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 When Eagles fly East (Part I)

“Either send them all on their way, unharmed and as quickly as possible, or kill them to the last man.”

While Greece was reaching its zenith to usher in the Hellenic era as Alexander the Great conquered the Achaemenid Empire in the latter part of the Fourth Century BC, Italy was embroiled in a much more local war. The city state of Rome had grown to become a regional power in the centre of the peninsular, dominating the Latins, and much of the latter half of that century saw them embroiled in a trio of wars with the other major regional power in central Italy – the Samnites.

The outcome of the wars to see who would be master of Italy was far from certain, with the Romans suffering major defeats such as when the Samnite commander Pontius trapped the entire Roman army in the valley of the Caudine Forks in 321 BC. Unsure how to take advantage of his success, he wrote to his father Herennius, who advised that he should free them all, unharmed and as quickly as possible. When he rejected that advice and asked again, his father said he should kill them to the last man. When his father arrived to explain his contradictory advice, he said to free them would gain the friendship of Rome, while to kill them would cripple the Roman military for a generation and end the war. Herennius said there could be no middle way, and that anything else would see the Romans smarting for revenge without being weakened – evidently, he understood the juggernaut that Rome was to become.

Despite such major setbacks, Rome showed its remarkable ability to recover from hits, and would go onto win the series of wars at around the same time Alexander’s empire was disintegrating into the Wars of the Diadochi, with numerous successor states and kingdoms arising and Greece fragmenting again. The Samnite Wars saw Rome abandon the Greek phalanx formation of fighting due to the difficulties in maintaining the formation in the undulating terrain of Samnium, instead adopting the legionary formation of velites, followed by hastasti, then princeps, and lastly triarii. Rome thus began to spread its influence across Italy, and was soon absorbing many of the states of ‘Magna Greacia’, the Greek colonies in southern Italy. With the Alps sheltering Rome to the north and the Celts of Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy) not deemed the state-ending threat they had been when Brennus sacked Rome in 387 BC, and with seas in every other direction, Rome felt assured in its expansion across the peninsular.

In 280 BC that security was shattered with the campaigns of Pyrrhus of Epirus, the Greek king who fancied himself as the next Alexander, and sought to expel the Romans from Magna Greacia. The battles of Pyrrhus was largely successful, though his campaign was a failure as Rome was able to replace its losses far better than he was. Roaming around southern Italy and Sicily, the invasion of Pyrrhus even saw the Romans forge an alliance with the Carthaginians, the Phoenician city state the focus of Pyyrhus’ attention as they were expanding into Sicily from their base in Africa (Tunis). The war would eventually end five years later with Pyrrhus returning across the Adriatic, where he was eventually killed fighting in the packed streets of Argos when a soldiers’ mother threw a roof tile down on his head. Having won numerous battles but at too high a cost to win the war, the king of Epirus gave us today’s term “Pyrrhic victory”.

The Pyrrhic War was essentially a 9/11 moment for Rome, opening the eyes of its citizens to existential threats from elsewhere in the Mediterranean and realising that the thin sliver of water that was the Adriatic was far from an indomitable barrier. Growing increasingly uneasy about other threats to the republic, Rome’s wrath next turned on their former ally Carthage, affronted by its expansion into Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia. Being a trading nation, the Carthaginians fought their war using mercenaries, and often faced problems of demobilising their armies or providing their backpay at a war’s conclusion. One such problem saw a group named the Mamertines seize control of Messana (Messina) after having fought for Syracuse, and separate emissaries applied to Rome and Carthage to aid.

The First Punic War erupted in 264 BC, with Rome immediately at a disadvantage as the agrarian nation had no navy, nor knowledge of how to build one. Campaigning successfully on land in Sicily, Rome struggled to raise a fleet to challenge Carthage by reverse engineering captured and shipwrecked vessels, then suffered a disastrous defeat. Rome again showed its resilience, with the senators themselves funding the construction of a new fleet to challenge the Carthaginians. Realising their strength was in their legionaries rather than their rowers, the Romans adopted the “corvus” (crow), a bridge that would drop down onto the deck of an enemy ship and allow them to board it. Relying on conventional naval warfare of ramming and evading enemy ships, this new tactic caught the Carthaginians off guard and began to turn the tide of the war.

The war was not yet over, and after Rome’s legions went to a foreign continent for the first time, invading Africa following their victory at sea at the behemoth Battle of Cape Ecnomus, with around 290,000 crew and marines on 680 ships making it possible the biggest naval battle in history. After initial success abroad, the Carthaginians reorganised under the Spartan Xanthippus, and went onto defeat the Roman expedition, with the conflict dragging on into a war of attrition, and the focus reverting to Sicily.

Carthage agreed to surrender having been so weakened by war and struggling to maintain their territorial positions in Sicily. They even requested a 2,000 gold talent (around $2.8 billion) loan from Egypt, which was rejected, and surrendered its Sicilians possessions. Despite being war wary itself, Rome seized the opportunity to begin to expand overseas, cynically capturing Sardinia and Corsica after the Carthaginians attempted to recapture them from rebels. With Carthage apparently subdued, Rome’s gaze now turned across the Adriatic. Eager to prevent a future Pyrrhic War, the Italian republic sought a beachhead where it could establish its legions in Greece and ensure future conflict with the disparate collection of warring city states took place East of the Adriatic. When a contender for the throne of the rising Illyrian kingdom found himself out of favour, Rome had the pretext it needed to sail east.