Tom Holland

They can start to look at an overseas possession of the Romans and think, well, what if we took that?

And that, of course, is Sicily, with which the Carthaginians are very familiar because they don't possess large swathes of it.

They've been fighting endlessly in it.

And if they can get Sicily, then that massively weighs the advantage in favor of Hannibal.

So the key to Sicily is the city of Syracuse that we mentioned in the first half.

It's an ally of Rome, a very loyal ally.

The Carthaginians therefore have to think, well, how can we suborn the Syracusans or seduce them or whatever?

to come over to our side.

And if they can do that, then potentially it means that the whole of Sicily can kind of fall into their lap.

Hannibal, of all men, needs no reminding of how strategically significant Sicily is.

That's where his father, Hamilcar, had made his name.

The occupation of Sicily by the Romans had been the Versailles Treaty-type humiliation, the worst of all the humiliations that Carthage had suffered when the Romans defeated them in the previous war.

In a sense, it's the Alsace-Lorraine of the Punic Wars.

It's very rich,

It's strategically vital.

And I guess it's doomed to be a bone of contention between Rome and Carthage for as long as both of them are great powers.

its wealth and its splendor in this period.

There was a Roman poet, Silius Italicus, who wrote about the Punic Wars some three centuries later.

His comment on Syracuse in this period was that in all the earth round which the sun drives his chariot, no city at that time could rival her.

He's not exaggerating because Syracuse in the decades before Hannibal's war