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264 BCEPrimary source · 2 sourcesWell documented

Rome Had No Navy, So It Copied a Wrecked Carthaginian Ship and Built 100 of Them in 60 Days

On the timeline · around 264 BCE · The RepublicThe RepublicRome Had No Navy, So It Copied a Wrecked Carthaginian Ship and Built 100 of Them in 60 Days375 BCE350 BCE325 BCE300 BCE275 BCE250 BCE225 BCE200 BCE175 BCE150 BCE

What happened

War broke out when the Mamertines, mercenaries holding the Sicilian city of Messana, first invited a Carthaginian garrison in against Syracuse, then switched sides and expelled it to invite Rome in instead. Rome sent two legions, and Carthage answered by allying with Syracuse. At the war's start Rome had no serious navy and no experience in naval warfare, while Carthage was the Mediterranean's dominant sea power. According to the Greek historian Polybius, the Romans captured a wrecked Carthaginian warship that had run aground during the fighting and used it as the design template for their own fleet. By 260 BCE Rome had built a fleet of 100 quinqueremes and 20 triremes, training rowers on wooden benches on dry land while the ships themselves were still under construction.

Why it matters

This is the moment Rome became a naval power at all, something it had never been before. To offset Carthage's naval experience, Roman engineers designed the corvus, a hinged boarding bridge about 11 meters long with a spike on the underside, mounted on a ship's bow. Dropped onto an enemy deck, it let Roman marines storm across and fight what was essentially a land battle at sea, turning Carthage's seamanship advantage into a non-factor. The war ended in 241 BCE with Carthage ceding Sicily, which became Rome's first province outside the Italian peninsula, the first piece of what would become a Mediterranean-wide empire.

How we know

The main ancient source is Polybius, writing in the 2nd century BCE with access to participants' accounts, whose Histories describe both the captured quinquereme serving as a shipbuilding model and the corvus's construction in mechanical detail, a pole, a hinged gangway, and a spike to anchor it into an enemy deck. This text survives through the Perseus Digital Library and LacusCurtius classics archive at the University of Chicago.

Sources

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Part of a timelineAncient Rome30 events · From a legendary fratricide on the Palatine Hill to a teenage emperor's quiet deposition twelve centuries later, told through the battles, plagues, and one bridge-crossing that ended a republic.View all →