By legend, the city’s founders were the semidivine twins Romulus and Remus, who, like their predecessors Sargon and Moses, had been set afloat to the fates in the river. They had been nursed by a she-wolf (still the city’s emblem) who happened upon them at the Tiber River shoreline, reared by a shepherd, and eventually set up an original settlement on the Palatine Hill near the river. Historical Rome, indeed, commenced with separate tribal settlements atop its famous seven spring-fed hills near where an ancient salt trade route crossed a shallow fording point in the Tiber near the Tiber Island. By the eighth century BC, the city came under the rule of the Etruscans, from whom Rome inherited many of its advanced hydraulic arts of drainage and irrigation. By draining large swamps from Tuscany to Naples and embanking the silt-rich Po River against uncontrolled flooding, the Etruscans made Italy’s limited agricultural resources yield enough food to sustain a pre–Athenian age civilization sufficiently prosperous to challenge Carthage and the Greek colonies of the mid-Mediterranean.
It was under Etruscan rule that Rome’s first large engineering work was completed in the sixth century BC. The Cloaca Maxima, or great sewer, drained the swampy, malarial valley between the city’s Seven Hills to create what became the center of ancient Rome’s civic and commercial life, its Forum. So well constructed that it still functions today, its egress point into the Tiber can be seen along the embankment from the Tiber Island bridge and its malodorous effluvia smelled through the air vents in the Forum’s ruins.
The Romans cast off their Etruscan kings in 509 BC. They set up, like their ancient Athenian contemporaries, an aristocratic republic. Governed by two annually elected consuls, a Senate, and landed patrician families, the Roman Republic would endure in form and as an ideal for centuries. It protected private property and other rights with written law and exalted the virtues of the simple, independent citizen-farmer who was expected to put down his hoe and pick up his arms when war necessitated—ideals extolled in the late eighteenth century by America’s founding fathers. Without the existence of a central, arterial river to provide transport and large-scale irrigation through the Italian peninsula, Rome’s economic and political power consolidated slowly, facilitated by its construction of a network of well-drained major roads that fanned out from the capital in all directions, starting with the southeasterly Appian Way in 312 BC. Rome’s rise was abetted indirectly by the sea power of the Greeks of Syracuse, who early in the fifth century destroyed Etruscan naval power. By 270 BC Rome controlled the entire Italian peninsula. Across the Strait of Messina, on the northeastern tip of the rich, grain-growing island of Sicily, Rome’s expanding ambitions collided with the great Mediterranean naval empire founded by the Phoenicians centuries earlier—Carthage.
The turning point of Rome’s rise in history as a great power was its three Punic Wars, through which it won command of the Mediterranean. The First Punic War began in 264 BC and lasted twenty-three years. Rome’s initial objective was simply to remove Carthaginian garrisons from eastern Sicily. But its besieging armies were frustrated by the resupplies Carthage delivered from its western Sicily strongholds, which in turn were supplied by sea from its capital city in North Africa. Thus, to neutralize eastern Sicily, Rome needed to control the sea-lanes around the island.
Yet Rome at this point was exclusively a land power. To achieve its objectives, it would have to become one of history’s rare land-based civilizations that successfully transformed itself into a dominant sea power as well. In 260 BC the Senate authorized the construction of 20 triremes and 100 quinqueremes, five-bankers manned by 300 oarsmen. Since Romans didn’t know how to design a war galley, they relied upon the know-how of Greeks from the cities of southern Italy and Sicily. In a remarkably few months, with rowing crews training on dry land all the while, the neophyte fleet, with more than 30,000 men, was ready to set sail out of Rome’s harbor at Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber to confront Carthage’s larger, experienced, and redoubtable navy. In effect, the battle for Sicily was to be a proxy contest with Carthage for dominance of the entire western Mediterranean. Rome’s warships did not try to match Carthage’s light, fast fleet designed for rapid maneuvers and ramming executed by skilled seamen. Instead, they were designed pragmatically to mobilize the advantage of Rome’s infantry strength by making the sea battle more like a land fight. They were heavier, slower, and steadier in bad weather, with large decks to hold more marines. They were designed to pull alongside with grapples and board the enemy for hand-to-hand combat. A brilliant stroke was added when the fleet was readying for battle in Syracuse—some say at the suggestion of its ingenious resident, Archimedes—to attach an upright 36-foot-long gangplank with a heavy spike at the outboard that could swing down over the bow and embed sturdily into the nearing enemy vessel both to frustrate its ram and to permit swift boarding by Roman soldiers.
Against improbable odds, Rome’s navy triumphed in the war’s first major sea battle in August 260 BC off Sicily’s northern shore near Mylae. What followed was nineteen years of naval-warfare attrition, both from losses inflicted by the enemy and even larger losses wrought by sea storms. One Sicilian storm in 255 BC cost hundreds of Roman ships and more than 100,000 lives; another two years later off southern Italy sank most of the navy’s rebuilt fleet. In the end, Rome won the First Punic War chiefly by its relentless perseverance in rebuilding its fleet and its tolerance for sustaining heavy losses in vessels and manpower, all the while improving its seamen’s skills. The final battle was at the western tip of Sicily near the Aegates Islands on March 10, 241 BC.
The strategic advantage won by Rome in the First Punic War—of being the most potent naval force in the western Mediterranean—proved to be decisive in the outcome of the Second Punic War, from 218 to 201 BC. It was during the second war that Carthage’s brilliant general Hannibal famously led his army and a contingent of elephants from his base in Spain across the Ebro River into Gaul, over the Alps, and into Italy, where he marauded victoriously throughout the Italian countryside for over a decade in what proved to be a fruitless bid to trigger local insurrection against Roman rule. In the end Hannibal was unable to sustain his supply lines without naval replenishment and was ultimately defeated on the banks of the Metaurus River in 207 BC, when reinforcement troops traveling overland under his brother Hasdrubal failed to arrive in time. Indeed, it was Rome’s naval superiority that had compelled Hannibal to attempt the treacherous overland invasion of Italy in the first place. Had Hannibal been able to go “by the sea, he would not have lost thirty-three thousand out of the sixty thousand veteran soldiers with whom he started,” concluded Captain A. T. Mahan in his classic The Influence of Sea Power upon History. Sea-power superiority also delivered Rome the means to counterattack Carthage. Through the naval supply buildup of a formidable army base in northern Spain, it besieged and finally took Carthage’s Spanish stronghold at Cartagena (“New Carthage”), and then forced Carthage’s surrender in 202 BC through attacks on its North African homeland across the Mediterranean.
The first two Punic Wars transformed the trajectory of Roman history. The conversion of the entire western Mediterranean basin into an unchallenged Roman lake brought Rome its first taste of the fruits of ruling a provincial empire and propelled its rise as one of history’s great powers. All the grain wealth of Sicily, the mineral deposits of southern Spain, the tin, silver, and other resources that moved from the Atlantic through the Pillars of Hercules, and slave manpower from defeated populations came into Roman hands. Gradually, Rome ceased striving for basic self-sufficiency from its low-yielding home soils and began to rely on shipments of imported grain for its daily bread. Large estate owners abandoned drainage projects to reclaim marginal cropland in favor of producing higher-value-added, tradable luxuries like olives, wine, and livestock, often with slave labor. Class tensions polarized as wealth became concentrated in fewer hands, while individual military commanders compensated by advancing the interests of free commoners, who increasingly served as their professional
troops.
Initially, Rome took uneasily to its changing political cultural identity as a hegemonic maritime power. Only gradually during the course of the second century BC did it accept the inexorable demands of its success to extend its dominance over the eastern Mediterranean as well. Nevertheless, whenever possible, it exerted its weighty influence indirectly through the soft power of financing trade and being the largest import market, while leaving naval patrol duties in the east to maritime allies like Rhodes and Pergamum. As late as 100 BC, Rome had scaled back its fleet in the eastern Mediterranean to skeletal size.
All that changed dramatically during the first century BC when pirates began to exploit Rome’s minimal naval presence. The largest group of buccaneers, headquartered in Cilicia on Asia Minor’s rugged southern coast, possessed more than 1,000 ships and a formidable arsenal, and was ruled by a well-organized, hierarchical command. By 70 BC they had become an intolerable nuisance by interfering with vital grain shipments to Rome and by brazenly raiding coastal highways as far away as Italy and kidnapping prominent Roman citizens for ransom. One famous hostage was the young Julius Caesar, who was seized while on a ship bound from Rome to Rhodes, where he was to study law. During his captivity Caesar amicably suggested to his captors that due to his importance, they should double their initial ransom demand—which they readily did—and promised, with equal geniality, that after his release he would return to crucify each and every one of them. In fact, as soon as he was freed, he raised a fleet in Miletus and killed as many as he was able to catch, though as a reward for their decent treatment of him he allowed their throats to be slit before nailing them to the cross.
Gripped by a sense of national crisis at the threat to its food supply, Rome’s Senate finally acted. In 67 BC it commissioned General Pompey to rid the Mediterranean of the pirate menace and invested him with almost unlimited power to accomplish it. In one of the most spectacularly successful naval operations in history, Pompey amassed a force of 500 ships and 120,000 marines and launched a methodical, sector-by-sector sweep of pirate enclaves eastward from Gibraltar. In less than three months, all the pirates were defeated and the buccaneer capital in Cilicia was besieged into submission.
Pompey did not stop there, however. Without authorization from the Senate, he sailed his formidable fleet to the Near East, where he brought Syria, Judaea, and the cities of Antioch and Jerusalem under Roman rule. He returned to Rome in 62 BC as a conquering hero with fearful power, and entered a ruling triumvirate with Caesar and Crassus. Pompey’s naval operations revived Roman sea power and organized it into a permanent naval force. Thereafter, it always would be a crucial component of Rome’s ability to wage war and enforce its will on others. At first, however, it was turned inward upon itself in two decades of bloody civil wars that were ignited on January 11, 49 BC, when Caesar and his army marched across the muddy little Rubicon in northern Italy, which violated the republic’s forbidden boundary line, and amounted to an attempted coup d’état. The ensuing civil war between Caesar and Pompey was fought across the breadth of the entire Mediterranean from Spain to Egypt, with Caesar’s breakout from Pompey’s blockade in the Adriatic playing a major role in his ultimate triumph prior to Pompey’s assassination in Egypt. When Caesar, now dictator for life, himself was murdered at the Senate in Rome on March 15, 44 BC, civil war erupted anew.
Fittingly, the final, decisive battle that ended the civil wars and inaugurated the imperial era was fought at sea, in 31 BC, off the Actium promontory near the Gulf of Corinth in Greece. On one side was the allied force of Caesar’s leading general, Mark Antony, and his lover, Egyptian queen Cleopatra. On the other side was Octavian, later honored by the Senate with the supreme title Augustus Caesar, the young grandnephew and adopted son of Caesar. In command of Octavian’s fleet was his brilliant military commander, lifelong right-hand man, and civic colossus of the Roman Empire in his own right, Marcus Agrippa.
To try to offset his inferiority at sea, Octavian had raised a new navy of 370 ships. Recognizing that his enemy’s more-expert crews and nimbler, more-lethal vessels rendered futile any attacks based on the conventional tactic of ramming, Agrippa, in a stroke of genius reminiscent of Rome’s design innovation of the spiked gangplank in the First Punic War, armed the ships with a new weapon he conceived: a catapult that fired arrows leashed to a rope and tipped with an iron-clawed grapnel that enabled his marines to clutch onto enemy galleys from much farther range than the conventional, hand-thrown grapnel, and pull themselves in by windlasses for hand-to-hand combat. With the help of the catapult grapnel, Agrippa’s fleet won decisive battles off Sicily in 36 BC that reversed Octavian’s waning fortunes and went on to win control of the sea war on the Mediterranean. By the time of Actium, he held enough strategic bases to interdict Egypt’s grain supply freighters, and thus slowly starve Antony’s huge military forces, including its Actium fleet, into submission. At the battle itself, Agrippa enjoyed a numerical warship advantage of 400 to 230. Before the day had ended, Cleopatra and Antony had fled for Egypt, where, a year later, they committed suicide, while Octavian’s Rome seized direct possession of the Mediterranean’s last nominally independent great state and with it the prize of the rich Nile granary.
Octavian acquired the title of Emperor Augustus and prudently consolidated his power by, among other actions, establishing a well-organized, permanent professional navy to police the Mediterranean. Over the next 200 years of the Pax Romana, Rome’s empire was extended from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf, from North Africa to the northern British Isles, and from central Europe through the Balkans. To secure the frontier against barbarian tribes, naval squadrons controlled some 1,250 miles of natural defensive water barriers, including the Rhine, the Danube, and the Black Sea.
One of Julius Caesar’s unfulfilled visions had been to join the Rhine and Danube rivers by a canal and thus create a navigable, arterial water route through continental Europe’s heart, a Nile of Europe. In the event, the Rhine-Danube boundary remained the defensive frontier between Roman civilization and the barbarian world—an equivalent of China’s Great Wall—and never became the central transport waterway unifying northern and central Europe. In the Middle Ages, the old Rhine-Danube frontier again shaped history as the rough, axial dividing line between Catholic and Protestant Europe. Ultimately, it took 2,000 years, until 1992, for political conditions to be conducive for the completion of the 106-mile-long Rhine-Main-Danube canal linking the North Sea and the Black Sea and helping to integrate Europe into a single economic community.
Augustus famously boasted of his legacy that he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble. Indeed, under the order established by the Roman Empire, wealth and commerce soared. Goods were sucked in by inexorable political and economic gravity from the empire’s provinces along its rivers and bordering seas—North, Baltic, Black, Red, and Atlantic—toward its ravenous mouth and stomach in the central Mediterranean. In an era where it was difficult to move any large quantities by land, river and sea transport were Rome’s vital lifelines.
At the empire’s height, staples and luxuries poured into its bustling ports from distant foreign civilizations spanning the Old World. Grain that became the daily bread dole for commoners came from Egypt, North Africa, and the Black Sea; the rich and powerful enjoyed wools from Miletus, Egyptian linens, silks from China, Greek honey, peppers, pearls, and gems from India, Syrian glass, marble from Asia Minor, and aromatics from the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The mutual attractive force of trade between Rome and its counterpart empire in the Far East, Han China, increasingly found shipping routes through the narrow Strait of Malacca between the Malaya Peninsula and Sumatra to stimulate a vibrant exchange across the long-distance Indian Ocean highway to give critical mass to the nascent global market economy that took hold in this era. Over a hundred trading ships per year sailed the monsoons for India through the Red Sea, parts of which were patrolled for pirates by the Roman navy. Throughout the Mediterranean
, the infrastructures of shipping and trade were improved and expanded. In order for large cargo ships to arrive directly at Rome instead of being transshipped in smaller boats from the natural, deep port near Naples, for example, Emperor Claudius in AD 42 constructed a man-made harbor from the dredged marshes north of Rome that was linked to the Tiber by an artificial canal and towpath; inside the harbor, called simply Portus, was a large lighthouse modeled on Alexandria’s Pharos lighthouse.
Rome earned its economic surplus both from being the center of sea trade and from imperial exploitation of the rich provinces around the Mediterranean rim whose own political economies were increasingly molded to the necessities and pulse beat of the giant Roman metropolis. With some 1 million inhabitants at its height, Rome was far and away the largest city in Western history and would remain so for nearly 2,000 years. Such a size was far more than it could support on local Italian agriculture and industry. Therefore, as Rome grew rich upon the provincial resources on its periphery, it also grew increasingly dependent upon them for its internal stability. During Rome’s zenith, chronically high urban unemployment resulted in a welfare state with up to one-fifth of the often restive population receiving subsidized bread from public storehouses and entertainment at public spectacles—gladiatorial contests, ship races and various games, in venues like the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus. Rome’s basic food security required the reliable importation of about 300,000 tons of grain per year. Two-thirds came from destinations within several days’ sailing. But one-third came from the Nile Valley in Egypt, which was a difficult and dangerous thirty- to sixty-day voyage into the prevailing westerlies. Emperors from Augustus onward thus placed high state priority on protecting the fleet of huge grain ships that crossed the open waters from Alexandria to Rome. Each cargo carrier was up to 180 feet long and 44 feet deep—larger than any ship that crossed the Atlantic until the early nineteenth century. One famous grain cargo ship passenger who voyaged to Rome in AD 62 was the prisoner St. Paul. The Nile became so important as a breadbasket that Egypt was forbidden by edicts to export its grain anywhere else. Egypt’s irrigation was intensified and its cultivated acreage expanded under the Romans, facilitated by a long period of good Nile floods, and even rainfall.
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