You will recall that I once quoted Horace on the subject of Greek culture taking Rome captive? And, in all fairness, set beside the ancient Greeks the Romans were barbarians. Gladiatorial combat in place of the Olympic Games was rather telling on its own! Their language, too, was nowhere near as rich—phonetically included. And so the Greek φοῖνιξ ‘Phoenician’ became, in Roman mouths, punicus.
And since Rome had virtually no dealings with the Phoenician metropolis itself, trafficking instead with the nearer Phoenician colonies of the western Mediterranean—in North Africa, Spain, Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily, whose centre was Carthage—European historians apply to these western Phoenicians the adjective “Punic,” borrowed from Roman sources.
And the best-known phrase built on that adjective is, of course, the Punic Wars. Who fought whom, and when?
The Limits of Expansion, and a Fear of Gauls
It all began in the 3rd century BC. By that time Rome had transformed itself from an unremarkable Latin town into the capital of most of the Apennine peninsula (the northern frontier with the Gauls ran along the line from Pisa to Ariminum, now Rimini). Pushing further north was not, for the moment, a proposition they cared to entertain: firstly, it was cold up there, and secondly, up there lived the ill-tempered Gauls, who had once already burned Rome to the ground by way of retaliation.
To the south, however, a mere three kilometres across the strait from Rhegium (Reggio di Calabria), lay Sicily—large, sweet, and the subject of an interminable quarrel between Phoenicians and Greeks.
Between Scylla and Charybdis
The strait, admittedly, was a somewhat forbidding proposition—it was there that the Apennine Scylla and the Sicilian Charybdis resided: two monsters personifying the dangerous whirlpools, and devouring sailors and ships alike (you remember the tale of Odysseus—Ulysses to the Romans?).
So long as Rome was preoccupied with dry land, she got on famously with the maritime power of Carthage, trading away in the friendliest fashion. But the moment the peninsula ran out, the Romans were seized by that notion as old as the world itself: to annex whichever neighbours happen to be lying about unattended. In Messana (modern Messina), the Athenian colony nearest to Rome, and subsequently in mighty Corinthian Syracuse, powerful pro-Roman factions unexpectedly materialised—and as a result of the First Punic War (264–241 BC), Sicily, and then Corsica and Sardinia after her, found themselves under Roman rule.
