12.3 Europe: 300 to 201 b.c.  (Page 2/3)

Italy

This was a century of great Roman activity. By 290 B.C. all territory of the Sabines had come under Roman rule, and after the battle of Lake Vadimo about 280 B.C. the Samnite resistance was crushed and Rome controlled all the harbors of Italy as well as having perhaps 40,000 slave-captives. In 281 B.C. a Roman general had also triumphed over Etruscan Volsinii and Vulci. Italy was densely populated by a hardy peasantry, which gave the Romans a dependable pool of military man-power. Their labor force, like the Greeks before them, was slaves. Rome, too, was a slave society. (Ref. 249 )

NOTE: Insert 23: ITALY BEFORE THE FIRST PUNIC WAR 264 B.C.

In the meantime, Pyrrhus, king of Epirus in the Balkans, and a kinsman of Alexander the Great, responded to pleas of the Greek city-states of Syracuse (Sicily) and Tarentum on the heel of the boot and helped them fight the Romans for control of south Italy. Rome was even joined by Carthage in this particular fight, in the attempt to keep Pyrrhus out of Sicily. King Pyrrhus brought 25,OOO men and many elephants which terrified the Italians and he initially won some victories at Heraclea (280 B.C.) and Asculum (279 B.C.) but lost many men and much strength, so that by 275 Rome had won and had reached the toe and heel of the boot of Italy. Carthage still held the western end of Sicily. (Ref. 8 , 28 )

By 260 B.C. Rome controlled 10,000 square miles of Italy, and with her allies another 52,000 square miles. It had about 292,000 men and its allies about 750,000, with a total population of about 3,000,000. This powerful confederacy had now become a potential challenge to Carthage and war between the two great powers broke out in 264 B.C. This First Punic War began a century of warfare for the mastery of the Mediterranean. With Hamilcar (see footnote on page 243) leading the Carthaginians and Regulus becoming the Roman hero, this was essentially a series of gigantic sea battles with a few land skirmishes in Sicily and the southern tip of Italy. The Romans won the sea battles by the "corvus", a boarding crane that allowed their soldiers to board the Carthaginian ships. (See NORTH CENTRAL AFRICA, earlier in this chapter, page 233). Carthage sued for peace in 241 B.C., giving Sicily to Rome and removing restrictions on Roman trade in the Mediterranean. In the next four years, while Carthage was torn by a bloody internal revolution, Rome took Sardinia and Corsica in treaty violations. (Ref. 48 , 8 )

These treaty violations set the stage for the Second Punic War beginning in 219 B.C. and continuing until 201. The Carthaginian General Hannibal (See footnote on page 243) entered Spain, enlisted Gaul mercenaries