Clash with the Greek World
The growing influence of Rome in southern Italy was seen as a potential threat by Tarentum (today's Taranto), a Greek colony
founded by the Spartans. Its natural harbour was well protected from both heavy seas and
enemy attacks and Tarentum was a very rich town. In 282 the Romans violated the terms of the peace treaty they had
signed in 302 with Tarentum.
The Greeks turned for help to Pyrrhus, king of Epirus,
a region on the Ionian coast of today's Greece.
Pyrrhus landed in Italy with an army of 20,000 troops, a cavalry of 3,000 and 26 elephants.
The first battle with the Romans took place at Heraclea, a few miles to the west of Tarentum.
The Greek line of battle arranged in phalanxes and the elephants, animals the Romans were
not familiar with, were the two key factors which led Pyrrhus to victory. He moved towards Rome
and won a second battle, but the losses he suffered were such that he offered a peace
treaty to the Romans (hence Pyrrhus' victory to
mean a victory which has a significant cost). The Senate refused and Pyrrhus preferred not to attempt
to seize Rome.
The Greek colonies in Sicily asked Pyrrhus to help them in repelling the Carthaginians, who from Lilibaeum, a town they had founded at the western
tip of Sicily, were trying to conquer the whole island. Rome and Carthage made an alliance against Pyrrhus; the Carthaginians
lost most of their possessions in Sicily, but held onto Lilibaeum: the war went on until some Greek towns, wary of the
financial cost of financially supporting Pyrrhus, made peace with Carthage.
Pyrrhus returned to the continent and moved towards Rome, but at Maleventum he was defeated
by the Romans and with the rest of his army fled back to Epirus. The Romans changed the name of
the town to Beneventum (good event).
(left to right) Clean shaven emperor (Trajan); emperor with a light beard (both in the
courtyard of Palazzo Mattei di Giove); complex beard of a Roman portrayed
in Arco di Settimio Severo
Tarentum and the other Greek colonies which had supported Pyrrhus were forced to reach peace
agreements with Rome and to acknowledge it as the leading power on the Italian peninsula. In order to retain
part of their territories and trading privileges they had to pay; they gave the Romans not only gold and silver,
but also slaves.
We generally associate slavery with very painful jobs in mines and plantations,
but some of the slaves who came from the Greek colonies had skills which
were appreciated by the Roman upper classes.
Apparently there were not good barbers in Rome, prior to the
arrival of slaves who were very experienced barbers. The early Romans did not pay too much
attention to their appearance and did not shave on a daily basis: the availability of good
barbers brought a change and for the following centuries all the
portraits of consuls, politicians and emperors showed well shaved faces.
This lasted until the emperor Trajan, with the remarkable exception of Nero; later
Hadrian preferred to be portrayed with a light beard. At the time of the emperor Septimius Severus the beard became even more prominent.
The First Punic War (264-241)
The long fight with Carthage is a key component of the myth of Rome: by defeating the
city founded by the Phoenician Queen Dido not far from today's Tunis, Rome became the emerging
power of the Mediterranean: when Virgil, at the suggestion of Augustus, devised a poem meant
to give Rome a noble origin, he wrote some of his best verses on the "love and death" story between
the hero of his poem, the Trojan prince Aeneas, and the Carthaginian queen.
By celebrating the strength and wealth of Carthage, Virgil knew he was celebrating Rome;
Dido's brother Pygmalion, who had killed her husband Sicaeus, forced her to flee Tyrus.
She escaped to a site in northern Africa where she founded Carthage; soon after
Aeneas was stranded by a sea storm on the shores near the new city: he was hosted and
well received by the queen and Venus, who protected Aeneas,
asked her son Cupid to throw one of his arrows to make the queen fall in love with the Trojan prince: they passionately
loved each other until Aeneas was reminded by Hermes that his destiny was to leave for Italy where
his descendents would found Rome.
When the sails of Aeneas' ship disappeared over the horizon, Dido killed
herself swearing eternal hatred of Rome.
As a matter of fact the initial relations between
Rome and Carthage were friendly for almost 250 years as the first commercial treaty between them
was signed in 510. The two powers had made a military alliance against Pyrrhus and by forcing him out of Sicily
and the Italian peninsula they realized that the remaining independent Greek
colonies had become easily conquerable.
Carthage wanted to expand its influence on the eastern part of Sicily and in particular on
Syracuse; the Romans had already a foot on the island, as Messina was in the hands of mercenaries from Campania;
the casus belli (the situation or act justifying the war) was a quarrel between
Messina and Syracuse; the surprising thing in this first Punic (Phoenician) war is
that the Romans lost on land and won at sea. In 241 the Roman fleet defeated that of the Carthaginians near the north-western tip of Sicily.
Carthage gave up its Sicilian colonies and in 238 also those it had in Sardinia;
the two islands (with the addition in 227 of Corsica) became the first Roman "provinces", direct possessions of the Roman Senate.
A shop window and a relief of the new section of Museo Nazionale Romano recently opened
in Via delle Botteghe Oscure on the site of the former Theatre of Balbus; until a few years ago the ruins were thought to belong to Circus Flaminius
During the period of the Punic Wars the decision making role of the patricians was challenged by the ever growing
number of plebeians, the commoners of Ancient Rome.
They used to congregate outside the walls in the then almost empty space of
Campus Martius; the importance of these meetings was eventually acknowledged
by the Senate through the building of a circus where the plebeians could meet and discuss in a more
structured way (the patricians made use of Circus Maximus).
The circus was named Flaminius after the Consul Gaius Flaminius Nepos who was in charge when in 221 the circus was built.
The ruins of the circus were for centuries thought to be inside the houses along Via delle Botteghe
Oscure (south side), but it is now thought that the circus was completely
pulled down by Augustus and that a few years later Lucius Cornelius Balbus built on that same site a theatre, the ruins
of which are those inside the houses of Via delle Botteghe Oscure. Most of these houses
were recently acquired by the Italian State and they now host a section of
Museo Nazionale Romano (the other three sections being located at Terme di Diocleziano, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme and Palazzo Altemps).
The Second Punic War (218-201)
The Carthaginians reacted to the loss of Sicily and Sardinia by expanding their influence in Spain where they
already had a colony (Gades, today's Cadiz). They conquered almost all of the southern half
of the peninsula, which had important mining districts. Rome became weary of the rapid recovery of Carthage and in 226 imposed
a limit to the expansion of the Carthaginians in Spain. The treaty however left in the Carthaginian sphere of influence Saguntum,
a coastal town, with which Rome had made an alliance.
In 219 the Carthaginians laid siege to Saguntum and seized it, while the Roman Senate was still
pondering on how to react to the Carthaginian initiative; this uncertainty was summarized by Titus Livius in the saying:
Dum Romae consulitur, Saguntum expugnatur which can be translated in a very updated version
as While in Washington they toy with e-mails, New Orleans drowns.
Eventually Rome asked the Carthaginians to leave Saguntum; at their refusal it declared war.
The Carthaginians in Spain were led by Hannibal Barca then aged 29; he did not lose time
and moved towards southern France (Gallia Transalpina); in the summer of 218 he crossed
the Alps, most likely through the Little Saint Bernard Pass, a very difficult task considering
that he had brought with his army a certain number of elephants (maybe 37). The Romans had split
their forces by sending an expedition to Spain and another army to Sicily to protect their recent acquisitions.
The legions in charge of the defence of Rome met with the Carthaginians
in northern Italy and were defeated by Hannibal. The legions in Sicily were recalled and
rapidly reached northern Italy to stop Hannibal but they were defeated too. The Gauls living
in the Po Valley, who had been subdued by the Romans just a few years before, joined their forces
with the Carthaginians. In 217 Hannibal crossed the Apennines and moved towards Rome: near Lake Trasimeno the Romans suffered a third defeat.
(edited) Section of a modern marble map on the rear wall of Basilica di Massenzio
Hannibal did not have a supply chain to support his army and thus he relied on the help
of the towns which rebelled against Rome or on the sacking of those which resisted him. He
therefore was hit by the new Roman tactics, devised by the dictator Fabius Maximus,
who by a sort of guerrilla actions set fire to the territories of the towns which in one way
or another would have fallen into Carthaginians hands; he also avoided a direct confrontation
with the enemy: he thus gained time to reorganize the Roman army; for this reason he was called
Cunctator (the Temporizer).
The consuls who replaced him at the end of his six months in office thought they had enough forces to engage Hannibal, who in the meantime had made an alliance with the
Samnites and had reached southern Italy. At Cannae the Romans were again defeated: this battle
was among the bloodiest ones of ancient history, with more than 50,000 Roman casualties.
Crisis, Despair and Resurrection
At the news of the Cannae defeat the Romans were struck with terror: signs of the
imminent fall of the city were identified in many extraordinary events: births of children
with characteristics of both sexes, temples struck by lightning when there were no clouds in
the sky, strange behaviour of animals. While some Romans worked at organizing a last defence, others
believed that only a supernatural intervention could save Rome. It is during the Second
Punic War that new deities (e.g. Cybele) became popular in Rome and temples were dedicated to them in the
belief that they could help the Roman armies in defeating the Carthaginians. A precedent had been set in
293 when the cult of Aesculapius (the Greek god Asclepius) was introduced in Rome to put an end to a pestilence.
(left) Small cylindrical Christian monument inside S. Bartolomeo all'Isola, thought to be a sacred well of the Temple to Aesculapius; (right) relief at the eastern tip of Isola Tiberina, showing a snake, the symbol of
the god
Two thousand years later another young general crossed the Alps and gained in the Italian battlefields a glory
which surpassed that of Hannibal; at the news of his victories the madonnelle,
the sacred images in the
streets of Rome, cried: certainly when he was the obscure cadet Bonaparte at the Military Academy of Brienne
he had carefully studied the accounts of Hannibal's campaign in Italy.
Eventually Hannibal did not move towards Rome; in the following years the Romans returned
to a careful strategy of containment of the enemy: to prevent Carthage from sending reinforcements to Hannibal, they attacked the Carthaginian possessions in Spain. In 212
they seized Syracuse and gained control of all Sicily. In 211 they occupied Capua, which had become Hannibal's headquarters. According to Livius Carthaginiensium
exercitum, quem neque nives neque Alpes debilitaverant, otia Campaniae enervaverunt. the Carthaginian army, which had not been weakened neither by the
snow, nor by the Alps, lost its strength while resting in Campania, the so called Capua leisure.
Over time the isolated army of Hannibal was no longer a real threat to the security of Rome:
an attempt by his brother Asdrubal to bring new forces and raise again the Gauls against
Rome was repelled in 207.
In 204 the consul Publius Cornelius Scipio landed south of Carthage and moved towards
Carthage; Hannibal returned to defend his own city, but in 202 at Zama, the Carthaginians were defeated. The
subsequent peace treaty gave Rome full control of the Carthaginian territories in Spain and imposed strict limits
on the size of the Carthaginian fleet and on its foreign policy. Scipio was given the title of Africanus for his victories in that land
(the Romans called Africa what is today's Tunisia).
Iconography
The following external links show works of art portraying characters and events
mentioned in this page:
Pyrrhus showing an elephant to a Roman ambassador painting by Ferdinand Bol, 1656 in the Royal Palace of Amsterdam.
Aeneas and Venus by Tiepolo.
Dido's death by Guercino.
Hannibal crossing the Alps by J. M. W. Turner
Napoleon crossing the Alps by J. L. David (the name of Hannibal is written in the left lower corner).
Hannibal in Italy XVIth century painting in the Musei Capitolini in Rome (the Carthaginians are portrayed like Turks - it opens in a separate window).
Hannibal - a movie starring Victor Mature
Previous pages:
The foundation and the early days of Rome
The early republican period
Next page:
Expansion in the eastern Mediterranean.
Image used as background for this page: detail of the elephant in Piazza della Minerva in Rome.
