3 - North Africa in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, 323 BC to AD 305

Summary

By the end of the fourth century BC, the two colonizing nations, Greeks and Phoenicians, appeared to be securely established in control of the Mediterranean, and northern Africa was effectively divided between a Greek and a Phoenician state. In the east, the conquests of Alexander had extended Greek colonization and political control over vast new areas, substantially accelerating the process of ‘hellenism’, the adoption of Greek culture by non-Greek peoples, from which the name conventionally applied to the post-Alexandrine period the ‘Hellenistic’ era, is derived. When, on Alexander's death in 323 BC, his empire broke up into several rival kingdoms, control of Egypt was secured by the Macedonian house of Ptolemy to whose realm the older more westerly Greek settlements in Cyrenaica were also annexed. In the west, the Phoenician state of Carthage, having survived the invasion of its North African territories by the Greek leader Agathokles in 310-307 BC, had re-established its control over North-West Africa and throughout the western Mediterranean. But these states were quickly to find themselves overshadowed and eventually subjugated by the rising power of Rome. Rome had risen from the position of a minor Italian city-state to the control, by the 270s BC, of all southern Italy. The Romans defeated Carthage in two wars (264-241 and 218-201 BC), after which the Phoenician city was reduced to the status of a client of Rome and ultimately (146 BC) destroyed. They also began to interfere in the east, between the warring Greek states, and imposed their dominance and finally their direct rule.