The Mercenary War, also known as the Truceless War, was a mutiny by troops employed by Carthage at the end of the First Punic War (264 to 241 BC), backed by an uprising of African settlements against Carthaginian control. The war began in 241 BC as a dispute over wages owed to 20,000 foreign soldiers. It erupted into a full-scale mutiny that included 70,000 Africans from Carthage's oppressed dependent territories, bringing supplies and finance. The Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca initially demonstrated leniency to woo the rebels over, but pursued the war with great brutality after they tortured 700 Carthaginian prisoners to death. It ended in late 238 or early 237 BC with a Carthaginian victory. An expedition was then prepared to reoccupy Sardinia, where all Carthaginians had been killed. However, Rome declared that this would be an act of war and occupied both Sardinia and Corsica, in contravention of the recent peace treaty. (This article is part of a featured topic: Punic Wars.).
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_topics/Punic_Wars
_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1934:
At least 10,700 people died when an earthquake registering 8.0 Mw struck Nepal and the Indian state of Bihar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1934_Nepal%E2%80%93India_earthquake
1951:
Ilse Koch, the wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camps, was sentenced to life imprisonment by a West German court. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilse_Koch
1981:
The American serial police-procedural television show Hill Street Blues aired its pilot episode, "Hill Street Station". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_Street_Station
1991:
Queen Elizabeth II signed letters patent instituting the Victoria Cross for Australia; the country became the first Commonwealth realm with a separate Victoria Cross award in its honours system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Cross_for_Australia
_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
field of vision: The area that a person, an animal, etc., can see with its eyes (or each eye individually) without turning the head. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/field_of_vision
___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
An individual has not begun to live until he can rise above the narrow horizons of his particular individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. And this is one of the big problems of life, that so many people never quite get to the point of rising above self. And so they end up the tragic victims of self-centeredness. They end up the victims of distorted and disrupted personality. … These are the people who cannot face disappointments. These are the people who cannot face being defeated. These are the people who cannot face being criticized. These are the people who cannot face these many experiences of life which inevitably come because they are too centered in themselves. --Martin Luther King, Jr. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.