Carthage Must Be Destroyed (29 page)

In an account clearly coloured by historical hindsight, the Greek historian Polybius described the opposing points of view put forward during the debate. The Roman consuls, anxious for the chance to earn military glory, were said to be in favour of sending a force to provide help. However, other senators reminded their colleagues of the unsavoury nature of the Mamertines’ seizure of Messana and the charge of hypocrisy that would be justifiably levelled at Rome after the harsh treatment that they had meted out to the Campanians who had attempted to seize Rhegium. With the Senate deadlocked, the consuls now turned to the Popular Assembly, who were easily convinced by the promise of war booty. It was decreed that a force should be sent to aid the Mamertines, with the consul Appius Claudius Caudex at its head.
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Clearly aware that the Romans were raising an army and arranging transport among their new allies in Magna Graecia, the Carthaginians stationed a naval squadron to block any crossing of the Strait of Messina from Rhegium. However, rather than risk a naval battle against the much stronger Carthaginian navy, Appius Claudius covertly sent one of his tribunes, Gaius Claudius, across in a small boat to persuade the Mamertines to eject the Carthaginian garrison from their city.

After a second visit, during which he received enthusiastic assurances from the Mamertines, Gaius Claudius attempted a crossing with several ships. However, weather conditions and a Carthaginian attack forced the Romans back to Rhegium. In a conciliatory gesture, Hanno, the commander of the Carthaginian garrison at Messana, sent the ships that he had captured back to the Romans, and even offered to release the men that had been seized once hostilities had ceased. When these overtures were rejected, Hanno then boasted that he would not allow the Romans even to wash their hands in the sea. He was soon to be made to regret such a bold statement. Gaius Claudius attempted the crossing again, and this time was successful. After calling an assembly of the Mamertines in the city, he managed to persuade them to request a meeting with Hanno, who had by then taken refuge in the citadel. After reluctantly agreeing to this assignation, Hanno was promptly seized, but was then allowed to leave the city unharmed with his men. He was later crucified by the Carthaginians ‘for both his lack of sense and his lack of courage’.
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The Roman occupation of Messana, although a limited operation, sent shock waves through the island. With their bloody diarchy now under threat from a third force, Carthage and Syracuse quickly forged an alliance of convenience against Rome.
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The Carthaginian forces under the command of another Hanno, son of Hannibal, blockaded Messana in conjunction with the Syracusans. In a deliberate stalling tactic, Appius Claudius, who was waiting in Rhegium with the main body of the Roman army for an opportunity to cross into Sicily, sent envoys to both Hiero and the Carthaginians offering a ceasefire. These overtures were quickly rebuffed, with Diodorus–possibly once more armed with historical hindsight–presenting Hiero as mocking the Romans’ justification of their actions as merely maintaining the bond of
fides
that they owed to their new allies, the Mamertines.
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However, soon Carthaginian confidence in their naval supremacy was undermined when Appius Claudius and his army managed to cross the Strait of Messina in a ragbag flotilla of ships largely borrowed from Rome’s allies in southern Italy. A later historical tradition stated that Appius Claudius had managed to hoodwink the Carthaginian naval command by feeding false information to their agents (who hung around the harbour at Rhegium on the pretext of trade).
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The situation was made worse by the fact that one of the Carthaginian warships detailed to halt the crossing ran aground and fell into Roman hands, with serious future consequences.
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In fact the first stages of the land war in Sicily appear to have been inconclusive, with both sides loudly claiming victory.
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The next year, 263, Rome sent the new consuls with a fresh army of 40,000 men to the island, and once again the Carthaginian fleet failed to prevent the Roman army from crossing. As a consequence, a larger number of Greek Sicilian cities defected to the Romans, and Hiero, now increasingly isolated and unsure of victory, sued for peace. The Romans, who had problems of their own in maintaining supplies for their troops on the island, were willing to offer extremely generous terms. Hiero was allowed to keep his throne and a large chunk of territory in eastern Sicily in exchange for becoming a friend and ally of Rome. Syracuse was also to hand over all Roman prisoners of war and a sum of 100 talents in war reparations. Most importantly for Rome, it now had a secure base in eastern Sicily from which to launch any future offensive.
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For Carthage the loss of Syracuse was a blow, but not a devastating one. After all, its alliance with the city had always been based on convenience, and it had long been a major competitor on the island. In fact it was the second-century-AD historian, and former Roman consul, Cassius Dio who appears to have best understood the underlying reasons for the outbreak of hostilities between the two powers:

Most probably there was little political will on either side for war. But equally there was seemingly little will to stop the progression towards full-scale conflict. While Carthage was most probably now not a Roman target, it is difficult to read Rome’s intervention on the side of the Mamertines as anything less than a desire to be more closely involved in Sicilian affairs.
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Roman ambitions most likely now looked not to North Africa but to Syracuse, control over which might be justified as an extension of Roman military policy in southern Italy.
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Indeed, by this period the Roman people’s appreciation of the material benefits of conquest had become highly developed, as had the connection between the winning of military glory and elite status. Combined, these two motivations made for an ominous mix, and fears of a Carthaginian backlash may have been dampened by Carthaginian military complacency and the failure of Carthage’s navy to repel the Romans from the Strait of Messina.

The aggressive and acquisitive nature of Rome had been undeniably proven by its conquest of Italy.
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Yet, as Rome expanded its territory through its own aggression, it increasingly came to fear the greater proximity of its larger neighbours. The possibility that Carthage might intervene in southern Italy was probably a very real concern, fed by insecurities over Rome’s recent experience with Pyrrhus.
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For their part, however, the Carthaginians were probably concerned less about attacking southern Italy than with defending their territory in Sicily. Their original involvement there had been prompted by the pragmatic desire to control the lucrative Tyrrhenian and Ionian trade routes. However, after 150 years of a Carthaginian presence on the island, there was now a strong sense that Punic Sicily was
their
land, that Lilybaeum, Panormus and Solus were as Carthaginian as the farms of the Cap Bon peninsula or the olive groves of the Sahel. When war did break out, the pro-Carthaginian historian Philinus would accuse the Romans of breaking a treaty signed sometime after the 348 accord which explicitly debarred them from interference in Sicily, although Polybius, who claimed to have researched all such treaties, would hotly deny that such a treaty existed.
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Whether that treaty existed or not, the claim of Philinus nonetheless demonstrates that Roman interference in Sicily was, for the Carthaginians, a legitimate cause for war.
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Initially, therefore, neither Rome nor Carthage planned to attack the other, but the respective strategies of Italian expansion and Sicilian defence boded ill for the maintenance of peace.
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In fact the main antagonists of the First Punic War drifted into the conflict less for reasons of grand strategy, and more for the lack of political will to prevent it.
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Those who predicted that this dispute would be settled swiftly with honours shared would prove hopelessly wrong. It was no accident that Timaeus chose to end his history in 264 BC with the start of the First Punic War. Looking back on events, he knew that the central-Mediterranean world was about to change for ever.
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As Carthage’s stock as the pre-eminent power in the central Mediterranean had fallen ever lower, one arm of its military still remained with its exalted reputation intact. The Hellenistic kings may have built ever larger and more pointless ships, but everyone in the Mediterranean world in the early third century BC knew that Carthage ruled the waves. Yet it had been a very long time since that much-vaunted maritime supremacy had really been tested. Apart from a few minor skirmishes, the Sicilian wars had produced little in the way of naval warfare. But nothing about Rome–a land power with virtually no fleet of its own –suggested any challenge to Carthage’s navy.

In all its dealings with Carthage after the defeat of Pyrrhus, Rome clearly considered itself to be an equal. Only in one area did this Roman perception of parity with Carthage not exist: the sea. Polybius described the Carthaginian position at the beginning of the First Punic War as one of ‘undisputed command of the sea’.
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The Carthaginians had been the pacesetters in naval technological innovation throughout the fourth century BC. They had been the first to develop the quadrireme, which was both bigger and more powerful than the trireme, the ship that had dominated naval warfare for the previous 200 years. Indeed, a veritable arms race developed, with different Mediterranean powers vying with each other to develop larger and larger warships, to the extent that some of these craft were so huge that they were of no use at all for naval warfare.
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However, the quadrireme was fairly quickly replaced by the larger quinquereme, which was first developed under the aegis of Carthage’s old enemy Dionysius of Syracuse. The quinquereme (from the Latin for ‘five’,
quinque
) took its Roman name from the number of men required to power each section of it: two pairs of men operated the upper two tiers of oars, while a single man operated the lower. Although they were not the original inventors of the quinquereme, the Carthaginians quickly adopted it and did much to improve its original design. It is thought that one of these innovations was to house all three levels of oars and their rowers in a single oar box that projected from the hull. This meant that the hull was exceptionally wide and could also be strengthened.
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These innovations were particularly important for contemporary naval warfare, in which the two main aggressive tactics were boarding and ramming. The latter involved driving the ram, a long blunt-headed metal implement that was fixed to the ship’s keel, into the side of the enemy ship, so that it would start taking in water and be abandoned or taken or sink. The reinforced hulls of the Carthaginian quinqueremes gave them extra protection from ramming, but made what was already a difficult manoeuvre even trickier to complete successfully themselves. In fact the size of the quinquereme made it too unwieldy for this tactic to be really effective.
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Increasingly, war fleets tended to rely on securing themselves to enemy ships with grappling hooks before boarding parties attempted to overpower the enemy crew. Once again the quinquereme offered an advantage for this form of combat, because its wide deck could accommodate a larger number of marines for hand-to-hand fighting.

Marine archaeologists have found the remains of several Carthaginian ships dating to this period, of which one in particular, found lying on the seabed just off Marsala on the west coast of Sicily, has excited much interest. It was a small military craft in use sometime around the mid third century BC. On close inspection, archaeologists were amazed to discover that each piece of the boat was carefully marked with a letter which ensured that the complex design could be easily and swiftly assembled. The Marsala wreck had, in effect, been a flat-pack warship.
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The excavators were also able to provide invaluable insights into the crew’s diet, which appears to have consisted of preservable foods such as meat (horse, beef, venison, poultry, pork and goat) and nuts (almonds and walnuts). Wine appears to have been drunk in response to the lack of fresh water.
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Rome, on the other hand, although not quite the maritime virgin that Polybius (who was generally sympathetic towards the Roman cause) tried to portray it as, had very little experience of naval warfare.
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After all, the Roman army had never fought outside the confines of the Italian peninsula. By the last decade of the fourth century the Romans had officials whose responsibility was the building and maintenance of a small number of warships, but when this fleet had seen action against the Tarentines in 282 BC it had been soundly defeated. After that embarrassment the Romans had preferred to rely on their allies to provide shipping for troop transportation.