Buy this book on Amazon: A Short History of the World
Rome started as a small town on the banks of the river Tiber in the 8th century BC. Legend has it that the city was founded in 753BC by the twins, Romulus (hence Rome) and Remus, who were both saved from death by a wolf who suckled them. The area was ruled by Etruscan kings until 509 BC, when a more representative form of government was established under the Republic of Rome. The Republic proceeded to grow rapidly, wisely incorporating the people it conquered as ‘citizens’ as opposed to ‘subjects’, a strategy which effectively reduced chances of rebellion.
Rome was not without competition, however; the dominant power in the Mediterranean at the time was a Phoenician trading colony founded in the 9th century BC on the north coast of Africa in modern-day Tunisia: Carthage. Carthage had become independent after the Persians had conquered the Phoenicians in the 6th century BC. By the 3rd century BC, the Carthaginian Empire had grown to become the greatest naval power in the Mediterranean, stretching from northern Africa and Sicily to the southern Iberian peninsula in present-day Spain.
Looking to expand its power base beyond the Italian mainland, Rome interfered in the Carthaginian sphere of influence. Over the course of 118 years, from 264 to 146 BC, the Roman and Carthaginian empires waged a titanic struggle against each other for control of the western Mediterranean on both land and sea. Named the Punic Wars from the word Peoni, the Latin word for Phoenicians, they drained both sides of money and manpower. While there were three major Punic Wars in total, the most famous of these was undoubtedly the second, as it involved a full-scale invasion of Roman territory, an invasion in which the Romans suffered a number of severe losses and from which they only just managed to snatch victory.