sources. Polybius was an analytical historian and wherever possible personally interviewed participants in the events he wrote about. Only the first book of the forty comprising The Histories deals with the First Punic War. The accuracy of Polybius's account has been much debated over the past 150 years, but the modern consensus is to accept it largely at face value, and the details of the battle in modern sources are almost entirely based on interpretations of Polybius's account. He was on the staff of Scipio Aemilianus when Scipio led a Roman army during the Third Punic War on a campaign through many of the locations which featured in the events of 256–255 BC. The modern historian Andrew Curry considers that "Polybius turns out to [be] fairly reliable"; while the classicist Dexter Hoyos describes him as "a remarkably well-informed, industrious, and insightful historian". Other, later, histories of the war exist, but in fragmentary or summary form, and they usually cover military operations on land in more detail than those at sea. Modern historians usually also take into account the later histories of Diodorus Siculus and Dio Cassius, although the classicist Adrian Goldsworthy states that "Polybius' account is usually to be preferred when it differs with any of our other accounts." Other sources include inscriptions, coins, archaeological evidence and empirical evidence from reconstructions such as the trireme Olympias. Background In 264 BC the states of Carthage and Rome went to war, starting the First Punic War. Carthage was a well-established maritime power in the Western Mediterranean; Rome had recently unified mainland Italy south of the Arno River under its control. Rome's expansion into southern Italy probably made it inevitable that it would eventually clash with Carthage over Sicily on some pretext. The immediate cause of the war was the issue of control of the Sicilian town of Messana (modern Messina). By 256 BC the war had grown into a struggle in which the Romans were attempting to decisively defeat the Carthaginians and, at a minimum, control the whole of Sicily. The Carthaginians were engaging in their traditional policy of waiting for their opponents to wear themselves out, in the expectation of then regaining some or all of their possessions and negotiating a mutually satisfactory peace treaty. The Romans were essentially a land-based power and had gained control of most of Sicily. The war there had reached a stalemate, as the Carthaginians focused