Three wars erased Carthage and made Rome Mediterranean
Between 264 and 146 BC, Rome and Carthage fought three Punic Wars spanning forty-three years of combat plus a Carthaginian revolt. Sicily sparked the first; Hannibal's Alps march defined the second; the third ended with Carthage sacked and its people killed or enslaved in 146 BC.
Polybius, a Greek hostage in Rome from 167 BC, remains the steadiest guide, interviewing both sides and accompanying Scipio Aemilianus; Livy offers fuller Roman politics but weaker battle math. No complete Carthaginian narrative survives, though traces of the pro-Carthaginian Philinus leak through Polybius. By 270 BC Rome held peninsular Italy south of the Arno after the Pyrrhic War, while Carthage dominated western Sicily after centuries of fighting Syracuse. The two had sworn formal friendship in 509, 348 and around 279 BC, and seem to have stumbled into war in 264 BC rather than planned it.
Rome fielded citizen infantry and cavalry by property class; Carthage rarely risked citizens except near home, hiring Libyans, Numidian horsemen, Iberians and Gauls instead. Quinqueremes, each rowed by 280 oarsmen with 20 more on deck, dominated both fleets. The first war dragged on for twenty-three years until Carthage lost in 241 BC, paid heavy reparations and surrendered Sicily, which became Rome's first province; a mercenary revolt then shook Carthaginian territory.
The Second War opened in 218 BC as Hannibal crossed the Alps and campaigned in Italy for fourteen years while other theatres burned in Iberia, Sicily, Sardinia, and Africa. A Roman landing in Africa in 204 BC forced his recall, and he lost at Zama in 202 BC. The treaty of 201 BC stripped Carthage of its overseas lands, capped its forces and barred it from war without Roman consent.
In 151 BC Carthage resisted Numidian encroachment anyway; Rome treated that as grounds to declare the third war in 149 BC. Fighting stayed on Tunisian soil around a long siege, and in 146 BC the city was stormed, emptied by massacre and enslavement, and razed, its land becoming the province of Africa.
Source: Punic Wars
