The Fall of Carthage Read online

  In the fourth century several states began to construct larger warships than the trireme. The Carthaginians were the first to build 'fours' or quadriremes, whilst Dionysius I, the tyrant of Syracuse in the early fourth century, was responsible for the design of the 'five' - pentereis in Greek and quinquereme in Latin. The kingdoms which emerged in the Hellenistic world in the late fourth century were able to lavish huge resources on the construction of their fleets. Some of the largest ships were built by the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt, including such monsters as Ptolemy II’s 'thirties' and 'forty', but there is no record of anything larger than a 'ten' seeing actual combat. The realization that, although the trireme had three banks of oars, its name derived in fact from the number of each team of rowers goes some way towards understanding the design of these ships. Clearly, galleys with four or five banks of oars would have been absurdly impractical and ones with ten or more utterly impossible. In fact, there is no evidence for any warship in the classical world ever having more than three banks of oars. Therefore in 'fours' and larger ships at least some of the oars must have been operated by more than one rower.5

  The quinquereme had a basic team of five rowers, but how were they arranged? Did it have one level of oars rowed by five men each, two levels, one rowed by three and the other by two, or three levels with two oars operated by a pair of rowers and one by a single man? The navies of the Mediterranean powers in the late Middle Ages included many galleys, all of which had a single bank of oars, regardless of how many rowers operated each one. Two men can sit side by side and operate an oar effectively, but if there are more than two rowers per oar, then it is necessary for them to rise to their feet to dip the blade and then hurl themselves back onto the bench when they deliver the stroke. This was the method employed in the Middle Ages and must also have been used in the larger galleys in the classical world. Of necessity, this design required a somewhat broader and heavier hull to accommodate the rowers, which probably made them slower and less manoeuvrable than the sleeker types. It has been suggested by Casson that this had the advantage of reducing the requirement for skilled rowers, since it was only essential for one man per oar to be highly trained. This might seem an attractive prospect for the Romans who were undertaking the creation and manning of a fleet on an unprecedented scale. On this basis Casson argued that the Romans used quinqueremes with a single bank of oars, each rowed by five men, unlike the Carthaginians who used more slender, three-banked 'fives'. This, he felt, explained why our sources emphasized that the Punic ships were individually faster and more manoeuvrable than their Roman counterparts. However, Polybius tells us explicitly that the Roman ships were copied from a captured

  Carthaginian 'five' and there seems no good reason to reject this evidence.6 The superior performance of Carthaginian ships for most of the war was a reflection of their more highly trained crews, and, at the very beginning, better construction, not a result of a fundamentally different design. On the whole, it is more likely that the quinqueremes of this period had more than one bank of oars. Two levels of oars, with three and two rowers respectively, would have meant an uneasy combination of the two different designs, and it is more probable that the quinquereme had three levels, the lowest with a single rower and the others with a pair. This would make the quinquereme a more logical development from the trireme. The upper level of oars in a trireme were mounted in an outrigger and this has sometimes been perceived as a weakness. Even if this was so and would have remained a failing in similarly designed 'fives', it is distinctly possible that the quinqueremes of the Punic Wars were constructed differently. Morrison and Coates have recently argued from the iconographic evidence that the Carthaginian 'five' differed markedly in its layout from Greek ships of the same size, suggesting that this distinction had its origins in Phoenician building methods. The Punic 'five' had all three levels of oars emerging from a single, deep oar-panel, the oarports being arranged in a chequer-board pattern. This they interpreted as an oarbox containing all the rowers and constructed separately to, and projecting from, the main hull. This would have produced a somewhat wider ship, but may have allowed the hull to be strengthened against ramming and possibly increased storage space in the main hull. This pattern of ship was, they argued, copied by the Romans, offering confirmation of Polybius' account, and continued in use with the Roman navy until well into the Principate. This system offered limited possibilities for development of higher ranked ships, since only a 'six', putting two crew on each oar, was really feasible within the confined space. As they point out, the Romans are not recorded as having floated anything larger than a six during the war, although whether these were of Punic or Greek pattern is unknown.7

  Morrison and Coates' interpretation of the evidence is an attractive one, especially as it appears to confirm the literary tradition, but the evidence is too poor to reach a final conclusion. Ultimately there must remain some doubt about the precise nature of the quinquereme. However, certain reasonably confident assertions can be made about its capabilities and general characteristics. The crew of a Roman quinquereme consisted of 300 men, of whom about twenty were deck crew and the remainder rowers. At Ecnomus, Roman ships carried 120 marines, but this was because a major encounter was anticipated, and the normal complement was probably fewer, perhaps around forty. Athenian quadriremes were accommodated on the same slipways originally constructed for triremes and cannot have been much larger than these. 'Fives' were markedly higher than these earlier ships and were probably longer and a little broader as well. They were certainly slower and less manoeuvrable than threes and fours, although their greater mass allowed them to make better headway in rougher seas, and increased the effect when they rammed another ship.

  There were two main tactical options open to ancient galleys, ramming and boarding. The amount of missile fire which could be delivered by a ship's marines, and the artillery mounted on the larger ships, was insufficient to inflict serious or incapacitating damage on an enemy vessel. At best such fire served to suppress an enemy crew preparatory to boarding. Shooting remained an adjunct to the main methods of attack and for this reason the wind was too uncertain a means of propulsion to be relied upon during a battle. Therefore all decisive combats necessitated physical contact between the opposing ships.

  The earliest rams mounted on oared warships had been pointed in shape, but by the fifth century these had been replaced with much blunter devices. As ships became more powerful, there was a real danger that a narrow-headed ram would become deeply fixed into the enemy hull that it could not easily be extricated, immobilizing the ramming vessel as surely as the victim. For the same reason, it was normally inadvisable to ram from an angle higher than 60 degrees, since this also ran the risk of too deep a penetration. A third-century ram found off the coast of Athlit in Israel and now in the National Maritime Museum at Haifa is blunt-headed, broadens towards its tip and has wider projections on either side. It is 7 feet 6 inches (2.2 m) long, 30 inches (76 cm) at its widest point and 37.75 inches (96 cm) at its highest and weighs 1,023 lb (464 kg) The ram is probably from a Ptolemaic warship; Casson suggested that it may have come from a 'four' or 'five'. The ram found on the wreck of a small Punic warship discovered near Lilybaeum (Marsala in Sicily) 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. Rams were fixed to the ship's keel, but never formed a part of it, since this would have transferred too much of the force of a successful ram to the ramming ship's own hull. The other advantage of this design was that if the ram did become fixed in an enemy vessel, then it would probably break off and allow the ramming ship to withdraw.8

  Ramming the bow of an enemy ship was dangerous and usually avoided, since this was the strongest part of a vessel and the resultant collision was likely to inflict serious damage to both ships. Instead, captains would manoeuvre their ships to ram the enemy's side. The ideal position was to attack from astern at a narrow angle, the ram
not breaking through at one single point but rupturing a wide section of the enemy's hull, causing its seams to split and take on water. Sea battles therefore consisted of a series of individual duels as ships carefully tried to out-turn the opposition and strike from the flank, whilst trying to avoid making themselves vulnerable to another enemy, a type of combat sometimes compared to the aerial dogfights of the First World War. A highly skilled crew might choose to strike an opponent at such an angle that the ram ran along the enemy's side slicing off the ship's oarbanks and rendering them helpless, but this was difficult to achieve without damage to the attacker's own oars. Manoeuvres such as the periplus, which involved outflanking the enemy line, and the diekplus, which involved penetrating the enemy line to deliver rams from astern, cannot now be reconstructed precisely, but it is probable that they were tactics for squadrons rather than individual ships.9

  The alternative to ramming was boarding, grappling the enemy vessel and overrunning it with a swarm of attackers. Success in the resultant hand-to-hand combat depended on the numbers, enthusiasm and fighting skill of the boarders compared to those of the defending marines and deck crew. As a result this method favoured the largest ships, which were able to carry more marines and also had a height advantage. Boarding placed far less demand upon the seamanship of a ship's crew whose main task was simply to bring their vessel into contact with an enemy ship and grapple it securely. Ramming required a far more highly skilled crew to perform successfully, since it relied upon speed and manoeuvrability. In the fifth century the Athenian navy had been brilliant exponents of ramming tactics, making use of their light, un-decked or aphract triremes, crewed by highly skilled rowers drawn from their poorest citizens. Few states other than the radical democracy of classical Athens were willing to pay huge numbers of rowers the regular wage needed to keep them in constant training. The Hellenistic kingdoms which emerged after Alexander were in general shorter of available manpower to provide crews than they were of the funds to construct fleets of increasingly large ships. The new emphasis on larger and larger warships diminished the importance of the ram, since such vessels were slower and less manoeuvrable and their main advantage was that they could carry greater numbers of marines. In addition to this, the hulls of the bigger ships were more strongly constructed and so perhaps less vulnerable to enemy rams, although a ram delivered by anotiier large and heavy ship was likely to cause great damage. By the third century the ram had become in effect a secondary weapon, although the well-trained Carthaginian navy were still to prove highly skilled in its use.

  The crew of a quinquereme, like other galleys in the ancient world, was exceptionally large in proportion to its size, especially in comparison to the sailing ships of more recent history. The rowers who formed the majority of the crew were confined for most of a journey to their benches, since their bodily weight made up a significant part of the ship's ballast, making it undesirable for them to be allowed to move about. Galleys had very little space for the storage of food and, most important of all for rowers labouring in the heat of the Mediterranean summer, fresh water. This imposed a severe limitation on their strategic range, making journeys of more than a few days impossible for a properly crewed fleet. Ideally, ships would be drawn up on land at the end of each day to allow the rowers to rest, but beached squadrons were intensely vulnerable to attack by land or sea and this practice was unwise unless the landing could be protected by land forces. Fleets were therefore very dependent on secure bases where they could be re-supplied. Sicily and its offshore islands, and to a lesser extent Sardinia and Corsica, were ideally placed between North Africa and Italy to provide suitable staging points for each side's navies. The range of fleets was subject to further significant reduction if a major encounter with the enemy navy was anticipated, especially for fleets who relied primarily on boarding tactics. When a battle was expected it was normal to increase the number of marines carried on each ship, perhaps doubling or trebling the complement. This resulted in a much more rapid consumption of whatever supplies of food and water were carried. Even more importantly, it represented a great increase in the weight carried by a ship, drastically reducing both its speed and handling capability, problems only exacerbated if the marines were not evenly distributed and kept stationary as far as possible. Therefore, it was normal practice only to take on board the majority of marines immediately before a battle. This was not always possible and on several occasions fleets were placed at a severe disadvantage because they had failed to make contact with friendly land forces and draw marines from their ranks.

  The Early Rounds

  The Romans' decision to include twenty triremes in their fleet of quinqueremes has been plausibly interpreted as a revival of the old duumviral squadrons, perhaps a sign of the Romans' innate conservatism. Triremes were no longer large enough to play a significant part in a massed battle, but any fleet needed a number of faster vessels to support its heavier warships. Polybius is inclined to imply that later fleets consisted entirely of 'fives' and they were clearly the majority type, but he does mention the presence of smaller 'fours' and 'threes' as well as occasional larger vessels, and it is clear that he uses 'five' as a shorthand for 'warship'. Polybius tells us that the model for the Roman quinqueremes was a Punic 'five' which had been captured after running aground near Rhegium in an attempt to prevent the crossing of Claudius' forces. It is unclear where the construction work was undertaken. Presumably the skills of the shipwrights from the naval allies was drawn upon, but it is distinctly likely that the work was undertaken at a central point under the direct supervision of Roman magistrates, perhaps at Ostia. Many of the skills involved were those of carpentry and woodworking used in many other day-to-day activities with which Roman craftsmen would have been familiar. Although inexperience may have lowered the quality of the first ships produced, the production of so many vessels makes it highly likely that the standard of workmanship steadily improved. Whilst the ships were being built crews of rowers began their training on benches erected to represent their positions in a ship. Pliny tells us that the ships were completed in only sixty days.10

  The story is a typical instance of the Romans' pride in their ability to copy the technology and tactics of their enemies and eventually surpass them, but there is no good reason to disbelieve it, nor to doubt Polybius' explicit statement that quinqueremes had not been manufactured in Italy before this time (Polybius 1. 20. 10). Syracuse had constructed large ships in the past, but if Morrison and Coates are right then the Carthaginian 'five' may anyway have been of a different design to Greek patterns and perhaps believed to be superior. The speed of the construction has recently been given added credibility by the analysis of the Marsala wreck. This small Punic warship revealed traces of many markings on its timbers clearly indicating the stages of construction. For instance 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. Unlike more modern techniques, the shell of the hull was made before the skeleton of ribs was put into it. Since this meant that the men working inside the hull to fit the timbers of the floor would therefore have been unable to see this series of marks on the keel, the same sequence had been repeated on one of the strakes inside the hull. Another word of instruction had been painted upside down, since this was the direction from which a workman would have looked at it during construction. Interestingly, the shipwrights had not followed the more modern practice of trying to employ suitably shaped pieces of wood to make each component, but had been quite happy to join several bits of timber to form the requisite shape. Such joints could be stronger than the natural wood. The use of a pre-marked template conforming to a standard design must have gready speeded construction. For a long time it was believed that such techniques of mass production had been unknown before the Industrial Revolution.11

  Before describing the first operations of the newly created Roman f
leet, we must consider who provided its crews, in particular the over 30,000 rowers required. Clearly some were drawn from the socii navales, who probably also provided a good number of the skilled captains and deck crew, but it is doubtful that these cities could have provided such a large number of rowers and certain that they could not have mustered the bulk of the huge crews required for the Roman fleets later in the war. Some of the other Italian peoples seem to have provided some men, notably the Samnites who are mentioned in this respect purely because they attempted a mutiny in 259. There is no reason to suppose that it was only the Samnites who supplied sailors. However, despite the dismissive comments of some historians regarding the seafaring aptitude of the Roman people, it is distinctly probable that a good proportion of the crews were from the class of citizens known as proletarii, the very poor who lacked the qualification for service in the legions, as well as freedmen from the urban population. This seems to be confirmed by the, admittedly problematic, census figures recorded by Livy, as well as the colourful anecdote told of the sister of Claudius Pulcher which we shall encounter later in our narrative.12

  As the ships of the completed Roman fleet put to sea, their crews spent a short time training before moving along the Italian coast to the Straits. Of the two consuls in 260, the patrician Cnaeus Cornelius Scipio was appointed to command the fleet, whilst his colleague, the novus homo Caius Duilius, was given command of the land forces in Sicily. Scipio went on ahead with the first seventeen ships to be ready and crossed to Messana, to prepare the logistical support for the fleet's arrival. Whilst there, he received the offer to betray Lipara to the Romans already mentioned in the last chapter. Lipara was the most important port in the small group of islands lying off the north-eastern tip of Sicily, ideally placed to threaten the direct route to Italy. Denying the Carthaginians this base was clearly highly desirable and Scipio readily seized this opportunity for an early success. Taking his seventeen ships he travelled the short distance to Lipara and occupied the harbour. Whether or not this was a deliberate trap, the Carthaginian response was swift. The Punic fleet was currently at Panormus, a short distance away on the northern coast of Sicily, under the command of Hannibal, the man who had led the defence of Agrigentum. As soon as he was aware of Scipio's movements, Hannibal sent twenty of his own ships to the city. Led by Boodes, a Carthaginian nobleman, this squadron arrived at night and boxed the Romans into the harbour. The Roman ships failed to put up any serious resistance; some of the inexperienced crews panicked and fled inland. One tradition maintained that Scipio and his officers were treacherously seized whilst negotiating with Boodes, although this may simply be a stock tale of Punic perfidy. Scipio was later to acquire the nickname Asina or 'donkey' as a result of this disaster, the feminine form perhaps intended to add to the insult; but it did not have too great an effect on his career, for he achieved the consulship for the second time in 254. Presumably he had been released from captivity either by ransom or exchange at some stage before this.13