Carthage and the Punic Wars

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Rest Is History

Holland and Sandbrook's four-part Carthage run, and the most entertaining way into the subject. Start at part one; they build.

Part of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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 of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of Tides of History

With Bret Devereaux

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 of The Rest Is History

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 of The Rest Is History

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 of The Rest Is History

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 of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of The Ancients

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 of The Rest Is History

Part one, fifty-five minutes on Hamilcar rebuilding Carthaginian power in Spain and on the son he raised inside that project.

Part of The Ancients

With Eve MacDonald

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 of The Rest Is History

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 of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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 of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of Tides of History

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.

Part of Tides of History

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.

Part of Tides of History

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.

Part of Tides of History

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.

Part of Tides of History

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.

Part of Tides of History

Forty minutes on Sicily as the contested ground between Carthage and the Greek tyrants, in the same year Xerxes came down on Greece.

Part of Tides of History

Forty minutes on Carthage turning economic weight into territory in Sicily, timed to the moment Athens destroyed its own expedition there.

Part of Tides of History

Forty minutes on Zama in 202 BC, and on the fifteen years between Cannae and it when Hannibal was never again that close.

Part of The Ancients

With Louis Rawlings

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.

Part of Tides of History

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.

Part of Tides of History

Thirty-nine minutes on the one genuinely exceptional Roman commander the war produced, and on the Spanish campaigns where he learned it.

Part of Tides of History

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.

Part of Tides of History

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.

Part of Tides of History

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.

Part of Tides of History

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.

Part of Tides of History

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.

Part of Tides of History

Thirty-three minutes touring the whole sea in 146 BC, region by region, at the moment it became one power's lake.

Part of The Ancients

With Louis Rawlings

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of HistoryMarche

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Eleven minutes on Carthaginian and Syracusan warfare in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, long before Rome was anyone's problem.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Eleven minutes on Camillus, who appears at the siege of Veii already formed, and on how little the record holds before that.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Nine minutes on the counterfactual, answered by someone who has read the campaign closely enough to say where the decision points actually were.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Nine minutes on Hannibal's logistics, which is the part of the campaign that decides it and the part the story always skips.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

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 The Hellenistic Age Podcast · The three centuries between Alexander and Actium; 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 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 Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; 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 Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; 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 Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; 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 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 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 The Hellenistic Age Podcast · The three centuries between Alexander and Actium; 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 Ancient History Hound · Ancient Blogger on Greece, Rome and antiquity for every level; 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 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 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 Greeced Lightning · Myths and movies with a doctor of classics; 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 Kings and Generals · Military history in campaigns and battles; 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 Ancient History Hound · Ancient Blogger on Greece, Rome and antiquity for every level; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Kings and Generals · Military history in campaigns and battles; only the Roman episodes are indexed