what if Carthage had become dominant?

[Vietcong]

what if Carthage had become dominant in the mediterranean instead of Rome?
hear are my questions to it, instead of asking what if it never fell* a silly question* lets ask

1. How would a mediterranean dominated by Carthage change history then?
2. How would modern history,*doesnt matter if Carthage continued into modern history* be different today?
3. And, Would Carthage be able to dominate the mediterranean? would it have the resources? the man power? or would it domination be short lived?

 

[BCLG100]

I do think this was pretty much answered in the other thread- in that there is simply no way carthage could have become anymore dominant than what it was and maintaining it.

 

[RalofTyr]

There was a way. If Hannible had better united the Celtic tribes, he could have had the man power to take Rome down, once and for all.

Hannible was a great tactician. He could take down any Roman army (except the last one). But he wasn't good at strategy. He should have better judged Rome's resolve. But he really never went to war to win, just hurt Rome.

 

[Tee Kay]

Let's assume Hannibal marched Rome after Cannae. I would imagine Rome being sacked thoroughly, its city walls torn down, its population enslaved. The other Italian cities would probably be organised into some sort of loose confederation under Carthaginian military ie Hannibal's control.

The politicians back home won't be happy though. Perhaps they will send Hannibal a present in the form of an assassin. When that failed, they would probably purge the Barcas in Carthage. Civil war would broke out. Hannibal (from his base in, say, Cumae) might well conquer Carthage, but in the process he would have to destroy traditional Carthaginian society. Perhaps Hannibal would crown himself King and founded a Barca dynasty. If the oligarchs won, however, then Carthage would continue to prosper for about a century at most before crumbling before its own inefficient government, or because of outside enemies - Celts, Greeks, Egyptians, maybe even a resurgent Rome. Either way, history will be very different. The dominant culture in the western Mediterranean will be neither Roman, nor Punic, but perhaps Greek (whose city-states in the western Mediterranean, I would think, would benefit a lot from the fall of Rome and in a position to take advantage of post-war Carthaginian weakness) or something else entirely.

 

[~Corsair#01~]

I don't really think the magnates in Carthage would have been able to oppose Hannibal once he established himself as a military genius. They would likely have just settled into compliance with the occassional grumbling. They had no real means of fighting him since they could hardly rely on the armies of Spain or Italy to fight the Barca family. And their key commercial interests in Spain hardly made fighting a war with Hannibal which they were bound to lose an enticing prospect. Likewise Hannibal had no reason to alienate the magnates, though he would certainly centralise power in the empire under his own control.

If we assume Carthage won PW2, which is extremely unlikely, then Carthage would become politically much as it did in real life under Barca after the war but with far more power. Numidia would be consolidated under Syphax and go back to being a vassal state. Spain would be in quite a bit of chaos, but a competent Carthaginian commander could sort it out, as the Romans did. Italy would be divided between allies and vassals according to who was o what side. Capua would be the dominant city, but Rome would still be there and be quite large at that. Revolt in Italy or Sicily would be impossible unless Capua or Makedonia decided to support it and even then Carthage would be in a strong position to beat them.
Carthage would certainly not be in the position to expand east as the Romans were since their only ally in the area would be Makedon, who could easily lead a united coalition against Carthage who in any case lacked the manpower for the kind of expansion Rome had.

Carthage would stay a dominant power for a while, but would not be anything like the superpower Rome turned into. The history of the world would be very different and the middle east would probably still be Greek today.

 

[Ur_Vile_Wedge]

Why are we all assuming Hannibal this, Hannibal That?

At the time of the Second Punic war Rome, vis a vis Carthage had......


More men
More money
More allies
More ships
More equiptment
And probably a few other massive advantages as well. It's a testament to Hannibal's brilliance that they got anywhere at all.



But lets look at the First Punic war, where things were a lot more even, (and back and forth) Say the Carthaginians had dominated Sicily and started to sail/fight their way up the straits and into southern Italy. I thinkl that is very possible, although I don't know enough about Carthaginian culture and the like to make a good guess how their dominance of the Mediterranian would work out?

 

[Dachs]

But lets look at the First Punic war, where things were a lot more even, (and back and forth) Say the Carthaginians had dominated Sicily and started to sail/fight their way up the straits and into southern Italy. I thinkl that is very possible, although I don't know enough about Carthaginian culture and the like to make a good guess how their dominance of the Mediterranian would work out?

Commercial dominance. They'd attempt to balkanize Italy - split Rome's allies away from her and then get individual commercial agreements with them. Meanwhile Sicily turns even more into a Punic base, with maybe cultural influence extending (that is somewhat doubtful because of the extremely strong Greek tendencies of the eastern end of the island and the general Punic tendency to not go for cultural extension).

...but Carthage really doesn't have the military to go for a conquest of Rome. Sicily was really the only thing they could play with.

 

[TheLastOne36]

what if Carthage had become dominant in the mediterranean instead of Rome?
hear are my questions to it, instead of asking what if it never fell* a silly question* lets ask

1. How would a mediterranean dominated by Carthage change history then?

1. if carthage dominated instead of rome, then i think we'd be speaking in the pheonican script instead of the roman, and i'm not to sure bout the rest.

 

[cybrxkhan]

that would throw in different variables then historically. if Carthage had become dominant, then perhaps that meant that perhaps Egypt or even the Seleucids had a chance to become dominant too (at least in the East Meditteranean), given that now it is a different timeline. perhaps Parthia, China, India, and so forth would have had different histories.

though, definitely, there is a good chance the history of Christianity (and probably Islam with it) would be very different, if it exists at all.

 

[Tee Kay]

1. if carthage dominated instead of rome, then i think we'd be speaking in the pheonican script instead of the roman, and i'm not to sure bout the rest.

Or maybe Greek, because:

1. it's already an established language in the Med.
2. with the decline/defeat of Rome, the greatest threat to Greek dominance will be gone.
3. Carthage is unlikely to grow into a superpower as the Romans did in real history, not in the short run, anyway.

 

[RalofTyr]

If Hannibal won the war, he would have conquered Rome. Then, he'd be assasinated by the Carthage Senate during the first day of Mounichion, so says Wilhelm Shakespeare's play, Hannibal.

Carthage was a confederation, not an empire. It wasn't very strong. The Italians would resurge or the Greeks would dominate, as they had before. The greatest change would come from the Celts and later on the Germans as the Huns move in.