The three Punic Wars make up possibly one of the most intense chapters in Roman history,
so if you want the full story, please check out this video on the Roman Republic.
The short of it is that over the centuries the tiny town of Rome grew and grew until it conquered the entire Italian peninsula.
Basically they leveled up, and Carthage was the next level.
The first war can be roughly attributed to a miscommunication with some Sicilian pirates.
While Carthage and Rome may have been destined to fight each other at some point or another,
they ultimately came to blows on account of both being called in to Sicily
to settle a fight between the city of Syracuse and some rowdy pirates.
Rome and Carthage kind of just tripped face-first into war,
and spent most of the 23-year-long war not actually fighting each other.
The issue was Carthage had been a long-standing naval power in the Mediterranean
but Rome had no navy to speak of so Rome really needed a navy, and quick.
This is another of many instances of Rome adapting to situations really well.
Say what you will about Rome – they were immensely clever
and had a great habit of taking good ideas, methods, technologies and techniques from other cultures
and using them to great effect.
In this case the Romans found a few beached and sunk Carthaginian triremes and quinqueremes
and proceeded to reverse-engineer an entire fleet of ships.
You know, just casually, as you do.
Rome's first aquatic outings weren't all that fruitful,
but at battles like Cape Ecnomus, which is arguably one of the biggest naval battles in history,
Rome pulled out wins.
Ultimately, Rome won the war, claiming Sicily for itself and forcing heavy reparations on Carthage.
They also decided to take Corsica and Sardinia, because screw you, Carthage, these are mine now.
In the decades following, the Carthaginians, led by the general Hamilcar Barca,
colonized the seaside coast of Spain, largely for the purposes of mining silver to pay their Roman reparations.
Little did Rome know Hamilcar, his son Hannibal and the other Carthaginians in Spain
were furious over losing Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia
and had been casually scheming to completely destroy Rome for almost two whole decades.
In 219 BC Hannibal sacked the Roman allied Saguntum in Spain and Rome, defensively of course, declared war.
Hannibal – the madman – proceeded to rather famously Leroy Jenkins his way across the goddamn Alps
with over 40,000 soldiers and 37 elephants.
Elephants!
And while elephants aren't particularly scary to us,
if you're an ancient Roman who's never seen an elephant before,
that thing is a four-legged giant with two spears and a snake coming out of its face.
Bottom line, they're monsters.
The Romans thought they were
MONSTERS!
Granted, most of Hannibal's elephants died while crossing the Alps, perhaps unsurprisingly,
but it doesn't take a lot of elephants to have a scary amount of elephant on the battlefield.
I genuinely can't convey how viscerally terrifying the mere mention of Hannibal's name would have been to a Roman.
Now, to change the topic away from the Carthaginian bogeyman,
since we're talking about Roman military history here,
I'll refer you to my video on classical warfare for some context.
It mostly talks about hoplite warfare but I cover the classic Roman republican army in the later portion,
although as it turns out the Roman army that conquered the Italian peninsula was basically a hoplite army,
so honestly the whole video is probably relevant to Roman history.
Anyway, after arriving in Italy, Hannibal demonstrated his tactical brilliance
by immediately winning two battles in northern Italy through guerrilla and ambush tactics.
Hannibal and his armies would proceed to stay in Italy,
effectively behind enemy lines with next to no means of supply or reinforcement for 16 years.
The Carthaginians went up and down the peninsula setting fire to farms left and right,
hoping above all else for Rome to simply surrender.
Two years into the campaign, Hannibal said "all right, screw this, I'm gonna destroy the entire Roman army"
and proceeded to make plans for his next battle at the Roman supply depot at Cannae in southern Italy.
At the battle the Carthaginians advanced in a U shape
with 40,000 infantry forming the front line
and 10,000 cavalry on the wings.
The Romans however had almost twice as big an army
so they felt pretty good about their chances.
The armies met and as the fighting progressed,
the center of the Carthaginian line fell back
and the Romans pushed forward hoping to break the retreating line.
Except at that moment when they all rushed in,
the Carthaginians' African infantry and famed Numidian cavalry
advanced on the flanks and effectively enveloped the whole Roman army.
From there it was a bloodbath.
Estimates are all over the place,
but the gist is that most of the 80,000 strong Roman army was killed outright and the rest were imprisoned.
The slaughter went on until nightfall, and in one version of the story I've heard,
the Carthaginians only started taking prisoners because their arms got tired from all the killing.
It was the single greatest defeat that Rome ever suffered in its history
and Hannibal hoped that a shattered and dismayed Rome,
having lost 16 legions and the entire south of Italy, would surrender at once.
Rome's response was simply "see you next year"
and it spent the entire winter raising more armies to go out the following summer.
For the next several years the Roman army pursued the strategy of "just bother him"
and shadowed Hannibal around the Italian countryside.
He was still being annoying, but he wasn't a direct threat to the city of Rome, so...
good enough for now.
But jumping back, can we take a second to appreciate the sheer quintessential Roman badassery it takes
to hear that you lost at least 50,000 soldiers and then turn around and tell the guy who killed them
to shove it and wait for round 2?
Because holy crap, that takes some serious cogliones
serious and massively suicidal cogliones.
And speaking of, in 211 the young Publius Cornelius Scipio took up a generalship for the Spanish campaign
which was widely considered to be a suicide mission.
To the surprise of basically everyone he spent the next five years successfully de-Carthageifying Spain to great effect.
Following his campaign he hatched a brilliant plan to take the fight back to Carthage.
The Senate, thinking this was another suicide mission, told him he could do it
but they wouldn't finance his armies.
So Scipio raised a couple of legions in Italy and Sicily and hopped over to north Africa.
Now, while Hannibal is absolutely a brilliant general and that he did impossibly crazy stuff,
like crossing the Alps, campaigning in Italy for 16 years and wiping out an entire Roman army,
Scipio's brilliance came from his quintessentially Roman ability to adopt and adapt.
The Romans, above all else, knew a good idea when they saw one and they almost never made the same mistake twice.
Scipio studied Cannae and he knew what he had to do to defeat Carthage.
since the Numidian cavalry was critical to the Carthaginian army,
Scipio played into a Numidian civil war to get some of their cavalry for himself.
In doing so he had massively weakened Carthage on their own soil
and had nearly orchestrated their surrender
when, oh snap, Hannibal's back.
And on that day history nerds from all around the world and across time busted out the popcorn
because this is gonna be good.
The night before the impending battle of Zama,
Hannibal and Scipio actually – supposedly – had a meeting.
It's detailed in Livy's History of Rome, book 30, chapters 30 and 31.
There's a link in the description, it takes five minutes.
Just read it, okay? For me.
Read it. It's incredible.
First they're simply in awe of each other.
Then Hannibal waxes philosophical about fortune, gives Scipio life advice and asks for peace.
Scipio responded, "Well, I was going to make peace, but then you brought an army here. I can't just leave now.
Look, Hannibal, I respect you, I really do, and you're leaving me no choice here, man.
I've just got to kick your ass, dude. I'm sorry, there's no other way, I have to kick your ass."
And on the following day, some asses were certainly kicked.
At the battle of Zama Scipio's Numidian cavalry put the Carthaginian cavalry to flight,
and fighting between the infantry lines was actually very close
until the Roman cavalry returned from behind the Carthaginian line to ultimately win the day.
It was a hard-fought and super tense battle but with that, the Second Punic War was won.
Half a century and a lot of Cato the Elder ending all of his speeches with "Carthago delenda est" later,
Rome returns to raze Carthage to the ground.
To rub more salt in the wound the Romans also literally rubbed salt in the earth
to make sure the Carthaginians would never rise again.
Wow.
Okay, so there's regular bitter, there's Taylor Swift writes a song about you bitter
and then there's Rome hates you so much they wipe you off the face of the Earth forever bitter.
Moral of the story is Rome does not screw around
so don't screw with Rome.
And that's the Punic Wars.
If you'd like to see where the rest of the story goes,
give this video a click in the description and hop on back to the Roman Republic,
and remember:
Carthago delenda est.