How the Roman Navy Invented Sea Warfare

In 260 BC, Rome had almost no navy. Its enemy, Carthage, had ruled the western Mediterranean for centuries. Twenty years later, Rome had crushed the Carthaginian fleet and won the First Punic War. How does a land power beat the greatest sea power of its age at its own game? The first answer was a bridge: the corvus, or "raven," a spiked boarding ramp that turned sea battles into infantry fights. But the weapon that won Rome's first naval victory is not the one that won the war. That took storms that swallowed entire fleets, a commander who drowned the sacred chickens, a bankrupt treasury, and a final fleet paid for out of private citizens' pockets. In this documentary we follow Rome from its first improvised fleet to the decisive Battle of the Aegates Islands, where bronze warship rams are still being pulled from the seabed today, and on to Pompey's campaign that cleared the pirates from the Mediterranean in about three months. SOURCES Ancient sources - Polybius, The Histories, Book 1 (first fleet, stranded Carthaginian quinquereme, rowing drill on land, Lipara, Mylae, Ecnomus, the Camarina storm, Drepana, the privately funded fleet, the Aegates Islands) - Pliny the Elder, Natural History 16.192 (fleet launched 60 days after the timber was cut) - Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 2.7; Suetonius, Life of Tiberius 2; Valerius Maximus 1.4.3; Livy, Periochae 19 (Claudius Pulcher and the sacred chickens) - Cicero, On Old Age 44; Duilius's rostral column inscription, CIL VI 1300 (Duilius's honors) - Plutarch, Life of Pompey 24–28 (the campaign against the pirates) Modern scholarship - J. F. Lazenby, The First Punic War: A Military History (1996) - Adrian Goldsworthy, The Fall of Carthage: The Punic Wars 265–146 BC (2000) - William M. Murray, The Age of Titans: The Rise and Fall of the Great Hellenistic Navies (2012) - Philip de Souza, Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World (1999) - Sebastiano Tusa and Jeffrey Royal, "The landscape of the naval battle at the Egadi Islands (241 B.C.)," Journal of Roman Archaeology 25 (2012) - RPM Nautical Foundation and the Soprintendenza del Mare (Sicily), Egadi Islands survey project A note on accuracy: ancient figures for fleet sizes and casualties, especially at Ecnomus, are debated by historians and are presented in the video as reported figures, not settled fact. #romanhistory #ancientrome #punicwars #carthage #navalhistory #historydocumentary