Pyrrhic War - Roman Alliance With Carthage

Roman Alliance With Carthage

Pyrrhus next offered to negotiate a truce with Rome, but Rome refused to talk as long as Pyrrhus remained on Italian soil. Appius Claudius, who built the Appian Way, now an old man and blind, exhorted the Romans to refuse negotiations with Pyrrhus, who was really only asking at this point for freedom for Tarentum and her allies.

Pyrrhus tried to ally with Carthage against Rome, but the Carthaginians, seeing Pyrrhus as the greater threat, refused and sent a squadron up to the Tiber mouth to offer help against him. The third Roman treaty with Carthage now concluded an effectual alliance between them and against Pyrrhus. (A dozen years later, Rome’s interests in the Mediterranean would come into conflict with those of Carthage, and they went to war.) The effect was to limit Pyrrhus' career in the west to aggression against the Greek states which he had nominally come to protect.