THE CARTHAGINIAN NAVY.

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an independent footing on her territory, or if disaffection spread among her Libyan allies. She was more than once brought to the brink of ruin by mutinies such as that provoked by the conduct of Hamilcar, and that which, as we shall presently see, followed the First Punic War. The earlier military history of Carthage is characterised by reliance on the mere numbers which enabled her to effect conquests, such as that of Sicily, without any conspicuous generalship. It was not till the time of her adversity that other qualities appeared in the family of Barca, to give Carthage one of the proudest places in the military annals of the world.

Another source of danger to her African empire was the unfortified condition of the subject cities, a state in which Carthage insisted on their remaining, as her military system did not permit of their occupation by trustworthy garrisons. With her own peninsula almost impregnably fortified, she relied on her naval power for her outer line of defence. The wide extent of her maritime enterprises in seas which were already occupied by the Tyrrhenians, the Phocæans and their Massaliot colonists, and the Greeks of Sicily, must have required from a very early time the protection of a war marine; and we have already seen the provision made in the plan of the city for docks and arsenals. Carthage first appears as a great naval power, as the ally of the Tyrrhenians and the enemy of the Greeks in the battle of Alalia; and from that period to the outbreak of the Punic Wars, her maritime supremacy had been steadily increasing. In her Sicilian campaigns we find her sending out navies of 150 and 200 ships; but at the climax of her maritime power, the great sea-fight with Regulus was fought by a fleet of 350 ships, carrying 150,000 men (B.c. 256). The triremes, which she originally used in common with the Greeks, were afterwards superseded by larger ships, which were generally quinqueremes, but the "great ammirals" had sometimes as many as seven banks of oars. † The same

The result of this exposed condition of the African cities has been already seen in the rapid progress of Agathocles.

The particular vessel referred to, the flag-ship in the battle with Duilius, had been taken from Pyrrhus. Among the Greeks, quadriremes and quinqueremes are said to have been first used by Dionysius of Syracuse, which agrees with the story of their Carthaginian origin, though others claimed the invention. The Greek kings of the period after Alexander had a passion for immense ships, of 12, 20, 30, and even 40 banks of oars-floating palaces rather than vessels. One of the most celebrated of these was that built by Archimedes for Hiero, who presented it to the King of Egypt.

class of vessels was adopted during the First Punic War by the Romans, who built their first quinqueremes on the model of a Carthaginian ship that had been wrecked on the coast of Bruttium. The regular crew of a quinquereme was 420, of whom 120 were fighting men and 300 rowers, the latter being public slaves. Kept constantly on board, and perpetually exercised, they were rapid in performing the manoeuvres directed by their bold and skilful commanders. But there was nothing in the naval prestige of the Carthaginians which could not be emulated by rivals so fertile in courage and resources as the Romans; and when the latter were once provided with a fleet, the former felt the fatal want of a land army. "That Rome could only be seriously attacked in Italy, and Carthage only in Libya, no one could fail to see: as little could any one fail to perceive that Carthage could not in the long run escape from such an attack. Fleets were not yet, in those times of the infancy of navigation, a permanent heirloom of nations, but could be fitted out wherever there were trees, iron, and water. It was clear, and had been several times tested in Africa itself, that even powerful maritime states were not able to prevent a weaker enemy from landing. When Agathocles had shown the way thither, a Roman general could follow the same course; and while in Italy the entrance of an invading army simply began the war, the same event in Libya put an end to it by changing it into a siege, in which, unless some special accident should intervene, even the most obstinate and heroic courage must finally succumb."*

Such was the state which now stood committed to an internecine conflict with the other great republic of the west. Such a position seems to have been quite opposed to the traditional policy of Carthage, which had rather been to strengthen herself against the Greeks by alliances with Rome, just as formerly with the Tyrrhenians. Enough has been already said of the treaties of B.C. 509, B.C. 348, and B.C. 306, by which, at the slight cost of acknowledging the unquestioned superiority of Carthage in the African seas, Rome obtained protection for her commerce against the Greek pirates, and the opportunity of subduing the Etruscans and Italians before she was committed to a still more formidable contest. Let Italy be Roman, provided that Sicily be Punic : such was the spirit of the Carthaginian policy, manifested by the

* Mommsen, History of Rome, vol. ii. pp. 26, 27. The same chapter contains an admirable comparison of the constitution, resources, empire, and policy of Rome and Carthage.

B.C. 261.] THE FIRST GREAT ROMAN FLEET.

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congratulations sent to Rome, together with costly offerings, on the conclusion of the First Samnite War (B.C. 342). We have seen how the rivalry, innate in the relative position of the two republics, and left to its natural action by the extinction of the Etruscan and Syracusan powers, was clearly manifested in the affair of Tarentum, and how the aid voted by the Romans to the Mamertines of Rhegium proved the spark that kindled the conflagration of the Punic Wars.

The FIRST PUNIC WAR began in B.C. 264 and lasted till B.C. 241, a period of four-and-twenty years. In three campaigns the Romans made themselves masters of all Sicily, except the maritime fortresses at the western extremity, Eryx* and Panormus. Hamilcar annoyed them by frequent sallies. Meanwhile the Carthaginian navy ravaged the coasts of Italy, exacting contributions from the allies of Rome, and paralysing her commerce (B.C. 261). It became manifest that Sicily could only be held, nay Italy itself protected, by the creation of a fleet powerful enough to cope with the mistress of the seas. The statement is absurd, that the Romans now built a fleet for the first time; but their actual navy was utterly worthless against that of Carthage, both in numbers and class of ships. We know something of the gravity of the problem for even the first of naval powers to reconstruct its navy; but Rome had at the same time to raise hers from insignificance. The alternative of calling in the aid of the Syracusans and Massaliots was wisely rejected, and it was resolved at once to build a fleet of 120 ships of war.† A Carthaginian quinquereme, which had been wrecked on the Bruttian shore, was taken for a model; the recently acquired forest of Silo furnished ample supplies of pitch and timber; and sailors were levied from the commercial marine of the Italian and Grecian cities. To these incredible exertions sixty days sufficed for the building of the 120 ships the rowers were meanwhile practised on scaffolds erected in imitation of the benches: and by the spring of B.C. 260, the fleet was ready to put to sea. The energy which prepared it is almost less surprising than the boldness of leading such a fleet of green wood and raw sailors against such foes as the Carthaginians.

In the sixth year of the war (B. C. 259) Hamilcar transferred the inhabitants of Eryx to Drepanum, as more easily defensible by sea.

+ Of these 100 were quinqueremes and the rest triremes; but another account makes them all quinqueremes.

The Roman name for sailors (socii navales) preserves the memory of their being at first raised chiefly from the allies.

The practical ingenuity of the Romans was evinced by a contrivance for neutralizing the better seamanship of the enemy, and preserving on the sea the superiority of their land force. They returned to the ancient tactics of converting the decks into a battle-field for the soldiers, by the help of a long boarding bridge, hinged up against the mast in the fore-part of the ship. If the first shock of an enemy could only be avoided, the bridge was let fall over the prow or either bow, and fixed to the hostile deck by a long spike which projected from its end: its width permitted the boarders to pass two abreast, and its sides were defended by bulwarks. The consul Cn. Scipio first led out a squadron of seventeen ships for a coup-de-main upon Lipara, only to be taken prisoner with his whole force; but the remainder of the fleet, while sailing along the coast of Italy, surprised and captured a Carthaginian squadron more than equal to that which Scipio had lost, and, with fortune thus retrieved, entered the harbour of Messana. Here the command was taken by the consul C. Duilius, who boldly sailed out to meet the Carthaginian fleet, which was advancing under Hannibal from Panormus. In the battle of MYLÆ (Milazzo), the Carthaginians, coming up in disorder against a foe whose bad sailing excited their contempt, found their ships grappled one by one and carried by the boarders. They saved only half their fleet by a disgraceful flight; but their loss of fourteen ships sunk and thirty-one taken-among the latter the seven-banked flag-ship of the admiral—was but a slight measure of the victory of Duilius. He was received at Rome with the honours due to the man who had given a promise of the issue of the conflict by breaking the prestige of Punic supremacy on the seas; and a column was erected in the Forum, ornamented with the beaks of the captured ships. In a single day, which reaped the fruit of the efforts of a single year, Rome stood forth before the world in her new character as a naval power of the first rank (B.c. 260).

*

Instead of prematurely imitating the enterprise of Agathocles, the Romans now directed all their energies to securing their maritime power by the conquest of Sardinia. But their desultory attacks on its coasts from the naval station which they established at Aleria in Corsica made less impression than the energy of Hamilcar in Italy. While his sallies kept the Romans occupied in the field, his emissaries gained over the smaller towns, and the presence of both consuls could scarcely secure the ground An ancient copy of the inscription on this Columna Rostrata, preserved in the Capitoline Museum, forms one of the precious monuments of the old Latin language.

*

already won. After another great sea-fight off Tyndaris, not far from Mylæ, in which both sides claimed the victory, the Romans obtained the Lipari Islands and Malta (B.c. 257).* But the following year brought on a crisis in the war, and witnessed the appearance of its great hero on the Roman side (for, as we shall soon see, the Carthaginians had theirs too), M. ATILIUS REGULUS. Already distinguished in his former consulship by his conquest of the Salentines (B.C. 267), Regulus was a yeoman noble of the same class and habits as Cincinnatus, Curius, and Fabricius. In the midst of his victorious career in Africa, he is said to have petitioned the Senate for his recal, because the farm which he was wont to till with his own hands was going to ruin in his absence, and his family was reduced to actual want. The time was now come when the Romans thought they might strike the decisive blow in Italy. In the ninth year of the war (B.c. 256) a fleet of 330 ships, manned by 100,000 sailors, embarked an army of 40,000 men, under Regulus and his colleague L. Manlius Vulso, at the mouth of the river Himera (Satso), on the south coast of Sicily. The Carthaginian admiral, who was watching the coast with a fleet of 350 ships, as if to secure his prey, suffered the embarkation to be accomplished, and then drew up in line of battle, with his left resting on the coast at Ecnomus. The action which ensued is celebrated in naval history as the first example of the manœuvre of "breaking the line." The Roman fleet bore down upon the enemy arranged in the shape of a wedge, with the consuls' two ships at the apex, the horse-transports in tow between the extremities of the two oblique lines, and a fourth reserve squadron bringing up the rear. The Carthaginian admirals showed their well-known skill in meeting this novel form of attack. Their centre gave way before the advanced squadron, commanded by the consuls; the right wing made a circuit out in the open sea, and took the Roman reserve in the rear; while the left wing attacked the vessels that were towing the horse-trans

The Roman commander was the consul C. Atilius Regulus Serranus, not to be confounded with the great M. Atilius Regulus, who was consul in the following year with L. Manlius Vulso. Serranus was also consul with the same L. Manlius Vulso in B.C. 250, and was foiled in an attack on Lilybæum.

It is not meant that the tactics of Regulus were precisely the same as those devised by Mr. Clerk of Eldin and executed by Rodney and Nelson, the main object of which was to double with the attacking fleet upon a portion of the enemy's line cut off from the rest. But the resemblance consisted in Regulus's piercing the extended Punic line by bringing an overwhelming force to bear on a single point. His main purpose appears to have been to force the line in such a manner as to carry his transports safely through.