There was some futile naval fighting against the Vandals in the days when Rome was crumbling. Finally, by a curious freak of history, Genseric the Vandal took a fleet out from Carthage against Rome, and swept the Mediterranean. In the year 455, some six centuries after Rome had wreaked her vengeance on Carthage, this Vandal fleet anchored unopposed in the Tiber and landed an army that sacked the imperial city, which had been for so long a period mistress of the world, and had given her name to a great civilization.
During the four centuries in which the Pax Romana rested upon the world, it is easy to conceive of the enormous importance to history and civilization of having sea and river, the known world over, an undisputed highway for the fleets of Rome. Along these routes, even more than along the military roads, traveled the institutions, the arts, the language, the literature, the laws, of one of the greatest civilizations in history. And ruthless as was the destruction of Vandal and Goth in the city itself and in the peninsula, they could not destroy the heritage that had been spread from Britain to the Black Sea and from the Elbe to the upper waters of the Nile.
REFERENCES
History of Rome, Theodor Mommsen, tr. by W. P. Dickson, 1867.
General History, Polybius, transl. by Hampton, 1823.
History of the Romans Under the Empire, Chas. Merivale (vol. III.), 1866.
The Greatness and Decline of Rome, G. Ferrero, tr. by A. E. Zemmern, 1909.
Études sur l'Histoire Militaire et Maritime des Grecs et des Romains, Paul Serre, 1888.
Fleets of the First Punic War, W. W. Tarn, in Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1907.
Heresies of Sea Power (pp. 40-71), Fred Jane, 1906.