Sicily was of great importance to the Romans, because they depended much on the supply of corn which it gave them. That was another reason, besides the reason of its position as a kind of bridge or stepping-stone between the two great rivals, why it became their battle-field. If the Carthaginians could get Sicily, they could cut off much of the enemy's food supply. The Romans, for their own preservation, had to make sure of Sicily. It was over the possession of Sicily that this first Punic war broke out.
The Romans had gradually made their fleet stronger and stronger until they were powerful enough to risk a sea battle with the great naval forces of Carthage, and they twice met and beat the navies of Carthage, once in 260 B.C. and again four years later. Thus, having command of the sea, they ventured to send an army into Africa, against Carthage itself, but there they suffered a very heavy defeat and their general was taken captive. The Carthaginians were much aided in this victory by Spartan mercenaries. But the fate of Sicily, where there were both Roman and Carthaginian armies, remained to be decided. The war went on, with varying results, in and around that unfortunate island, with now the one nation and now the other gaining a victory, until a decision was at length reached by a great victory of the Romans in 241 B.C. This war had lasted twenty-seven years.
And here we may note a point in which Rome seems to have been like our own country, of which Napoleon I. complained that she always won "the last battle of a war." Many times we see her very hardly pressed, with the enemy at the gates of the city; but she goes on fighting and she wins the last battle, the battle which counts and which settles the result in her favour.
This was more particularly so in the Second Punic War, which began in 219 B.C.
Carthage had very great trouble with her own mercenary troops at the end of the first war against Rome; they demanded their pay, which was long overdue. That matter was largely settled by such heavy fighting between them and the Carthaginians themselves that comparatively few of the mercenaries were left alive at the end of it to receive pay, if there had been any for them.
In the years that followed, Carthage became rich and prosperous. She had a large trade with the interior of Africa as well as with all the coast cities round the Mediterranean. She worked mines in Spain, and in order to draw more wealth from that rich and fertile country she gradually made herself mistress of a great part of it, and it was the capture by Carthage of Saguntum, a city in southern Spain, which was in the Roman alliance, that led to the outbreak in 219 B.C. of the Second Punic War.
Hannibal
The Carthaginian general who captured Saguntum, and thus provoked this greatest of the three Punic Wars, was Hannibal, perhaps the most famous leader of armies in all history.
In telling this story of the world in mere outline, as I am trying to tell it, it is impossible to speak of any of the details of his extraordinary campaign. He had his army there in southern Spain. He marched with it, meeting no very serious opposition, through Spain into that northern part of Italy which was then part of Gaul, and he thence descended into southern Italy and into the very heart of the Roman country itself. He won three great victories over the Roman armies on the way, and finally, a fourth, at Cannæ, in the autumn of 216 B.C., three years after he set out from Spain; and after Cannæ Rome herself seemed to lie at his mercy.