"I don't know anything about Carthage. Like I've literally never heard of it before." Scipio still winning.

"Never heard of Carthage before."  Rome-"Great Success."

Rome losing around 300,000 men and 2 or three fleets

Carthage: Just give up already! Your finished!

Rome: I didnt hear no bell

“I’ve never heard of Carthage.”

Well, over the next few videos in this series, you are about to find out why. Although you may have heard of one of their best generals (Hannibal Barca).

The idea behind only having the consuls serve a one year term was to prevent any serious damage being done if one of them turned out to be god awful at the job, basically. The reason it ended up causing so much warfare was because of how much stock Rome put in earning glory.

One thing you must consider. At this point in history Rome was still not the unstoppable force that will make almost all Europe trumble, in fact pretty much no one actually expected them to win a war against Cartage.

I love me a girl who enjoys her history. So cool to see you watching this Stim.

Talking about the difference in honor. The  Roman Consul went back to be tortured because he made a promise,while the Carthage elite ran off the Spartan who saved them because him being so competent made them look bad

Two of my favourite historical quotes comes from this era, "Carthago delenda est", or "Carthage must be destroyed." by Cato the elder, a roman politician that would end his speaches with that quote. The quote in it self is not that awesome, but its how he would just add it to the end of speaches. And ofc Hannibal Barca's promise to his father,  “I will always be an enemy to the Romans."

I'm not sure if you misunderstood it, but I did for a long time so might as well point it out. I assumed that when they said Carthage will need to pay Rome 2200 Talents of silver, it meant that they had to pay them 40 million USD in today's money. But turns out he was talking about 1 Talent of Silver being worth 40 million USD. So in reality Rome asked Carthage to pay 88 billion, but then changed it to 128 billion. They raise it again later to 176 billion (which would be around 195 billion in 2025, crazy how much inflation there's been since 2022) so they really were having a laugh. Off topic but something I found interesting, Germany was asked to pay a little over 3x that amount after WW1.

3:50 Ancient peoples tended to mythologize their history, so the confusion is understandable

Yes, the Punic wars series from oversimplified is great! Happy to see stim reacting to it :)

Elephants were in the back for the same reason Europeans rarely used their large battleships in WW2. They cost an ungodly amount of time and resources to grow/train/build. Losing a battle can be recoverable, but even in victory you don't want to be the leader who lost most of your biggest bad ass weapons. In the case of Carthage, that would be ground for crucifixion

From what I remember, Hannibal meant "the one favoured by Baal" or it seems that it's "Baal is gracious"

Baal was a title and honorific meaning "owner" or "lord" and came to be associated with the storm and fertility god Hadad.

Wait, so that would mean that Hannibal means "the lord is gracious"? Interesting.

Stim going "oh carthage is in africa" made me pause for a moment
Its good that you are learning though, it just caught me off guard

19:17 Pyrrhic victory actually came from the Greek king Pyrrhus of Epirus trying to invade Rome while they were still obscure. He won alot.  But the romans just wouldn't give up and werent armed like barbarians so he just ended up with pyrrhic victory after pyrrhic victory. He said something like
"more victories like this and Im done for."
That's the origin of the term.

It’s worth noting that Carthage was very much an agricultural powerhouse and not just a trade empire, Mago literally wrote the book on agricultural, he’s sometimes called the father of farming and as Rome expanded and set up farming operations in recently conquered lands or even as the wealthy gobbled up farmland in Italy and replaced local farming with slave run mega farms it was Mago’s example they followed

56:37 "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"

39:50 Carthage was literally pay to win in terms of leadership. Obviously, wealth played a big role in who made up the senatorial class in Rome, but Carthage explicitly promoted the idea that the wealthiest citizens should rule. So you got a lot of...questionable leadership styles. It also doesn't help that most of our information on Carthaginian politics is filtered through Roman sources, so they naturally come off badly.

Elephants are notoriously smart so putting them in the front is a good temporary strategy but if you do it too much they get traumatized and smash into your own forces to escape a battle. War elephants were usually only used to move supplies. Even Hannibal rarely used them to smash defenses.