First Punic War
| First Punic War | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of the Punic Wars | |||||||||
 Western Mediterranean Sea in 264 BC. Rome is shown in red, Carthage in purple, and Syracuse in green. |
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| Belligerents | |||||||||
| Roman Republic | Carthage | ||||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
|
Marcus Atilius Regulus (POW) Gaius Lutatius Catulus Gaius Duilius |
Hamilcar Barca Hanno the Great Hasdrubal the Fair Xanthippus |
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| Strength | |||||||||
|
690,000+ , 120 ships |
457,000+, 130 ships |
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| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| 155,000+ | 130,000+ | ||||||||
690,000+ ,
457,000+,
The First Punic War (264 to 241 BC) was the first of three wars fought between Ancient Carthage and the Roman Republic. For more than 20 years, the two powers struggled for supremacy, primarily on the Mediterranean island of Sicily and its surrounding waters, and also in North Africa. The war signaled the beginning of a strategic transformation in the western Mediterranean. Carthage began the war as the great sea-power of the western Mediterranean, while Rome had but a small fleet of fighting ships. Over the course of the war, Rome built up a powerful navy, developed new naval tactics, and strategically used their navy, army, and local political alliances on Sicily in order to achieve a victory that expelled the Carthaginians from Sicily. The First Punic War ended with a treaty between Rome and Carthage, but years of bloodshed were to follow in the Second and Third Punic Wars before the strategic issue of power in the western Mediterranean was resolved in favor of Rome, and in the total destruction of Carthage.
The series of wars between Rome and Carthage took the name "Punic" from the Latin name for the Carthaginians, Punici. This is derived from Phoenicis (Phoenicians), and it refers to the Carthaginian heritage as Phoenician colonists. A Carthaginian name(s) for the conflicts does not survive in any records.
Rome had recently emerged as the leading city-state in the Italian Peninsula, a wealthy, powerful, expansionist republic with a successful citizen army. Over the past one hundred years, Rome had come into conflict, and defeated rivals on the Italian peninsula, then incorporated them into the Roman political world. First the Latin League was forcibly dissolved during the Latin War, then the power of the Samnites was broken during the three prolonged Samnite wars, and then the Greek cities of Magna Graecia (southern Italy) submitted to Roman power at the conclusion of the Pyrrhic War. By the beginning of the First Punic War, the Romans had secured the whole of the Italian peninsula, except Gallia Cisalpina in the Po Valley.
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