At the beginning of the Republic, Rome was surrounded by enemies, so it expanded for defense. Romans became involved in a series of wars, first in Italy and then in the Mediterranean at large. Even though the Romans defeated a great many peoples in Italy and throughout the Mediterranean world, they at first were reluctant to take over, administer, or exploit the territories of the peoples they defeated. By 270 BCE, Rome controlled the majority of the Roman Empire.
of the italian peninsula that's what you see here in purple they still didn't have the far all the way up to the alps but they had the majority of it here um so you see the the the different waves here uh up to the punic wars and then this is what they get in the punic wars and then by the time julius caesar dies and obviously eventually this will include all of this and all of this and a bunch of this as well um but most of the expansion done for what we know as the Roman Empire, was actually done under the Republic. The Roman Empire did not, they did some fighting and they did some expanding, but not nearly what was done under the Republic, not even close. So the government will continue to change as conquests occur and as wealth starts to roll in. By the 200s BCE, the Senate included both patricians and influential plebeians.
So that change has already been made. by the 200s. The single greatest conflicts of this era were the Punic Wars, which occurred three different ones between 264 and 146 BCE. These were wars with Carthage, the former Phoenician colony turned empire.
They controlled the western Mediterranean. And they will get into this series of war. And these three wars were fought over control of Italy, over Sicily in particular, it's going to be a big one, and over the Mediterranean Sea, the western Mediterranean Sea in general.
The Romans began a struggle with the Carthaginians over the western Mediterranean. Actually, it specifically begins over......over... um, Sicily. So we're going to look at these wars.
The first, obviously, is the First Punic War, fought between 264 and 241. Carthage was attempting to gain control of the island of Sicily. Now, the Romans needed a navy to fight back because Carthage was a sea power, so the Romans will develop one. And off the coast of Sicily, several times, but there's going to be a couple of more significant battles, the Romans will defeat the Carthaginians, which shocked them because both sides, but mostly Carthage, because it wasn't all that long ago that these Romans didn't even have a navy, and now all of a sudden they were better?
It was shocking, to say the least. The results of this war, and obviously I'm boiling down 23 years of war into four, five, six sentences, but um The other Punic Wars demand more attention. Romans took control of Sicily, and the Carthaginians had to pay what's called an indemnity. They had to pay, basically, money for losing the war.
Sicily, therefore, became the first Roman province. The core of Rome, the homeland, is going to be the peninsula itself. So Sicily, the island of Sicily, became the first province. Carthage, then...
Vowed revenge. And it started extending its power into what we now call Spain. Over here.
Some time will go by, and eventually, we'll get to the Second Punic War. 23 years later. In 218 to 201 BCE.
This one's a little more complicated. The fortunes of the Carthaginians had revived, and under the leadership of Hannibal Barca, there's Hannibal, they will rebuild their army using silver and also bringing in mercenaries, Celtic mercenaries, from Spain. In 218 BCE, Hannibal led a large army and 37 war elephants out of Spain. He started here. This is the green arrow.
So, you see it starts here. And they move up and he will take this army through the Alps and into Italy. And once he crosses the Alps, he will inflict two very quick defeats on the Romans, two huge defeats on the Romans in 217 BCE.
Now, of those 37 war elephants, two actually made it through the Alps. One of them was sick or lame, and so it had to be put down. So really only one of those elephants actually made it into Italy proper. But you see the Green Arrow. He comes in and marches around and all of this.
The Roman army, once they lost those, had those two big losses, they're going to turn the control of their army over to someone who was going to... basically the Romans had tried to stand up to Hannibal and Hannibal had crushed them at every opportunity and so a a Roman consul said he had a different idea so the centurion assembly will slap the power of imperium on him and he comes up with something different and that different becomes known as the Fabian strategy now this is Fabius Maximus that was the name of the of the consul or at least the short name of the consul and he comes up with the Fabian strategy And this was a strategy designed not to defeat Hannibal, but to wear him down. So what this was is you avoided battle at all costs.
You focused on indirect combat and what's called attrition. A-double-T-R-I-T-I-O-N. You wear down the enemy.
You bleed them of resources. You bleed them of manpower. You make the war costly. You make the war... Basically, you make the enemy quit instead of defeating them.
Not only, you know, initially this works so well that the Roman Senate will actually slap dictator on Fabius Maximus. He'll be dictator for six months. And the Fabian strategy worked brilliantly.
It's actually been, it's something that is still in use. many times throughout history, perhaps most famously for the U.S., by George Washington, the American Revolution, the idea of never rushing headlong into battle, preserving the army, a war of attrition, a war of indirect combat. You avoid battles at all costs, or you pick your spots well. Washington was doing a modified Fabian strategy, and this works well. The problem was, he was dictator for six months.
And he was wearing down the Carthaginians and Hannibal. But after his six months was up, he steps aside. The Centurion Assembly elected two new consuls. And both of those consuls, and the Centurion Assembly itself, favored direct confrontation. And dropping the Fabian strategy and going for direct confrontation is going to lead to one of the most lopsided and brilliant victories.
in world history. And this is the Battle of Cannae in 216 BCE. Hannibal will win a masterpiece victory at Cannae in 216 BCE.
It's one of the greatest military victories in world history. The Carthaginians were outnumbered 2 to 1, yet won the battle after encircling the Romans and killing 50,000 of them. Basically, Hannibal killed the same number of people as were in his own army. So if you extrapolate out what I said, Carthaginians had about 50,000 men.
The Romans had about 100,000 men. And by the time the battle is done, Hannibal and the Carthaginians will have killed 50,000 Romans. So basically a one-to-one here. Obviously, they had their own casualties. and deaths as well.
Now, the Romans, when they attacked, had one way of war, and that was to attack in one giant column, which you see here with the blue lines. They're going to line up and just move forward. And the idea was that the armies that they faced were smaller than theirs, couldn't stand up to the brute force. Well, Hannibal had, but this time he was heavily outnumbered. So what Hannibal did here was set a trap.
And it's just, it's absolutely brilliant. You see the formation that he had here. He actually put his infantry, most of his infantry on the outside.
Actually, I'm sorry, he put it in the middle, and then he has cavalry on the outside, and he pointed them in a V at the army. Now, that is not a strong position, and this is a thin line as well. So, what happens is, of course, the Romans move forward in their column, and what Hannibal was planning here was a strategic retreat.
As the Romans moved in, he'll... show like an attack. He'll hold for a minute and then pull back.
He'll sucker the Romans in between his wings here because these sides here, African infantry here and here, and then the two cavalries aren't going to move at first. They'll eventually move as the cavalry here will destroy the main Roman cavalry. And of course, the main Roman army is going to move forward. as Hannibal suckers them in.
When Hannibal suckers them in, the wings suddenly turned and attacked, not because the cavalry was gone on each side. Instead of moving forward, these wings will turn inward. And so the majority of the battle actually looks like this.
That suddenly doesn't look like one army has a massive advantage. Instead, you see here, the cavalry is going to circle back around and attack from behind. The infantry have pulled him in, pulled the, uh, suckered the Romans in. See, that's a recipe for disaster here, but Hannibal knew what he was doing, and he suckered him in.
Um, and once the cavalry circled behind and attacked from the rear, this completed the encirclement. The Roman army was completely encircled. Um, the rest of the battle was a calculated slaughter of the Roman army.
It was a masterpiece of maneuvering, of planning, of strategy, of the military art. One really stupid thing here is that typically the consoles led from the wings, right? Because that way they could move around or they were in the rear. In this case, the consoles were both in the middle.
So when this turns sideways... Now they're trapped. So if you watched Game of Thrones, the Battle of the Bastards is actually a fairly decent representation of how that worked, where Jon Snow's army was in the middle and getting crushed and getting slaughtered.
The problem is, the Game of Thrones depiction, the guys in the middle won, which isn't what happened at Canny. And... There was, you know, there were other things that weren't true about it.
But as far as that crush and the slaughter, you know, being encircled like that, it's a great depiction. The Senate obviously realized they screwed up. And they will, even without Fabius Maximus, adopt the Fabian strategy again.
And the problem or the thing that happens then is without an army to crush. Hannibal will be forced to just march around the Italian peninsula and he will do that for a entire decade go back here so he wins at Cannae in 216 and then just marches around here because the army won't give chase they won't um they won't give him battle So he's just marching around, marching around, trying to win. He'll threaten Rome, but he can't stay there because of supplies. It just becomes this giant fiasco for 10 years.
Fabian's strategy is so effective if you can pull it off. Because if you're not smart, you end up with a battle of canny. Now, while Hannibal continued to rampage around Italy, The Romans actually counterattacked here towards the end of this period.
And that counterattack was led by a general named Scipio Africanus. Now, he wasn't initially known as Scipio Africanus. Africanus is a title that he'll be given after winning the Punic War, Second Punic War.
So the Roman counterattack, they didn't go after Hannibal. Hannibal's been running around and going after... he's been rampaging through Italy for a decade now let him uh Scipio Africanus goes after Spain and he will reconquer or he will conquer Spain rather um and then once he conquers Spain he'll push into North Africa.
And pretty quickly, he will be marching upon Carthage itself. Hannibal will realize this. He will rush back to Carthage and the two will have a showdown at the Battle of Zama.
Is it on the big map here? Third Punic War. There we go. Zama right here.
So. Hannibal will rush back. Scipio Africanus wins here, and then his army will make it over here and eventually fight at Zama. Again, that's...
There it is. Yeah, Zama. This was a pretty close battle.
But at first, but this was another masterpiece battle in the history of warfare, except this time it wasn't Hannibal. It was Scipio who had the masterpiece. We're not going to get into any, we're only going to get to a few other battles in this entire course, like I just did with Canny.
I just like Canny because it's just such a brilliant set of maneuvers by Hannibal to sucker somebody in like that. When Scipio wins the Battle of Zama, the Carthaginians will sue for peace, and that will be completed shortly after. And like I said, Scipio will receive the nickname Africanus in recognition of his victory.
It basically means conqueror of Africa. In this Second Pudic War, in the aftermath, Spain becomes a Roman province, and the Romans become the dominant power in the Mediterranean. Carthage survives. but it was stripped of its military.
Now, there was a very famous Roman senator named Cato, C-A-T-O, who, even though Carthage had been stripped of its military and its economic power was virtually gone, he did not believe that was enough. And anytime Cato would speak in the Senate, anytime he would end his speeches with, Carthage must be destroyed. So he could be talking about it. sanitation. He could be talking about taxes or the law.
And he would, you know, my gentlemen, this is, fellow senators, this is why we must have this law. This is why we must have these taxes. And finally, Carthage must be destroyed.
He ended every speech that way, no matter what it had to do with anything else. That dude hated Carthage. He hated it.
Imagine if you ended every conversation with somebody with the same line, you know, you know, you're talking, talking to your friends. You're like, all right, well, I guess I'll see you later. I hate the Philadelphia Eagles. I mean, it's true. You should hate the Philadelphia Eagles, but it'd be weird if you did that with every conversation.
So, so the hatred for Carthage was still there and, and Carthage itself, since it did technically survive. It will eventually rebuild itself. Now, this gap is much larger. The gap between the First and Second Punic Wars was, what, 18 years?
This war ends in 202 BCE. The Third Punic War takes place in 149 BCE. 149 to 146. I forgot the 146. Carthage had rebuilt itself as an economic although not a military power.
Rome was jealous of Carthage's wealth, so they attacked the city. The Romans captured the city. They started the attack in 149. They'll capture the city in 146, and they will burn it to the ground.
Now, the typical myth here is that it was salted, that they spread a bunch of salt on there so that nothing would grow, that they couldn't rebuild the city. They didn't do that. That's actually horrible policy.
Because if you do that, then you're not going to get any value out of it. So they didn't salt it. It's a common myth, but it's not what happened in reality.
So Carthage, this territory in North Africa, becomes the Roman province of Africa here in 146 BCE. And that's the third Punic War. There we go.
So what's the significance of all of this? Well- At this point, the Roman attitude towards foreign territories will change. They had recognized that allowing defeated enemies to remain independent caused problems, you know, especially with Carthage. Rome is now going to dominate the western Mediterranean, and they will become committed to the east.
They want to dominate the east, because dominating all of this is nice, but all the real wealth was over here to the east. And you'll see that by the end of the... third Punic War, they'd actually conquered Greece.
I didn't talk about that campaign, but they're going to do that. And as they start to conquer the East, the wealth will start flowing into Rome. And that, of course, will change the Romans and it will corrupt the Romans.
Military leaders are going to become more crucial as they have these larger areas to control. And because as they grew, they needed a larger army. So having better military leaders and putting more emphasis on the military leaders is going to be a very big deal under the Republic. Now, there are many, you know, it fundamentally changes Rome, these wars.
But there are, and there are many ways of how not just the Punic Wars, but how Roman expansion affected Roman society. And that is where we will pick up. in the next lecture, Carthage must be destroyed.