The Rest Is History - 423. Carthage vs. Rome: The Wolf at the Gates (Part 3)

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

“Every man is the architect of his own destiny” Long before Rome reigned over the Mediterranean, there was Carthage: the supreme predator of Antiquity. But how did Rome rise to become one of the most ruthless powers of all time, united in cold, disciplined violence? And what was it about the Roman people that made them the greatest threat Carthage would ever face? Whilst the Carthaginians depended upon foreign mercenaries, Rome’s legions were formed of Romans, all committed to protecting and furthering the interests of Rome. And unlike anyone before, the Roman people shared a collective sense of destiny, with Roman citizenship generously offered to all conquered peoples. But following the Sack of Rome by Gauls in 390 BC, the Romans would become even more ruthless, disciplined and bent on total victory… Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the rise of Rome, history’s most famous superpower. By 285 BC her dominion of Italy was almost complete. Only one thing stood in her way: the formidable military leader Pyrrhus. He alone foresaw the destruction to come, and the “beautiful killing ground” that would emerge when, ten years later, Rome and Carthage would finally go to war… *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London!  Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join Carthaginians and theirs, on these conditions. The Romans and their allies shall not sail beyond the promontory just north of Carthage, unless compelled to by storm or by enemy action. If any of them are swept by winds beyond it, they shall not buy or remove anything more than is required for the repair of the ship or for sacrifice, and they shall depart within five days. If any Roman enters the Carthaginian sphere of influence in Italy, he shall enjoy equal rights with others. As regards those Latin peoples who are not subject to the Romans, the Carthaginians shall not have

dealings with any of these cities and should they capture one of them they are to deliver it up to the romans undamaged should they enter the region bearing arms they are not to spend more than a single night there so that might sound a little bit obscure but actually that is an enormously fascinating historical document because that is the detail of the very first treaty signed by the future superpowers of the mediterranean the great powers that have dominated the world's imagination for so long and they are carthage and rome and that was signed in the year 509 BC. And the text comes from a bronze tablet kept in the capital, in Rome. And Tom Holland, I believe I'm right in saying that it's a Latin so ancient and obscure that nobody knows, well, somebody

must know, but very few people know how to decipher it. Is that right? It is an amazing, amazing text, and it's recorded by Polybius, who we've been talking about, this Greek who writes a history of the great wars that are fought between Rome and Carthage. He reports, yes, that this text is very, very hard for people to decipher. But obviously, the Romans keep it because they know that it is an absolutely key historical document. It really is. It's amazing. All the stuff that we've been talking about in previous episodes about Carthage, we're dependent on Greeks writing stuff about two centuries before or whatever, but this seems to be an authentic record of the

dealings between Carthage and this emergent power in central Italy, this city called Rome, which really has not intruded at all on the imaginations of outside peoples until this point. So at this point, they're not the great superpowers, right? They're absolutely not a great superpower. No, they're absolutely not. And it's fascinating because it does kind of give an insight into what we were talking in the previous episode about how Carthage in the, so this is the sixth century, is kind of maintaining its power. It's a commercial empire. And so it is trying to arrange treaties with all kinds of different powers. You know, they don't have to be superpowers. You know, they can be kind of minor

powers like Rome. Yeah. So just Tom, to recap, because obviously this is a Monday episode and lots of people might not have heard the series from last week. So remind us who the Carthaginians are, where they came from and where Carthage even is. So Carthage is the most powerful and the richest city in the 6th, the 5th, the 4th centuries BC. It's very near where Tunis is now, so it's in North Africa, on that kind of point of Africa pointing up towards Sicily. And Carthage, at this point, when this treaty is signed, its prime interest is in keeping the Greeks out of the Western Mediterranean. The Carthaginians have lots of commercial interests.

We know this, for instance, because not far north of Rome in this period, there's a town called Caeri, which belongs to a people called the Etruscans. They have a coastal settlement that is so full of Carthaginian merchants that it's actually called Punicum. So Punicus is the Latin word for Carthaginian. And the Etruscans are kind of mysterious, powerful people at this point. They have a famously indecipherable language. They have a tremendous genius for reading the future. So they're experts in kind of reading the entrails of animals and all that kind of thing. And they seem to have had a delightful domestic life. So women have a very high status and there are all these kind of wonderful funerary sculptures of husbands and wives sitting on

couches, having a lovely time as though they're kind of sat down watching the TV or something. And so they're simultaneously mysterious people. But you know, when you look at the sculptures that the Etruscans did, you feel almost like you know them. And in this period, Rome is not an Etruscan city, but culturally, and some have argued militarily, it may be kind of subject, certainly, to Etruscan influence. And so for this reason, it makes sense for the Carthaginians. They're allied with the Etruscans against the Greeks,

and it makes sense for them to sign a treaty with Rome as well. So at this point, what are we, the 6th century? In the last episode, we talked loads about the Carthaginians and the Greeks squabbling for control of Sicily. So by this point, the 6th century BC, they're expanding their influence into mainland Italy as well. Is that right? But not in an imperialist way. They're trying to construct kind of trade treaties.

They're kind of like Liz Truss going around, you know, global Carthage. With a little bit more success, I think it's fair to say. With a little bit more success, yes. So basically they're trying to ensure that their sphere of influence is protected. So that's why the Romans are agreeing not, for instance, to go crashing into Africa. That's why there are kind of requirements that their ships are not allowed to intrude into Carthaginian waters. But equally, the Carthaginians are saying that they will respect Rome's power. And it offers a glimpse of Rome at the beginning of her career. And this is fascinating because, of course, we know what

is going to happen with Rome. We know that Rome is going to become the supreme carnival, the apex predator of antiquity. What we're seeing here is the infancy of this predator. I think that we are so attuned to the idea of the Roman Empire just existing, the idea that the Romans are this great military power. But the puzzle is, why are they so successful? What is it about Rome that makes them the city that will emerge as the great rival of Carthage and, spoiler alert, fight three terrible wars that in the long run will culminate in the utter destruction of Carthage. And I think that there are clues here. So certainly Rome is a significant regional power. It clearly has control over, you know, so there's reference there to Latins.

Latins are Latin speakers, cities around Rome. And there is a sense in this treaty that Rome has established a regional dominance over them. So that's fascinating. But I think even more intriguing is the date of this. So it's 509 BC. This is the date that's given by Polybius. And this is the date that traditionally the Romans saw as being the great change in their city's history from a monarchy to a republican system of government. Oh, this is when they kicked out Tarquin the Proud. Tarquin the Proud. So the story goes that they've had seven kings, you know, descended from Romulus,

the founder of the city. Tarquin is the seventh. He has a son called by Macaulay, the great Victorian writer in the 19th century, False Sextus. False Sextus. False Sextus. And he rapes a noble Roman virgin. She kills herself in front of her father. And the Roman aristocracy and the people are so appalled by the crime that Sextus has committed that they throw both Sextus and Tarquin out of Rome.

There's an attempt by an Etruscan king called Lars Percena to try and take Rome back. But the Etruscan ranks are kept at bay by Horatius and two of his friends who stand on the bridge. The bridge, love Horatius on the bridge. While the other Romans hack it down, two of the defenders scarper back. Horatius stands there. The bridge comes crashing down. Horatius in full armour jumps into the Tiber. You know, is he going to drown? No, he makes it to the Roman side. And even the ranks of Tuscany could scarce forbear to cheer. So all very dramatic, very novelistic, possibly not entirely true. What, Tom? Don't do this. Don't do this. You're better than that.

But Dominic, the fact that this treaty is signed in 509 suggests that the traditional dating is probably accurate, that something radical did happen in 509. Because otherwise the Carthaginians would not have needed to regularize their relations at Rome. Yes. So probably this is an attempt to reset relationships after what effectively has been a kind of revolution. Now, in later generations, and so particularly the time when the Romans are fighting the Carthaginians, and they are trying to make sense of their own past. The story they tell about how the Republic comes into being is that the king is expelled and his powers get divided up between two elected magistrates called consuls. And you remember,

we talked in the previous episode that the Carthaginians actually have something quite similar called suffetes. Are the Romans ripping off the Carthaginian system, Tom? Well, also the marker of a consul is that he wears a purple bordered robe. And of course, the dye comes from Carthage. Mollusks, Carthaginian mollusks, crushed mollusks. Oh my word. You can tell I've been paying attention to the last two episodes. Having said that, I mean, I think the Carthaginians are not influencing this at all.

It's being instituted for very Roman reasons. The idea being that the consuls are elected for one year, they each keep an eye on the other. And it's this whole idea that no one man in the wake of the expulsion of the monarchy should be allowed to seize absolute power. This is the great principle of the Republic. And according to the Roman traditional accounts of what happens in the century after the founding of the Republic. According to the Roman traditional accounts of what happens in the century after the founding of the Republic, it works. Roman historians say that there are social convulsions, that there are demands from the mass of the people for improved civic rights, lots of constitutional reforms. But the Republic, according to Roman historians, does not implode into civil war, into revolutionary

activity. And this is because the Romans will demonstrate a genius for being simultaneously very, very innovative, but very, very traditional. You know, you said this is very Roman reasons and all that. Isn't it possible that you only think that because Rome is so successful? So this could be a widely practiced thing or it could be something because you said in the last episode that we knew very little about Carthage's constitutional arrangements and Carthage is far more influential than Rome at this point is it not possible that the Romans took this from Carthage then Rome became tremendously successful so we say oh well of course this is very Roman keeping competition within bounds all that kind

of thing so Roman you know the predatory course, this is very Roman, keeping competition within bounds, all that kind of thing. So Roman, the predatory ruthlessness of it, very Roman. But we're only thinking that because we're projecting backwards, as it were. I think you are absolutely right that there is a problem with taking what the Romans said about the first century of the Republic as being historically true. But I think that what they believed matters for understanding how they will behave in the wars against Carthage, because they do have a sense of themselves as being distinctive. And it's evident that in their ability to project violence and their refusal

ever to accept surrender, there is something very, very strange about it. So in that sense, I think it's worth just looking at how the Romans, in the period when they are fighting the Carthaginians, how they understood their past and how they explained what they were about. So Polybius, for instance, this Greek historian who we've been talking about, he is trying to make sense of this puzzle. How is it that the Romans have defeated Carthage, have gone on to overthrow the various Macedonian kingdoms. I mean, how have they done it? And his explanation is that the masses are basically incredibly superstitious, that the elites are very cynical. But I think that this is a very Greek perspective,

because just as the Greeks don't really understand Carthage, they don't really understand Rome either. And the truth is that the Republic, like Carthage, is not a Greek state. Greek states are regularly being shattered by civil wars, by revolutions, by social tensions. Rome genuinely seems to be impervious to these kinds of disasters. You do not see the blood of its citizens being spilled on the streets in civil strife. And that is because I think the Romans authentically have an ideal of shared citizenship. It's incredibly, well, one might say sacral to them. And our word republic comes from res publica. It means kind of public business. So every Roman, by the time that the wars against Carthage are being fought, every Roman has this ideal that his sense of self-worth exists in the context of what his fellows think about him.

So the Romans have this word, onestas, which means moral excellence, but it also means reputation. The two are kind of indistinguishable. The Romans don't separate the two out. There are basically two corollaries of this. So the first is that the stuff about the consuls, these kind of rival magistrates who are simultaneously kind of working together. This is what every Roman wants. And this is the supreme honor. And every time that there is a kind of a civic convulsion in Rome, more magistracies are given, meaning that there are more prizes, meaning that there are more opportunities for Romans to rise up through the ranks, to gain honor. And so the effect of that

is to kind of channel the ambition for glory that Roman society seems to have encouraged and keep it within civic bounds. So it works for the benefit of the whole mass of the people, for the res publica, for the Republic, rather than kind of fragmenting outwards and setting powerful men against powerful men. So that's one corollary of it. Every Roman, right from the lowest, right the way up to the top, is keen for the kind of glory that is judged by your fellow citizens. So it gives an incredibly powerful civic identity. But of course, this is terrible news for the Roman's neighbours, because how do you obtain glory? Basically by going out and fighting and conquering your neighbours. And so every citizen is expected to fight. So the word legion, a legio is a levy.

Every citizen is expected when war is summoned to go out into the campus marshes, the plain of Mars, which stretches outside the walls of Rome, and to be enrolled in a legio, in a legion. And this commitment never to accept disrespect, never to accept dishonour, is manifest in what to their enemy seems a kind of terrifying commitment to violence. So when the Romans capture a city, it's not just that has kind of resisted them, that has refused to surrender or has committed some kind of perceived crime against Rome. The legions will not only take the city by storm, but they will kill every living creature within it. So, you know, dismembered dogs, the heads of cattle and

horses kind of littering the streets. So it's terrifying, but they're not barbarians. They're fighting in a kind of coherent civic body. It's just that this is an utterly lethal predator. I'm not convinced that's much consolation to the dogs, but anyway, there you go. No, no consolation at all. I mean, you would not want to be a dog in a city that has offended the Romans. No. I mean, absolutely terrifying. So with

those who resist them, they are terrifying. But there is also, again, and this is something that contrasts with the Greeks. You think of a city like Sparta that is so xenophobic that they won't even allow strangers into their city. The Romans are very, very generous with their citizenship. And again, this bewilders the Greeks. So according to legends, you think of Athens, the story there is that people rise up from the soil, that the Athenians are born from the earth of Attica. The Romans freely admit that when Romulus founded the city, he summoned people from all around, kind of criminals, escaped slaves, whoever, it didn't matter.

These are where the Romans come from according to their own legends. And even the most powerful of dynasties in Rome are perfectly happy to celebrate their immigrant status. So you think of one of the most famous political dynasties in Rome, the Claudians, which will, you know, the Emperor Claudius is descendant of them. According to tradition, this is founded by a guy called Attius Clausus, who migrates to Rome from the hills beyond Rome six years after the founding of the Republic, so in 503. A decade later, he's become consul. From that time on, the Claudians absolutely dominate the lists of consuls. There will be Claudians taking a part throughout the history of the Punic Wars. It's not just kind

of powerful people or immigrants coming into the city. The Romans are also very, very good at integrating cities that they've defeated. So in the 350s, this is 150 years after that peace treaty that the Romans signed with Carthage. Rome is still the dominant power in central Italy, but then in 340, all the Latin cities rebel against Rome. And basically they're annoyed at being treated as subjects rather than allies. And the Romans defeat this rebellion, but they kind of draw a lesson from it that what had previously been a kind of a league of the Latin cities, kind of like a Latin European union, this is no longer acceptable. Every city is going to have to be treated individually. And so the Romans

divide and rule with the Latin cities. So some are enrolled as Roman citizens. Others are given a kind of subordinate citizenship. Cities that had been inveterately rebellious are treated very harshly. So their walls are razed, their elites are sent into exile. One of them has its entire fleet confiscated. The Romans take the prows of the fleet, which they called rostra, and put them up in the forum, the great central space in Rome, to be a kind of place where orators will go and stand. And this is where we get our word rostra from. And this kind of provides the blueprint that will be followed throughout the entire history of the Roman Empire, that you go in hard against your enemies, but those who are defeated or surrender

or submit, you treat them very, very generously. And perhaps you enroll them as citizens. More citizens mean larger armies. Larger armies mean more conquests. More conquests mean more citizens. So can we draw a contrast with Carthage? So while the Romans are doing all this, what's that? Fourth century BC. Carthage is top dog in the Mediterranean. But does Carthage do anything like this, Tom? Because Carthage obviously has colonies, doesn't it? It has trading stations, it has forts. But has it got any similar history of incorporating? Are the Romans unique in that regard, would you say? I think they are unique. So Carthage has mercenaries. The mercenaries obviously do

not have any civic sense of belonging to a single body, a res publica. And that is a real difference between the Carthaginian and the Roman way of making war. And in the long run, the Roman way of making war will show itself to be much more successful. But war between Rome and Carthage in the middle of the fourth century is still a long way off. And so in 348, a decade before that Latin uprising that I was talking about, there's a second treaty between Rome and Carthage. And it's almost identical to the previous one. And in fact, actually, it's slightly more favourable to Carthage because they specify that Romans are not allowed to, for instance, go and found a colony

in Sardinia. And the Romans have to accept this. And you may wonder, well, if the Romans are this kind of predator in waiting, this great carnivore, how is it that basically in the space of 150 years since the founding of the Republic, they haven't done better? I mean, what's going on there? And I think that the answer to that is pointing to the point you raised earlier, which is that actually it's not the founding of the Republic that changes everything, but another event. Because I think that the great event, the great turning point happens actually in 390 when Rome is sacked by a great army of Gauls. So the geese. Absolutely, the geese. So the Romans go out to meet this great war band of Gauls. So the geese. Absolutely, the geese. So the Romans go out to meet this

great war band of Gauls. They get annihilated at a battle. The anniversary of it will forever be commemorated as the darkest day in the Roman calendar. The Gauls then lay siege to the Capitol. They're climbing up the side of the Capitol. The watchdogs don't bark. The geese hiss. The Capitol is saved. And from that point on, every year on the anniversary of that, the geese on the Capitol will be taken down into the Forum to witness the crucifixion of the guard dogs. So all very odd. But this story doesn't disguise the fact that it was a humiliating defeat, that Rome has to buy off the Gauls. They hand over all their treasure. The Gauls demand more.

The Romans object and say that this wasn't in the treaty. And the Gauls famously say, vivictis, woe to the defeated. And this seems to have affected the Romans as the most terrible shock, the most terrible humiliation. And they seem to have resolved that from that point onwards, they would never again accept anyone disrespecting them. And there are a number of brilliant scholarly studies that kind of try to make sense of this by saying that essentially the story of there being this kind of common civic identity that had existed since the Republic is actually not true. That really it's with the defeat by the Gauls that you start to get this integration of the aristocracy and the mass of the people, and this sense of a kind of aggressive, common civic identity and purpose. And so it's in the decades that follow the sack of Rome by the Gauls

that you seem to see the emergence of a citizen army. So actually before then, is this not Jeremy Alexander's brilliant book, Tom? It is, yes. Yes, which I've been talking to you about. It's just the argument that he makes that Rome was far more divided than we think. And actually it's the trauma of defeat.

Yes. That means they have to bind themselves together into a common civic culture, kind of martial culture and say never again. You know, well,, it's that classic thing of people being brought together. It's the foundation of so many nationalisms, the external threat that provides the glue. Yeah. So the book you mentioned, War and Society in Early Rome, From Warlords to Generals, and that's by Jeremy Armstrong. And his argument is essentially is

that the elite, so people like Clausus, this ancestor of the Claudians, that these are like kind of superstar galacticos who drift around from top club to top club and don't have any particular loyalty to the club that they're in. What really matters is their own status, their own profile. They're Jordan Henderson, Tom. Yeah, they're kind of Jordan Henderson. And that the mass of the Roman people therefore feel a disconnect from these Galacticos, but that the sack of their city by the Gauls changes that. And the aristocracy, as well as the mass of people, start to have a shared identity of being Roman. And this is where you get the emergence of the aristocracy as a common group of people called the Senate. The

mass of people, they have their assemblies, they have their voice. These are the people who will elect the consuls and the various other magistrates. You have the emergence of the citizen army. You can tell from archaeology that armor is starting to become less showy, which in turn means that it's more affordable. So the mass of people can now afford it. The walls around Rome are renewed and improved. And basically, Rome has become a kind of mutant state. It's a state like no other. And the mutant quality is its absolute refusal ever to suffer humiliation. No Roman from this point on is willing to tolerate a loss of face. And rather than endure humiliation, a Roman will go to any length basically to ensure that that doesn't happen. And so Rome in the wake of the sack by the Gauls has become a state that is kind of uniquely lethal, but from the point of view of the Romans, uniquely glorious. And so the result is that with the suppression of that Latin uprising in 338, Rome now has incredible reserves of manpower because it's enrolled the people of these defeated cities

into its own citizen body. And that gives it a resource that kind of has elevated it from the level of a regional power, pretty much to the level of Carthage, a level with the Greek kingdoms in the East. Carthage is rich. Carthage is trading all the time. Carthage has loads of money. Does Rome have loads of money? Yeah. I mean, Rome is rich because it's a plunder-based society. So that's how it gets its wealth. It's not a trading society. At this point, it doesn't have a fleet.

It doesn't have a maritime tradition at all. But of course, what it has that Carthage doesn't have is manpower. And it is manpower that is what you need in this kind of world. The Carthaginians can pay people to fight for them, but the Romans don't need to do that. They have lots of people who are desperate to get out and fight. So when Carthage signed that treaty a decade before, Rome was a secondary power. Now it isn't.

And the consequences of that for the peoples of Italy and in the long run for the Carthaginians will be devastating. And for the world. And for the world. And for the world. Okay, come back after the break to find out what happens next in this absolutely swashbuckling, blood-drenched story of the rivalry between Rome and Carthage. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Now, in general, the Romans rely upon force in all their undertakings

and consider that having set themselves a task, they are bound to carry it through. And similarly, that nothing is impossible once they have decided to attempt it. So, Tom, I know that's your personal motto, isn't it? And that's from Polybius. Absolutely. Well, it's the motto of the podcast, isn't it? You absolutely believe both in the use of force and that nothing is impossible when you set your mind to it. So that's Polybius talking about the Romans. That's taken them very much at their own estimation, isn't it? It is.

That they're incredibly hard and nothing is beyond them. But bear in mind that Polybius, you know, I mean, he's a Greek who's been taken as a captive to Rome. So he's in a position to appreciate it. But is that true? I mean, let's be honest. Are they invincible? Are they peerless, all those things? Let us look at the evidence.

So if we accept the thesis that was posited just before the break, that the great turning point is 390 BC, the sack of Rome by the Gauls, and the determination of the Romans from that point on, never again to risk such a humiliation. And maybe it takes them a few decades to forge this new kind of society, one in which the drive for honour is something that can be turned against Rome's neighbours. Well, by the 340s, all the Latin cities around Rome have been utterly subordinated to Roman authority. Lots of them have been enrolled within the citizen body of Rome itself. What happens next? How does this reliance upon force that Polybius identifies, how does it manifest itself in the context of Italian politics? So south of Latium, of the land of the Latins,

there is Campania, which is Naples, Capua, both of them Greek cities, Pompeii, sheltering under Mount Vesuvius, rich, prosperous, civilized. But up in the mountains, you have a people called the Samnites, very hardy warriors, whose ancestors supposedly were led there from not far from Rome by, depending on who told the story, a bull or a wolf or a woodpecker. God, you wouldn't want to be led by a woodpecker, would you? I'd choose the wolf. I think I would. I was thinking about this. I think I would choose him because at least you wouldn't lose him, would you? I mean, you'd always be able to hear him

knocking on a tree. Yeah, but it's so demeaning. I think a bull, fine, but a wolf is better and a woodpecker is definitely third. Anyway. Okay, so you're not team woodpecker. No.

Anyway, so these are people who are viewed even by the Romans as being very, very savage. They're notorious for practicing witchcraft. They wear great heavy rings of iron around their neck and they're supposedly given to shaving their private parts in public. Again, this is the woodpecker issue, isn't it? I mean, this is what happens when you go down that road. And they will live long in the Roman imagination, you know, for centuries afterwards, because they are given to wearing very thick belts and helmets with great bobbing crests.

And this is a style that will become very popular with gladiators. So you think the classic image of the gladiator with its bobbing crest and its great big belt. This is Samnite armor. And so they are viewed by certainly the people down in the plains of campania with contempt not unreasonably i would say tom so the greeks particularly yeah and so the very hostile relations between sam knights and the campaign so sam knights are always coming down trying to kind of bully and intimidate the capuans or the neapolitans kind of go off with their cattle that kind of thing and so in the second half of the fourth century,

the Romans, who are now the great power in central Italy, get sucked into this. And they kind of come in on the side of Capua. They start fighting against the Samnites. They then get distracted by the Latin uprising. And when they resume hostilities in 341, the Samnites immediately come to terms. The Romans patch up an alliance with the Samnites. The Campanians are now siding with the Latins. It's all very confusing. But I think what is obvious from this kind of whole confusing melange of Romans fighting Samnites on behalf of the Campanians, and the Campanians are then fighting with the Latins against the Romans, it's all incredibly balkan. What's clear is that the Romans are basically going to be going to war

with the Samnites. And so it turns out, because in 326, war blazes out again, and this will last for 22 years. And the Romans carry it on despite the fact that they suffer one of their most humiliating defeats when they get trapped in a narrow valley called the Cordine Forks. And the Sabines, rather than massacring them, they play by the rules because there are accepted rules in Italian warfare. If you capture your enemy, you force them to submit. So you make a yoke, you have two spears stuck in the ground, and then you put another spear across it. And the defeated army has to thread beneath this yoke. They have to agree to end the war, and they have to accept the terms of the conqueror. So in this context, after the defeat

of the Chaldean forks, two Roman consuls who had been in charge of the army agree that they will withdraw what the Romans called coloniae, which are colonies, the English word comes from, which are kind of plantations of Romans in enemy territory. So the Romans have planted coloniae in Samnium and the condition of their army being allowed to go is that they will withdraw this and they swear this to the gods and all this kind of thing. But what about this thing about the Romans would endure any suffering rather than be humiliated? Right, exactly. So when the defeated legions come down from Samnium into Campania, they're too humiliated even to show their faces in Capua. They're so embarrassed. They feel they've let the Capuans down, they've let the Romans down,

but worst of all, they've let themselves down. And when they get back home to Rome, they just go and lock themselves up in their homes and won't come out. And so the shame of this is something that is clearly insufferable. And so one of the consuls who has agreed to the terms stands up in the Senate and says, look guys, it was me and my consular colleague who agreed this. You, the Roman people, did not agree this. So you can carry on the war. Of course, this will require me and my colleague to be handed over naked and shackled to the Samnites. But because we are patriotic Romans, we are willing to accept that. And so this is what happens. The Romans return to war. The consuls are given to the Samnites. The Samnites don't know what to do with them, so send them back because they're still playing by the traditional rules. The Romans embark on a kind of total war, endless grueling sequence of campaigns. But by 304, the Samnites have no choice but to sue for terms. There's another

cycle of war that breaks out in 298. But by 290, the Samnites have been decisively defeated. Roman colonies are planted across their land. The Samnites have been decisively defeated. Roman colonies are planted across their land, the Samnites themselves are forced to become allies of Rome, much of their land is annexed, and essentially the Samnites are now being absorbed into the apparatus of the Roman war machine. Meanwhile, even as the Romans have been fighting the Samnites, they've also been going northwards, attacking the Etruscan cities, conquering them, absorbing them into their framework of alliances. Even the Gauls in the north of Italy are being forced to submit. And by 285, so this is within the lifetime since that treaty with Carthage was signed, the Romans have conquered pretty much the whole of Italy.

And all that remains really independent is the Greek cities in the south. So Magna Graeca, as the Romans called it. So to just pause a second and look to Carthage, the Carthaginians at that point do not have colonies and territories on the mainland of Italy and never have. Is that right? They have trading colonies.

So they're kind of like... The sort of Hong Kong and Singapore type places. Not exactly because they're not administered by the Carthaginians, but there are kind of colonies of Carthaginian merchants within all these various cities. And that is what the treaties have agreed to. But they haven't been conquered by the Romans or they have? They have been conquered by the Romans, yeah. But the Romans are just letting the Carthaginian merchants in those places crack on with it.

Yes, because the Romans treaty with Carthage provides for cities that are dominated by Rome. Okay. So the provisions of the treaty with Rome now governs the whole of Italy. Understood. So Rome and Carthage are still allies at this point. Yeah. And actually, the fact that Rome is now gearing up to attack the Greek colonies in the south of Italy, the area that had been settled, much as

Sicily had been, southern Italy also had been settled by Greek colonists. The Greeks are the enemies of the Carthaginians. The Romans are now having a crack at the Greeks. So there's every reason for the Carthaginians and the Romans still to be allies. And the most powerful Greek city in the south is Tarentum, founded by the Spartans many centuries before and preserving that kind of military tradition. But the Romans are clearly too powerful for the Tarentines on their own to resist. And so they look around for an ally. And fortunately for the Tarentines, such an ally is there just on the other side of the Adriatic in the mountainous kingdom of Epirus, kind of around Albania, that kind of area. And its king is a guy called pyrrhus i hope he doesn't

win a pyrrhic victory tom well so pyrrhus is he's very much an alexander the great wannabe right he's stuck in this kind of mountainous sub-macedonian kingdom yeah and he wants scope for glory and he's a very very proficient general he's been kind of swaggering around the eastern mediterranean scoring all kinds of victories but he does have links to the west because he's a very, very proficient general. He's been kind of swaggering around the Eastern Mediterranean, scoring all kinds of victories. But he does have links to the West because he's married to the daughter of Agathocles, who's the tyrant of Syracuse, who we talked about in the previous episode. So when the invitation from the Tarentines come, Pyrrhus looks over, he thinks, yeah, Southern Italy, Sicily, scope here for glory. And so he crosses the Adriatic with an enormous army that features, for the first time in Italian combat, war elephants. Okay, can we stop and talk about the elephants for a second?

Because I love an elephant on the rest of history. The elephants he has presumably got because as king of Epirus, he and part of the kind of Macedonian Hellenistic world, he presumably has got those from the Seleucids, from the Greek Empire in Asia, I'm guessing. Yeah, they've come from India. There's a great deep water port on the Red Sea where vast ships come with elephants and basically you can source elephants from there or you can source elephants from the kings in Syria who have access across the land channels. So yeah, this is how you get elephants. Or there's a particular kind of elephant that is now extinct that is in North Africa.

So this is where the Carthaginians get their elephants. Is that so? Yeah. So elephants are available if you want them. Right. And why wouldn't you? And Pyrrhus does want them. Quite right too.

Because, of course, horses are terrified of elephants. Right. And why wouldn't you? And Pyrrhus does want them. Quite right too. Because of course, horses are terrified of elephants. Yeah. You know, cavalry charging along and you see an elephant and they all go screaming off in reverse. And of course,

they can go crashing into a line of infantry, stampede them. Terrifying. The issue with elephants, Tom, I know we're not the rest of military history, but I believe the issue

with elephants is that elephants can easily be frightened and will stampede their own side. That is constantly a risk. So they can be a tremendous liability. They can be. But if you're a top general like Pyrrhus, you know how to control them. Yeah. And so Pyrrhus in 280, he lands in Italy and he brings a whole load of war elephants. He brings

his cavalry, Macedonian cavalry is famous. And of course he brings his phalanx, you know, enormously long spears, the instrument of war that had enabled Alexander to conquer the Persian empire. Tremendous innovation. So the Romans are now in the big league. I mean, again, to pursue the football analogy, this is the Champions League. They are now facing the most terrifying way of making war that exists in the Mediterranean. How are they going to do?

Well, they meet at a place called Heraclea, the Romans and Pyrrhus' army, which is in southern Italy. The elephants are brought out. The Roman horses are terrified. They scarper. The Romans lose, but it's a very bloody victory. The Romans inflict a lot of casualties on Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus is also playing by the rules. He doesn't want to conquer Rome and destroy it. He assumes that having won his victory, the Romans will now negotiate. And so he sends an embassy to Rome and he offers, yeah, very reasonable terms. So he says, I'll free the prisoners that I've taken. I'll help you with the subjugation of the rest of Italy.

All you've got to do is give immunity to Tarentum. And the Senate is tempted to accept these terms. I mean, they seem very good. But then you have this terrifyingly craggy old senator who is a Claudian, Appius Claudius. And he is the guy who builds the Appian Way, the great road that runs from Rome down to the heel of Italy, and is like a chain that has been cast over the mountains of Samnium, enabling the Romans to strike where they want. He is blind, so he's called Caicus the Blind. He stands up and he basically says, never surrender. We are never going to negotiate with an invader of Italy. He has this famous line, every man is the architect of his own destiny, with the implication that every citizen has it within him to be the architect

of Rome's destiny. The Romans carry on the fight. The following year, 279, there's another battle, another victory for Pyrrhus. But again, his phalanx, his cavalry, his elephants are very, very badly maimed. And it's at this point that he makes the famous comment, another victory like this, and it will be the ruin of me. So this is exactly where the phrase Pyrrhic victory comes from. And he decides he's had enough. He thinks, you know, I don't want to keep fighting the Romans. I won't have anybody left. And so he goes off to Sicily to fight the Carthaginians. He's invited there by the Sicilian Greeks. They want another Greek to help them have a crack at the Carthaginians, which they're always doing. And Pyrrhus is keen to install his grandson, who is Agathocles' grandson as well, because Pyrrhus has married Agathocles' daughter, to become king of Syracuse. So basically he's trying to establish his dynasty in Syracuse. So he goes off and does that. But Pyrrhus unfortunately behaves in such a kind of arrogant manner that all the Greeks get pissed off with him and they switch sides and team up with the Carthaginians. So Pyrrhus and the Greeks have

split up. So Pyrrhus now finds himself fighting both the Carthaginians and the Greeks. And he thinks, you know, had enough of this. So he heads back to Italy. But there he finds that the Romans have built up their forces, inevitably. There's another battle. Again, it's indecisive. Again, the Romans inflict devastating casualties on Pyrrhus. And he decides that he's had enough.

And so he packs up and goes home. And that basically is the last that Pyrrhus is engaged in Italy. And in 272, he goes off into Southern Greece, into the Peloponnese. He gets involved in a street battle in Argos and he's fighting with this guy. And the guy's mother is up on the roof, you know, sees her beloved boy fighting Pyrrhus, reaches for a roof tile, hurls it at Pyrrhus, brains him and it kills him. And so that's the end of Pyrrhus, reaches for a roof tile, hurls it at Pyrrhus, brains him, and it kills him. And so that's the end of Pyrrhus.

What a depressing end for Pyrrhus. Yeah, very sad. Very rich for the Lionheart. But meanwhile, back in Italy, the moment he goes, the Romans move into Tarentum, take it. And basically the conquest of Italy is complete. Just one thing on Pyrrhus. All that stuff about the Romans being invincible and brilliant and stuff. I mean, they didn't be Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus. All that stuff about the Romans being invincible and

brilliant and stuff. I mean, they didn't be Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus won. No, they didn't. But Pyrrhus, yes, he does effectively win the three battles, but he doesn't win the war because the Romans keep coming back. And it's not that the Romans expect to win every battle, but they expect to win every war. Right. Because of their manpower, Tom. It doesn't matter how many battles they lose, they will always come back. And this, of course, will be a key theme in the wars that Rome goes on to fight with the Carthaginians. Right. You know, it's like the Hydra.

You chop a head off, another one sprouts back up. Yeah. But at this point, with the whole of Italy successfully pacified, with Pyrrhus seen off, conditions between Rome and Carthage remain stable. The Carthaginians are not opposed to Rome conquering Italy. In fact, 348, so this is right when they're just about to embark on their great series of conquests, and they've started fighting the Samnites. The Romans win a particular battle over the Samnites, and the Carthaginians send them a tremendously lavish golden crown,

which the Romans then keep on the capital as a kind of a memento. There are definitely Carthaginians in Rome at this point. There's an entire area of Rome that's called the Vicus Africus, the African quarter on the Esquiline Hill, named after the Carthaginians. The Latin word for market, which is machelum, to derive from the phoenician and there are even vague hints in later roman writers that there's a betel which is a kind of sacred stone erected in the fruit market in rome so there is a carthaginian presence as per the terms of the treaty carthaginian merchants are moving freely around rome and the cities that are subordinate to rome and just one last thing on carthage. What have they been doing all this time? So there's just

been presumably a succession of people called Mago and Hanno and stuff, just interchangeably kind of making loads of money. They have been fighting the Syracusans. Okay. Which we talked about in the previous episode. Yeah. In the wake of that, they've been licking their wounds. They've been trying to rebuild their forces, hire more mercenaries, build up their fleet. And so this is why when Pyrrhus comes, a Greek king, the Carthaginians assume that Pyrrhus is the major enemy.

And this is why they're happy to be in alliance with the Romans. They don't think of the Romans as being a threat comparable to Pyrrhus, essentially because the Carthaginians, like the Greeks in Sicily and like everybody in Italy, it takes time for them to work out what they're facing in Rome. There are kind of rules of combat that everyone in the Western Mediterranean has accepted. It can be very brutal. Cities can be destroyed or whatever. But by and large, that doesn't happen. By and large, it is like a kind of brutal form of sport that every year you go out, you know, you have a battle, you have a war or whatever,

but then you sign treaties. You're not going out there to exercise total domination. Yeah. But of course, this is what the Romans are about. But the Carthaginians are not really, you know, they haven't had their noses rubbed in that particular fact yet. And so you might think with the withdrawal of Pyrrhus in Carthage, you'd think, well, great. We've seen off this Macedonian king. The Greeks in Sicily are now allied with us. We're allied with Rome. We have our sphere of influence in Western Sicily. Everything's great.

But Pyrrhus had recognized what was to come because it is said that while he was in Sicily, just before he leaves to go back to Italy, he looks around him and he says, what a beautiful killing field we are leaving here in Sicily for the Romans and the Carthaginians. And he's not wrong, Dominic, because within 10 years of his departure from Italy, Roman Carthage will be at war. Oh my word, Tom, what a cliffhanger. As Chris Morris would say, it's war. Do you know what, this is like

the ancient world podcast we've ever done to Laurence Olivier's The World at War. You're too kind. With you as Laurence Olivier. Absolutely fascinating stuff. Incredibly exciting. Listen, I can't believe there's anybody who would happily wait, what, three days to hear the final episode of this series,

which is World War between Rome and Carthage. And if you're in that position where you are going to have to wait, you can actually listen to it right now, because all you have to do is go to therestishistory.com, a couple of clicks, you'll be in the Rest is History Club, which is brilliant. And then you can listen to that episode. If not, I'm afraid you'll have to wait several days and who knows what could happen in the intervening period. So don't take that risk. Join the club, listen to the episode, and then join the throngs of people going through the

streets, cheering Tom Holland's name. They've enjoyed it so much. And on that bombshell, goodbye. Goodbye. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment

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