The Rest Is History - 424. Carthage vs. Rome: Total War (Part 4)

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

In the third century BC, a clash which had been brewing for centuries finally erupted: Rome, the ruthless imperialist upstart dominating Italy, against Carthage, the ancient but sinister apex predator of the Mediterranean. The conflict sparked in Messina in 263 BC, and went on for over two decades, as the fortunes of both powers rose and fell. Rome’s superior, land-based army proved the perfect match to the Carthaginians’ maritime might, though both forces rapidly adapted to the expertise of their foe. By 250 BC, Carthage was embattled and flailing, and in need of a hero, to restore the fate of Carthage, and ensure her survival… Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the outbreak of the First Punic War, in which history’s greatest rivalry, Rome vs Carthage, finally came to blows. As the established power of Carthage was challenged by the rise of a new contender in Rome, but could either live in a world where the other survived? *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 the club. That is therestishistory.com. It is my intention to give a full account of the first war between Rome and Carthage, which was fought for the possession of Sicily. This is because it would be hard to think of a conflict which went on for longer, demanded more effort from both sides, or was prosecuted with a more brutal vigour, nor one which featured more battles or more sudden changes of fortune. The two cities which fought it were still at this time possessed of customs and institutions

that were yet to fall into decadence. Both were dependent chiefly on their own efforts rather than on good luck for their successes, and both were equally matched in terms of their resources, which is why we can arrive at a more accurate assessment of the respective qualities and attributes of the two combatants in this particular war than we can by studying any comparable conflict. So that was the Greek writer Polybius talking about one of the titanic clashes, not just in ancient history, but Tom, in all history, it is the first Punic war between Rome and Carthage. It is. I guess the Carthaginians would have called it the first Roman war. So that's a

perspective that perhaps we could try and keep in mind. But yes, it is the great superpower clash in antiquity. And the two sides are perfectly matched because Carthage is the whale, Rome is the elephant. Carthage's wealth is in trade. Rome's in her resources of manpower. Carthage has been a great power for centuries. Rome is essentially an upstart. So that I think is what Polybius is talking about when he says that this is so interesting, you can gauge the respective strengths of the two cities. And so we're in the third century BC, just for those people who haven't listened to previous episodes. Carthage is on the shores of North Africa, present day Tunis, maritime power,

mercantile power, as you said. Rome has taken all Italy by now, has absorbed Latium, all these other people, Campania and so on, and has incorporated them into Roman-ness, hasn't it? Into its manpower. Lots of them, yes. And we talked in the previous episode about how up until this point, the fact that Rome and Carthage are so different has actually made them seem complementary rather than antagonistic. They have their own kind of dimensions, their own spheres in which they operate. So again, we looked at how there've been various peace treaties. They were allies against this Greek king called Pyrrhus, who had come over and defeated the Romans, but these had been Pyrrhic victories. And so effectively, the Romans had won the war. And we also mentioned how Pyrrhus, before he left to go back to Epirus's

kingdom on the other side of the Adriatic, had looked at Sicily in particular, where Carthage for many, many centuries had established a sphere of influence in the western half of the island. And he'd said, Sicily will make a beautiful killing field for the Romans and the Carthaginians. So he's seeing that this is going to be the flashpoint. And I mean, he's not wrong because the Romans are in Rhaekium on the very toe of Italy. And of course, on the other side of the Straits, you have Messina, what back in classical times was Messana. And it's been argued that the Romans are nervous. They're nervous that the Carthaginians might, they've got this great fleet, that their control of the Italian coastline might leave them very

exposed. But there's a very great scholar of Roman imperialism called William Harris who makes a brilliantly convincing case that war was inevitable above all because Rome is a state that is attuned to violence. There's this kind of mafiosi quality to them, never to accept disrespect. So just on that, obviously there comes a point in Roman history where they become more conservative. What we have we hold. Kind of, I don't know, Trajan or something. But at this point, would you say expansionism, imperialism for want of a better word, is absolutely built into their system,

partly because it's the credo of the Republic, but also because of the structural competition between different generals and so on. So you win political promotion and you win the honestas, the glorious reputation in the face of your fellow citizens by achieving great things for your city. And so that is kind of baked into the structure of Roman society. It has to be said that the Romans do not see themselves as predatory. They see themselves as a terribly moral people who essentially are going to war in self-defense. So there's this kind of weird thing that the Romans end up conquering the world

effectively in self-defense. And they would say that the proof of the fact that they are a moral people is that the gods have favored them and brought them victory. So they don't see themselves as ruthless imperialists, although effectively that is what they are. But they are definitely a kind of new mutant element in this centuries-old conflict in Sicily between the Greeks and the Carthaginians. And on top of that, of course, the Greeks and the Carthaginians are known factors to each other. But I think Carthage also has reason to be hostile to Rome, actually, because, of course, the Greeks are. And he says, the Carthaginians, who had been a great power for so long, and the Romans, who were growing ever stronger by the year, could not help but cast envious eyes on each other. So that's what American geopolitical strategists today would call the Thucydides trap.

Right, the US and China, or whatever. Yes, or Britain and Germany under the Kaiser. the anxiety of the established power and nervousness about a rising power. And so it's not surprising that it all kicks off in Messina. So the point that is nearest in Sicily to Italy. And there's a bunch of Italian mercenaries from Campania who are called the Mamatines after this brilliantly named god Mamas, who's an Italian war god. And they've been working for Agathocles, the tyrant of Syracuse, who had gone off, invaded Africa and then been defeated. And so they've been made redundant. And so they come to Mycenae and they seize control of it. And Hero, who is the king of Syracuse, he's a guy who's, as in the tradition

of Syracuse and tyrants, he comes from nowhere. He makes himself tyrant and then king of Syracuse. And he's doing what kings of Syracuse always do, which is to eye up opportunities in cities in Sicily that are going through domestic trouble. And so he looks and sees that these Mamertines have seized the city, that the Messenians don't really want them there. He advances against Messina to try and kick them out and take control of the city for himself. What the Mamertines do, they appeal to Carthage for help, which is again traditional. This is what you always do in Sicily, but just to hedge their bets, they also appeal to Rome. Carthaginians don't know this.

So the Carthaginians, they move into Messina, they take control of it, and they think, brilliant, this is par for the course. But then a Roman agent turns up, actually a Claudius, one of this very distinguished political dynasty in Rome, the Claudians. And he wins the Mamertines over and gets them to expel the Carthaginians. So the Romans, most unexpectedly, to the surprise of both the expel the Carthaginians. So the Romans, most unexpectedly, to the surprise of both the Greeks and the Carthaginians, they've now seized control of Messina. And this, you can imagine, sends shockwaves through the entire island. And the Romans do what the Romans always do in this situation, which is to double down. So another

Claudius, who's the consul Appius Claudius, even though they don't have any ships, they commandeer fishing boats and all this kind of thing. And they arrive in Messina and they defeat a Syracusan army and they defeat a Carthaginian army. And in 263, 40,000 men and both consuls arrive in Messina. And this is enough to get all the Greek cities in Sicily to sign up to the Romans. He arose the Syracusan king. He sues for terms. The Romans agree that he can stay as king in Syracuse, effectively be independent, but from this point on, he has to serve as an ally of the Roman people. Within a couple of years, the Romans have basically established a supremacy over the Greek eastern half of Sicily. This is a nightmare for Carthage because they don't want the Romans

in Sicily. They know what they're dealing with with the Greeks, but not with the Romans. And do the Romans know, they must be conscious that this is unbelievably provocative to the Carthaginians who have been fighting the Greeks for control of Sicily for so long. So has that first Claudius done this on his own initiative and basically the Romans are being dragged in? It's a bit like the way that people say the British Empire was kind of, parts of it required in a kind of fit of absence of mind. Is it being centrally directed? Have people sat around a kind of map in Rome and said, this is the time? Has that happened? Well, it's interesting. There is some embarrassment around the Roman support for the Mamertines because the Mamertines have seized the city illegally. And so the Romans are a little bit

nervous that maybe the Mamertines actually have offended the gods, they've offended the laws of hospitality. But they brush that aside. They convince themselves that they're entirely morally justified, that this is what the gods want. And so they pile in. And the fact that the Carthaginians are offended and demand the Roman withdrawal is seen as disrespect. And so the Romans are fully up for full-scale war. And the Carthaginians, because they are not prepared to tolerate the intrusion of this upstart power into their sphere of influence, likewise are completely committed to it. And the Carthaginians, although they respect Roman land forces, the Carthaginians are dependent on mercenaries. They don't have this kind of great body of citizens that the Romans can

command. They're confident of victory because of course, Sicily is an island. They are the great maritime power and the Romans don't have a fleet. So Carthage thinks we can ace this. And so what they do, so there's a place, Lilibaeum, which is on the furthest most western point. Pernormus, which is Palermo, modern day Palermo. Palermo is an old Phoenician city. Lilibaeum was deliberately founded to be an impregnable fortress of Carthaginian power. But what they actually decide to do is to seize control of a Greek city, Akragas, modern day Agrigento, because it's further to the east on the southern coast. So it's towards where the Romans are operating, but it can be easily supplied from Carthage.

It's a Greek city. It's famous for having been once ruled by a notorious tyrant who used to boil people to death inside a great bronze bull. And it's large and prosperous. There are kind of maybe 25,000, 30,000 people there. And they fortify it. The Romans pile in, they besiege it. Carthage sends a huge relief force, 60 elephants, all the works. And Dominic, I'm sure you can guess the name of the guy in charge of it. He's yet another Hanno, is he? He is a Hanno. He's yet another Hanno. Yes. But this is a terrible, he's a terrible general. So he lands with his forces

and he looks down from a hill at the Romans and he thinks, oh, I don't really want to fight them. A bit nervous of it. So he just stays there for two months. And then finally, because we should say, we mentioned this a couple of episodes ago, but the penalty for failure in Carthage is very, very severe. So at the worst, you can be crucified, but it's not good. So finally, he thinks, well, I better crack on. So he advances against the Romans, but it's a disaster. The Romans stand firm. The elephants stampede. They trample their own men. It's a complete catastrophe. And the commander of the Carthaginian garrison in Acragas realizes that all is lost. And so he and his garrison slip out. They fill the Roman trenches

with straw, manage to get across Scarpa. The Romans move into Acragas, sack it, sell all its inhabitants into slavery. And meanwhile, back in Carthage, Hanno loses all his civil rights and it has a massive fine slapped on him. Right. Could have been worse. Could have been crucified. Yeah, it absolutely could have been worse. And back in Rome, the news that they have brushed off the Carthaginians so easily kind of determines them in their conviction that they should kick the Carthaginians out of Sicily altogether. The Carthaginians, they rely very heavily on mercenaries, don't they? So even at this stage, they rely on some mercenaries in a way the Romans aren't? Yeah, basically their troops are all mercenaries.

So obviously the problem though for the Romans is that if they're going to conquer Sicily, let alone hold it, they do need a fleet. And this is a real challenge because Carthage is the greatest naval power of its day. It's got centuries of maritime experience. It's the inventor, Dominic, of the quadrareme, which is a ship that is bigger and more powerful than the trireme right so it has kind of four banks of oars and it also has lots of quincarines which is battleships with five bounds of oars which had been invented by the syracusans so they're basically the kind of the dreadnoughts of the ancient world and the romans don't have any of these but this is exactly the kind of challenge the romans relish. A quincarim has been shipwrecked on the Italian coast,

the Carthaginian quincarim. They take it and they disassemble it. The way the Carthaginians build ships, and we know this because the shipwreck of one of them has been found, they kind of built them in the way that you might build a cabinet from ikea they're kind of flat packs they're kind of numbered pieces and you can stick them all together and so this actually makes it quite easy for the romans to work out how to build oh just to copy it yeah yeah just to copy it and so they do this and they build 100 quink reams 20 tri reams and polybius you know our greek historian who's our main source for this terribly terribly impressed. And he says of this, that nothing better illustrates the remarkable spirit and boldness of the Romans.

And so they build this great fleet. None of the Romans have any naval experience at all, but they kind of go sailing down to try and confront the Carthaginians. And it's an absolute disaster. They sail into an enemy harbour. The Carthaginians come out, all the crews panic, jump into the sea, and the whole force is taken prisoner. But does this put the Romans off? Probably not.

No, it doesn't. Because the Romans realise that they're never going to be able to match the Carthaginians in terms of their mobility, the art of ramming a ship, all that kind of stuff. But what the Romans are really good at is, of course, fighting on land. The Roman wheeze is to turn naval battles into land battles. They do this by inventing a thing they call the corvus, which is a crow. It's a kind of boarding bridge that has a huge, great spike on the end, like the beak of a crow or a raven. You sail up beside the enemy ship and you release this and the spike sinks into the boards of the enemy ship. Then all your soldiers, your marines, can pile across, slaughter the enemy and seize control of the enemy ship. It's a brilliant invention. No one thought of it before. So the Romans, very excited, they sail out. And in 260, they creep up on the Carthaginian fleet, who have no idea what's about to hit them,

at a place called Meli off northern Sicily. And it's a tremendous success. They win. And again, Polybius says it's the battle became exactly like a battle on land. Right, so they've turned it into the kind of battle that they know and are very proficient at. Yes, absolutely. And for the Carthaginians, you can imagine this is a tremendous shock to be beaten by a bunch of landlubbers. And so the remnants of the Carthaginian fleet sail off to Sardinia and they're so pissed off

with the Carthaginian admiral. They don't fine him, Dominic. They don't deprive him of his civic rights. They crucify him. And Tom, as you've noted there, this is a battle referred to in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. Yes, very sinister passage. The first part of it, isn't it? Stetson, you who were with me in the ships at Melite, that corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout? I wonder why, well, I don't know why T.S. Eliot chose that particular battle. Do you know, Tom? I think because the scale of slaughter and fighting in this war must have reminded Eliot of the scale of slaughter in fighting in this war must have reminded Eliot of the scale of slaughter in the First World War, the horror of it. And it just goes on and on and

on because even though, you know, Mylae is a great victory, but it doesn't bring the Carthaginians to defeat at all. Because weirdly, despite the fact the Romans have now won at sea, they're actually doing quite badly in the land war in Sicily because the Carthaginians, just as the Romans have learned how to fight on the sea, the Carthaginians have learned how to fight the Romans on land. And they do it by avoiding pitch battle, by adopting guerrilla tactics. And the Romans, a bit like the Americans in Vietnam, or European colonial powers, get so cross with this that they start conducting reprisals against local populations. They lose hearts and minds. And their control over Greek Sicily starts to kind of wobble.

And so in 256, that's four years after Meli, they decide to do what the Romans have always been good at, which is going for the jugular. And they decide to follow the example that had been set by Agathocles, the Syracusan tyrant who had invaded Africa, and launch a full-blown invasion of Carthage itself. They've got by now 330 ships, and they load these ships with 140,000 men. Both the consuls are in charge of this great armada, sails across the Mediterranean towards Africa, and the Carthaginians sail out to oppose them with a fleet that has 150,000 men.

Can we rely on these numbers? Or are these made up according to the Roman literary practice of inflation? I think we probably can. And even if they're not precise, they reflect a fact that is noted by Greeks at the time and gets kind of reported by Polybius, our favourite Greek source. It's seen as being a battle beyond the dreams of people in the eastern half of the Mediterranean, so that the Greek world is accustomed to think of itself as these are the great powers. And now suddenly they're getting reports of this battle, which is on a scale larger than anything they could comprehend.

And it always reminds me of the Battle of the Midway in the Second World War between the Americans and Japanese fleets, and how Europeans must have felt this is a different order of conflict completely. So I think it's generally held to have been the single largest naval battle in antiquity. And it's a victory for the Romans. They win. So they land in Africa, they capture various towns, they establish a bridgehead. Having done that, one of the two consuls is ordered home

because the Romans obviously don't want to stake everything on this throne. They want to keep reserves. One of the two consuls, a guy called Regulus, is ordered to stay there. He has 40 ships, 15,000 infantry, 500 cavalry. The figures come from Polybius. He goes out, he defeats a Carthaginian army that has come out to meet him. He captures more cities, and then he institutes a blockade of Carthage. The Carthaginians say, okay, well, this isn't looking good. Let's have peace negotiations. But Regulus, the terms he demands are too harsh. So the key sticking point is that he demands that Carthage surrender Sardinia and Sicily. And I think it's particularly Sicily.

The Carthaginians are not prepared to give up their half of Sicily, which by now has come to seem as much Carthaginian territory as the lands around Carthage itself. And that would mean their relegation from the Champions League places, as it were, wouldn't it? I mean, if they lost such an important and rich territory that was psychologically so important to them? Yes, I think so. But I think it's the fact that they see it as being theirs. It would be like Britain being required to surrender Yorkshire or something. I mean, they see it as being part of their territory. That means that they, like the Romans, are determined to fight on. And as it happens, they have a guy on hand who is perfectly qualified to defeat the Romans because this is a Spartan called Xanthippus. So we talked about how the Carthaginians employ mercenaries. He's a mercenary. And because he's a Spartan, he's tremendously good at drill. And he works out the best drills to defeat the Romans. And all the people in the Carthaginian army decide that actually he is the best qualified

to lead them. And so rather than be led by a Carthaginian general, they demand to be led by Xanthippus. And Xanthippus' drills turn out to be tremendous. He's very good at tactics. He goes out to meet Regulus. The Romans are annihilated. And he's using good at tactics he goes out to meet regulus the romans are annihilated and he's using elephants right he's using elephants the elephants crash into the roman infantry the cavalry on the wings sees off the roman cavalry and the whole roman army gets enveloped and wiped out and regulus himself is taken prisoner now in due course the story comes to be told about regulus that the carthaginians send him back to Rome to persuade the Romans to surrender. And Regulus goes back to Rome and he tells the Senate on no account surrender.

Keep fighting. Tom, I translated this when I was at school. I remember this story very well. It's a very noble, inspiring story. And then Regulus, rather than staying in rome because he feels duty bound goes back yeah to carthage amazing and when he gets back to carthage there are various accounts that kind of escalate over the centuries the story is told so cicero says that he's put in a box with spikes in it so that he can't kind of lean against it augustine says that he's put in a barrel with

spikes driven in it and kind of rolled down the hill. Yeah. So a tremendous story. It's not true. Oh, Tom. It's not true. I said last time that I thought you were better than this. And yet again, you've let your podcast down. How do you know it's not true? Don't tell me Regulus died happily in his bed at the age of 82.

We don't know what happened to him. He probably just dies in Carthage. It comes to be told because it serves to illustrate this idea that Punic faith is treachery. Roman faith is honesty. He's given his word and it's a kind of stirring patriotic tale. And in fact, Augustine loves it because it reminds him of Christian martyrs. And so he says that Regulus was the noblest Roman of them all, even though it didn't actually happen. But the salient fact is that the Roman are defeated in Africa. And then the year after this, they lose two fleets in a row to violent storms. So 300 ships are lost, 100,000 men are drowned. So this is the point again, where if this was a normal war, the kind of war that the Greeks and the Carthaginians had been

fighting, the Romans would have negotiated. Greeks and the Carthaginians had been fighting, the Romans would have negotiated. Peace treaties would have been opened up. There would have been spheres of influence in Sicily decided. But the Romans don't do this. They just keep coming back. And they keep suffering terrible losses at sea because they win the battles. But because they're not skilled mariners, they can't read the waves. They can't read the weather. They keep getting storms. And the most notorious example of this, which is mentioned in I Claudius, it's the first time I came across it, is that in 249 BC, a Roman fleet under another Claudius, Publius Claudius Pulcher, are sent to launch an attack on a port held by the Carthaginians

called Drapana in Sicily. And Claud Claudius' fleet is stationed off Drapana. He wants to attack. The Romans have to consult the sacred chickens to find out whether the gods are in favour. The report comes back that the chickens are refusing to eat their food, to which Claudius says they must be thirsty. He goes, he picks them up and he throws them in the sea. He then sails in, gets absolutely annihilated and only 30 Roman ships survive. So it's an absolute disaster. Claudius goes back to Rome, gets prosecuted, heavily fined. And there's another notorious story that his sister, Claudia, she's trying to get through a crowd in the forum and she can't because it's so thick.

And she's said to have cried out, I wish my brother would lose another battle. In other words, the population of Rome would be thinned out. These are cited as examples of Claudian arrogance. The Claudians are either very noble, like Appius Claudius, the guy who had persuaded the Romans to fight on against Pyrrhus, or they're the kind of people who chuck sacred chickens into the sea or kind of wish defeat on the Romans. But in Sicily itself, the Romans are starting to really grind the Carthaginians down. So in 254, they capture Palermo, which Polybius describes as being the strongest Carthaginian city in Sicily. Other Carthaginians follow, and every attempt to oppose

the Romans in battle ends in disaster for the Carthaginians.. Every attempt to oppose the Romans in battle ends in disaster for the Carthaginians. Every year, it seems, captured elephants are being paraded through the streets of Rome until by 250, only two strongholds are left. Drapana, which is the port that had been saved by the chicken-related incident, Claudius, and the great, great naval base of Lilibaeum, this naval fortress with its massive walls and its moat. The Carthaginians invest it in 250, but it holds out and it's really starting to look bad for Carthage now. So they've lost almost all their territory except for these two cities. The sea lanes can no longer be relied upon because the Romans have these fleets. And as a result of

that, they are losing money. And if a result of that, they are losing money. And if they're losing money, they're losing manpower because they need money to pay for their mercenaries. So it's looking terrible. It's a death spiral, Tom. It is a death spiral. And they need a hero. Where are they going to find a hero, Dominic?

Well, I think they'll probably find one after the break, won't they? They will. It'll be a very short podcast. But I think the exciting thing for our listeners is they are going to find a hero and this is going to be one of the most thrilling comebacks

in the history of humankind. So on that bombshell, please join us after the break to find out who that hero is. 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. The trireme advanced in fierce and haughty fashion, cleaving the foam around it, the latine yard quite square and the sail bulging down the whole length of the mast. Its gigantic oars kept time as they beat the water.

Every now and then the extremity of the keel, which was shaped like a ploughshare, would appear, and the ivory-headed horse, rearing both its feet beneath the spur which terminated the prow, would seem to be speeding over the plains of the sea. As it rounded the promontory, the wind ceased, the sail fell, and a man was seen standing bare-headed beside the pilot. It was he, Hamilcar the Suffet. About his sides he wore gleaming sheets of steel. A red cloak fastened to his shoulders left his arms visible. Two pearls of great length hung from his ears and his black bushy beard rested on his throat. Gustav Flaubert's novel Salambo of the hero of Carthage, Hamilcar the Suffet, Hamilcar Barker, one of the great names, Tom,

of antiquity. And he is the man who is going to save the Carthaginians' bacon in this terrible mess they've got themselves in against the Romans. Or is he?

So you said before the break that this is one of the great comebacks. I think, to be honest, it's more of a holding operation. But that is not to be underestimated. So Hamilcar, he's appointed commander-in-chief of Carthaginian forces in Sicily in 247. There aren't many Carthaginian forces in Sicily by this point, but they are his to command. He is from a very distinguished family. Carthage is an aristocratic republic, and so you tend not to be appointed unless you are distinguished. Actually, he claims to be descended from a brother of Elissa or Dido, the legendary founder of Carthage. He's relatively

young, and he is famously energetic. He's famously proactive, and so much so that he gets the nickname of Barker, which seems to have meant kind of lightning. So he's Hamilcar the lightning bolt. As he sails from Carthage, he is leaving behind a daughter and a wife who is pregnant with another child and who in due course will turn out to be a son. This will be the first of three boys. So bear that in mind. Hamilcar's eldest son is being born while he is away in Sicily, where it has to be said the situation is completely grim because there isn't any money and without money, they can't afford to pay the mercenaries. So there are about 10,000 infantry, few cavalry, and these two strongholds, Drapena and Lilibaeum, both of whom are under siege. So what Hamilcar decides to do, he thinks there's no

point in launching myself at the Romans. What I will do is I will establish myself as a kind of guerrilla commander in the heights outside Pernormus, which he does. And he finds this spot, Hayicte it's called, which I've never actually been to Palermo, so I'm not familiar with the geography, but apparently the consensus is that it was in the mountains five miles west of what's now Palermo. And it was easily defended. It had fresh water, it had pasturage for the horses, and most importantly, it had access to the sea. So from here, he's able to launch his lightning raids. But the downside, of course, is that he can't actually do anything to relieve Lillebeum or Drapana. He doesn't have the resources. And so that's why I mean that it's not really a comeback. It's basically

he is able to preserve a stalemate. And considering how little money he has, how few troops he has, I mean, that's not bad, but it's not a strategy that is going to enable Carthage to win the war. And of course, as the years go by and Hamilcar is there for six years, the numbers that he has start to fray. So in 244, he abandons his position outside Panormus and he goes to another place, a small town called Erix, which had been captured by the Romans. Hamilcar takes it back and this is just outside Drapana. And he stays camp there for two more years, harrying the Roman siege. But again, the same problem, not enough men to lift it completely. So by 242, the great crisis of the war is approaching because the Romans are locked

in the stalemate and they recognise that the only way ultimately they can force a victory is decisively to defeat the Carthaginians at sea. So even though they've lost fleet after fleet after fleet to the weather, they decide that they will build one more armada. And by this point, Rome too is very skint. And so they take patriotic loans from the richest men in the Republic. Right. War bonds. War bonds, that kind of thing. And they're able to, by the skin of their teeth, to build a fleet of 200 ships. And that's somehow 242. It sails for Sicily under command of one of the two consuls,

Quintus Lutatius Caculus, and it takes the Carthaginians completely by surprise. The Carthaginians, I mean, some people have said they were lethargic. Others have said that they're exhausted,

but they just haven't prepared for this crisis, which they must have known was coming. The Carthaginian fleet has been kept at Carthage. The news is brought that the Romans are coming.

They sail out. The Romans annihilate them. Disappointing. So it's just a total walkover. Total walkover, because basically the traditional situation where it's the Carthaginians who are more proficient has been turned on its head. The Romans have been practicing and practicing and practicing, and it seems that the Carthaginians haven't. Whether, as I say, they're too depressed. Run out of money, exhausted. Run out of money. Yeah, they're just down. And so they lose the commanding general, who inevitably is called Hanno. He goes back, he gets crucified, and effectively the war is now over.

And Hamilcar, you know, in his mountain hideout, he knows that it's doomed. You know, he can see the kind of the shattered spars of the Carthaginian fleet floating off Drapana. It's all terrible. And so the Carthaginian Senate back in the mother city says to Hamilcar, you should go and negotiate with the Romans. Hamilcar does not want the shame of this to attach to himself. And so he sends the commander of Lilibaeum, a man called Gisco, to go and meet with Catulus. And Lutetius' terms, I mean, they're severe, but they're not utterly crippling. So Carthaginians have to withdraw from Sicily, but not Sardinia. So that's an advance on what they were previously offered. Yeah. They have to return all their prisoners without ransom. They have to guarantee not to

make war on Hero, the king of Syracuse. Oh, he's still around. He's still around. And they have to pay a kind of massive Versailles-type indemnity. Right. So Catulus agrees to this. He goes back. He presents the terms to the popular assemblies in Rome, where the mass of the Roman people say they're not tough enough. So they demand a higher indemnity, which the Carthaginians have no choice but to agree

to. But Hamilcar is able to get the Romans to agree that neither side will interfere in the internal business of the other power. So in other words, just as the Carthaginians agree not to go to war with Hero in Syracuse, so the Romans are agreeing not to come to the support of any of the Carthaginian subject peoples. And this is very important if the Carthaginians to hold their empire together. And so the treaty is ratified by both sides.

Hamokar leads his men down from the mountain, down to Drapana, board ships, sail off to Carthage. He leaves Gisgo behind to supervise the withdrawal of all the other mercenaries, not just from Drapana, but from Lilibaea. Meanwhile, Hamilcar has gone back to Carthage. And the reason that he's been so desperate to head back and not to take charge of the withdrawal of the mercenaries from Sicily is because he knows, he understands the massive problem that Carthage is now facing. That the troops in Sicily are mercenaries and will want to be paid, but the treasury is empty.

And because of the terms that Hamilcar has just agreed with the Romans, they have to pay this indemnity. There isn't any money to pay the mercenaries. So this is why he's been so keen that Gisco gets all the responsibility for handling it. Hamilcar is a very shrewd politician, very brilliant self-publicist. So he's able to present himself as the guy who carried the fight on to the very end, then did his patriotic duty by getting the best terms that he could, but he doesn't want to be associated with what this surrender actually means. The truth is that the situation with the mercenaries is very, very alarming because the mercenaries arrive in Africa and the Carthaginians have failed to take hostages for their good behavior before they land in Africa.

Very foolish. This is very bad because you now have mercenaries who haven't been paid and they are all together in a large camp outside Carthage and they're starting to get restive. So Gisco by now is back in Carthage as well. And because he had been their commander, the Carthaginian Senate thinks, well, we should send him out to negotiate with them. I'm sure they'll be delighted to see their old commander. So Gisco goes out and he's sent with as much treasure as the Carthaginians can rustle up. And he goes out to the camp. Meanwhile, however, in the camp, there are two mercenaries, one of whom, a guy called Spendius, is an escaped slave from Campania

who had taken service as a mercenary. Another is a guy called Matho, who is a Libyan. Do you want to know what Flaubert says about Matho, Tom? Yeah, tell me what Flaubert says about Matho. He introduces him thus thus on the other side of the tables was a libyan of colossal stature with short black curly hair he had retained only his military jacket the brass plates of which were tearing the purple of the couch a necklace of silver moons was tangled in his hairy breast his face was stained with splashes of blood he was leaning on his left elbow with a smile on his large open mouth.

So that is what Matho is like. That is what Matho is like. He's hairy, he's huge, he's smiling and he's covered in blood. He rips couches, all that kind of thing. So Spendius and Matho have essentially got the mercenaries behind them. They've said, look, let's conquer Carthage and take it all, take it over. They are duly appointed generals of the mercenary force. And so when Gisco comes, they say, let's take him prisoner. So they take him prisoner and they seize all the

gold that's been sent and they re-mint it. So this is Carthaginian coinage. The mercenaries re-mint it and they're stamping it. And they're kind of saying that they're a kind of proto-state. And there are 20,000 mercenaries. And because of Matho, this giant hairy Libyan, they are able to raise maybe up to kind of 70,000 Libyans from the interior beyond Carthage. So this is almost 100,000 troops. And the Carthaginians don't really have the men to oppose them. They don't have any. Yeah, they don't. I love this.

I love the mercenary war. I love Salambo, which I did at university. And basically, it's just unbelievably statistic and blood-soaked, isn't it? What follows? Absolutely hideous. And Polybius says that this is, of all wars, the war in which the greatest atrocities and cruelties were practiced. And in part, that is because the

mercenaries know that by taking this step, if they're defeated, they can expect no mercy. But likewise, Carthage knows that she is fighting for her very survival. So what are you going to do if you're Carthage and you're fighting for your very survival? Obviously, you're going to turn to a Hanno. This is what you do in this situation, despite the fact that as far as I know, from the records, every time a Hanno leads something, they turn out to be terrible. They've never won with a Hanno, Tom. So this guy, he's called Hanno the Great. And this is because he seems to have been the most significant political player in Carthage for the previous two decades.

So while Hamilcar is the great military leader, Hanno seems to have been the political commander in chief. So he gets told, go out and defeat these mercenaries. Predictably, he makes a complete hash of it. And so the people say, well, Hanno's hopeless. Let's have Hamilcar. He's the military hero. Let's make him joint commander with Hanno. So he's given a very small army, only about 10,000 men, a few war elephants. But because he's a brilliant general, he's able to go out and win the victories that Hanno had been unable to. And the mercenaries are defeated in a couple of battles. And in the camp, Spendius and Mattho are nervous that this may lead to mass desertions. And so they decide to take a step that will effectively ensure that all the mercenaries are dipping their fingers in blood.

So what they do, contrary to all the laws of war, is that they put Gisco and the other Carthaginian members of the embassy to death and they do it horribly. So what they do, they cut the hands off of Gisco and the other Carthaginians. They castrate them. And we haven't had some genital mutilation for a while. And they then break their legs. They throw them into a pit, and they then bury them alive. And the leaders of the mercenaries, so Spendius and Matho, then say that this is how all Carthaginian prisons of war will be treated. So they really are making it impossible now to have any settlement. It is absolutely a war to the death. And so Hamilcar reciprocates. If he captures any of the mercenaries, he has them trampled to death by elephants.

Hanno is still on the scene, but general acceptance is that he's so rubbish that in this war to the death, they need Hamilcar. And so the troops, all the Carthaginian troops vote for Hamilcar to be sole general. And this is obviously good because it means that the guy best qualified to win the war now has sole command. And there are also two other positives. And one is that help and reinforcements arrive from Carthage's old enemy, Syracuse. And the reason for this probably is that Hero, who is still in situ, he's nervous about the Romans being too powerful.

So he wants Carthage to survive. So it will be a counterweight to the Romans. But help also comes from Rome. So they release all the prisoners, Carthaginian prisoners, that they'd been keeping without demanding a ransom. And they issue an absolutely strict ban that no one in Italy is allowed to help the mercenaries. And again, you might think, well, why are they doing this to their old enemy? And the reason obviously is because they want Carthage to survive so that it can pay the indemnity. So it's a little bit as if the Allies had intervened to help the Weimar Republic

during the German revolution or something. Yes, I think that's exactly the analogy. So things are starting to improve for Carthage. And then in 238, so a couple of years after the outbreak of the revolt, the great decisive moment comes when Hamilcar successfully traps a large chunk of the mercenary army in a narrow pass called the Saw. So it's called the Battle of the Saw. Yeah, Flaubert calls it the Defile of the Axe, which I think sounds better than the Saw. Yeah, Defile of the Axe is better, I agree. Yeah. Anyway, sorry, that's just by the by. Well, let's call it the Defile of the Axe. And Hamilcar blockades them,

and there's none of this Samnite thing of allowing them to go through a yoke or anything like that. Hamilcar, basically, he starves them out. And so the mercenaries, they kill their prisoners, they kill their slaves, they eat them. And then once they've done that, they recognise that they've got no choice but to negotiate. And so Spendius had been in charge of this. Matho is with the other army. So Spendius and nine other of the mercenaries go out to treat with Hamilcar. And Hamilcar offers them what seemed to be very mild terms. He says, yeah, fine, you can go. The whole army can go, but you will need to leave me with 10 hostages. And Spendius and his nine colleagues agree. And of course, the 10 hostages that Hamilcar chooses is Spendius and his nine colleagues agree. And of course, the 10 hostages that Hamilcar chooses

is Spendius and the other nine negotiators. Very canny. Yes. And so he then seizes them, keeps them, fetters them up, and then slaughters the entire army. Oh, he breaks his word. He does break his word because he says that the murderers of Gisgo were beyond the pale. That's fair, I think, Tom. They behaved very poorly to Gisgo. And to be honest, do you have to keep your word to a mercenary anyway? Yeah.

Well, so now the war reaches its, can I say, hideous climax, don't I? Oh, we love a hideous climax. A hideous climax. So Hamilcar and his deputy are inevitably called Hannibal. But he's not Hannibal,

to be clear. This is not the famous Hannibal who we'll be coming to shortly. Hamilcar and his deputy are called Hannibal. They march on the remaining army, which is led by Matho, the Libyan, big hairy Libyan. And they arrive outside Matho's camp and they put up 10 crosses and they nail Spendius and the other nine ambassadors to the crosses and they kind of leave them there. And Mattho is so outraged, so appalled, so humiliated that he summons his men and they ambush Hannibal's force and they capture Hannibal and they torture him at the foot of Spendius's cross. And they then take down the body of Spendius and they nail Hannibal alive to the

cross. And they take 30 high-ranking Carthaginian prisoners and they sacrifice them at the foot of the cross as a kind of, you know, a sacrifice to the spirit of Spendius. And Hamilcar in the face of this has to beat a retreat, but it's fine. He hasn't suffered any major defeat and he patches things up with Hanno and the two of them advance out again. And in the autumn of 238, they meet with the surviving mercenaries and they win an absolutely crushing victory. Most of the mercenaries are wiped out. The survivors are all crucified and Matho is taken prisoner. So Matho has survived, but his fate is uh very exciting isn't it yes so he is taken to carthage and kept in prison for a year and then in the following year 237 he is made to walk through the streets of carthage in a kind of parody of the triumphal procession that

he would have enjoyed had he managed to enter the great city and dominic i'm sure you'll remember it from reading salambo there's a horrible horrible account of it it's the kind of we love a hideous climax it's the hideous climax of salambo and in flober's version of it it's decreed that he can walk through the streets without an escort but with his arms tied behind his back and the crowds are not allowed to put out his eyes because Matho has to be able to see what is being done to him. And they're not allowed to cripple him because he has to carry on walking. And they're not allowed to inflict anything that would kill him. Anything else, they can do what they want to do. And so this is Flaubert's description of what happens. The crowds discharged little drops of boiling oil through tubes at him. They strewed pieces of broken glass beneath his feet.

Still he walked on. The slaves of the council struck him with their whips of hippopotamus leather so furiously and long that the fringes of their tunics were drenched with sweat. Matho appeared insensible. Suddenly he started off and began to run at random, making a noise with his lips like one shivering with severe cold. That's not even the worst bit, Tom. Do you want to come to the worst bit?

Well, I mean, there's so many bits. Because Flobo, as we said in the first episode, he really kind of goes to town on this, doesn't he? A child rent his ear. A young girl hiding the point of a spindle in her sleeve spit his cheek. They tore handfuls of hair from him. He was very hairy and strips of flesh.

Others smeared his face with sponges steeped in filth and fastened upon sticks. And then it just kind of goes on and on of flesh. Others smeared his face with sponges steeped in filth and fastened upon sticks. And then it just kind of goes on and on and on. And at the end, Flaubert says at one point, he had no appearance of humanity left. He was a long, perfectly red shape. I mean, by the standards of 1860s kind of Victorian novels. It's not Man of Bowery, is it?

No, no. No, I mean, it's not Dickens even. So this takes us back to where we began with Flaubert's kind of imagining of Carthage. And of course, we opened the series, Dominic, with Flaubert imagining a sacrifice to Moloch, the Carthaginian elite sacrificing their children in this great blazing furnace, which you do at moments of particular peril because your child, of course, is the most precious thing that you have. And in that account, Hamilcar is pressured by the council to sacrifice his eldest son, who of course had been born while Hamilcar was in Sicily. And this boy was given the

name of Hannibal. So Hannibal Barker. And it's an echo of a scene that almost certainly did happen. And it didn't involve Moloch and it didn't involve human sacrifice, but it did involve sacrifice before the greatest of the gods of Carthage, which was Balhamon. And Hamilcar Barca, he is now the greatest man in Carthage. He has won this great victory over the mercenaries. He was the last man standing against the Romans in Sicily. And yet at the same time, he has been powerless to oppose the Romans who were behaving very, very badly. Even though the Romans did not intervene in the mercenary war, they take advantage of Carthage's distraction to seize Sardinia against the terms of the peace treaty. And when the Carthaginians complain,

the Romans threaten them with war. So it's like that phrase that the Gauls had said to the Romans when they captured Rome and extorted lots of treasure out of them, woe to the defeated. And so the Carthaginians have no option but to suck it up. But obviously they feel incredible resentment. And probably there's no one who feels greater resentment than Hamilcar, this great patriotic figure, greatest military leader, the man who dreams of seeing his city restored to her former position as undisputed mistress of the West. And so he knows that he needs to find some way with Sicily off limits, with Sardinia lost to restore Carthage's fortunes and above all finances. And so he looks to Spain because Spain is a place so rich in silver that

it is said when there are forest fires on the high slopes of the mountains, liquid silver runs in torrents down the side of the hill. And so he decides that this is where he's going to go. He's going to carve out a new empire. He sets out for there in 237. But before he leaves, as I say, he goes to offer sacrifice to Balhamon. And he takes with him his eldest son, this little boy, Hannibal, who by now is about nine years old. And he offers sacrifice and the omens prove favorable. Balhamon approves of Hamilcar's expedition to Spain. And this then done, Hamilcar orders everyone to withdraw except for his young boy, Hannibal. And he calls Hannibal, come and stand by me. And then he says, would you like to come with me to Spain?

And Hannibal's eyes light up and he says, yes, I would love to come to Spain. you like to come with me to spain and hannibal's eyes light up and he says yes i i would love to come to spain i want to be with you and hamilcar nods and then he tells his son lay your hand on the carcass of the sacrificial victim and swear this oath that you will never bear goodwill to the romans and the little boy swears it but he will never bear goodwill to the Romans. And the little boy swears it, but he will never bear goodwill to the Romans. And this boy, nine-year-old son of Hamilcar, Hannibal Barca, after Hamilcar goes on to die in Spain, having carved out the great empire that he'd wanted to carve out, Hannibal will succeed to its rule. And in due course, he will launch an invasion of Italy itself, leading war elephants over the Alps and bringing the Romans to a succession of terrible defeats and bringing Rome itself

to the very brink of utter disaster. Hannibal will be remembered by the Romans for all time as the greatest of all their enemies. And Dominic, next year maybe, we will continue the story of Carthage and we will look at the rise to greatness of Hannibal. We will indeed. What a wonderful series, Tom, and what an amazing incentive for people to carry on listening to the rest of history.

Knowing that one day when they least expect it, Hannibal will return. So that was a fantastic, a blood-drenched tour de force. Everything that we wanted from a history of Carthage. Tom, thank you very much. That was absolutely wonderful. So next week, we have a complete change of tone. We will be returning with a history of chocolate from its Mesoamerican origins

to its glory days in Victorian Birmingham. And then the episode that I think many people have been waiting for, for years, frankly, that you'll only get on The Rest is History. And that is, of course, history's greatest monkeys. so we will see you for those episodes next week bye-bye bye-bye i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond 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.

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