This was the nature of the Romans ‘anything that they perceived as a threat was violently assaulted until it was not just defeated but rendered incapable of ever wielding any political or military power again.’ So incomprehensible to the Romans was the concept of defeat that in 216 BC, a few days after the largest military defeat in Roman history, with the Carthaginian general Hannibal’s huge army just outside walls of Rome, the Roman Senate refused to even see the envoy sent to negotiate a peace treaty. The Republic ceased to regard Carthage as an enemy only when it had been razed to the ground and, as the (symbolically appropriate but untrue) story goes, its foundations plowed with salt to make sure nothing could ever grow there again. The Romans did not stop fighting the Carthaginians when they drove them out of Sicily, or even, fifty years later, when they defeated a Carthaginian army at the doorstep of Carthage itself, during the Second Punic War. This was the determination that was to make Rome the master of the known world. Within a few years, however, it not only raised a fleet of over two hundred ships, defeating the Carthaginians in more than one battle, but lost this entire force to storms – and immediately replaced it with another. of 4 - When Rome and Carthage first went to war in 264 BC, few would have predicted that this arrogant newcomer – this Italian upstart with its strange semi-democratic form of government ‘would one day rule an empire stretching from Britain to Persia.’ Yet even in those early days the actions of the Republic gave signs of what was to come: entering the First Punic War, against an enemy with hundreds of years of naval experience, Rome did not have a single creditable warship to its name. Ladder General Summary of Roman History, 264BC-14AD
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