10 March 241 BC
Battle off the Aegates
The Roman ships carry only what they need to fight, while the Carthaginian ships are laden with grain and stores for the garrisons. The Carthaginian crews are newly raised and short of marines, who were to be taken on from Hamilcar’s army. The Roman ships, modelled on one of the best Carthaginian vessels, have better crews, and they use their speed to ram.
Bronze rams recovered from the site of the battle, shown in the Carthago exhibition at the Colosseum in Rome, 2019Wikimedia Commons, Jamie Heath, CC BY-SA 2.0 (Carthago exhibition - Aegadi Rams (49340681036).jpg)
The Romans sink 50 Carthaginian ships, 20 of them with all hands, and capture 70 with 10,000 men. The fight is hard, and the Romans lose 30 ships sunk and 50 damaged. A sudden change of wind lets the rest of the Carthaginian fleet hoist sail and escape, and the Romans, with their masts left ashore, cannot follow.
Since 2010 archaeologists have found 27 bronze warship rams on the sea floor off the west of Sicily, along with helmets and hundreds of amphorae. Inscriptions mark four of the rams as Roman built and one as Carthaginian, and their positions agree with Polybius’s account of where the battle was fought.
Sources
- Polybius, Histories, book 1, 61.
- John Lazenby, The First Punic War (1996).
- Adrian Goldsworthy, The Fall of Carthage (2006).
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