The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (25 page)

Reverse engineering is notoriously difficult under the best of circumstances, but according to
Pliny the Elder, from a standing start with virtually no
shipbuilding industry of their own, the Roman fleet “
was on the water within 60 days after the timber left the tree.” This is all the more astonishing when compared with the three years that experienced Athenian shipwrights had taken to build two hundred ships under
Themistocles. Archaeological finds suggest that the Romans may have benefited from Carthaginian construction techniques. Examination of the so-called
Punic Ship, a third-century
BCE
liburnian found off
Marsala, Sicily, showed that the Carthaginian shipbuilders had written on the various hull pieces to mark their placement in relation to one another, not unlike the system employed in the
Khufu ship twenty-two hundred years before. (A liburnian was an oared vessel—this one had seventeen sweeps on either side—with two men per oar and employed for carrying dispatches and for scouting.) If the ship the Romans used as their template included such builders’ marks, it would have made the job of creating a fleet of ships from scratch far easier than it might otherwise have been.

Because the Carthaginian ships were better built and more capably manned, consul
Gaius Duilius determined to offset the Carthaginians’ superior seamanship by replicating the conditions in which the Romans were unrivaled in battle, and to beat the Carthaginians in boarding actions. Central to the Romans’ tactics was the
corvus
(literally, raven), a boarding ramp 11 meters long by 1.5 meters wide with rails along the sides. One end of the
corvus
was hinged at the base of an eight-meter-high mast mounted forward in the ship. When dropped on the deck of an enemy ship, an iron spike at the outer end held the
corvus
fast and the Roman soldiers swept aboard the enemy ship. When Duilius caught a Carthaginian fleet off the northeastern coast of Sicily
near Mylae in 260
BCE
, the effectiveness of the
corvi
told early. As the Roman marines swarmed the enemy ships, “
the fighting seemed to have been transformed into a battle on dry land.” Carthaginian attempts to round on the Roman ships from astern were ineffective because the
corvus
could be dropped across a broad arc from port to starboard, thus ensuring that the Romans never lost their advantage. By the battle’s end, the Carthaginians had lost 50 of their 130 ships.

Dissatisfied with the lack of progress in Sicily, four years later the Romans took the war to North Africa and came close to forcing an onerous peace on the Carthaginians before their army was soundly defeated. A relief expedition captured more than 100 Carthaginian ships, but en route home the Romans lost more than 280 ships and thirty-five thousand soldiers and crew to storms. Polybius blames the disaster on the commanders’ utter disregard for their pilots’ advice about the weather and their destination, “
the southern coast of Sicily … a rocky shore which possesses few safe anchorages.” He goes on to draw some general observations about Roman character, their reliance on brute strength, and their stubbornness, and why these are incompatible with success at sea. On land, the Romans frequently prevailed against other men and their machines because they could apply “one kind of force against another which is essentially similar.… But when they are contending with the sea and the atmosphere and try to overcome these by force, they meet with crushing defeats. So it turned out on this occasion, and the process will no doubt continue until they correct these preconceptions about daring and force.” One theory attributes the heavy losses to the
corvus,
which in an elevated position would have made the ships top-heavy and prone to capsize. If the Romans realized this, they may have decided that the
corvus
was more dangerous than it was worth, which would explain
why it is not mentioned after the start of the North African campaign.

The war dragged on another fourteen years punctuated by triumphant successes and epic failures, none of them conclusive. The keystone of Carthaginian strategy was the security of Lilybaeum (Marsala, Sicily), which the Romans blockaded off and on for nearly a decade, though they lost more than a thousand ships in storms. The Carthaginians were able to slip the blockade at crucial junctures until 241
BCE
when a fleet laden with grain and manned by relatively unseasoned seamen and marines was intercepted in the
battle of the Aegates Islands north of the port. The Carthaginians lost 120 ships and the Romans took ten thousand prisoners. With no possibility of support from home, Lilybaeum’s position was untenable and the Carthaginians surrendered.

Despite their longer tradition of seafaring, the Carthaginians never came close to victory in the
First Punic War. In some respects this is
understandable. Carthaginian sea power depended on its people’s role as merchant-sailors. They had never fought a major naval war, and while they were not ignorant of warfare—they frequently fought their Numidian neighbors, even during the war with Rome—it was not a hallmark of their civic life. The Romans’ martial spirit and relentless military ambition enabled them to adapt readily to ships and naval warfare, and once they learned to respect the sea, they mastered it.

Trade between Rome and Carthage revived after the war, but despite an avowed policy of nonintervention in Carthaginian affairs, in 238
BCE
Rome seized
Sardinia; nine years later, this and western Sicily became the first two Roman provinces. Meanwhile, the Carthaginians began enlarging their territory in southern Spain. They certainly needed to increase their revenues from Spanish silver mines to pay Rome; they may have wanted to make up for the loss of Sardinia and Sicily; and it may have been a way to employ disgruntled soldiers who had been forced to abandon the field without themselves suffering a defeat. Chief among these was
Hamilcar Barca, who conquered new lands around the
Guadalquivir River and founded
Carthago Nova (Cartagena) on the southwest coast. Roman interest in the
Iberian Peninsula was limited to alliances with individual towns, notably the port of
Saguntum. Nonetheless, a treaty of 226
BCE
made the
Ebro River (which enters the sea about seventy-five miles southwest from Barcelona) the border between the Carthaginian and Roman spheres of influence.

Five years later, Hamilcar’s son
Hannibal became the supreme leader in Carthaginian Spain and in 219
BCE
he seized Saguntum to start the Second Punic War. Marching on Italy via southern France and the
Alps, Hannibal defeated the Romans repeatedly between 218 and 216
BCE
; at Cannae, on the Adriatic coast east of
Naples, fewer than fifteen thousand of eighty thousand Roman soldiers escaped death or capture. Yet Carthage never challenged Rome at sea, and although Hannibal remained at large in Italy for fifteen years, only one fleet reached him there, while Rome received
steady supplies of grain from Sicily, Sardinia, and possibly Egypt. Hannibal finally left the peninsula in 203
BCE
, when he was recalled to lead the defense of Carthage against the armies of Publius Cornelius Scipio. Although there were no major naval battles, maritime strategy was as important to the outcome of the Second Punic War as it had been in the first, a fact that Scipio appreciated better than anyone.

Scipio’s fortunes were inextricably linked to the war in Spain, where he led the capture of Saguntum in 212
BCE
and of Carthago Nova three years later. Polybius credits Scipio with perceiving the latter’s strategic value. “
He discovered first of all,” writes Scipio’s friend, “that it was virtually unique among the cities of Spain in possessing a harbor which could accommodate a fleet and naval forces, and that it was also conveniently situated for the Carthaginians
to make the direct sea crossing from Africa.” Scipio further reckoned that if his attempt to take the port failed, “he could still ensure the safety of his men because of his command of the sea.” The loss of Carthago Nova left the Carthaginians with only one major overseas port, at Gadir. Returning to Rome, Scipio began planning an invasion of North Africa. Hannibal was recalled to Carthage, where in 202
BCE
Scipio defeated him at the
battle of Zama, thus earning the honorific Africanus. Hannibal urged the Carthaginians to accept the
Roman peace terms before fleeing to the Seleucid court of Antiochus III, “the Great.”

It has been said that the Romans did not display a “
naval mentality” during the Second Punic War, but in fact their naval strategy was tailored precisely to the Carthaginian threat. The Romans had not abandoned their fleet after the First Punic War, but there were excellent reasons for them to avoid the expense of building and manning more ships than they did. With Hannibal’s army ravaging Italy, there was little manpower available for a larger fleet, especially considering that most naval losses in the first war had been to the elements and there was no Carthaginian naval threat to speak of. More to the point, the Romans were fighting simultaneously the First
Macedonian War (215–197
BCE
), in which their fleet played a critical role in the Adriatic and Aegean. Their involvement in the Adriatic began in 229
BCE
, in response to pleas from Italian merchants who had been harassed by ships from
Illyria, on the Balkan shore. The Romans launched a two-hundred-ship expedition and pressured the Illyrians to guarantee that they would never sail south of Lissus (Lezhe, in northwest
Albania) with more than two lightly armed
lembi,
a type of single- or double-banked galley they had developed. (Ideally suited for fast scouting and raiding expeditions, the
lembus
was later adopted by other maritime powers.)

Fighting resumed on the eve of Hannibal’s invasion of Italy, when Demetrius of
Pharos (the island of Hvar,
Croatia) took a fleet of
lembi
for a raiding expedition in the Aegean. Defeated by the Romans, he fled to Philip V of Macedonia, whose anti-Roman tendencies he encouraged. Rome did not commit many resources to the Adriatic, but a lot could be done with relatively few. Ten ships drove off a fleet of a hundred Macedonian
lembi
in 216
BCE
, after which the Romans assigned up to fifty ships to the coast between
Tarentum and Brundisium. They also forged an alliance with the
Aetolian League under which the Romans provided a fleet and were entitled to any movable property
in places it seized, terms appropriate to a maritime-based strategy, while the Greek city-states of the league fought the land war and received any captured territories. The war ended in 205
BCE
, but five years later the Romans renewed the fight because of Philip’s threats to their Greek allies, including
Athens and Rhodes, and for fear that he would soon be in a position to attack Italy.
“It took
Hannibal four months to reach Italy from
Saguntum,” declared one consul, “but Philip, if we let him, will arrive four days after he sets sail from
Corinth.”
Titus Quinctius Flamininus took his legions to
Illyria and in 197
BCE
smashed the
Macedonian army. Philip surrendered all but five of his regular warships and a “sixteen,” and withdrew his garrisons from around Greece. Flamininus grandly proclaimed the Greeks a free people, a contention they would soon dispute.

In the interim, the
Seleucid Antiochus the Great had crossed the
Hellespont to exercise his dynastic claims to
Thrace, which trumped any interest the newly arrived Romans could assert in Greece or the
Balkans. In 192
BCE
, he landed at the city of Demetrias (north of
Euboea) whose citizens believed that they were “
free in appearance only, while in reality everything was done at the Roman’s nod.” The Romans shattered Antiochus’s army at
Thermopylae, but the experience forced them to reevaluate their view of the Aegean world and their relationship to it. As a modern historian has put it, “
The essential unity of the Aegean basin, of the Greek world of Asia and of Europe as a geo-political system, had been revealed with dazzling clarity.” The late date at which the Romans received this epiphany attests to just how removed politically and culturally they had been from the
Hellenistic world of the eastern Mediterranean.

Armed with this new awareness, Scipio Africanus and his brother took up the challenge of asserting Roman hegemony in the Aegean. Antiochus’s fleet posed a real threat, so rather than cross the Aegean they marched their armies north to the Hellespont. The Roman fleet was under command of
Marcus Livius, who drew his crews from the
coloniae maritimae
despite their previous exemption from conscription. Notwithstanding its small size and the crews’ reluctance to serve, the value of the Roman navy was acknowledged by no less an authority than Hannibal, who advised Antiochus that “
Roman arms were quite as powerful at sea as on land.” As if to prove the point, the Romans and their Rhodian allies bested a succession of Seleucid fleets, including one under Hannibal. These defeats rattled Antiochus, as the Roman historian
Livy explains, “
because with the loss of his command of the sea he was doubtful of his ability to defend his distant possessions.” He withdrew his army from the Hellespont, and Scipio’s legions crossed into Asia unopposed. After a final battle on land, the Romans dictated a peace that eliminated Seleucid influence
from
Ionia. Rome now exercised its hegemony over the entire Aegean and after centuries of fending off an eastern despotism, the Greeks had succumbed to a western one.

To preserve their dominance, the Romans embarked on a campaign of divide and rule, one of the first victims being its faithful ally Rhodes, which it repeatedly undermined. After the Third
Macedonian War (172–167
BCE
), Rome transferred the island of
Delos to Athens with the stipulation that Delos be made a
duty-free port, which cost Rhodes an estimated 140 talents (about 3,500 kilograms of silver) in income per year in
harbor dues alone. A further blow came at the conclusion of the Third Punic War (149–146
BCE
) and the destruction of Carthage, which had been an important trading partner. This war had been preceded by Rome’s refusing the Carthaginians permission to defend themselves against attacks from neighboring Numidia; forcing it to surrender its arms to Rome; and insisting that the city itself be destroyed and its inhabitants moved eighty stades inland—coincidentally, the same distance that
Plato recommended to preserve a city from the corrupting influences of maritime trade. The Carthaginians declined these outrageous demands, but half a century of subservience to Rome in foreign and military affairs had left their navy undermanned, ill-equipped, and poorly trained. Yet even with their overwhelming advantages in preparation, weapons, and experience, it took the Romans three years to win the last of the
Punic Wars. When the city finally fell to the army of
Scipio Aemilianus, he heeded the war cry of
Cato, the Roman senator who with puritanical zeal had long urged his fellow citizens to war by closing his speeches with the words “
Carthage must be destroyed.” So it was, and with it a maritime power that had flourished for more than seven centuries.
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