quenched even by the sea itself, beyond which the Romans prepared to
extend their power. Among those who made a business of bloodshed, by
lending themselves out as soldiers to any one who paid them, the
Campanians enjoyed--if there could have been any real enjoyment in the
matter--a bad eminence. They had followed the trade of human butchers
for about fifty years; and, among other sanguinary engagements, they had
accepted a job from the tyrant[41] of Syracuse.
The Campanians had done their work of devastation; and there being no
further use for them, they had received notice to quit; but instead of
returning home, they resolved to stay, and perpetrate a little plunder
for their own exclusive benefit. They accordingly surprised the town of
Messana--if any enormity may be considered surprising, when committed by
such a set--and calling themselves the Sons of Mamers, or Mars, they
established themselves under the title of the Republic of the
Mamertines. From this point they carried on their trade of robbery and
murder, which they put in practice right and left, upon most of their
neighbours. On the unerring principle, that wrong never comes right, the
rulers of Syracuse, who had, for their own bad purposes, introduced the
Campanians into the place, became, in turn, the victims of that lawless
band of freebooters. At length, Hiero, a king of Syracuse, determined on
getting rid of the nuisance which his predecessors had established, and
fell upon the Mamertines with such effect, that they were on the point
of being crushed, when they were saved by the interference of a
Carthaginian Admiral. The Mamertines being themselves faithless, were
suspicious of every one else, and were as false to each other as they
were untrue to all besides; so that they looked distrustingly on the
offer made, and were unable to agree as to the policy of accepting it.
They were speedily in the position of a house divided, for some were
ready to receive the protection of Carthage, while others sent for help
to the Romans, who, to their utter disgrace, passed a decree, pledging
themselves to an alliance with the Mamertine miscreants. It must be
stated, to the honour of the Senate, that a majority of that body
rejected the humiliating proposal with scorn; but the Consuls, desirous
of giving _éclat_ to their term of office--an evil incidental to the
system of having a temporary, instead of a permanent, head to the
state--did all they could to plunge the country into a war, and brought
the question before the assembly of the people.
The lower passions of pride and avarice are soon aroused among the mass
by specious promises of glory and conquest; and though each man might,
for himself, have spurned an alliance with the Mamertine mercenaries,
the result proved the truth of the saying, that "a corporation will do
what an individual will shrink from with shame;" for the Comitia Tributa
voted that the disgraceful compact should be formed.
Appius Claudius, the son of the blind Consul, was sent to Messana with a
fleet of TRIREMES, or vessels with three ranks of oars, which had been
borrowed from the Greek towns of Italy; for the Roman Admiralty, in the
true spirit of a board, though continually building ships, was unable to
produce an effective navy. Appius Claudius was not seaman enough to
carry his TRIREMES to Sicily, and his rowers were not so expert as they
should have been in the management of the oars, which were placed in
ranks, one above the other, to a considerable height, so that a long
pull, a strong pull, and a pull altogether was extremely difficult.
Having at last got near enough for a parley, he invited Hanno, the
Carthaginian general, to a conference; and, finding him a weak and
nervous person, he seized him by the neck, and fairly shook the whole of
his resolution out of him.
Hanno was frightened into delivering up the citadel, and returning to
Carthage, he was hurried off to speedy execution, for having failed in
the execution of his duty. King Hiero, being deprived of his
Carthaginian aid, was completely beaten, and was glad to offer peace, or
rather he was glad to get it, on any conditions, for his own condition
was truly deplorable. He paid down 200 talents in ready money, which was
equivalent to about fifty thousand pounds of our modern coin, to prevent
the sacking of Syracuse, and by sacrificing all his cash in hand, he was
able to save his capital. From this period may be dated the commencement
of the first Punic War; and as a feeble-minded reader may be dwelling on
the word Punic, in the silly expectation of a pun, we, by explaining
that it is derived from Phœnicia, whence Phœnic or Punic, at once check
the morbid appetite. The city of Carthage is said to have been about one
hundred years older than Rome; but cities, like ladies beyond a certain
date, baffle all attempts to reduce their age to a matter of certainty.
Tradition assigns the foundation of Carthage to Dido, who, having been
converted into an unprotected female by the murder of her husband, fled
from Tyre, and when completely tired out, sat down to rest on the coast
of Africa. Here she agreed to take, on a building lease, as much land as
could be covered with a bull's hide, when, to the astonishment of the
lessor, she produced a skin cut up into thongs, and acting as her own
surveyor, she claimed to be monarch of all she surveyed, by putting this
new species of leathern girdle round as much earth as possible. There
was certainly less of the princess than of the tradeswoman in this
transaction, which, however, was characteristic of the future city, for
it became famous for its business and its bargains, as well as infamous
for its bad faith; the term _Punica fides_ having become a by-word to
express the grossest dishonesty. Her devotion to commerce led to the
establishment of a powerful navy, and her citizens having something more
profitable to do than to fight, her army was always hired from abroad
when occasion required. Rome, on the other hand, had made war her chief
pursuit, and the consequence was, that she had plenty of soldiers, but
no ships, except a few she had taken from her foes; and her occupations
being mostly of a military or destructive kind, she had no resources but
her valour to rely upon.
The Romans remained in Sicily, where several powers claimed their
protection; but Hannibal Gisco, anxious to preserve Agrigentum, threw
himself and sixty elephants into it. Here he was besieged for seven
months with an army of 50,000 men, who, of course, consumed daily a
large quantity of food; but there was something utterly irrational in
providing daily rations for sixty elephants. It was arranged, therefore,
that Hanno should proceed to the relief of Agrigentum, but he was
defeated with the loss of thirty elephants, left dead on the field--a
field which must have been necessarily a very wide one for conjecture.
Hannibal Gisco's army consisted of a medley of mercenaries, including
some Gauls, who, having much money owing to them, refused to strike,
except for their pay, and who intimated that they would not draw their
swords until they had drawn their salaries. Their general, unable to
settle with them in cash, chose a more treacherous way of paying them
off; for, getting them into an ambush, he caused a volley of missiles to
be aimed at them, and the discharge was in full of all demands, for it
effectually stopped all further clamour.
Agrigentum was plundered by the Romans, who sold 25,000 of the
inhabitants for slaves--at least, according to tradition, who usually
deals in round numbers, amounting often in value to the sum which a
perfectly round number or figure indicates.
Though the Carthaginians had failed on land, their fleet gave them
advantages at sea, for there the Romans were completely out of their
element. The latter, however, resolved to have a navy of their own, and
the Board of Admiralty set to work in good earnest, with the cooperation
of the Woods and Forests, which supplied the requisite timber. The
difficulty now felt, was to obtain a design upon which to build, and
instead of trusting to official surveyors, who might have shown plenty
of cunning, without producing any craft, the Romans took for a model a
Carthaginian quinquereme that had come ashore on the coast of Bruttium.
Being relieved from the supervision of the professional architects, the
ship-building progressed rapidly, and within sixty days after the trees
had been felled, one hundred and thirty ships were built; though the
builders must have been as green as the wood, and as crazy as the craft,
to have imagined that such a fleet could have any but the most fleeting
existence. While the vessels were being got ready, it occurred to the
authorities that crews would be required, and as the Romans had as yet
neither ships nor sailors, a few scaffolds were erected on land, that
the intended tars might try their hands at naval tactics.
[Illustration: Roman Man-of-War, from a scarce Medal.]
Matters went smoothly enough on shore, till the would-be seamen, having
ventured out to sea, found themselves as ignorant as babies, when rocked
in the cradle of the deep; and as the waves washed over them, they
perceived they had learnt nothing of their new art but its driest
details. With seventeen of these queer quinqueremes, each with 300
rowers, who by their misunderstandings kept up a continual but useless
row, the Consul, Cn. Cornelius Scipio, sailed for Messana, when the
Punic Captain Bugud, a regular Carthaginian tar, sent him flying, with
half his timbers shivered, into a port of the Lipari. The crews, most of
them half dead with sea sickness, scrambled as well as they could on
shore. Their commander, Cn. Scipio, was taken prisoner, and so
ridiculous had been the figure he cut, that his countrymen conferred
upon him the name of Asina--or the donkey--a character that might in
these days have qualified him for an appointment to a jackass frigate.
After this ludicrous defeat, the command of the Roman navy was taken by
the other Consul, C. Duilius, who determined to wash out in the ocean,
as well as he could, the stain thrown upon his countrymen. He felt that
naval tactics were out of the question among those who were, in one
sense, sailors of the first water, for they had never been on the water
before; and as to rowing, he knew it to be so impracticable that he
resolved to throw the oars overboard. He hit on an expedient for making
a naval engagement resemble as much as possible a fight on shore; and by
overcoming in some respect the inequalities of the waves, he put his own
men on nearly the same footing with the enemy. He constructed boarding
bridges, capable of holding two or three persons abreast, and these
bridges being thrown on to the enemy's ships, enabled the Romans to walk
into them.
The Carthaginians who were not prepared for such close quarters, and had
trusted rather to the roughness of the sea, to deprive their opponents
of an even chance of success, were so thoroughly taken by surprise, that
they suffered their ships to be taken one after the other. C. Duilius
was handsomely rewarded for his victory; he was hailed as the first
naval hero that Rome had introduced, and as if the festive propensities
of a sailor on shore had been foreseen, he was allowed the curious
privilege of being accompanied home at night from banquets by an
attendant with a torch--in which we see a foreshadowing of the policeman
and the bull's-eye. He was further honoured by a _columna rostrata_, a
sort of Nelson Column, adorned with the beaks of ships--a short stumpy
looking affair, of which the museum at Rome contains an imitation from
the hand of Michael Angelo,[42]--who has afforded us a fair copy of one
of the columns of the Times, in which the deeds of great men were
advertised.
This nautical exploit of Rome was followed up by minor successes, and
L. Scipio made an attack upon Corsica, where he was opposed by a
Carthaginian fleet, under the command of Hannibal Gisco, who was killed
by his own men, but honourably entombed by the Romans, who nobly buried
their former animosity.
Carthage and Rome were mutually suffering by their hostilities, and each
nation lost its thousands alternately, according to what is called the
fortune of war; but which, like the fortune of the gaming-table, must
end in the ruin of both sides, for the sole profit of the grim enemy.
While the forces of Rome were being diminished nearly every day, her
enemies were multiplying; and that inextinguishable race, the
Samnites--the increase of whose population would present a most
startling series of returns--appeared to the number of upwards of 4000,
who had been enlisted into the Roman navy. Their intention was to set
the city on fire, but their own leader threw cold water on it before it
was even lighted, by making himself an engine of communication with the
Roman Government.
In Sicily the Romans were continually in motion, but they took little by
their motion beyond a few small towns. At length they determined on one
grand naval effort, and they prepared 330 quinqueremes, which were
placed under the Consuls, L. Manlius and M. Atilius Regulus, who were
probably selected as the most likely to be able to command a fleet
because they had never tried. The Carthaginians went to meet them with
350 quinqueremes, in which were--according to tradition--150,000 men; an
instance of overcrowding which would have qualified the commander,
Hamilcar, for the captainship of a Thames steam-boat. The collision
between the two fleets was as destructive as might be anticipated.
Thirty ships of the Carthaginians went to the bottom; and, considering
their cargo, we can only wonder how they remained at the top. The Romans
lost comparatively little, for with them matters went on pretty
swimmingly. Regulus was so elated that he sailed for Africa, and, having
taken Clupea, the neighbourhood of which was cultivated like a garden,
he sat down to enjoy the fruits of success. He took the pick of
everything he could lay his hands upon, and he pounced upon the cattle
wherever a herd was to be seen. At the end of the year his colleague, L.
Manlius, returned to Rome, with a portion of the fleet, and 27,000
prisoners--an arrangement that savours of an enormous cram--and left
Regulus alone in his glory, which was destined to become his shame.
Early in the year of the city 498, Regulus, having the field to himself,
went into it with great confidence. He laid siege to the town of Adis,
which the Carthaginians tried to relieve; but getting among the
mountains with their elephants, they were unable to turn round, and
found themselves encumbered by the trunks as well as the bodies of these
ponderous animals. Regulus took Tunis, and several other places, though
in the course of the campaign he is said to have encountered an
unexpected enemy in the form of a snake in the grass--a species of
serpent one hundred and twenty feet long, which swallowed up his
soldiers by hundreds--swords and all--though the reptile ran the risk of
cutting its own throat by such extreme voracity.[43]
The Carthaginians were anxious for peace, and sent ambassadors to the
Roman camp to negotiate, but Regulus, in his proposal of terms, exceeded
all reasonable limits. He pretended to act on the principle of give and
take, but the giving was to be all on one side, and the taking all on
the other. The Carthaginians returned no answer to these insolent
demands; but it is probable their silence must soon have been construed
into consent, had it not been for the valour of a Spartan of the name of
Xanthippus. This individual was a mere mercenary, who put other people
to death for his own living; but he was, at all events, a working man,
and infused his own spirit of energy into the Carthaginian army. He
personally superintended the training, not only of the men, but of the
elephants, and taught the soldiers how to wield as a power those
hitherto unwieldy animals. Taking a hundred under his immediate tuition,
he brought them into such a state of docility, that when turned out for
exercise, they formed a stud worthy of the zoologist's attentive study.
With these sagacious brutes, and a large number of troops, he went forth
against Regulus, whose army amounted to 30,000 men; but the soldiers of
Xanthippus fought with the courage of lions, which, backed up as it was
by the firmness of the elephants, gave them a decisive victory. More
than 30,000 Romans perished, if the accounts handed down to us are to be
believed, and 500 were taken prisoners, though, if the same accounts are
to be believed, the Roman army was only 30,000 strong; so that the 500
captives must have been supplied from some of those exclusive sources
which are open to none but the historian. 2000 more are alleged to have
escaped, but we must leave the reader to solve the difficulty as he can;
for as two into one will not go, so 33,500 out of 30,000 will not come
by any process we are acquainted with. Xanthippus, the mercenary, had
made it worth his while, for he was highly paid, and received rich
presents, with which, as he dreaded the envy of the nobles, he thought
he had better make himself absent as speedily as possible. He returned,
therefore, to Sparta, to astonish the natives of his own city with the
wealth he had acquired.
The Consuls of the year, Ser. Fulvius and M. Aemilius, were now
despatched with the whole of the Roman fleet, amounting to about 300
ships, to Africa, where, after destroying the whole of the Carthaginian
fleet, it went ashore on the southern coast; and this fleet of 300 ships
lost, according to the authorities,[44] 340 vessels. The Carthaginians,
whose army on land amounted to about 18,000, managed to lose about
30,000 at sea; but an abundant population was still left for the
historian to deal, or rather to cut and shuffle, with. We must confess
ourselves wholly incompetent to grapple with the arithmetical problems
that continually present themselves to us in the course of our
researches, and we therefore postpone all attempt at a solution of the
difficulty until the universal solvent shall be discovered.
The Romans and Carthaginians, instead of being overwhelmed by their own
misfortunes, were in high spirits at the disasters of each other, and
both parties proceeded to repair the damage done to themselves, in order
to qualify them for doing further injury. At Rome the Senate ordered a
new fleet to be built, which took several Carthaginian towns, and
Carthage ordered a fresh army to be levied, which took nearly all the
Roman vessels.
Shortly afterwards another naval force was despatched under the Consuls,
Cn. Serulius Cæpio and C. Sempronius Blaesus, who had got together 260
ships, with which sundry ravages had been committed on the African
coast, when the sea, with its insatiable appetite, swallowed up at a few
gulps the greater part of the squadron.
Rome was now thoroughly sea-sick, and determined to have nothing more to
do with the water, but to wash her hands of it. She was, however, still
powerful by land, and encountered the Carthaginians at Panormus, where
the pro-consul, L. C. Metellus, gained a decisive victory, by turning
the elephants against their owners, and fighting the latter as it were
with their own weapons. This defeat led to a desire on the part of
Carthage for peace, and an embassy was sent to Rome, accompanied by
Regulus, who had been a prisoner five years, and who agreed to consider
himself morally in pawn, pledging himself to return, if the terms
proposed by Carthage should not be acceded to by his countrymen. The
conduct of Regulus seems to have been dictated by a strong love of
histrionic display, for he appears to have been acting a part in which
he sought to make as many effective points as possible. In the first act
we find him at the gates of Rome, refusing to come in, although he had
left Carthage for the purpose of doing so. His wife and two children
having gone to meet him, he looked at them as strangers; but this piece
of dramatic effect may be accounted for as springing from various other
motives than those affecting the patriot.
Having been invited to take his seat in the Senate, he at first refused,
but he yielded after a considerable amount of pressing; a proof that his
refusal was founded on no fixed principle. When asked for his opinion on
the Carthaginian question, he spoke against the arrangement he had been
sent home to further, and the noble Romans strongly urged him to stay
behind, though he had pledged his honour to return, and the Pontifex
Maximus, the head of the religion of the nation, devised a dodge by
which Regulus might have evaded his promise. It must, however, be
stated, to his credit, that he kept his word to the Carthaginians, and
returned among them; but instead of being hailed as a hero, he was
denounced as an impostor, and put to death in the most cruel manner. The
stories told of his being corked up in a cask filled with nails and
serpents, are altogether false; for, after carefully looking into the
matter, we are glad to be enabled to knock the cask to pieces by the
gentlest tap possible.
Rome, having refused to make peace, was compelled, in self-defence, to
go to war, and ordered 200 new ships with the recklessness of the
spend-thrift who, calling on his coachmaker, desired that "some more
gigs" should be immediately sent home to him. The Carthaginian fleet was
in the harbour of Drepana, when P. Claudius Pulcher--son of Appius the
blind, and who seems to have wilfully shut his eyes to the danger he
ought to have seen--determined to surprise the enemy. Every attempt to
dissuade him from his rash purpose was vain, and he persevered in spite
of the auspices, which were declared to be unfavourable; for the sacred
chickens were completely off their feed--a fact he set at defiance, by
observing that, if the birds would not eat, he would at least make them
drink; and he threw them all neck and crop into the water. The fate of
the chickens went to the hearts of the Roman soldiers, who became
thoroughly chicken-hearted, and fought so languidly, that they allowed
themselves to fall by hundreds into the hands of the enemy. The Senate
recalled Claudius to Rome, where a charge of high treason was preferred
against him; but a thunder-storm interrupted the proceedings, which were
never resumed, for the thunder seems to have cleared the air of all the
clouds impending over him. As he must have ultimately died in some way
or other, and as there are no records of his having been put to death,
history has returned an open verdict, which is equally adapted to the
suspicion that he came to his death by his own hands, or that it was
brought to him by the hands of his fellow countrymen.