Two Powers, One Sea
1Rome and Carthage both grew up beside the Mediterranean Sea. Carthage, founded by Phoenician settlers from the city of Tyre, stood on the coast of North Africa. It became a trading power with a strong navy and ports around the western Mediterranean. Rome began as a farming city on the Italian peninsula, a long, narrow land with the Apennine Mountains running down its middle and the high wall of the Alps across its north.
2The sea that connected the two cities also set them against each other. The large island of Sicily lies between Italy and North Africa, only about 90 miles from the African coast near Carthage. In 264 BCE Rome and Carthage went to war over Sicily, the first of three Punic Wars. Rome had little experience fighting at sea, so it built a large fleet and trained thousands of rowers. By 241 BCE Rome had won, and Carthage gave up Sicily.
3In 218 BCE the two powers went to war again. Many historians think that because Rome now had the stronger navy, the Carthaginian general Hannibal chose to reach Italy by land. He marched an army with horses and war elephants from New Carthage in Spain over the Pyrenees Mountains, across southern Gaul and then over the Alps into northern Italy. Snow, narrow paths, steep slopes and attacks by mountain peoples cost him many soldiers and animals. The Greek historian Polybius, who wrote a few decades later, said he had walked part of the route himself to study it.
4Hannibal won great battles in Italy, including Cannae in 216 BCE, and stayed there for about 15 years. Yet he received little help by sea from home, while Roman armies attacked Carthaginian lands in Spain. In 202 BCE the Roman general Scipio defeated Hannibal at Zama in North Africa.
5In peacetime, the same sea carried trade. Merchant ships moved grain, wine, olive oil and pottery between ports all around the Mediterranean. In later centuries the city of Rome came to depend on grain shipped from Sicily, North Africa and Egypt.