Hi there, you're listening to the Hellenistic Age podcast.

Episode 68, the Second Punic War Over the Mountains. mountains.

After the destruction of Saguntum in 219 and the subsequent declaration of war in early

218, the Roman Republic and Carthage were once again locked in a titanic struggle for

control over the Central Mediterranean.

Given the conduct of the last conflict, the Roman commanders assumed that they were going

to have to oversee military expeditions in Carthage's Iberian and North African territories.

A war theater in both Europe and Africa is certainly what they got, but they never could

have imagined what they would have to also deal with certainly what they got, but they never could have imagined what

they would have to also deal with was what they feared the most. A full-scale invasion of Italy,

audaciously planned and executed by Carthage's leading general Hannibal Barka, that would result

in fighting across the peninsula for 15 years. Bringing the war to Roman soil was partially intended as a

humiliation, a revenge for the campaigns of Marcus Aetilius Regulus in North Africa during

the years 256-255. But Hannibal knew that to crush his enemy, he needed to avoid grappling

with the many heads of the Roman Hydra, and focus instead on driving a sword through its heart.

The number of men that fought and died in the first Punic War was quite staggering, and the second Punic War was no different in this regard.

Though they no longer had access to the men or foodstuffs of Sicily, the market expansion into Iberia enabled the Carthaginians

to reap a great amount of silver from Spanish mines to pay for mercenaries, and could capitalize

on an enormous body of Celt-Iberian warriors, fierce fighters that were skilled in mountainous

warfare and equipped in heavier armor. Ironically, many of these troops would become nearly indistinguishable from the Roman and Italian ones,

for they would frequently strip the equipment from the bodies of those they killed in battle to replace their own.

Hannibal would also continue to levy troops from the various Libyan peoples near Carthage,

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