In the Middle to Late Republic, Rome's expansion through conquest offered her political-military adventurers extraordinary opportunities for self-publicity; the long-drawn series of wars between Rome and Carthage – the Punic Wars – produced twelve triumphs in ten years. Towards the end of the Republic, triumphs became still more frequent, lavish, and competitive, with each display an attempt (usually successful) to outdo the last. To have a triumphal ancestor — even one long-dead — counted for a lot in Roman society and politics, and Cicero remarked that, in the race for power and influence, some individuals were not above vesting an inconveniently ordinary ancestor with triumphal grandeur and dignity, distorting an already fragmentary and unreliable historical tradition.