In 256–255 BC the Romans attempted to strike at the city of Carthage in North Africa, but suffered a heavy defeat by a Carthaginian army strong in cavalry and elephants.

Once he arrived in Panormus, Metellus turned to fight, countering the elephants with a hail of javelins from earthworks dug near the walls.

[3][4] His works include a lost manual on military tactics,[5] but he is best known for his Histories, written after 146 BC, or about a century after the end of the war.

Carthaginian written records were destroyed with their capital, Carthage, in 146 BC and Polybius's account of the First Punic War is based on several lost Greek and Latin sources.

[19] Most male Roman citizens were liable for military service, and would serve as infantry, with a better-off minority providing a cavalry component.

Many were from North Africa which provided several types of fighters including: close-order infantry equipped with large shields, helmets, short swords and long thrusting spears; javelin-armed light infantry skirmishers; close-order shock cavalry carrying spears; and light cavalry skirmishers who threw javelins from a distance and avoided close combat.

[22][23] Both Iberia and Gaul provided small numbers of experienced infantry; unarmoured troops who would charge ferociously, but had a reputation for breaking off if a combat was protracted.

[22][25] Roman and Greek sources refer to these foreign fighters derogatively as "mercenaries", but the modern historian Adrian Goldsworthy describes to this as "a gross oversimplification".

[26] They served under a variety of arrangements; for example, some were the regular troops of allied cities or kingdoms seconded to Carthage as part of formal treaties.

[30] By this time Carthage, with its capital in what is now Tunisia, had come to dominate southern Spain, much of the coastal regions of North Africa, the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, and the western half of Sicily in a military and commercial empire.

Away from the coasts its hilly and rugged terrain made manoeuvring large forces difficult and favoured defensive over offensive operations.

Garrison duty and land blockades were the most common operations for both armies; only two full-scale pitched battles were fought on Sicily during the 23-year-long war; Panormus was one of these.

[53] Panormus was a large, for the time, city on the north coast of Sicily, the site of the modern Sicilian capital Palermo.

[60] In late summer 250 BC[61] Hasdrubal, hearing that one consul (Gaius Furius Pacilus) had left Sicily with half of the Roman army, marched out from the major Carthaginian stronghold of Lilybaeum towards Panormus with 30,000 men and between 60 and 142 elephants.

[62] Halting some distance away, he devastated the harvest in the territories of Rome's newly allied cities, in an attempt to provoke the Roman commander, Lucius Caecilius Metellus, into battle.

The Oreto reached the sea immediately south of Panormus, and once there Hasdrubal ordered part of his army to cross the river and advance up to the city wall.

Panormus was a major supply depot, and townspeople were employed in carrying bundles of javelins from stocks within the city to the foot of the walls so the Roman skirmishers were constantly resupplied.

When the elephants broke, disorganising a large part of the Carthaginian army and demoralising all of it, Metellus ordered an attack on its left flank.

Metellus did not permit a pursuit, but did capture ten elephants in the immediate aftermath and, according to some accounts, the rest of the surviving animals over the succeeding days.

[72][73] Hasdrubal's successor, Adhubal, decided that the large fortified city of Selinus could no longer be garrisoned and had the town evacuated and destroyed.

A large army commanded by the year's consuls Gaius Atilius Regulus and Lucius Manlius Vulso Longus besieged the city.

When Carthage besieged the Roman-protected town of Saguntum in eastern Iberia in 218 BC, it ignited the Second Punic War with Rome.