The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic (12 page)

Militarily, Carthage was on firmer ground at sea. Shipborne trade was the city’s lifeblood, and the necessary skills and experience were likely to have been widely shared by a whole class of mariners. Undoubtedly many crewed in commercial transports. It also appears probable, though not certain, that Carthage’s navy was largely, if not exclusively Carthaginian manned.
32
Since Hellenic navies were rowed by their own nationals, Polybius, a Greek, likely would have mentioned it had it not been the case with Carthage. It has also been suggested that naval service helps explain the political stability of the city, since it would have given the poorest elements steady employment.
33

This was no minor proposition. By 256 B.C. the basic Carthaginian warship, a quinquereme (named after the arrangement of its oars), required a crew of around three hundred to row.
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Archaeological excavation of the famed circular military harbor at Carthage indicates berthing space for around 180 first-line warships. Together this amounts to a requirement of fifty-four thousand oarsmen, a substantial percentage of the total male population. All signs point to Carthaginians taking great pride in their fleet, and this in turn points to wide participation. (Livy reports that when Scipio Africanus burned the Carthaginian fleet at the end of the Second Punic War, the sight caused grief as deep as if the city itself had been aflame.
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)

Arguably this pride and this participation were at the heart of Carthage’s tragic fate. The fleet, as noted above, was a fragile asset, and its military power was hard to apply, but that would not have been apparent, either to Carthaginian or to other eyes. During the first portion of the third century B.C., the force’s squadrons swept around the waters of the western Mediterranean, showing the flag and looking very formidable. In 276, Plutarch tells us, the Carthaginians caught Pyrrhus in the Strait of Messana (modern Messina) and destroyed most of what was probably a convoy of merchant vessels carrying his soldiers.
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When Carthage later went to war with the Romans, the admiral Hanno boasted that he would not even let Romans wash their hands in the sea. Given the circumstances, it sounded realistic, but instead the Romans would turn the waters around Sicily red with Carthaginian blood. For they would fight as if they were on land, and Carthage would find itself locked in a struggle that would consume huge quantities of its wealth. This is generally conceded, but there is something entirely more demoralizing that has been largely overlooked: quite probably large numbers of the citizens who manned the oars of Carthage’s war galleys were killed.

[4]

Carthage and Rome had a long and not necessarily unfriendly relationship, with Polybius (3.22 ff) citing three treaties between the two states going back as far as 508–7 B.C. There is a lot of scholarly debate over the contents of the first two pacts, yet most agree they were largely about carving out spheres of influence for trade. The Carthaginians were interested in keeping the Romans clear of Libya and Sardinia, but they yielded primacy in Latium and granted the Romans commercial rights in Sicily—fair enough, considering the status and motivation of the parties. The final agreement in 279–8 was specifically concerned with mutual support against Pyrrhus, though nothing much came of it, except perhaps bad feelings. There is a confusing story that had a Carthaginian fleet descending on Pyrrhus’s erstwhile ally, the city of Tarentum, in 272, just as the Romans were besieging it by land. The Carthaginians were offering their help, but this left the Romans suspicious, since no aid had been requested. At any rate, relations continued downhill.

A group of Campanian mercenaries, who had earlier worked for Agathocles, seized the city of Messana in Sicily sometime during the 280s.
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Calling themselves Mamertines, after the war god Mars, the Campanians took advantage of the confusion engendered by Pyrrhus’s short stay to plunder the surrounding area and generally make a nuisance of themselves for upward of fifteen years. Then, hard-pressed by the new and vigorous ruler of Syracuse, Hiero, the Mamertines appealed to both Carthage and Rome for help. Both responded, which put them in a competitive position and eventually on a collision course. Many contemporary historians agree with Polybius that the Roman decision to take up the sword in 264 was basically opportunistic, driven by Rome’s fundamental motivators—the potential for military reputation and plunder—Romans acting like Romans.
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Still, it is interesting to note that in the years just prior to the first clash with Carthage, families of Campanian origin were on the political ascendancy in Rome (the Atilii, who held the consulship seven times between 267 and 245, were from Campania), and products from this district—pottery and wine—were in direct competition with Punic wares.
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The Carthaginians, for their part, had been wrangling over chunks of Sicily for three centuries; in that regard this was nothing new, a continuation of business by other means. But Carthage very likely had no idea what to expect or, in Livy’s words (31.34.6) “what men they had to fight.” After all, Sicily was an island, and Carthage was a sea power.

Actually, Carthage was at the precipice—the immovable object faced with Rome, the irresistible force. The first struggle would last twenty-three years, the longest continuous war in ancient history. Less than a century later there would be nothing left of Carthage, save smoldering ruins.

The First Punic War began inconclusively. The Carthaginian fleet proved unable to keep the Romans off the island, but the Romans had trouble making progress once they got there, since the rough topography did not favor massed land battles. (There would be only four in the entire conflict, two of them in Africa.) Also, most of the population lived behind walls, which made it hard for the Romans to get at and control the civilians. After the arduous though successful siege of Agrigentum, the Romans realized that the only way to win was to exclude the Carthaginians from the entire island, and that meant building a fleet.
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It was an audacious proposition. Romans did not take to the sea naturally, and apparently no one in Italy had experience with quinqueremes. Polybius (1.20.10) tells us that to fill the gap they used a Carthaginian warship that had run aground early in the war, and duplicated it one hundred times in sixty days—ancient reverse engineering. Meanwhile, oarsmen were trained on stages, sitting in the order they would assume at sea. Even if, as is likely, these rowers were joined by
socii navales
, naval allies, from Italian coastal towns with seafaring traditions, the Roman armada—its men and its timber—were bound to be green in comparison to Carthage’s. They proved it on their first mission when the crews of a seventeen-ship squadron panicked and were captured, earning for their commander, an ancestor of Scipio Africanus, the nickname Asina (“she-ass”). This initial loss was deceptive, however. Almost immediately the Carthaginians ran into the main Roman fleet and lost a number of ships, and this was only their first unpleasant surprise.

The Romans had a secret weapon. Realizing their quinqueremes were outclassed, someone had suggested turning them into delivery systems for marines by mounting pivoting boarding bridges, which Polybius calls “crows,” on their bows. As a Carthaginian vessel approached to ram, the crow from the Roman ship would slam down, embedding itself with an iron beak, whereupon a file of
gladius-
wielding Romans would storm aboard to wreak havoc on the helpless oarsmen. In the war’s first massive fleet action off Myle on the north coast of Sicily, the Carthaginians were puzzled by the strange devices but sailed confidently ahead, and were thus impaled, losing around forty-five ships and ten thousand men, many of whom were killed.
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If the crow was sort of the reductio ad absurdum of naval warfare, allowing the Romans to turn seaborne encounters into infantry battles, the Carthaginians were plainly slow to react, suffering a string of defeats off Sulci and Tyndaris, and then a huge one at Cape Economus. The latter, which involved almost three hundred thousand participants—more than had fought in a naval battle before or since—has been compared to Cannae in the way the Punic center collapsed inward; but certainly with different results. According to Polybius (1.28.10–14), the Carthaginians had over thirty ships sunk, and sixty-four captured by the Romans and their crows.

Rome now went for the knockout.
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Refitting their fleet, they headed to Africa in the late summer of 256, disembarked near Cape Bon, and ravaged the rich agricultural district, just as Agathocles had done. At this point messengers from Italy ordered most of the fleet back with the spoils, leaving the consul Regulus with forty ships and two legions. He almost immediately met and defeated the Carthaginians at a place called Adys, plundering their camp and leaving them despondent and faced with the threat of a native revolt. But Regulus overplayed his hand. He offered peace terms so harsh that his opponents decided they had little to lose by continuing.

With their backs quite literally to their city’s wall, the Carthaginians were open to suggestions. A Greek mercenary named Xanthippus, who was familiar with Spartan training methods, took command and drilled a scratch force of civilians into an effective phalanx. In the spring of 255 he led them onto a chosen field, accompanied by a strong cavalry element and approximately a hundred elephants. Rather than wait for reinforcements, Regulus, whose horse were heavily outnumbered, engaged and soon found himself engulfed and then captured, with only about two thousand Romans managing to escape to their original camp near Cape Bon. This disaster would cast a long shadow over Scipio Africanus’s plan to take the Second Punic War to Africa a half-century later.

The Carthaginians, who had suffered negligible losses, were undoubtedly elated, but only temporarily. The Romans had readied a fleet to blockade Carthage at sea while Regulus invested it by land. Events having overtaken that plan, the fleet was now sent to rescue the remnants of the Roman invasion force. The Carthaginians intercepted the armada off Cape Bon,
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only to lose 114 ships, many of them driven ashore and captured by the Roman grappling tactics—their fifth naval defeat of the war.

Carthage had not done well; nearly a decade of fighting had brought little but futility. The city was no longer under threat, but the fleet was shattered and it would be five years before we would hear of renewed operations at sea.
44
Carthaginian warships and seamanship were plainly superior, but in the massed engagements close to shore that had been typical of this conflict, there was little opportunity to apply these advantages. Instead the Carthaginians found themselves boarded and their vessels captured, and in such circumstances it can be presumed that the Roman marines were not gentle. This along with drowning must have led to many thousands of casualties. All aboard were probably not citizens, but the toll on the city’s male population must have been heavy. It was fortunate for Carthage that, unlike during much of the war with Hannibal, prisoners of this conflict were frequently ransomed; therefore, many men were probably able to return to their homes. Still, the city’s demographics must have been significantly affected. Carthage remained enormously wealthy, and could afford to reinforce and rebuild its mercenary land forces in Sicily at least five times during the war.
45
Yet the naval fleet was a precious asset, and if it were decimated, Carthage could not win this type of conflict.

Meanwhile the Romans were also being swamped by fate, discovering that while at sea, seamanship did matter. After picking up the remnants of Regulus’s Afrika Korps, they ran into a sudden storm off Camarina on the south coast of Sicily. Probably already riding low in the bow from the weight of their crows, the war galleys didn’t stand a chance against the heavy seas and rocky shores. Of 364 ships, Polybius (1.37.2) says, only 80 survived, and he calls it the greatest naval catastrophe in history. His words still stand; there is simply no modern equivalent. More than one hundred thousand Romans and Italians likely drowned—twice the number of dead at Cannae. That number may have amounted to 15 percent of all the military manpower in Italy.
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But if the Romans were discouraged, they didn’t show it. Instead, they voted the two consuls in charge triumphs for the victory at Cape Bon, and set about rebuilding the fleet. By the spring of 254, they may have had as many as three hundred ships and were looking for trouble.
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They found it. After establishing superiority in Sicilian waters, they were back in Africa raiding the coast. While the Carthaginians failed to challenge them, the tides did, beaching the fleet until they managed to break free by jettisoning everything heavy, including presumably their spoils. Disconcerted, the Romans left in a hurry, and the commander Sempronius Blaesus compounded his problems by attempting an open sea return to Italy, during which he ran into another storm off Cape Palinurus in Lucania that cost him more than 150 ships. He too was voted a triumph, but for the next few years Romans cut back their operations and regrouped.

The year 249 found them blockading Lilybaeum, one of the last Carthaginian bases in Sicily, but none too successfully, since elements of the renascent Punic fleet stationed nearby at Drepana had repeatedly relieved it. The new consul, Publius Claudius Pulcher, rashly intent on eliminating this nuisance, sailed north at midnight aiming to surprise the Carthaginian commander Adherbal. The Punic fleet barely cleared the harbor, but once in open waters was at last able to effectively apply its superior crews and equipment against the Romans, who appear to have given up their crows and who ended up losing 93 out of 123 of their ships. And that was just the beginning. The other consul, L. Iunius Pullus, was leading a convoy of eight hundred transports and 120 warships to resupply the troops at Lilybaeum, when he was intercepted by a smaller Carthaginian squadron under Carthalo. Without ever actually engaging, the Carthaginian admiral forced the Roman fleet’s two detachments close to the rugged shore, and then, anticipating a storm, he ducked behind Cape Pachynon, leaving the Romans facing the full fury of the squall. Before the storm was over the Roman navy had virtually ceased to exist.