Modern scholarship · modern scholarship

Unplanned Wars: The Origins of the First and Second Punic Wars

Dexter Hoyos

Composition

1998 CE

Language: english

Specialist study arguing that neither the First nor the Second Punic War was the product of long-planned imperial design on either side, that both wars emerged from contingent decisions, miscalculations, and escalations across years that, individually, no party to them had intended to lead to total war. For the First Punic War, Hoyos analyzes in detail the Mamertine crisis, the Roman senate's division, the comitia's role, the fragmentary evidence for pre-264 treaties between Rome and Carthage, and the lost Philinus tradition. The book is the starting point for any serious treatment of the war's outbreak; its thesis substantially reshaped Anglophone scholarship on Roman imperialism in the western Mediterranean.

Claims citing this source

Carthage responded to the Mamertine appeal first, establishing a garrison at Messana under a commander named Hanno before the Roman expedition arrived.
The comitia centuriata voted for war after being persuaded, by the consuls, in Polybius's account, by the prospect of plunder and the argument that allowing Carthaginian control of Messana would put a hostile power on the Italian doorstep.
Appius Claudius Caudex's crossing of the Strait of Messina in 264 BCE was the first time a Roman army had ever deployed outside the Italian peninsula, a structural shift whose long-term significance is underemphasized in narrative accounts focused on the Mamertine crisis.
The Mamertines of Messana, threatened by Hiero II of Syracuse, appealed for protection both to Carthage and to Rome in 265 or early 264 BCE.
Philinus of Akragas alleged in a now-lost history that Rome had violated an existing treaty with Carthage by intervening in Sicily, a claim Polybius preserves only in order to reject it.
The Roman senate was divided on whether to intervene at Messana, and the matter was referred to the comitia centuriata for decision, an unusual constitutional step that suggests serious doubt about the legitimacy or wisdom of the war.