Battle Of Aegates Islands 1st Punic War Ends

[Valin]

History Of War

The battle of the Aegates Islands was the final and decisive battle of the First Punic War. When the war had started twenty years earlier, Roman had been a land power and Carthage the foremost naval power in the western Mediterranean. Now that war would end with a resounding Roman naval victory.

 

The Romans had won the majority of the naval battles that had taken place during the war, but they had suffered a series of major disasters, losing four major fleets in storms. In 249 B.C. they had lost part of their fleet in their only major naval defeat of the war, the battle of Drepanum, and had then lost the rest of the fleet in yet another storm. For the next seven years they made no effort to rebuild their fleet. The main reason for this was financial exhaustion. The Roman state could not afford to both keep its armies in the field and to build a new fleet. The Romans chose to keep their armies in the field, and maintained a siege of Lilybaeum, the main Carthaginian base remaining on Sicily, that lasted from 250 B.C. to the end of the war.

 

After more than six years it became clear that the Roman armies were not able to finish the war on Sicily. In 247 B.C. Carthage had sent Hamilcar Barca to command on Sicily, and although he was unable to break the Roman grip on Lilybaeum, or indeed capture any significant Roman possession, he conducted an active guerrilla war on Sicily, and was even able to launched limited raids on the Italian coast.

 

Faced with this stalemate the Senate decided to make one final attempt to win the war at sea. With public funds exhausted, the Senate decided to impose a heavy loan on the wealthiest men of the state, which would be paid back if the Romans won. Most of the wealthy men involved were of course in the Senate, although trade had started to become important in Rome since the conquest of the Greek cities of southern Italy in the years before the outbreak of the war.

 

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