Then, in the third century B.C., came a very remarkable experience: the first great war with Carthage, fought for twenty-three years in Sicily, the victories of which compelled the whole civilized world of the day to recognize the existence of this hitherto unknown people and to invent plausible pedigrees for it. The construction of the first fleet and the sudden defeat of the greatest navy on the seas must have aroused the Romans to self-consciousness, as the Crusades aroused the French and the defeat of the Spanish Armada awakened Elizabethan England. This discovery of the Romans that they existed—that they were being watched and discussed—stirred them into a critical attitude about themselves. They saw that importance in the eyes of others implied expectations. And they discovered that, by the definition of the Greeks, they were barbarians and that the designation was deserved. They set about to learn avidly and to enter into the cultural occupations of the more advanced Greeks. The first Messala, who had liberated Messana in the second year of the war, imported a painter to depict his victories on the walls of the senate house at Rome. Duilius who had defeated the Punic Armada was voted an honorary column with a long inscription modeled on the most verbose Sicilian laudations. But these are only some of the superficial effects of the new contacts. The Roman youth serving in Sicily was learning much more. Since the war lasted twenty-three years and since it required the services of practically all the able-bodied young men of Rome, these youths, who encamped some six years each in and about the Greek towns of Sicily, carried home an abundance of impressions that meant much for the future of Rome. There can be little doubt that the tragedies of Euripides and the comedies of Menander were still being played at Syracuse and even in the smaller towns. Indeed Sicily had dramatic writers for many years after Athens had ceased to produce them. Mimes had long been a specialty of Sicily, and Theocritus was still writing them. Rhinton, for a while residing at Syracuse, was producing his farcical parodies of tragedies. Songs, too, tragical, comical, and sentimental were being sung with gestures, with dance and musical accompaniment on the variety stage of Sicilian towns. It was doubtless to satisfy the desires of soldiers who had seen these things that Roman officials immediately after the war introduced the production of Greek tragedies and comedies as a regular feature of the Roman festival. That all important date for Roman and world literature is 240 B.C.