Tom Holland

She has tremendous natural advantages there.

great harbours, a fertile hinterland.

She is on the tip of what is now Tunis, so opposite Sicily, and her position there enables her to dominate those crucial straits.

Traditionally, her great enemies were not the Romans, but the Greeks who had planted a whole host of colonies in the island of Sicily.

And the most formidable of these colonies was a city that is still very much to be found in Sicily to this day, the city of Syracuse on the southeastern corner of the island.

And exactly like Carthage, Syracuse boasted tremendous natural advantages.

So again, a superb natural harbour.

Rocky heights and plateaus, very defensible.

And again, like Carthage, a very commanding position on kind of the key shipping lanes that run throughout the Mediterranean, joining the western and eastern halves of the sea.

So Carthage and Syracuse are very evenly matched and they're always fighting each other.

But these wars...

are not wars to the death.

They actually remind me of the old firm, um, Rangers and Celtic, um, in the Scottish premiership.

One of them always wins, but they never established a kind of absolutely permanent commanding, um, supremacy over the other.

And that's basically the relationship between Carthage and Syracuse for, you know, for centuries and centuries.

But then in the third century BC, a new kid arrives on the block and this is

the Roman Republic.

I mean, to pursue the football analogy, I guess it's as though, I don't know, Aberdeen were to be taken over by the Saudis and pumped full of money, and then suddenly they start winning.

Because in 264 BC,

The Romans get embroiled in a kind of minor squabble over treaty rights, and they massively escalate it into a full-blown war with Carthage.