Ancient Roman Navy

The city of Rome is about nineteen miles from the sea, so the earliest settlers were not a seafaring people. It was not until they came into contact with other cultures that the Romans found it necessary to venture out to sea, and the earliest Roman vessels were probably river boats traveling along the Tiber river and small trading vessels going short distances to coastal towns. It was not until sometime before the fourth century BC that Rome acquired military ships. One of the earliest evidence of Roman warships is an account of a ship that carried a delegations of Romans to the Greek city of Delphi in 394 BC.

The birth of the Roman fleet as an organized part of the military came around the year 311 BC when two new official positions were created by the Roman Senate. These officials carried the title, duumviri navales classis ornandae reficiendaeque cause, or duumviri navales (two naval men) for short. They were the men tasked with maintaining a fleet of warships. Each man was put in charge of ten triremes.

Triremes were war ships that were equipped not only with sails, but also with three rows of oars and 180 oarsmen. When it came to close combat, sails were too unreliable to propel a ship and the three rows of oarsmen were called into action. The oars were of the ideal length and arranged in such a way so as to gain maximum speed. These ships were equipped with a bronze ram on its nose which was used to ram a hole in the side of an enemy vessel. Romans were much more comfortable fighting on land and never developed much skill with using any sort of artillery from the deck of a ship, so the usual tactic was to get near enough to the enemy to either sink the ship or board it and fight a more conventional battle.

Until the first Punic war, the main purpose of the Roman fleet was to protect the Italian coast from pirates. For naval ventures that required greater skill or experience, the Roman typically enlisted the aid of more seagoing allies, such as the Greek colonies of southern Italy and Sicily.

In 265 BC, hostilities broke out with the city of Carthage, an ancient Phoenician colony on the coast of North Africa in what is now modern Tunisia. Because Carthage was a naval power with colonies dotting the western Mediterranean, Rome was forced to fight at sea. In 261 BC, the Senate authorized the construction of one hundred quinqueremes, or ships with five banks of oars to augment the twenty triremes. The quinquereme was large enough to be equipped with a corvus. This device was a bridge attached to the ship. The bridge had a spike on the far end to insure when it was dropped onto an enemy ship it would hold fast and allow soldiers to cross over and fight a battle on the opponent’s deck.

The use of the corvus led to a series of victories in Sicily, allowing for the Romans to move on to Africa and eventually the city of Carthage. Eventually the corvus was abandoned because it made the ships too unstable in rough seas, but it served its purpose in secureing early victories and helping the Romans gain greater skill in naval warfare.

With the defeat of Carthage at sea, Rome gained control of the western Mediterranean Sea. In 229 BC Rome turned her fleet to the east in a series of wars known as the Illyrian wars and gained territory and allies in the eastern Mediterranean, but Carthage went to war with Rome for a second time. As a result of Roman control of the seas, when Carthage went to war with Rome for a second time in 218 BC, the famous general Hannibal led his army, famously equipped with elephants, across to Spain, from where he crossed Europe to approach Rome from the north. Carthage lost that war and lost her fleet, after seventeen years of fighting. This war diverted Roman attention from the east for decades.

A series of wars with the Macedonians and the Selucid Empire gave Rome mastery of the eastern Mediterranean by middle of the second century BC. After this, the most serious naval threat to Rome came from pirates. Mithridates, the king of Pontus used the pirates to bolster his navy in a war to gain autonomy again over his kingdom. The pirate problem became such a serious disruption to Roman trade that the Roman Dictator, Sulla, quickly assembled a fleet of ships that, under the command of Lucullus, defeated Pontus at sea. This war reestablished the need for a standing Roman fleet.

Mithridates was defeated, but the pirates were still a serious problem. The brash young military commander, Pompeius, nicknamed Magnus or “The Great,” by Sulla, was given command of the navy and great authority over all the coastal lands under Roman control, and quickly solved the piracy problem. However, dome degree of piracy would plague Roman shipping until Rome came to control all the lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea.

But that is for another time, for this leads us up to the time of Caesar and the characters of the Nomenclator series of novels. It is hoped that this brief summary of the development of the Roman navy makes your reading experience more enjoyable.