is changed Greek culture, which we call Graeco-Roman culture, that was handed down to the European civilizations in late antiquity and the Renaissance. Our journey through this remarkable history begins with the land itself and the various peoples that inhabited it. Unlike most of the regions dealt with, Italy was a multicultural landscape that came to be dominated by this small village, Rome.
             Expansion overseas made Rome a mighty Empire during the 200's and 100's BC Rome came into conflict first with Carthage, a sea power and trading center on the coast of northern Africa. Hooker author of "The Punic War's" 1996, stated that:
             Carthage was the greatest naval power of the Mediterranean in the third century BC. The Carthaginians were originally Phoenicians and Carthage was a colony founded by the Phoenician capital city of Tyre in the ninth century BC; the word "Carthage" means, in Phoenician, "The New City." The Phoenicians, however, were conquered by the Assyrians in the sixth century BC, and the conquered by the Persians; an independent Phoenician state would never again appear in the Middle Ease. Carthage, however, remained; it was no longer a colony, but a fully functioning independent state. While the Romans were steadily increasing their control over the Italian peninsula, the Carthaginians were extending their empire over most of North Africa. By the time that Rome controlled all of the Italian peninsula, Carthage already controlled the North African coast from western Libya to the Strait of Gibraltar, and ruled over most of southern Spain, and the island of Corsica and Sardinia in Europe as well. Carthage was a formidable power; it controlled almost all the commercial trade in the Mediterranean had subjected vast numbers of people all whom sent soldiers and supplies, and amassed tremendous wealth from gold and silver mines in Spain. These two mighty empires came into contact in t...