Niebuhr's lectures on Roman history, Vol. 2 (of 3)

by Barthold Georg Niebuhr

2. From 492 to 496, to the landing of Regulus in Africa.

3. From 496 to 497, the campaign of Regulus in Africa.

4. From the destruction of the army of Regulus to the victory of L. Cæcilius Metellus near Panormus. Fortune is nearly equally balanced; the Romans lose two fleets by storms, the Carthaginians have the upperhand in Sicily: nevertheless the Romans are victorious at last.

5. From the beginning of the year 502 to 511; from the contest for Lilibæum and Drepana, to the victory near the Ægatian isles. The ten years’ struggle is confined to an exceedingly narrow space, being important rather in a military than in an historical point of view. The diversion of Hamilcar Barcas, of which, unfortunately, we know so little, is, owing to the taking of Hercta and Eryx, one of the most remarkable in the military history of any age; it shows a great man, who creates new resources for himself, and avails himself of them. Yet for the history of nations this period is not so important.

The Carthaginian system of warfare is quite unknown to us; we can only say, that, where the Carthaginians themselves were in arms, they were drawn up in a phalanx just like the Greeks. The Spaniards very likely stood in catervæ, and fought with small swords, and in cetris, that is to say, linen coats of mail. The Gauls, no doubt, fought in great masses.

In the year 490, the third of the war, the Romans undertook to besiege Agrigentum with two armies. This town was of great extent; yet, as a city it was but a mere shadow of what it had been a hundred and forty years earlier, before its first destruction by the Carthaginians. Within its high and strong walls, a considerable army of the enemy had now thrown itself. The name of the Punic general was Hannibal. The Carthaginians were called by their first-names only, and one might be easily led to think that they were all related to each other, as there were so few of these names, Hannibal, Hanno, Hamilcar, and some others. These correspond to our christian names, to the Roman prænomina, as Gaius, &c. They certainly had, all of them, family names also, which, however, at that time were not yet made use of to designate individuals: they had even bye-names, but these have been partly lost to us. The generals who bear the name of Hannibal, are in the whole of Carthaginian history so insignificant, when set beside that great man who gave the name its renown, that little mention only is made of them. Hannibal had posted himself with fifty thousand men within the wide and waste precincts of Agrigentum; the two consular armies advanced on the south against the town, entrenched themselves in two camps, and constructed two lines against the city, and against any one who might attempt to relieve it. The Carthaginian generals were very bad in the beginning of the war; they either made no use at all of the elephants, or only a limited one, and they were very loth to give battle to the Romans. Hannibal had now imprudently allowed himself to be thus hemmed in, and as Agrigentum does not lie close to the sea, he could not get any succours from thence: yet he succeeded in conveying to the Carthaginians, by single messengers and letters, his entreaties for relief. They indeed, when he had been besieged five months, sent Hanno with a large army and fifty elephants. This general pitched a strong camp near Heraclea; took Erbessus, the arsenal of the Romans; and by means of barricades of felled trees, &c., so shut them in, that they were much distressed for want of supplies, and on account of the state of health of their troops: for the Carthaginians were masters of the sea, and the Numidian horsemen, the Cossacks of the ancients, made it exceedingly difficult for them to forage. It seemed as if they would be obliged to give up the siege, and to retreat; yet they could not bring themselves to do so, showing in this instance also their perseverance, and on the contrary, they kept up the blockade so strictly, that Hannibal found no means of bettering the condition of his troops. When under these circumstances two months had gone by, Hanno may have had reasons to attack; yet the Romans gained a complete victory, and set themselves up again by the booty which they got in his camp. All this time, Hiero had given them every possible help: without him they would have perished. Hannibal, who had been brought to extremities, took advantage of the moment when the Romans were enjoying themselves the night after their victory, to make preparations for a sally. The soldiers filled the ditches of the Roman lines with fascines and sacks of straw, climbed over the ramparts, drove back the outposts, and thus fought their way through: all that the Romans could do, was to annoy them in the rear. Whoever was able to bear arms, got off in this way; but the inhabitants of the town were for the most part left behind, as well as the sick and the weak. Agrigentum was, on the following morning, sacked and pillaged, like a town taken by storm. Here the Romans made up for all their privations: the whole of the unfortunate population was swept away.

After this frightful event, a year passed by without any remarkable occurrence. The Carthaginians strongly provisioned and fortified their other stations in the west; yet they also acted on the offensive. Their fleet cruised off the coasts of Italy, which it laid waste; the northern coasts of Sicily likewise surrendered to their power from fear, whilst the Romans kept the inner island and the eastern coast. The conquest of Agrigentum gave the latter quite different ideas with regard to the war. Formerly, they merely wanted to have Messana and Syracuse as dependent allies; but now their object was to drive the Carthaginians altogether from the island, as Dionysius, Agathocles, and Pyrrhus had done: they saw, however, that this could not be done without a fleet. It was the same difficulty as at Athens, where, in the Peloponnesian war, and in the times immediately following it, they had no other ships but penteconters, lembi, and triremes (with from 200 to 220 men, who were partly rowers and partly marines, and with a deck; the penteconters, which had 50 men,[2] were open, and the benches for the rowers in both were placed across, before and above each other); these vessels had been outdone long since, and larger ones were needed. In Syracuse, the cradle of mechanical art, quadriremes, and soon afterwards quinqueremes, were first mounted, ships of a larger class, which were not round, and which might properly be called ships of the line; for, the difference of the triremes and quinqueremes cannot have consisted merely in the number of the benches and the rowers, but it must really have been in the build itself, otherwise no great skill would have been required to construct them. These quinqueremes had already for a long time been in use, especially in the Macedonian, Sicelian, and Punic fleets; but neither the Romans, nor the Antiates had them. The Romans had also triremes, and wherever the Antiate vessels are mentioned, they are triremes.—The oars had the same effect as our steam boats, being independent of wind and tide: the ancients could, however, sail very well besides.

A quinquereme had three hundred rowers and a hundred and twenty marines; to these rowers the triremes could oppose but a hundred and twenty, who therefore were able to do as little against them, as a frigate or a brigantine would against a ship of the line. This accounts for the statement, that the Romans had had no fleet at all; and yet they had built triremes for the passage to Sicily. They wanted therefore a model, from which the ships might be built on correct principles, so that they could be worked with ease; and they might certainly have sent for a shipbuilder to Greece, or to Egypt, to Ptolemy Philadelphus, with whom they were already allied, and have fetched a model thence; for the ancients indeed built from models. But it so happened that a Carthaginian ship of war was driven ashore, and from it they built a hundred and twenty quinqueremes.[3] These were indeed very unwieldy, and the Romans had not the number of sailors which they wanted, that is to say, more than 30,000. They were therefore obliged to man them with levies from the inland districts, and with slaves, as the Russian ships are by conscription in the interior of the empire;—for, the seamen from Etruria and the Greek towns were by no means sufficient (Polybius goes too far, in stating that they had had no able seamen at all): these were trained to ply the oars upon scaffoldings on dry ground. This drilling, as it is told to us, seems to be utterly ridiculous; and the Carthaginians must have been altogether unlike our nations, if on this occasion a whole crowd of caricatures were not published among them. There was in those times the same contrast between a Roman and a Carthaginian ship, which there is now-a-days between a Russian and an English or American man of war. But the Romans, being great in this as they were in all things, devised the means of overcoming this disadvantage. Their fleet was unable to make head against the Carthaginians in the ordinary tactics; and it was very likely at that very time, and not at a later one, that the idea was conceived of ridding the sea-fight of all artificial evolutions, and rather making ship fight against ship. For it required the greatest skill to manage and steer the ships against wind and tide in the same way as a rider manages his horse, so as to shatter the enemy’s vessel by means of the rostrum, and to tear off the benches of the rowers; this was more than the Romans dared to think of. Wherever an enemy is to be met who is greatly superior in skill, the only way of conquering is by employing masses, or some unexpected invention. Thus Carnot gained the victory for the French, by opposing masses to the thin lines of the enemy; the battle of Wattignies (15, 16 Oct. 1793) is the turning point of the modern history of warfare, the end of the old, and the beginning of the new tactics. General Hoche had recourse to the same system in Lorraine; by masses the Americans also beat the English ships, which, otherwise, they would have never succeeded in doing. The Romans invented boarding-bridges made of wood, which were wide enough for two men to run upon abreast, and protected on both sides by railings; on the prow of every ship a large mast was set up, resting on which the bridge was drawn up aloft, the upturned end having an iron ring through which a hawser was passed: the bridge was raised or lowered by a windlass, and it fastened itself to the hostile vessel by means of a grappling-iron. Thus the advantage of superior skill which the Carthaginian rowers possessed, was done away with. The Romans, moreover, had their best legions on board, and in all likelihood the Carthaginians had only middling or bad marine soldiers, as these were not picked. This was in the year 492, according to Cato; in 494, according to Varro. The first attempt was not, however, successful, or in the beginning all the ships were not yet armed in this manner. A squadron was caught at a great disadvantage near the Liparian isles, owing to the bad look-out of the Roman commander Cn. Cornelius, and many ships were lost; but the Carthaginians also, some time afterwards, got right into the midst of the Roman squadron, and several of their ships were taken. But the decisive affair was the naval victory of the consul C. Duilius off Mylæ. The Carthaginians engaged in the battle with a feeling of great contempt for their enemy, having 130 vessels against 100 Roman ones; but they soon found how much they were mistaken, when the Romans began to board, and the sea-fight was changed into the nature of a land one. Fifty Carthaginian ships were taken; then the Romans, quite intoxicated with their victory, landed in Sicily, and relieved Segesta (which, like Rome, boasted of its descent from Troy). Duilius was the first who led forth a naval triumph at Rome. He got the right of being lighted by a torch carried before him, when returning home of an evening from a feast, and of being accompanied by a flute player; moreover, as is generally known, the columna rostrata was erected to him. What this really was, we do not exactly know; perhaps it was a brazen pillar, cast from the beaks of the ships which had been taken: a pillar from which brazen beaks stick out, as it is generally represented, is quite a modern, and altogether ungrounded conceit. On the column there was an inscription, in which the victory and the booty won by Duilius were set forth. A small remnant of it is still in existence; yet the present tablet has not been put up in the time of Duilius himself, as some of the Roman antiquaries have also perceived. It is built of Greek marble, which in those days was not yet known in Rome. According to Tacitus, it was struck by lightning in the reign of the emperor Tiberius, and restored by Germanicus; but the old language and spelling were still faithfully kept. With that age, the form of the letters also agrees: those on the tombs of the Scipios are altogether different.

After this victory, the hopes of the Romans were unbounded: the war in Sicily was pursued with redoubled vigour. In the following year, the Roman fleet went to Sardinia. The conquest of this island was difficult, as on the coasts the Punic language and manners had spread; yet as all the subjects there had been kept in an unwarlike condition owing to the jealousy of the mother state, the attack was somewhat facilitated. But for all that, it had no important result.

The two following years were spent in making conquests in Sicily, besides this expedition to Sardinia. In this war, A. Atilius Calatinus got into an impassable part of the country; and a tribune, whose name is stated differently, M. Calpurnius Flamma, or Q. Cæditius Laberius, sacrificed himself with a small band for the sake of the army, as Decius did in Samnium. According to Cato, in the Origines, he was found after the battle, dangerously wounded and still scarcely breathing, among the dead; but he afterwards recovered.