The Punic Wars: The Grain Wars
by From 264 to 146 B.C., Rome and the Phoenicians, whose capital city was Carthage in what is now Tunisia in northern Africa, were locked in a series of wars to the death for control of trade in the western Mediterranean, especially the grain fields of Sicily.
To aid them in trade, the Phoenicians had invented a system of writing that is the basis of our alphabet. In the second of these wars, called the Punic Wars, a Carthaginian general named Hannibal made one of the boldest moves in military history. Instead of sailing across the Mediterranean and attacking Italy from the south, which they expected, he marched thousands of soldiers and sixty elephants over the Alps and attacked Italy from the north, taking them by surprise.
For more than ten years, Hannibal’s soldiers and elephant(s) (historians think that perhaps all the elephants died except one) ate their way up and down the Italian peninsula, through fields of wheat and barley, through orchards of apples, pears, and lemons, and through the vineyards. They devastated the country’s farms and economy, especially the rich agricultural areas of northern Italy, so badly that the damage to the fields could not be repaired for many years. Rome eventually won by attacking the city of Carthage, but fifty years later when it looked like Carthage might make a comeback, Rome finished the Phoenicians off. After a three-year siege, Carthage was burned and razed. The 50,000 Carthaginians who were not killed outright were sold into slavery. Then the ground was spread with salt so that nothing would ever grow there again.28 Rome now controlled the western Mediterranean Sea. Mediterranean means “middle of the land” in Latin, but after Rome gained control of the eastern part of the sea, too, they called it simply mare nostrum-“our sea.”
Hannibal had long-lasting effects on the Roman economy. Small farmers couldn’t afford to replant or repair the damage. They also couldn’t afford to compete with the slave labor on the latifundia, the large plantations. So they sold their farms to the wealthy landowners and then either roamed the countryside looking for work as laborers or moved to the cities where they were poor or homeless. Soon, one-third of the population of Rome was slaves and another one-quarter was poor.
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