Century 3 of 13 · 814 – 146 BC
The rival that nearly ended it: Hannibal over the Alps, Cannae, and the ashes.
100 entries · 77 hours · 67 with a written verdict
Three wars, 118 years, and at the end of them one of the two Mediterranean powers has stopped existing. Carthage gets a page of its own here because the story refuses to fit inside a century: it opens with a Phoenician colony traditionally founded in 814 BC and closes with Roman soldiers in the streets in 146.
The first war, 264 to 241 BC, is the one nobody expects. Rome had no fleet, built one, lost it to storms, built another, and kept going until Carthage ran out of money. The second, 218 to 201, earns its reputation. Hannibal destroyed three Roman field armies in three years; at Cannae in 216 a double envelopment killed somewhere between fifty and seventy thousand men in an afternoon. Rome lost a fifth of its adult male citizens and carried on, which is the single most important fact about the Republic. Fabius Maximus refused battle and was mocked for it. Scipio took the war to Africa and won at Zama in 202.
The third, 149 to 146, is barely a war. Carthage was disarmed and no longer a threat, and Cato ended every speech demanding its destruction anyway. The city was razed and the survivors sold. The story about salting the earth is a nineteenth-century invention, which you will hear corrected on roughly half the episodes below.
I feel like…
Cogitare, how it was thought and ordered
Sentire, what was lived and endured
Facere, what hands made and did
how it is made
who is talking
how much time you have
With a written verdict
Part of Fall of Civilizations
Three and a half hours on Carthage as a civilisation in its own right, with the sound design Cooper is known for. Carthage is the subject here and Rome the visitor.
Eight and a half hours of narrated Republic, carried end to end by one voice with no guests to interrupt the thread.
Part of The Rest Is History
Part three, sixty-nine minutes on Scipio crossing to Africa and on Zama in 202 BC, the one time the two best commanders of the age faced each other.
Part of The Ancients
What the city was like to live in, from the harbour to the tophet, which is the part every account of the wars skips.
Part of Tides of History
With Bret Devereaux
Bret Devereaux on what made the Republic so hard to kill: the manpower pool, the terms it gave its allies, and a political system that could absorb Cannae. Sixty- seven minutes.
How a nine-year-old swore an oath and spent the rest of his life keeping it, and what the Barcid position in Spain actually was.
Sixty-five minutes on Hannibal before Italy: the oath sworn at nine, the years campaigning in Spain, and the siege of Saguntum that handed Rome its war.
Holland and Sandbrook's four-part Carthage run, and the most entertaining way into the subject. Start at part one; they build.
Part two, sixty-one minutes on the Battle of Ibera and on Scipio in Spain, which is where the Punic War was settled while everyone was watching Italy.
For over twenty years Rome and Carthage fought for supremacy over Sicily; Tristan Hughes and Carthage expert Eve MacDonald explore the First Punic War's naval clashes, boarding bridges, war elephants and sacred chickens.
With Eve MacDonald
The third war, which was not really a war: a disarmed city destroyed because Cato kept demanding it. Also disposes of the salting of the earth, which is a nineteenth-century invention.
Part four, sixty minutes on 146 BC, when Rome went back and finished it: the city burned, the site cursed, and the Mediterranean left with one power in it.
Bret Devereaux on the uncomfortable answer: Carthage was a threat because it was the state most like Rome, with the same reach and the same appetite. Fifty-nine minutes.
Part one of two, fifty-eight minutes on where Carthage came from and on whether it really burned its children. The archaeology of the tophet is the hinge of that argument.
Part two, fifty-eight minutes on 218 BC and on the harder question underneath it: why the Republic could lose army after army and still field another one.
Part four, fifty-eight minutes on 216 BC and on the double envelopment that military academies still teach, from the point of view of the men in the middle of it.
Part three, fifty-six minutes on the crossing and its price: Hannibal reached Italy with a fraction of the army he set out with, and won anyway.
With Louis Rawlings
Louis Rawlings on 211 BC, when Hannibal rode to the walls of Rome to break the siege of Capua and the Romans kept besieging Capua anyway. Fifty-five minutes.
Part one, fifty-five minutes on Hamilcar rebuilding Carthaginian power in Spain and on the son he raised inside that project.
Eve MacDonald on Carthage as a Phoenician colony on the Tunisian coast that outgrew the mother city at Tyre. Fifty-four minutes before Rome enters the story at all.
Part two, fifty-three minutes on the constitution Aristotle admired and the trade network that paid for it, across the ninth century BC to the second.
Part four, fifty-three minutes on the collision itself, between an upstart that had taken Italy and a city that had run the western sea for centuries.
With Silvannen Gerrard
Silvannen Gerrard on the Seleucids, who had the real elephant army: an empire reaching to the Hindu Kush with a treaty supply of them from India. Fifty-two minutes.
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast
Part two, fifty-two minutes on the legion that took the Mediterranean off Carthage and the Successor kingdoms, and on which of the familiar claims about it have recently come apart.
With Josho Brouwers
Fifty-one minutes on 264 to 241 BC, the longest unbroken war in antiquity, fought mostly at sea by a Rome that had no fleet when it started.
Part three, forty-nine minutes on how the two of them ended up in the same sea with the same ambitions and no way of sharing it.
480 BC is remembered for Thermopylae and Salamis, and in the same year Carthage and the Sicilian Greeks fought at Himera. Forty-seven minutes on the war nobody teaches.
December 218 BC, the first full battle after the Alps. Forty-five minutes on how Hannibal got a Roman army to cross a freezing river before breakfast and then ambushed it.
Forty-two minutes on a mid-December battle in northern Italy, which almost nobody in the ancient Mediterranean fought, and on why Hannibal wanted one.
Forty-two minutes on Syracuse, the third power in the central Mediterranean, which fought Carthage for a century and is missing from most Roman accounts.
Forty-two minutes on Hamilcar Barca rebuilding Carthage out of Spanish silver after the First Punic War, which is where the second one actually begins.
Forty-one minutes tracking Carthage from Phoenician outpost to the edge of empire around 500 BC, told as its own history with Rome still a small town.
Forty-one minutes on twenty-three years of attrition that put Rome on the map, cost both sides fleets they could barely replace, and settled almost nothing.
Forty minutes on the year the board was set: Rome throwing out its kings, Carthage rising in the central Mediterranean, Greece about to turn classical.
Forty minutes on Sicily as the contested ground between Carthage and the Greek tyrants, in the same year Xerxes came down on Greece.
Forty minutes on Carthage turning economic weight into territory in Sicily, timed to the moment Athens destroyed its own expedition there.
Forty minutes on Zama in 202 BC, and on the fifteen years between Cannae and it when Hannibal was never again that close.
21 June 217 BC, an entire consular army caught in fog against a lake shore with nowhere to go. Louis Rawlings on the ambush that killed Flaminius. Thirty-nine minutes.
Thirty-nine minutes on the best question in the whole war: Rome lost the battle of the century and did not sue for peace. The answer is in how the Republic was put together.
Thirty-nine minutes on the one genuinely exceptional Roman commander the war produced, and on the Spanish campaigns where he learned it.
Thirty-nine minutes on the end of the third century BC, when the war with Hannibal was closing and Rome turned its attention east for the first time.
Thirty-eight minutes on the crossing itself, in the teeth of an Alpine autumn with tens of thousands of men and a baggage train that had to go over the same passes.
Thirty-eight minutes on the Gauls of the Po valley, who sacked Rome around 390 BC and frightened it for longer than Hannibal ever did.
Thirty-seven minutes on Messana, a small city and a small incident that started twenty-three years of war neither side had a reason to want.
Thirty-seven minutes on Cannae from inside the ranks: what a man in the compressed middle could see, hear and do, which was almost nothing.
Thirty-three minutes touring the whole sea in 146 BC, region by region, at the moment it became one power's lake.
Part two with Louis Rawlings, thirty-two minutes on the year between Trasimene and Cannae, when Fabius refused battle and Rome lost patience with him.
Thirty-one minutes on Cannae in 216 BC, where a smaller army enveloped a larger one and Rome lost more men in a day than on almost any day since.
With Juliette Pochin
Thirty minutes on Dido, whom Virgil placed three centuries out of her own time so that she could meet Aeneas. Juliette Pochin sings the Lament at the end.
Twenty-eight minutes on the crossing of 218 BC: out of south-east Spain, through hostile Celtic country, over two ranges, with elephants. Which pass he used is still argued over.
Part of The Ancient World
Twenty-six minutes on Severus beating Pescennius Niger, Julia Domna being hailed Mother of the Camps, and Caracalla made Caesar at seven, which started the next civil war.
Part of Echoes of Empires
Twenty-five minutes on Belisarius sailing for Carthage in June 533 with everyone expecting him to fail. He took the Vandal kingdom in six months.
Part of HistoryMarche
Part twenty-three of an animated march through the Second Punic War, on the year Hannibal broke camp at Capua and rode for Rome to pull the siege off his allies. Twenty-four minutes, and the maps carry it: two consular armies splitting and closing again is movement that defeats prose.
Twenty-two minutes on the first fight at Capua in 212 BC, animated, part two of the sequence. Hannibal takes the field and the siege lines close behind him anyway.
Twelve minutes on whether Hannibal re-equipped his army from Roman dead after Trasimene and Cannae, and what that would mean for how he fought.
Twelve minutes on where eight consular legions were found in 216 BC, which is the real answer to why Cannae did not end the war.
Eleven minutes on Carthaginian and Syracusan warfare in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, long before Rome was anyone's problem.
Eleven minutes on a listener's comparison: Rome against Carthage and Rome against the Vandals, same ground, seven centuries apart, and one took decades where the other took a season.
Eleven minutes on Camillus, who appears at the siege of Veii already formed, and on how little the record holds before that.
Ten minutes on the supply problem nobody puts in the paintings: an elephant eats well over a hundred kilos a day, and the Alps in autumn provide none of it.
Ten minutes on why Spartacus, Boudica and Hannibal are remembered while men who cost Rome far more are not. The answer is about who wrote it down.
Ten minutes on the famous meeting at Ephesus where Hannibal ranks the great generals and flatters Scipio at the end. Murray Dahm weighs the sources and the travel times.
Nine minutes on why legionary bases built amphitheatres, from Carnuntum on the Danube to newly identified sites at Megiddo. The army trained and watched in the same building.
Nine minutes on a good suspicion: the story that Rome had no fleet until it copied a wrecked Carthaginian one is very convenient, and the archaeology is less tidy.
Nine minutes on the counterfactual, answered by someone who has read the campaign closely enough to say where the decision points actually were.
Nine minutes on Hannibal's logistics, which is the part of the campaign that decides it and the part the story always skips.
Seven minutes on a fair question from a listener: if the legion beat the phalanx, how did Hannibal keep winning. Murray Dahm on what the manipular system did and did not guarantee.
Everything else, in order
Part of Ancient Greece Declassified · Conversations that take in Greece and the wider ancient world; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Ancient History Hound · Ancient Blogger on Greece, Rome and antiquity for every level; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast · The three centuries between Alexander and Actium; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Dan Snow's History Hit · Dan Snow on history's defining moments; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education · Lectures on literature and mythology; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Triumvir Clio's School of Classical Civilization · Ancient literature for people who want to start reading it; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Greeced Lightning · Myths and movies with a doctor of classics; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Kings and Generals · Military history in campaigns and battles; only the Roman episodes are indexed
