I was surprised to learn that Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game) didn’t know much about the Punic Wars:
Speaking of military history, I realized a while ago that I knew absolutely nothing about the three Punic Wars except that they were fought between Rome and Carthage, the Carthaginian Hannibal was a great general, and Rome won in the end.The Punic Wars, by Adrian Goldsworthy (Cassell & Co., 2000, 412 pp.) turned out to be the solution for my ignorance. This is an extraordinarily clear and fair-minded history of battles, strategies, and political struggles so remote in time that everything has to be pieced together from ancient sources that are often fragmentary. And the fragments we have are often unreliable, since the ancient writers had their own agendas.
As Rome expanded through central Italy, it was probably inevitable that it would collide with Carthage. The then-rich island of Sicily, divided among many city-states, lay right between the two nascent empires.
So the first war was essentially a contest for control of Sicily. Carthage was a sea-faring nation and Rome was not, so you’d think that the Carthaginians would have won handily in a struggle over an island.
But they were dealing with the Romans, and the thing about Romans was: They never gave up. Even though they had democratic institutions, the ruling class was deeply imbued with a stubborn sense of honor and entitlement that would not bend.
In other words, they didn’t get a year into a war, hold some polls, and cancel the fight. Which may be one reason why Rome created an empire that dominated the Mediterranean world from the Punic Wars until Byzantium finally fell to the Turks in the fifteenth century.
Rome didn’t have any ships? They built them. No trained sailors? They trained them as best they could, and the survivors of the first battles were certified as fully trained.
The first war ended with a Roman victory, but only because the Carthaginians decided it was cheaper to declare peace and pay tribute. That was their way of waging war — a Levantine way. They fought their wars with money. Their armies were mostly hired mercenaries, and they constantly weighed the cost. If surrender was cheaper than victory and left them free to continue making money, then they didn’t mind “losing.”
The Romans, however, had a very different view. When an enemy surrendered, the Romans regarded their surrender as permanent. From then on they were expected to behave like “allies,” which to Rome meant “subject states.”
The Carthaginians didn’t act that way. In fact, as they carved out a new empire in Spain, under the leadership of Hannibal Barco and his relatives, the Carthaginians actually became shockingly disobedient to the Romans. Well, it was shocking to the Romans, anyway.
The result was the last war that came close to extinguishing Rome for many years. Hannibal crossed the Alps and promptly destroyed every Roman army sent against him. To the Carthaginians, it seemed obvious: Rome was defeated, so Rome should surrender, pay tribute, and everybody could go home and make money again.
Only Rome didn’t know how to surrender. Or if they did, they had no intention of doing it. They kept raising new armies — of proud Roman citizens — along with troops from allied states. Unable to defeat Hannibal, they kept him busy, taking back whatever cities he had seized almost as soon as he left them. Hannibal, meanwhile, was baffled by the fact that he kept winning and yet the overall victory kept slipping out of his hands.
Finally the Romans under Scipio Africanus took the war home to Carthage in Africa, and even though Hannibal came home to try to defend his homeland, the Romans won.
The third Punic War was simply naked Roman aggression. Carthage was subservient now, but it irritated some Romans that their former enemy was rich again. So the found a ridiculous pretext for war, and despite almost desperate attempts by the Carthaginians to placate and obey Rome, it finally came to war, which Carthage lost so thoroughly that the city was utterly destroyed.
The side that refuses to lose is often the one that wins; the side that has no stomach for a longterm war, fought by its own citizens, is at a decisive disadvantage against a determined enemy. There are lessons to be learned, even from ancient times.
We may think we don’t want to be Rome — after all, we’re not in the empire business, and these days we obviously get bored with wars, even wars we’re winning. But it’s good to remember that it was the city that didn’t take its wars all that seriously, the city that was willing to surrender, that eventually was destroyed. Just a thought.