Campaigning went well for the Romans, who captured Acragas, an important Greek city and the Punic headquarters. Nevertheless, the Senate realized that however well the war went on land, it would be impossible to expel the Carthaginians as long as they commanded the seas, transporting reinforcements, blockading harbors, and raiding Italy. Rome, which had never been much interested in maritime matters, would have to build a fleet.
THE SEA WAS busy but perilous. For hundreds of years sailors, Phoenicians and Greeks especially, had crisscrossed the Mediterranean, ferrying wheat from the Black Sea, boat timber from Berytus, woolen fabrics from Miletus. Heavy goods such as oil and wine were much more easily transported by ship than on carts lumbering along unmetaled roads. Merchant vessels could carry from one hundred tons of cargo to a maximum of about five hundred tons. Their hulls were broad and well rounded, and they were equipped with a single low, rectangular sail (sometimes with additional triangular sails). They had no rudders, and one or two steering oars fastened to the stern were used instead.
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.