Sicily

The largest island in the Mediterranean and the principal contested territory between Carthage, the Greek cities, and (from 264 BCE) Rome for nearly six centuries, from the first Phoenician colonies of the 9th century BCE to the Roman annexation of the entire island as a province in 241 BCE. Sicily's strategic position between North Africa and Italy made it the natural pivot of any Mediterranean power projection: Carthaginian control of western Sicily (Motya, Panormus, Lilybaeum) underwrote Carthage's western Mediterranean dominance for centuries; Greek control of the east (Syracuse, Akragas, Selinus, Gela) produced the long Greco-Carthaginian wars chronicled by Diodorus; and Roman intervention in 264 BCE, the proximate trigger of the First Punic War, turned the island from a contested boundary into a Roman province whose grain underwrote Roman power for centuries afterward. Almost every event in Carthage's external history before 218 BCE either took place in Sicily or was shaped by what was happening there.