Treaty of Lutatius

The Treaty of Lutatius was the agreement between Carthage and Rome of 241 BC (amended in 237 BC), that ended the First Punic War after 23 years of conflict. Most of the fighting during the war took place on, or in the waters around, the island of Sicily and in 241 BC a Carthaginian fleet was defeated by a Roman fleet commanded by Gaius Lutatius Catulus while attempting to lift the blockade of its last, beleaguered, strongholds there. Accepting defeat, the Carthaginian Senate ordered their army commander on Sicily, Hamilcar Barca, to negotiate a peace treaty with the Romans, on whatever terms he could negotiate. Hamilcar refused, claiming the surrender was unnecessary, and the negotiation of the peace terms was left to Gisco, the commander of Lilybaeum, as the next most senior Carthaginian on the island. A draft treaty was rapidly agreed, but when it was referred to Rome for ratification it was rejected.

Rome then sent a ten-man commission to settle the matter. This in turn agreed that Carthage would hand over what it still held of Sicily; relinquish several groups of islands nearby; release all Roman prisoners without ransom, although ransom would need to be paid to secure the release of prisoners held by the Romans; and pay an indemnity of 3,200 talents of silver over 10 years. The treaty received its name from the victorious Gaius Lutatius Catulus, who also negotiated the initial draft.

In 237 BC, when Carthage was recovering from a bitter and hard-fought civil war, it prepared an expedition to recover the island of Sardinia, which had been lost to rebels. Cynically, the Romans stated they considered this an act of war. Their peace terms were the ceding of Sardinia and Corsica and the payment of an additional 1,200-talent indemnity. Weakened by 30 years of war, Carthage agreed rather than enter into a conflict with Rome again; the additional payment and the renunciation of Sardinia and Corsica were added to the treaty.

Primary sources

The main source for almost every aspect of the First Punic War is the historian Polybius (– BC), a Greek sent to Rome in 167 BC as a hostage. His works include a now lost manual on military tactics, but he is known today for ''The Histories'', written sometime after 146 BC, or about a century after the end of the war. Polybius's work is considered broadly objective and largely neutral as between Carthaginian and Roman points of view.

Carthaginian written records were destroyed along with their capital, Carthage, in 146 BC and so Polybius's account of the First Punic War is based on several, now-lost, Greek and Latin sources. Only part of the first book of the forty comprising ''The Histories'' deals with the First Punic War. The accuracy of Polybius's account has been much debated over the past 150 years, but the modern consensus is to accept it largely at face value, and the details of the treaty in modern sources are almost entirely based on interpretations of Polybius's account. The modern historian Andrew Curry considers "Polybius turns out to efairly reliable"; while Dexter Hoyos describes him as "a remarkably well-informed, industrious, and insightful historian". Other, later, histories of the war and the treaty that ended it exist, but in fragmentary or summary form. Modern historians usually also take into account the histories of Diodorus Siculus and Dio Cassius, and the 12th-century Byzantine chronicler Joannes Zonaras, who relied on much earlier sources, is also sometimes used. All, like Polybius, draw most of their information from even earlier, now lost, accounts. The classicist Adrian Goldsworthy states "Polybius' account is usually to be preferred when it differs with any of our other accounts".

First Punic War

The Roman Republic had been aggressively expanding in the southern Italian mainland for a century before the First Punic War. It had conquered peninsular Italy south of the River Arno by 272 BC. During this period Carthage, with its capital in what is now Tunisia, had come to dominate southern Hispania, much of the coastal regions of North Africa, the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, and the western half of Sicily in a military and commercial empire. In 264 BC Carthage and Rome were the pre-eminent powers in the western Mediterranean. The two states had several times asserted their mutual friendship via formal alliances: in 509 BC, 348 BC and around 279 BC. Relationships were good, with strong commercial links. In 264 BC the two cities went to war over the city of Messana (modern Messina) in the north-eastern tip of Sicily.

The war lasted 23 years, with the maritime aspect the largest and longest naval war of the ancient world. By 249 BC the war had developed into a struggle in which the Romans were attempting to decisively defeat the Carthaginians and, at a minimum, control the whole of Sicily. The Carthaginians were engaging in their traditional policy of waiting for their opponents to wear themselves out, in the expectation of then regaining some or all of their possessions and negotiating a mutually satisfactory peace treaty. Rome was the stronger land-ba