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By Jeff Emanuel Posted in History — Comments (9) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

A lesson from history

The situation in Iraq, and the spectre it presents of asymmetrical, guerrilla combat, as well as its requirement of radically different tactics than those to which we are accustomed, has caused doubt to creep into the minds of many regarding whether America is capable of adapting to the changing battlefield, both effectively and quickly enough to be successful in the war we are now engaged in.

There is historical precedent not only for adaptation to a different style of war, but for the radical alteration of scene, setting, and style of fighting.

One prime example is that of Rome, in its series of fights against the ancient city of Carthage. The Roman Republic, throughout its centuries-long history not just a land power, but accustomed to land fighting only, didn't just offer feeble resistance to the legendary Carthaginian navy, and hope for significant land action in order to defeat their enemy. Rather, the Romans revolutionized their entire system of warfighting, jumping with both feet into the world of sea-battles and waterborne combat.

Read on . . .

The epic clashes between Rome and Carthage (a Latin corruption - "Carthago" - of the Phoenician khart hadash, or "new city"), which took place between 265 and 146 BC as a series of three “Punic Wars" (again, "Punic" is a Latin corruption of the term "Phoenician"), were massive and bloody affairs, involving land and sea battles on grand scales. Fleets of hundreds of ships, crewed by literally hundreds of thousands of oarsmen, faced off in the twenty-three years that the first war raged on, and armies of many more clashed in the second. The century of warfare came at a steep cost for both sides, as countless soldiers and sailors and well as civilians - both on the order of the hundreds of thousands - were lost. When the smoke cleared after the third war, Punic Carthage had all but ceased to exist, and the geopolitical landscape of the Mediterranean had completed its radical shift toward total dominance by the Italic peninsula on all other lands and peoples in the region.

While the series of Punic Wars as a whole was a watershed event in the Mediterranean, the first war was similarly so for the budding Italian center of Rome. An expanding but mostly landlocked power when the first war with Carthage began, the Sons of Aeneas showed both their engineering genius, and their ability to adapt, as they developed a navy almost from scratch, manned the new ships, learned tactics on the fly, and took to the sea for virtually the first time – and defeated the region’s preeminent sea power on their own turf.

How did this happen? How did an almost completely land-based people go from nearly no knowledge of the sea to defeating the greatest naval power the world had ever seen, seemingly overnight? Even forgiving ancient author Polybius’ exaggeration that the Romans had “never before built a warship,” the Romans’ execution of constructing and properly utilizing a navy to such a successful degree that they were able to conquer an enemy with hundreds of years of maritime tradition – not to mention better equipment, and crew which were far more experienced and more skillful – was quite an achievement.

While it is not strictly true that the Romans had not built a warship before the First Punic War, they were definitely less than experienced at the practice. Expansion throughout, and conquest of, the Italian peninsula required little by way of maritime activity. With its lack of islands and natural harbors (in comparison to, say, Greece), sea-borne military activity would have offered far more inherent risk than reward for a budding power whose experience to that point had always been on land.

Though there was little need at the time for the consideration of naval exploits, it may not be wholly accurate to claim that the Romans had not, in some fashion, begun to think about the sea – or, more correctly, the gains to be made in lands beyond the sea – and attitude which set the stage for their eventual ambition to spread power and influence beyond the Italic shores.

Numismatist (scholar of coinage) Harold Mattingly hinted at this in his analysis of an early Republican bronze coin which featured a ship’s prow on the front.

The type obviously originated in a time when Rome’s interests were turning towards the sea – probably, as we have seen, in the generation before the Pyrrhic war. … The coins suggest that, if we had fuller knowledge of the years preceding the first struggle with Carthage, we might find the miracle of the building of the great Roman fleets something less than miraculous after all.

However, for any brief entertainment of the sea, and all that mastery of it could offer, Rome in the late 4th century BC was still very much a “typical land power and an agrarian people, who conquered slowly, but doggedly, through the whole of Italy from within, by land, without the navy coming into the picture at all." 130 ships did support the wars with Pyrrhus (the epic battles of 280 and 279 BC at Heraclea and Ausculum against the Epirian king, from whence came the term "Pyrrhic victory"), but they were provided to the effort by Carthage .

Even coastal cities which could have been taken from the seaward side were not only taken by land, but by land only, with no supporting naval force whatsoever. That is not to say that there was no attempt whatsoever at developing and utilizing some type of navy; however, those attempts were rudimentary at best. “Only twice in the history of this long period are real Roman naval actions mentioned by the sources.” Both of these activities resulted in defeat, and necessitated a follow-up campaign by land forces to achieve what their naval forerunners had failed to accomplish.

The first of these failures took place in 310 BC, when a small number of Roman ships attempted to deliver soldiers to Campagnia from the seaward side to help subdue the League of Nuceria, which was rebelling against Roman authority. The result of the landing was not successful, and it ended up being another two years before Nuceria was checked – and end brought about by the deployment of Roman land forces .

Similarly, in 282 a small group of Roman ships which arrived in the waters off of Tarentum (a Greek city in southern Italy) was completely destroyed by the Tarentan fleet – an act which spurred the war with Tarentum, in which Rome was victorious, but again, by means of land forces only . "Although certainty is impossible in this poorly documented period, it seems that the fledgling Roman navy was disbanded after the defeat of Tarentum," wrote Adrian Goldsworthy, British classicist and scholar of the Punic Wars. The question as to why the Romans would shelve their naval experiment after the crushing defeat of 282 was explained very simply by German scholar of ancient navies J.A. Thiel:

In the first place, the Romans were landsmen who liked neither the sea nor naval experiments; do the unlucky and humiliating naval experiment of 282 did not induce them to make up for it by building a stronger fleet and beating the Tarentines in their turn; on the contrary, it strengthened their natural landsmen's inclination to abstain from naval experiments as much as they could and it even made them give up for the moment all naval activities, [and] withdraw from the sea.

The Romans instead responded to this early lack of success by outsourcing their maritime needs to their allies – primarily those Greek cities in southern Italy which had traditions of seafaring. “This was essentially an extension of the traditional Roman reliance on allied military support, save that these cities, known as socii navales, provided ships rather than soldiers," wrote Goldsworty.

Rome even had such a treaty of sorts, signed in 278, with Carthage, which provided for the possibility of Roman use of Carthaginian ships and seamen to transport their legions . This reliance on allies and other local cities and powers to provide for Rome’s sea-based needs appears to have assuaged any feeling of need to develop a sizable warfighting navy of their own. As the middle of the third century BC neared, though, the total contribution of the Italiot towns to Rome’s rental navy appears to have been little more than twenty-five ships, as they were still focused overwhelmingly on being a land power, rather than a sea power.

The problem with this mindset, when facing a naval power which was across the sea from their own peninsula, quickly became clear to the Romans. The rented ships were nowhere near large enough in number to successfully challenge the swift and skilled Punic fleet, and both the transport and resupply of troops in Sicily proved extremely difficult in the early years of the first war, due to the harassment offered by the Carthaginian navy.

The decision in 261 to construct a fleet of warships cannot have been an easy one for the Senate, especially in the face of the hundreds of years of putting almost all of their military effort into maintaining a land army. Given that that was all that they had ever know – and ever needed – it must have taken a great awakening (helped along by the prodding of more progressive-minded contemporaries) to the opportunities outside of their immediate sphere of influence, as well as a realization that such opportunities could never be fully taken advantage of while Carthage held dominance of the seas, to cause the Roman leaders to finally shake the tradition of being army-centric in military focus, and to embrace the construction and manning of a navy.

Goldsworthy writes that “a very late source credits Valerius Messala, consul of 263, with first realizing that a fleet was essential for ultimate victory in the war, but it is uncertain whether this tradition is accurate, or simply a later invention by a family eager to glorify its ancestors.”

Regardless of the time of the idea’s inception – whether it was in 263 or in 261 – it became clear to Rome that neither Sicily nor any other coastal city or island could be completely taken and subjugated without the possession of a sufficiently manned and equipped navy, for two major reasons. First, when fighting coastal powers, sea-based blockades were crucial, as resupply by ship was always possible if the ports were left unguarded, making a land-based siege useless (save for the potential of treason within) if not supported from the water. The siege of Naples in 327 taught this lesson only partially, as the coastal city was delivered to the Romans through treachery – thus alleviating them of the need to blockade the seaward side of the city to complete the siege.

Second, when a non-landlocked area was taken, the reinforcement of Roman armies on the island would be hampered by Punic (or any non-Roman) control of shipping and supply lanes until Rome was strong enough at sea to safeguard them from attack.

Perhaps the biggest reason for a Roman fleet at the time of the First Punic War, though, was the fact that, to defeat Carthage decisively, Rome had to take them on - and best them - at their area of greatest strength. This was, of course, its fleet. Rome appears to have seen this clearly enough that they decided, at least in part for this reason, to build a fleet of their own, and to take the fight to the Carthaginians.

Polybius, who credited the naval aspect of the war with inspiring him “to give an account of this war at somewhat greater length than [he] otherwise should have done," wrote of the Romans’ thinking along these lines after the defeat of Agrigentum on Sicily:

Yet so long as the Carthaginians were in undisturbed command of the sea, the balance of success could not incline decisively in their favor. For instance, in the period which followed, though they were now in possession of Agrigentum, and though consequently many of the inland towns joined the Romans from dread of their land forces, yet a still larger number of seaboard towns held aloof from them in terror of the Carthaginian fleet. Seeing therefore that it was ever more and more the case that the balance of success oscillated from one side to the other from these causes; and, moreover, that while Italy was repeatedly ravaged by the naval force, Libya remained permanently uninjured; they became eager to get upon the sea and meet the Carthaginians there.

So the Romans undertook what Goldsworthy calls “the creation and manning of a fleet on an unprecedented scale." The order was made to construct one hundred modern (at the time) warships, known to the Romans as quinqueremes, and to the Greeks as pentereis. Ships of the time were named for the number of oar stations, or “banks” of oars situated along each side of their hull; a quinquereme was so named because it had five oar stations on each side. Also requested were two squadrons (twenty ships) of triremes, which seem to have been a nod to the traditionalist impulse so often present in Roman action and decision-making. These twenty ships, known since the 311 BC inception of the office as a double duumviral command, was to the Romans the requisite number of ships to constitute a fleet, and was made up of two squadrons. That they were of a size which was not the most effective in an age of much larger ships seems not to have mattered, and the request for them seems to have been almost reflexive.

Polybius wrote about the quinqueremes’ construction:

But one part of their undertaking caused them much difficulty. Their shipbuilders were entirely unacquainted with the construction of quinqueremes, because no one in Italy had at that time employed vessels of that description. There could be no more signal proof of the courage, or rather the extraordinary audacity of the Roman enterprise. Not only had they no resources for it of reasonable sufficiency; but without any resources for it at all, and without having ever entertained an idea of naval war — for it was the first time they had thought of it —they nevertheless handled the enterprise with such extraordinary audacity, that, without so much as a preliminary trial, they took upon themselves there and then to meet the Carthaginians at sea, on which they had for generations held undisputed supremacy.

Given the order to build the great fleet, and the resources with which to do so, what the Roman shipbuilders next required was a model from which to work. So far any naval activity had been carried out through the use of allies’ shipping. Tarentum, Locri, Elea, and Neapolis all provided warships for the transport of Roman soldiers to Messana. It was at this time that the model for the Roman engineers was provided. Again Polybius:

It was on this occasion that, the Carthaginians having put to sea in the Strait to attack them, a decked vessel of theirs charged so furiously that it ran aground, and falling into the hands of the Romans served them as a model on which they constructed their whole fleet. And if this had not happened it is clear that they would have been completely hindered from carrying out their design by want of constructive knowledge.

So the Romans, who many times throughout their history proved themselves to be supremely skilled engineers, were able to use as an example the very type of ship which had been terrorizing their rented fleet in the Mediterranean. By reverse-engineering the Carthaginian model, which the Romans apparently found to be superior to the Greek model already in use in the region, building techniques were quickly learned, and reproductions could be constructed.

The speed of the reconstruction has recently been given added credibility by the analysis of the Marsala shipwreck. As Goldsworthy described it,

This small Punic warship revealed traces of many markings on its timbers clearly indicating the stages of construction. …the outlines of tenons had been painted onto the planks showing the workmen where to cut. The Punic alphabet, used as numerals, had been painted along the keel at intervals which corresponded to the positions of the ribs. …The use of a pre-marked template conforming to a standard design must have greatly speeded construction.

In the interest of putting the most trained sailors in the water in the shortest amount of time, the requisite force of over 30,000 rowers were trained on dry land at the same time that the ships were being constructed. According to Polybius:

They made the men sit on rower's benches on dry land, in the same order as they would sit on the benches in actual vessels: in the midst of them they stationed the Celeustes, and trained them to get back and draw in their hands all together in time, and then to swing forward and throw them out again, and to begin and cease these movements at the word of the Celeustes.

By carrying out these two necessary tasks simultaneously, the new Roman sailors were ostensibly prepared to hit the water at the same time as the new Roman fleet. Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, who was appointed commander of the fleet, gave the first orders for the new navy – and sailed them into immediate disaster.

Ordering the bulk of the fleet to follow him to Messana, Scipio took seventeen ships with himself as an advance force, hoping to establish a landing site for his follow-on force once they arrived. However, he sailed into a trap off the town of Lipara, where he was met by twenty Carthaginian ships and trapped in the harbor where he had dropped anchor. “When day dawned the crews made for the shore and ran away, while Gnaeus, in utter dismay, and not knowing in the least what to do, eventually surrendered to the enemy,” wrote Polybius. This was an inauspicious start for the fledgling navy, but the Romans proved to be very fast learners.

This process of learning began with understanding, and accepting, the limitations that the new Roman navy faced. Their ships, though modeled after Carthaginian quinqueremes, were not as well made, due to the inexperience of the Roman shipwrights, who were learning almost entirely on the job how to build ships they had no experience with (a deficit which they apparently made up as they improved through repetition). This led to less speed and maneuverability than their opponents. Likewise, the Roman crews were not nearly as experienced as their Carthaginian counterparts, who had grown up on the sea, and whose people had a centuries-old nautical tradition.

A lack of skill and experience, combined with a lack of speed and maneuverability, was a recipe for disaster in the days of ancient naval clashes, when the fighting tactics included two options: ramming and boarding – both of which required positioning and physical contact between ships.

There was variation in the styles of ships’ rams from location to location; however, one apparent constant was the evolution from being pointed to more blunt, a development which appears to have become permanent by the fifth century. For all intents and purposes, this transformation had firmly taken hold long before the advent of the Roman navy in the third century BC. For specific style, though, the Marsala shipwreck again provided insight into Carthaginian (and by extension, early Roman) preferences, both in appearance and in composition. According to Goldsworthy, "The ram found on the [Marsala] wreck…was formed of timber encased on either side with a metal tusk, the whole ram curving upwards, presumably intended to puncture the enemy hull beneath the waterline."

Thus, sea battles were often made up of a series of individual ship-to-ship contests, with each attempting to out-maneuver the other and ram from the side, while simultaneously trying to avoid presenting a target to their individual opponent or to any other enemy ship – “a type of combat sometimes compared to the aerial dogfights of the First World War,” as Goldsworthy described it. Boarding, the other fighting option, involved coming alongside an enemy ship, securing it, and deploying marines onto the opponent’s ship. Due to their advantages in deck height and number of onboard personnel, larger ships often had the advantage during boarding operations.

Given their history of land-based warfare, and the fact that they were relative neophytes to the art of seafaring and maritime warfare, it seems only natural that the Romans favored the latter. To achieve the end of playing to their strengths even on their enemy’s turf, the Romans set out to make sea battles into as close an equivalent of land battles as possible – and so developed the corvus, the engineering of which Polybius described thus:

Their mechanism was this. A round pole was placed in the prow, about twenty-four feet high, and with a diameter of four palms. The pole itself had a pulley on the top, and a gangway made with cross planks nailed together, four feet wide and thirty-six feet long, was made to swing round it. Now the hole in the gangway was oval shaped, and went round the pole twelve feet from one end of the gangway, which had also a wooden railing running down each side of it to the height of a man's knee. At the extremity of this gangway was fastened an iron spike like a miller's pestle, sharpened at its lower end and fitted with a ring at its upper end. The whole thing looked like the machines for braising corn. To this ring the rope was fastened with which, when the ships collided, they hauled up the "crows," by means of the pulley at the top of the pole, and dropped them down upon the deck of the enemy's ship, sometimes over the prow, sometimes swinging them round when the ships collided broadsides. And as soon as the "crows" were fixed in the planks of the decks and grappled the ships together, if the ships were alongside of each other, the men leaped on board anywhere along the side, but if they were prow to prow, they used the "crow" itself for boarding, and advanced over it two abreast.

This new tool first saw major action at the battle of Mylae. Polybius went on to say that the Carthaginian seamen were greatly confused by the sight of this appendage at the bow of the Roman ships. However, they charged ahead as was their custom, and as they neared the Roman fleet – even successfully ramming some ships – the corvi were successfully dropped onto the ships’ decks, and each was held fast, allowing the Roman soldiers to board and to do what it was that they did best: fight on land.

The defeat at Mylae made the Carthaginian sailors wary of attacking the Roman ships head-on, implying a devastating lesson having been learned from their first experience with the prow-mounted corvus. This next large encounter was at Ecnomus, and was a naval battle on such a grand scale that many historians have endlessly debated the numbers claimed by Polybius, which amounted to a combined total of 680 quinqueremes, 204,000 sailors, and 80,000 soldiers. Historian W.W. Tarn found this hyperbolic, saying that “the numbers given for Ecnomus are impossible,” and citing as evidence the excessive percentage of Italy and Carthage’s respective populations that a force of this size would have made up.

Regardless of force size – whether it was actually the gargantuan battle described by Polybius, or the only slightly smaller affair argued for by Tarn – the Romans proved their naval worth yet again, taking advantage of early success, and the failure of the Punic commanders to fully exploit shifting momentum later in the battle, to win a victory and capture nearly one hundred Carthaginian ships. Those which remained of the Punic fleet retreated in different directions, in no condition to prolong the fight, while the Roman fleet made its port call in Sicily, offloading its soldiers repairing its damaged ships – and preparing to take the fight to Africa, where they were defeated.

The end of this battle appears to have also been the end of the corvus, the uniquely Roman boarding bridge which appeared on the scene early in the First Punic War, led to great successes at Mylae and Ecnomus, and then mysteriously disappeared from the scene forever. As Thiel wrote:

The fact of the matter is, that the boarding-bridge, which had made its first appearance in Roman naval history in such a conspicuous and glorious way, vanishes after the battle of Ecnomus without leaving a trace.

The “problem of the corvus” has since been debated by historians, some of whom argue that it was used under another name after Ecnomus; regardless, it does not appear under its original name or description in ancient sources ever again.
Equipped with the corvus or not, though, disaster struck the heretofore victorious Roman fleet in 255 BC, when they mounted a massive expedition to relieve their beleaguered army, which was caught in a quagmire in Africa. A storm hit off the coast of Camarina, and, according to Polybius:

Out of their three hundred and sixty-four vessels eighty only remained. The rest were either swamped or driven by the surf upon the rocks and headlands, where they went to pieces and filled all the seaboard with corpses and wreckage. No greater catastrophe is to be found in all history as befalling a fleet at one time.

Often cited as evidence that the corvus was still in use (though it was not mentioned by primary sources), was this loss of ships, as the unwieldy weight added to the ships’ prows could have made them susceptible to capsizing in rough seas. This was also a source of reason for the relinquishing of this spectacularly successful tool; Thiel argued that it may have simply been a phase through which the Roman navy “had to pass” in its transition from fledgling naval power to skilled, maneuverable, and lasting fleet.

However, if the original construction of a fleet from scratch, and with no prior shipbuilding experience, was the greatest feat of Roman engineering and ingenuity at the time of the First Punic War, only it can top the achievement of rebuilding the fleet after the massive loss off Camarina. Said Polybius:

The Roman government…felt it to be a grievous misfortune: but being absolutely resolved not to give in, they determined once more to put two hundred and twenty vessels on the stocks and build afresh. These were finished in three months, an almost incredibly short time, and the new Consuls Aulus Atilius and Gnaeus Cornelius fitted out the fleet and put to sea.

The newly rebuilt fleet immediately sailed for Panormus, blockading and besieging the city, and winning a victory not only of the physical variety, but almost certainly of the mental variety, as well, reassuring the Romans that they could bounce back from the devastating loss of their fleet and still achieve naval success.

This was a mindset which had to be reinforced yet again in 248, when the fleet was dashed to bits off the coast of Sicily while being pursued by Carthaginian ships who managed to avoid both the storm and the shoals. After this, the Romans “had entirely abandoned the sea, partly because of the disasters they had sustained there, and partly because they felt confident of deciding the war by means of their land forces; but they now determined for the third time to make trial of their fortune in naval warfare,” said Polybius, who continued:

Nevertheless it was essentially an effort of despair. The treasury was empty, and would not supply the funds necessary for the undertaking, which were, however, obtained by the patriotism and generosity of the leading citizens. They undertook singly, or by two or three combining, according to their means, to supply a quinquereme fully fitted out, on the understanding that they were to be repaid if the expedition was successful. By these means a fleet of two hundred quinqueremes were quickly prepared, built on the model of the ship of the Rhodian [the captured ship of Hannibal of Rhodes].

So the Romans determined to pursue a final solution, and to conquer the vaunted Carthaginian navy once and for all. To that end, Rome blockaded the remaining Carthaginian strongholds in Sicily, including the harbor at Drepana and the seaward side of Lilybaeum – all in an effort to draw out the main force of the Punic fleet, and to defeat it head on.

The Punic navy, on the other hand, had been all but decommissioned after the destruction of the Roman fleet, and few ships were even left in service after the five years of inaction – making it difficult to raise the ships and the sailors to take on the Romans at Sicily, and leaving the Romans, for possibly the first time in history, with the more experienced and more skilled crew in a naval battle. Said Polybius:

The fact is that the Carthaginian government never expected that the Romans would again attempt to dispute the supremacy at sea: they had, therefore, in contempt for them, neglected their navy. The result was that, as soon as they closed, their manifold disadvantages quickly decided the battle against them.

Despite weather which was once again not in their favor – the cause of the first two losses of the fleet – the Roman sailors proved their worth, attacking near the Aegates Islands and catching the Punic ships while the latter were still weighed down with supplies they were bringing to their besieged countrymen, and utilizing their advantages in speed and maneuverability to sink and capture a combined one hundred and twenty ships. A change in the wind allowed some Carthaginian ships to escape the scene, but along with the tattered remnants of the Punic fleet also sailed not only any possibility that Carthage would escape defeat in the First Punic War, but also the last remaining vestiges of centuries of Phoenician dominance of the sea.

The Roman decision to go back on centuries of preference toward land warfare and antipathy toward the sea, and to build a mighty fleet, was likely originally made for the purpose of defending the Italic coast from Punic aggression; however, it developed into an offensive weapon which Rome used not only to take the fight to their maritime enemy, but to defeat them decisively – expanding their sphere of influence farther than it ever could have been otherwise, and truly making the Mediterranean into mare nostrum ("our sea"). As Goldsworthy pointed out, “As the size of the fleets grew larger, so the superiority of the Punic navy declined. Its spectacular successes…were always small-scale, and even these were eventually checked by Rome.”

The construction and use of their navy demonstrated the Romans’ willingness and ability to be aggressive, to take the fight to the enemy, to change tactics when necessary, and to rebound from devastating misfortune. The speed and innovation demonstrated the Romans’ ingenuity and mastery of engineering, as they so swiftly constructed a navy – three times – and devised in the corvus an implement which had such a great effect on major battles fought in the First Punic War. Most importantly of all, the war itself demonstrated the Romans’ adaptability which would lead to their defeat of foes far and wide, in countless settings, on widely varying terrain, and against diverse styles of warfare. In short, by taking the fight to the Carthaginians, on the sea which the Phoenicians had ruled for centuries, and in a manner heretofore foreign to their people, the Romans showed all of those qualities which led them to become the preeminent power in the world for centuries afterward.

If a people as set in its ways as the Romans could revolutionize their entire way of thinking about warfare, and abandon the land fighting with which they had been comfortable for centuries in favor of an entirely different method and environment - and learn how to fight in such a setting quickly and effectively enough to defeat the preeminent sea power that the world to that point had ever known - then it is surely not impossible to believe that we, the greatest, most technologically advanced, and most militarily effective power that the planet has ever seen, can adapt to a different method of fighting, against those whose ability to sustain and win a fight are infinitessimal in comparison to ours - and can win this war in which we are currently embroiled.

We can succeed - we must only find the will, and make the conscious decision to do so.

More information can be found in:

Adcock, F.E. 1947. “Roman Republican Sea-Power.” Classical Review 61:116-8.

Bagnall, Nigel. 2002. The Punic Wars: 246-146 BC. London: Osprey Publishing.

Casson, Lionel. 1971. Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Goldsworthy, Adrian. 2000. The Punic Wars. London: Cassell & Co.

Mattingly, Harold. 1927. Roman Coins: From the Earliest Times to the Fall of the Western Empire. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.

Tufts University's Perseus Project. “Polybius: Histories 1.20.”

Scullard, H.H. 1957. “Roman Sea-Power.” Classical Review 7:144-7.

Starr, Chester G. 1943. “Coastal Defense in the Roman World.” American Journal of Philology 64:56-70.

Tarn, W.W. 1907. “The Fleets of the First Punic War.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 27:48-60.

Thiel, J.H. 1946. Studies on the History of Roman Sea-Power in Republican Times. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co.

Thiel, J.H. 1954. A History of Roman Sea-Power Before the Second Punic War. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co.

Walbank, F.W. 1945. “Polybius, Philinus, and the First Punic War.” Classical Quarterly 39:1-18.

Wallinga, H.T. 1956. The Boarding-Bridge of the Romans. London: Batsford.