Editor says, what if victory in the Second Punic War was a disaster for Carthage? This post is a second prequel to the article Hannibal Captures Rome written by Professor Jeff Provine Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s). This story was published in the February 2012 edition of Changing the Times Magazine.

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Editor says, in this article we explore a central idea discussed on the Answers Yahoo!, Total Warfare and Alternate History Discussion Boards Article 1 and Article 2 and repurpose content from those sites.

Mike commented on 2012-01-25 09:45:16 ~ And what a contest it was between Rome and Carthage.

Jeff Provine commented on 2012-01-25 16:19:19 ~ They were as apt conquerors as Romans, but they liked the sea much more. With Greeks blocking their way east, they could've spread west and even south to Africa's Forest Kingdoms or northward to secure the tin mines in Britain. We'd see a very different world social system.

Eric Oppen commented on 2012-01-25 19:13:29 ~ Wouldn't this world look like the AU in Poul Anderson's story "Delenda Est?"

Christopher Lee commented on 2012-01-25 21:31:41 ~ It's certainly an interesting concept. However, I am not sure that the Carthaginians did have the resources to take Rome. Rome was a heavily populated state with numerous citizens, all with vested interests in the survival of the state. Carthage had a much smaller populace and relied on a web of clients and tributary states. the vast bulk of Hannibal's army were non-Carthaginians. Whether they had large-scale siege ability within their military is a good question. Certainly Hannibal's army as it stood had no ability to besiege Rome. I think a putative siege would have probably failed and Roman guerrilla attacks depleted the Carthaginian numbers. Put simply I think Carthage was overall much weaker in terms of human resources than Rome and had reached its high-water mark by invading and ravaging Italy. If they were to succeed then detaching the Roman allies in southern Italy was far more important than taking Rome itself. To defeat Rome they needed to remove these allies from Roman allegiance and then Rome would have been reduced to a manageable rump. Hannibal signally failed to do this, probably because it made little sense for the allies to detach themselves from Rome and join a foreign power with a long track record of subjugating and exploiting their tributary states. If they had succeeded I find it very unlikely that the Greeks would have expanded in this way. The Greeks had plenty to do in terms of controlling the Hellenised regions of Egypt and Syria with those areas soaking up Greece's surplus manpower and interests. Carthage with its small population would have struggled to create a genuine empire like Rome's they would have needed to Carthaginianise their subjects. This would have been hard as Punic culture was a transplant from the Levant and there were no similar cultural or linguistic groups to easily assimilate, like the Romans could easily assimilate the other Italian peoples. It would have been a massive effort to achieve any real control outside the Carthaginian regions. So I propose that Carthage would have continued in its merry way and Italy would have reverted to smaller native states. I think the real beneifiaries might have been the Celts. Given space and time by the failure of Rome at this stage they might well have developed more advanced and impressive states. We might now have a Celtic western Europe.