Punic Wars essays

Punic Wars essays In the thousands of years men have formed nations and established dominance over one another, no other event has made as much an impact on military history as the Punic Wars during the fourth and third century BC. The Punic Wars served to demonstrate to all of the known civi-lized nations at that time the type of world power the Romans were willing to prove themselves to be.. With strategy, deception, and ultimate persistence, they shifted the balance of power in the European-Mediterranean region. But the larger change was a shift of power within the Rome itself that was brought by the larger, stronger military organization. It would serve to de-crease the supremacy of the Senate and Consul and give rise to a form of government. The first Punic War began almost accidentally. Carthaginians had controlled much of Sicily, but the Roman occupation of the southern tip of Italy created tension between the two civilizations. When a complicated dispute arose in the Carthaginian port city of Massena, the Romans intervened and thus the first Punic War began. The Romans captured the great fortress of Acreages in the first three years of the war. Nevertheless, the Romans realized that to win the war, they must drive Carthage out of Sicily, and to do this, they had to have a sea fleet. The standard tactics of the day was ramming the op-ponent to punch a hole in the side. This required a great deal of skill and allowed only an eight-second window to perform the maneuver. Romans found that in the course of the battles, that they lack the experience to outperform the Carthaginians. However, Rome produced a navy of a hundred quinquiremes (small, square-rigged schooners) and twenty triremes (rowed ships that were more maneuverable) and equipped ships with a secret weapon. The corvus, a spiked boarding bridge, was designed to swivel over the side of the Roman ship and drop on the enemy ship. Ingenious and ye...