The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire (33 page)

Warships were very different creatures—sleek, fast death machines. They were galleys with rows of oars to supplement sails. By the third century, the quinqereme was the craft of choice. It carried a crew of some three hundred oarsmen. It might be about forty meters long and, at sea level, five wide. The deck stood about three meters above the water. A metal beak was attached to the keel and projected from the bow, and the main tactic of attack was to ram an enemy midships and sink or, at least, swamp it. A quinquereme at action stations could attain more than ten knots an hour, but only in spurts. Five knots was a more likely average.

The word
quinquereme
derives from the Latin for “five oars.” This is misleading, for it seems it was oarsmen not oars that were arranged in groups of five. They controlled three oars set one above another.
Two men rowed with each of the top two oars and one with the bottom oar. The team occupied a wooden box, or frame, that jutted out of the ship’s side.

Ships of every kind were vulnerable to bad weather and tended to hug the coast for safety. Few ventured out in the winter months. This was not only to avoid storms but also because of the increased cloudiness. In the daytime, mariners navigated by the sun and landmarks, and by the stars at night. Without clear skies, they were lost.

The Carthaginians had the most technically advanced navy, and for Rome to create a fleet from a standing start that could compete with them was a bold, some must have said foolhardy, enterprise. But just as the serendipitous capture of an Enigma code machine helped the British win the Battle of the Atlantic in the Second World War, so chance came to the Republic’s rescue. Apparently, quinqueremes were unknown in Italy and Roman shipbuilders were completely inexperienced at building them. Polybius observes:

It was not a question of having adequate resources for the project, for they in fact had none whatsoever, nor had they ever given a thought to the sea before this. But once they had conceived the idea, they embarked on it so boldly that without waiting to gain any experience in naval warfare they immediately engaged the Carthaginians, who had for generations enjoyed an unchallenged supremacy at sea.

At the beginning of the war, Rome had no warships of any kind and borrowed some small secondhand vessels from Tarentum and other Italiote cities to guard the transport of troops to Messana.
Luckily, all went well, and, even more luckily,
a Punic quinquereme ventured too close to shore, ran aground, and fell into Roman hands.

We know from the discovery of the remains of a third-century military craft off the port of Lilybaeum that each part of it was marked with different letters, enabling speedy “flat pack” assembly. So it cannot have been a difficult or lengthy task to produce copycat versions of the captured ship. Within two months, despite the inexperience of their shipwrights, the Romans were the proud owners of a brand-new fleet, comprising one hundred quinqeremes and twenty triremes (galleys rowed by oarsmen in groups of three).

While the ships were being built, sailors—more than thirty thousand of them—were recruited. Their training had to be undertaken on dry land, however foolish those taking part must have felt. Polybius records what happened:

[The trainers] placed the men along the rowers’ benches on dry land, seating them in the arrangement as if they were on those of an actual vessel, and then stationing the keleustes [time-caller] in the middle, they trained them to swing back their bodies in unison bringing their hands up to them, then to move forward again thrusting their hands in front of them, and to begin and end these movements at the keleustes’ word of command.

As soon as the ships were completed, they were launched and the crews went aboard for some “real-life” practice. Under the command of a consul-admiral, they then set sail for the high seas.

To have established a maritime arm in so short a space of time was an extraordinary achievement. In its wars with the Samnites and the campaigns against Pyrrhus, Rome had shown a capacity to hang on, to bear disaster, and to return grimly to the fray. Here was evidence now of a less reactive, more purely aggressive energy. The creation of a new fleet almost out of thin air revealed Rome’s unremitting
enthusiasm for new challenges. It had learned how to upgrade itself into a more expansive, more irresistible state of being.

WOULD THIS UNTESTED
fleet win victories against the marine superpower of the age? An instant setback and the consul’s humiliating capture by the enemy gave pause for thought. However hard the shipbuilders tried, the fact was that the Roman ships were heavier and clumsier than their Punic counterparts. The Carthaginians were masters of maneuver. They knew how to sink their opponents by ramming, and they avoided having to fight hand to hand.

Some creative but now anonymous Roman came up with a very clever idea that restored the balance of advantage. He invented a device called a
corvus
, or “raven.” This was a wooden bridge with low railings attached to a vertical pole. Probably fixed near a ship’s bow, it could swivel around and be raised or lowered by a system of pulleys. A spike was attached to its underside. A Roman warship would approach an enemy quinquereme and drop the bridge down onto its deck. The spike pierced the deck and held the bridge in place. Then a team of between seventy and a hundred marines, experienced soldiers all, crossed over to the other vessel and captured it.

In effect, the
corvus
transformed a sea battle into a land battle on water, and took the Carthaginians completely by surprise. In the summer of 260, the Romans received intelligence that the enemy was ravaging the countryside near Mylae (today’s Milazzo), not far from Sicily’s northeastern tip, and sent their entire fleet there. As soon as the Carthaginians sighted them, they sailed ahead without hesitation. They were full of scorn for these Italian amateurs and did not trouble to keep any formation. They were puzzled by the ravens but rowed on regardless.

To their dismay, the first thirty ships to engage were grappled and boarded. The rest of the Punic fleet saw what was happening
and sheered off to encircle and ram the Romans. But they simply swung their gangways around to meet attacks from any direction. The Carthaginians, unnerved, turned and fled, having lost 50 ships out of a total of 130.

The Punic commander avoided execution because he had prophylactically sought and won advance permission from the authorities in Carthage to fight the battle. But when the cock-a-hoop Romans successfully extended their field of operations to Corsica and Sardinia his men mutinied and put him to death, perhaps by stoning.

An odd reversal of reputations was taking place. On the one hand, the Republic was ruling the waves, launching successful raids and scoring a devastating second victory over the enemy fleet; on the other, the Carthaginians were doing well on land in Sicily. They practiced a policy of attrition, avoiding open battle and forcing the Romans to undertake siege after lengthy siege of fortified hill town after hill town.

The Senate engaged in another strategic review. It was decided to exploit Rome’s new superiority at sea, bypass Sicily, and send an expeditionary force to attack Carthage itself. In 256, the two consuls and an armada of 330 ships set sail for North Africa; 120 foot soldiers joined each boat, making a total army strength of 120,000 in addition to the regular 100,000 oarsmen. This was a hugely ambitious project, with an unprecedented number of lives at risk.

The Carthaginians saw that this was a crisis point and assembled an even larger fleet of 350 galleys. The two sides met at Cape Ecnomus (today’s Poggio di Sant’Angelo, in Licata), on Sicily’s southern coast, and once again the Romans routed the enemy, sinking or capturing more than ninety ships. The way lay clear to the Punic capital.

The consuls disembarked safely to the east of Cape Bon, a promontory at the opposite end of the Gulf of Tunis from Carthage, and set about plundering the countryside, ravaging fertile estates and
capturing twenty thousand slaves. The campaign could not have gotten off to a better start. But summer was wearing on, and the Senate recalled one of the consuls, who sailed back to Italy with much of the army, loot, and captives. His colleague, Marcus Atilius Regulus, was left behind to winter in Africa with fifteen thousand infantry, five thousand cavalry, and forty ships. The Carthaginians realized, as they were meant to do, that this was no brief raid but an invasion. The legions intended to stay.

The Punic army came to the relief of a fort only twenty or so miles from the town of Tunes (today’s Tunis). Nervous of the Roman infantry, its commanders did their best to avoid a set-piece battle but still managed to get dislodged, with heavy losses, from their safe position on high ground. Tunes then fell to Regulus. Refugees from the hinterland crowded into Carthage and food supplies fell dangerously low. The endgame was at hand.

The Carthaginians opened peace talks. Regulus was an unimaginative man with too high an opinion of himself. He wanted the campaign over during his year of office, and then the satisfaction of a triumph. He was in a hurry. Virtually master of the city, he felt that all he needed to do was state his terms for them to be accepted. These were unrealistically harsh and had the opposite of the intended effect. The Carthaginians were to withdraw from Sicily and Sardinia; all Roman prisoners of war were to be released, while Punic captives were to be ransomed. Rome’s war costs were to be paid and an annual tribute levied. Carthage would be allowed to go to war only with Rome’s permission. These conditions were tantamount to unconditional surrender, but while the situation of the Punic state was critical, it was by no means terminal. The talks foundered.

Meanwhile, the Carthaginian high command recognized that its generals were incompetent and, in the spring of 255, sought advice from a Spartan military expert on the best way of dealing with the invaders. Firm discipline and training were introduced, and the
soldiers’ morale rose. The Punic army marched out and trounced the complacent Romans. The victory was won by cavalry outflanking the legions and destroying them. Regulus and five hundred others were captured, and of the rest of his force only two thousand made their escape from the field of slaughter.

Regulus’s fate is uncertain. He most probably died of natural causes in captivity. A tradition grew that he was released on his honor to negotiate a treaty at Rome. He advised the Senate to reject the Punic proposals and, keeping his word, returned to Carthage. According to a first-century historian, an acquaintance of Cicero:

They locked him in a dark and deep dungeon, and a long time later brought him out into the bright light of the sun, held him in its direct rays and forced him to look up at the sky. They even pulled his eyelids apart up and down and sewed them fast, so that he could not close his eyes.

Others report that he died from sleep deprivation.

The disaster put an end to the invasion, but it was not yet complete. The Senate had intended to send out a fleet to blockade Carthage while Regulus attacked from the city’s landward side. News of the debacle arrived before the fleet set out, but some 210 vessels were dispatched to rescue what was left of the expeditionary force. This they accomplished, brushing off a Carthaginian fleet and raiding the countryside for provisions. On their way home, though, they sailed into a tremendous storm. Hampered by their
corvi
, most ships were driven onto the rocks off the southeastern corner of Sicily. About 25,000 soldiers and 70,000 oarsmen drowned. In no previous war had Rome lost so many men at a single blow. The fleet was soon rebuilt, but in 253 it, too, was destroyed in a storm after raiding the African coast. This time, 150 ships were lost.

It is hard to know how much these catastrophes owed to bad luck. No doubt, something, but it seems that Rome’s admirals
understood fighting better than they did seamanship. Whatever the explanation, the public in Italy was shocked by the losses at sea and even Rome could not stand this human hemorrhage. The decision to fight Carthage by sea had failed. The Carthaginians were exhausted, too, not only by the struggle with Rome but also by a long-standing insurgency by the Numidians, their African neighbors. The war had reached a stalemate. For the next two years, there was a lull in hostilities.

A NEW CLAUDIUS
now arrived on the political scene at Rome. Grandson of Claudius Caecus, the Blind, Publius possessed a full share of the clan’s awkward, arrogant genes (or else was typecast by later disobliging historians). He was given the cognomen of Pulcher, meaning beautiful or pretty, so good looks can be inferred—or perhaps merely vanity about his looks.

The campaign in Sicily remained a long, hard slog, but Rome made some progress, capturing the Punic city of Panormus (today’s Palermo). Lilybaeum, on the island’s western tip, was one of Carthage’s last two strongholds. In 250, it was decided that a further effort should be made to clear Sicily of Carthaginians. A consular army and a new fleet of two hundred ships was sent out from Italy and invested the highly defensible port.

Consul for the following year, Claudius decided to launch a surprise attack on nearby Drepana (close to modern Trapani), the only other Punic base. Before battle commenced, he took the auspices in his capacity as admiral. An auspice was an omen as revealed through the observed behavior of birds—how they flew, sang, or ate. On this occasion, some sacred chickens were given food. They refused to touch it, a very bad sign, and Claudius ought to have aborted his enterprise, at least for that day. Instead, he lost his temper and threw the fowls into the sea, with the words “
Let them drink, if they won’t eat!”

The raid was an embarrassing failure. Apparently the Roman ships were not equipped with the
corvus
, allowing the enemy full scope for maneuver and ramming. Claudius lost more than 90
galleys (out of 120), although many of the crew made it to shore and rejoined the army outside Lilybaeum.

But a fresh disaster quickly followed. A consular fleet of 120 ships accompanying 800 transports sailed from Syracuse to resupply the army outside Lilybaeum. It was outsmarted by the enemy and driven without a battle onto the rocky coastline of southern Sicily. The Carthaginian admiral, an experienced sailor, detected a change in the weather and withdrew behind a promontory, Cape Pachynus (today’s Cape Passero), leaving the Romans to face a tempest that blew unforgivingly at the shore. The entire fleet was wrecked, except for twenty ships.