern door to Sicily, so you run into the problems on both sides. But yeah, and it's striking that when Rome resumes military activity, it will not be directed into Carthage's neighborhood. It will be directed north. Because like, when we're talking about Rome and Italy, we mean Italy south of the Rubicon. The Po River Valley is full of Gauls. We know the Romans don't very much like Gauls. And so the Romans certainly, I mean, they're expansionist in a way. This war is a continuation of the Pyrrhic Wars and therefore a continuation of Rome's final unification violently of the Italian peninsula. So the Romans are being expansionists, but no, it doesn't seem premeditated. 

So Sicily is an unexpected bonus.

 Yeah, and so the Romans, they send one of their praetors to Sicily to manage affairs there every year.

 This is a problem, because at this point they only have two praetors. And then in 237, while Carthage is fighting this mercenary war, the Romans get cheeky and just grab Corsica and Sardinia while the Carthaginians' backs are turned. And Carthage is like, hey, and the Romans are like, what are you gonna do about it? You're busy fighting your own army. And so they start, they're like, okay,

 now we need to send a praetor to Corsica and Sardinia. And presumably somebody is waving their arms and they're like, we need both a praetor Orbanus and a praetor Peregrinus to run the courts in Rome. And you have assigned both of our praetors to overseas provinces. So they raise the number of praetors to four. They do this in 237, they have four praetors. So two praetors in Rome, one on Sicily,

 one handling Corsica and Sardinia. But it is notable that the system that the Romans established in Italy is not brought into Sicily, right? In Italy, when the Romans defeat you, you're enrolled in the socii, you're made an ally. Please, you know, people, I know this isn't a visual medium but I'm making sneer quotes over "ally."

And you're incorporated directly into the Roman military system. In Sicily, they don't do this. It's not clear if that's because Sicily is, if they thought it was culturally different. I mean, it's full of Greeks,

 but so is Italy. Tons of Greeks in Southern Italy, they never problem with that. It may just be that it's overseas. And so recruits in Sicily couldn't march to a muster point in Italy. So the Romans are like, okay, so he's made it. So instead what the Romans do is what they'll do in most places. They impose tribute, they impose taxes. The taxes in grain, initially rather than money. They're gonna use this to help feed their armies. Initially, it's an irregular tax. The Romans will just go to the Sicilians every year

 and be like, here's how much grain we need for all the war we're gonna do. Eventually it becomes a fixed tax. And Sicily will be the breadbasket of the Roman Republic for quite a while and a pretty major province because Sicily is agriculturally quite productive as the Mediterranean goes.

Syracuse technically remains a subordinate Roman ally, not in the Alliance system, an external ally.

 And that will remain true until the second Punic War when the Syracusans will make more bad

 geopolitical decisions and become full subjects of Rome. So Rome sort of responds to the end of this war by taking quite a few years to recover, consolidating some control over Sicily. And then eventually Roman attention will turn northwards to those Gauls. The Romans will face a sort of major war

 in Cisalpine Gaul in the 220s. For Carthage, their sort of response to this war, again, heavily determined by the person of Hamilcar is that he seems to have decided we need an empire

 that looks maybe a little bit more like the Roman one. And he starts building that in Spain.

 The initial focus for the Carthaginians in Spain is there a whole bunch of silver mines in southern Spain. Hamilcar goes for those first. Get yourself some cash. But he then starts setting himself up.

 The way his conquest of Spain, the form it takes, is he begins setting himself up personally

 as the kind of warlord of warlords in Spain. The rule in coastal Spain is very personalistic.

 These folks live in towns, so they're somewhat urbanized, but these towns tend to have, the Romans will call these guys reguli, little kings, petty kings. And they seem to be kind of temporary ad hoc warlords. And so Hamilcar and then his descendants, because it'll be his son-in-law, Hasdrubal the Fair,

 and then his sons, Hannibal and Hasdrubal, brother Hasdrubal, they're two Hasdrubals, sorry.

 They're also like 12 Hamilcars and a bunch of Hannibals and a lot of Hannos. The Carthaginian aristocracy is not creative in its naming.

 How helpful.

 I know, I know, it's very annoying. And then it doesn't help that those names are then processed through Greek sources that are like mistranslating them too.

 Oh, great!

 But they're gonna set themselves up as like the warlords of warlords in Spain among the Iberians.

 And this will be where much of Hannibal's army will come from is that as the boss of bosses,

 he can command all of his subordinate warlords to kind of raise their banners, raise their levies,

 which is where he's gonna get all of these Spaniards to fight for him. And that's gonna be a huge part

 of Carthaginian military power in the Second Punic War. So the Carthaginian Empire really transforms as a result of this war in the way that its army is organized and in the way that it exerts power, becoming something a little more territorial. So we've heard Hannibal fought in the First Punic War. I think nearly everyone knows Hannibal fought in the Second.

 What's the time gap in between the First Punic War finishing and the Second Punic War starting?

Fairly long. So the First Punic War ends in 241. The Second Punic War starts in 218. So we've got about a 20-year gap during which the Carthaginians are off conquering Spain. The Romans are engaged in further military operations in Northern Italy, again, against those damn Gauls.

 And so there is something of a gap. Neither side is idle during these gaps. The Carthaginians especially

 are fighting for basically all of it. First fighting for their lives against their own mercenaries

 and then the sort of barked effort to establish an empire in Spain. And so both of these powers

 will have kind of enlarged their forces significantly by the time it's time for another go.

So Punic War II is gonna be a big one.

 Yes.

 Awesome. Well, we will have an episode on that sometime in the future. So with the First Punic War,

 what can we see as the big impact on Rome in the centuries following? What are the lessons that they learned?

So first Rome becomes the naval power and Rome is gonna maintain a continuous major naval force

 from this point forward. The Carthaginians will have a fleet in the Second Punic War, but there isn't a lot of big naval battles. The Carthaginians mostly avoid that. It didn't go well for them the first time.

 But Rome's large navy will be really important when Rome pushes into the Greek East because Rome will be a significantly larger naval power than any of the successors of Alexander. And so Rome goes into its wars in the East with naval dominance. And then of course on the flip side, right, this is the first war to draw the Romans out of Italy. It forces them to codify a system for the provinces.

 It's very ad hoc at this point, but the idea of provinces outside of Italy where you gain tribute instead of having allies, that's new in this war. So it's going to set the pattern for Roman overseas expansion.

 I said the Romans have to create two praetors, two new offices for this war. After the Second Punic War, when the Romans bite off Spain, they'll create two more praetors following that same model.

 And then at that point, the Romans are like, we can't keep making praetors since they have to come up with different arrangements for provincial governors. But this is setting the model by which the Roman rule outside of Italy will look, that they are then gonna continue. And then obviously, of course, it sets the stage for the Second Punic War. And the Second Punic War is going to

 obviously be an even larger conflict, although a shorter one, not much shorter, but a little shorter.

 Only 17 years this time.

 Oh, only?

 Once again, not intermittent. Hannibal is in Italy for most of those 17 years with an army, it's nuts.

 But the Second Punic War is going to bring Rome more clearly into conflict in the Greek East

 because the Antigonid Kingdom of Macedon will side with Hannibal. And so it's sort of, in a way, the First Punic War is like one domino falling that is now starting the chain of events. It's not the first domino. I mean, I think the first domino has definitely got to be Pyrrhus. Without Pyrrhus and Epirus just making an absolute mess of the political system here, I don't think you get the First Punic War

 in the form that we get it. And it's worth noting that prior to 264, Rome and Carthage were not hostile with each other. The Romans will averge all much to blame for this. Eventually, imagine that Carthage was their equal and opposite foe, ordained by the gods to challenge them, right? I mean, this is all the Aeneid opening, book one of the Aeneid, you know. Augustan propaganda. Yes, but like in 265, the Romans have a treaty with Carthage. The Romans have been trading with the Carthaginians

 for a long time. They have been largely friendly with Carthage. So the First Punic War also poisons the relationship between these two powers and sets them on a repeated collision course that didn't need to happen. These were powers that had been, they had a modus vivendi. They were able to work together.

 The Romans are not meeting the Carthaginians for the first time here. They had treaties.

 They had treaties even before Pyrrhus. They had treaties where the Romans recognized a Carthaginian sphere of influence in Sicily and the Carthaginians recognized a Roman sphere

 of influence in Italy. And so this war also fundamentally changes that relationship because both Rome and Carthage are going to assume there will be a round two and begin preparing for it.

But none of this was as inevitable as everyone says it is?

No; History is contingent everybody! People make choices, usually bad ones.

 Well, there we go.

 So next time anyone tells you that this was bound to happen, you can say, no, it was wrong.

 It was an accident. 

I mean, I think the thing I think we can say that does come out of this is the Roman and Carthaginian military systems were much more effective and much more powerful than the military systems

 of any other state in the Mediterranean. And so it sure seems like, given that all of the Mediterranean states are pretty aggressive in bellicose, that the winner of the sort of consolidation of the Mediterranean was probably always likely to be a Western Mediterranean state. Mostly because the Hellenistic monarchies actually kind of suck at this. They're just sort of embarrassingly bad.

 I'm going to tuck off all of the Hellenistic historians that listen to this, but I'm sorry you guys are bad at fighting. Macedonians are better at fighting than Greeks, but... 

So really, I mean, we think of the Roman empire as inevitable, but it seems like a flip of a coin. It could have been the Carthaginian empire that covered the entire Mediterranean.

 The Romans get really close to losing this war. If that fleet headed to the Aegadis had been sunk,

 there wasn't another one coming for another decade. The Carthaginians might have managed

 to get their sort of board reset that they were going for. And the Romans will come reasonably close

 to losing the Second Punic War too. Hannibal is going to give the Romans a run for their money.

 When you're thinking about the relative strength of these two powers, I mean, everybody is always struck by the sort of endless Roman military resources. And I am too, I'm writing a book about it.

 But Michael Taylor, I think, did a good service in his book on Soldiers in Silver. He just totals up the forces in the Second Punic War. And the Romans at one point, their maximum in 212, they field 185,000 soldiers in one year, which is a comically massive number. I always contextualize this with my students that Alexander the Great invaded the Persian empire with 45,000 men.

Okay, yeah, perspective. Jeez, that's, okay...

 The largest army any Hellenistic kingdom ever puts together is 80,000 men, and that appears to be everything they've got.

 Wow.

 But the Carthaginians are no slouches either. In the Second Punic War, the largest Carthaginian deployments into 15 or 165,000 men. So both of them huge amounts of people. And of course,

 and what Polybius is basically saying in book one is like, you all should have seen that coming.

 Look at these fleets. Like these two powers have tremendous resources and very effective systems for mobilizing them. And they can just throw these enormous fleets and these enormous armies at each other, and they can do it continuously for 20 years. And this is his point is like, and you idiots declared war on these guys, right? He's speaking to his Greek audience. Philip V, King of Macedon,

 voluntarily jumps into the Second Punic War on Hannibal's side. And you just like hear Polybius,

 you're like, what were you thinking? The Macedonian all call everybody they can get for the Antigonids is like 35,000 men.

 I'm not gonna be able to read Polybius now without imagining him just banging his head

 on his desk.

 What were you thinking? Well, and then, right in the 140s, and the revolt of the Greeks. And like you guys thought you were gonna rebel against Roman power alone with your like, again, 20 or 30,000 men is about the largest army they can put together. He's like, that was never going to work. So Roman Carthage had both learning great lessons from the Punic War, but the Greeks are just oblivious.

 And that's the impression that certainly we get from Polybius is that these Punic Wars

 don't appear to be very well known in the Greek East.

 No one's really paying attention.

 No one's even really paying attention for the second Punic War, right? The Seleucids and the Ptolemies

 don't really seem to check in. They're busy having another Syrian war. The Battle of Raphia is happening at the same time as Hannibal's marching into Italy. And so they're busy with their own nonsense and they're not paying attention. And information being what it is, right? They have no way to really get a sense of the size of the conflict that's happening over yonder. So as far as they're concerned, the Ptolemaic Pharaoh of Egypt and the Seleucid King of Syria and Mesopotamia,

 that's the world conquest, world championship match. And Polybius is like, no, no is not.

 You're going for the welterweight title, buddies.

 Okay, so we've spoken about Polybius a lot and you've mentioned that we don't have much of Livy.

 Do we have anyone who's quoting Livy or some of the smaller sources that aren't as famous as Polybius

 that are talking about the First Punic War?

 There's a lot that is scattered. And if folks want to find all of the scattered little bits and bobs,

 read Lazenby's First Punic War book. It's a little old 1980s or 90s, I think. But he pulls together all of the various, you know, Florus reports that in this year, the Carthaginians raided the Italian coastline

 and Erosius says, and all of these other exciting authors you have never heard of. We don't have Livy,

 but of course we have the periochae, we have these summaries of Livy. They are very, very brief,

 but they do let us confirm some things. We have snippets in Diodorus, bits of information and things like Dionysius and so on. But it has long been the conclusion of scholars and I think this is correct.

 All of these sources are later and you can't correct Polybius with any of them. Polybius carries more authority than all the others. So you start with Polybius and then because Polybius only,

 he summarizes this war in just his first book, right? The first Punic War is just book one.

 It's really just the first half of book one. The back half of book one is the mercenary war. So you can then fill in details from these other sources. We do have some independent confirmation. I mean, we have bits of the triumphal column that Duilius, the victor at Mylae, puts up to celebrate his naval,

 the very first Roman naval triumph. So we have inscriptions there. Obviously we have the rams from the Aegadi Islands, which is just wild, complete with, you know, cuister inscriptions that occasionally

 attest cuisters we know.

 Always handy.

 Yeah, it's so fun. The naval archaeology guys, how excited they get every time they pull up a ram

 that has an inscription on it. They're like, oh, we got a name.

 I mean, yeah, I would be too.

 Oh, no, it's great. It's like, yeah, yeah. Most of the time you're gonna get a name of a quaestor.

 The inscription tells you he's a quaestor and it's a guy you've never heard of because most quaestors don't go very far politically, right? There are a whole bunch of quaestors, probably eight of them at this point. And, you know, only two to four praetors and two consuls. So most of them do not go further.

 But every so often you get a cuister we've heard of and that we can nail down. And that's always exciting. But that's sort of the evidence as we have it. We're very reliant on Polybius here, more so than on almost anything else. But there are snippets scattered here and there. 

For anyone who's gonna be traveling around in the summer, you know, sunshine, Mediterranean beaches, it's quite difficult, isn't it, with naval wars to be able to visit anywhere. But is there anywhere that people can go and see evidence of the First Punic War or just recommended places that they can stand and watch and say, yeah, this is where this happened?

I mean, so again, we know where the Battle of the Aegadi Islands is. If you want to go look at the terrain around Lilybaeum and Drepana, that's just modern Tripani, you can go. The rams are in one of the national museums on Sicily. Like some of them are available on this, but I cannot for the life of me remember which one. But I mean, you know, Google RPM Nautical, check their website, they will tell you. So you can go see some of these rams. They are in shockingly good condition for being 2,260 years old, but it helps that they're giant hunks of bronze and bronze corrodes protectively. So, but yeah, I mean, these are, you can go to these places. You can take a boat out to the Aegadi Islands and you'd be like, okay, this is where it was.

 I mean, that's incredible. I always love when we're able to do that.

The fact that we were able to locate a naval battle is astounding. That is the only ancient naval battle

 that we can pin down in that way. Right, I mean, like, I think at this point, we have maybe like 30 or 35 total rams from antiquity and almost 30 of them are from this battle. It is like 80 or 90% of all the rams we have are the Aegadi rams. It's been an astounding set of discoveries and they keep pulling stuff up every summer, every summer. And then what we get to do is, every summer they pull more stuff up

 and then right around now, like early January, you get to check for the panel they invariably have

 at the SCS-AIA meeting, where somebody from RPM Nautical is like, this is what we found this year.

 Another ram! And they've been doing it for more than a decade now and it's really been astounding.

 So, you know, a case really where like, I mean, archeology is delivering us really shocking new evidence.

 Well, thank you so much for coming and talking to us about the first Punic War. Definitely the kind of neglected out of the trio of wars, I think. But it sounds like it was really, really incredible. So thank you so much for walking us through it and giving us everything we need to understand what was going on.

Thank you for having me. This was a blast. Now we'll have to come back and do the second one.

 Yes, please do!