Who won the Battle of Drepana?
Carthage won. In 249 BC the Roman consul Publius Claudius Pulcher sailed by night from Lilybaeum to surprise the Carthaginian fleet in the harbor of Drepana, modern Trapani. The admiral Adherbal got his ships out to sea first, pinned the Roman line against the shore and captured 93 of about 123 Roman ships.1
In 249 BC, deep into the First Punic War, Rome tried to finish Carthage's navy with one blow. A Roman army was besieging Lilybaeum, the last great Punic stronghold in western Sicily, and the new consul, Publius Claudius Pulcher, sailed by night to catch the Carthaginian fleet at anchor in the harbor of Drepana. Before the day was out he had lost most of his own fleet. Roman tradition blamed the disaster on one act: before the battle, it was said, he had thrown the sacred chickens into the sea.2
This is the story of Drepana from both sides: Claudius' gamble and the answer of the Carthaginian admiral Adherbal, what the battle cost, how the chickens story grew, and why even this disaster did not end the war. It belongs to our guide to the Punic Wars; see also the land battle at Panormus the year before and our ranking of the greatest battles of Carthage.
Why was the Battle of Drepana fought?
By 250 BC Carthage held little of Sicily beyond fortified ports at the western tip of the island. The most important were Lilybaeum, modern Marsala, and Drepana, modern Trapani, a harbor some 25 kilometers up the coast that a Carthaginian general named Hamilcar had fortified around 260 BC, moving there the people of nearby Eryx. (He is not Hannibal's father, Hamilcar Barca, who came to Sicily later in the war.) In 250 BC the Romans laid siege to Lilybaeum by land and sea.3
The siege went badly for Rome. A gale wrecked the Roman siege works and the garrison burned them. Carthaginian ships ran the blockade: Hannibal, son of Hamilcar, forced his way into the harbor of Lilybaeum with 50 ships and 10,000 men and then slipped out to join the main fleet under Adherbal at Drepana, and single fast ships kept the garrison in touch with Carthage. So many of the fleet's crews had been lost at the siege that Rome raised about 10,000 new rowers and sent them to the camp.4
What was Claudius Pulcher's plan?
Publius Claudius Pulcher, consul for 249 BC, came from the patrician family of the Claudii and was probably a son of the famous censor Appius Claudius Caecus. He took command at Lilybaeum and decided to strike at Drepana before Adherbal learned that the Roman crews had been made up.5
Polybius stresses that this was not one man's whim. Claudius put the plan to a council of his officers, who approved it; he chose the best men of the whole army as marines and sailed about midnight with his entire fleet, keeping the coast on his right. Otto Meltzer, the nineteenth-century historian of Carthage, thought Polybius mentioned that council on purpose, to answer the later Roman story that blamed everything on the consul's impiety.6
There was a reason to hurry. Adherbal was to be reinforced by 70 warships from Carthage under Carthalo. W. W. Tarn thought Claudius probably knew it and attacked before they arrived, a view C. F. Konrad finds plausible; Meltzer believed the ships had already reached Adherbal. Either way, catching an anchored fleet in a narrow harbor was the one fight in which, as Gaetano De Sanctis put it, Roman numbers and the valor of the legionaries would have decided the day.7
Did Claudius Pulcher really throw the sacred chickens overboard?
Roman commanders took the auspices before battle by watching the sacred chickens feed. Dio Cassius, in a passage preserved by the Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes, describes the method: tame birds were given barley, and the way they pecked at it was read as a good or a bad sign. A keeper of the chickens traveled with the army for the purpose.8
Cicero tells the story. When the chickens let out of their coop would not feed, Claudius had them thrown into the water and, "joking even upon the Gods," said: "Let them drink, since they will not eat." The summary of Livy's lost book 19 says he had them drowned, and Suetonius tells it the same way, adding that he joined battle and was routed.9
Polybius, whose account of the battle is the earliest and fullest, does not mention the chickens at all, and Meltzer noted that he does not even hint at them. Modern scholars are divided. Nathan Rosenstein lists F. W. Walbank and T. P. Wiseman among those who reject the story, and Friedrich Münzer, Richard Bauman and Tim Cornell among those who accept it. Gaetano De Sanctis set it among the tales the Romans made up after a defeat to give it a sacred explanation.10
True or not, the story did real work at Rome. In Rosenstein's reading, a commander who had defied the gods carried the blame for a defeat himself, so the soldiers and the state did not. Rosenstein notes that Claudius is the one general accused of sailing against the auspices who survived his defeat.11
How big were the fleets at Drepana?
Polybius gives no total for the Roman fleet, but his figures add up to 123 ships: 30 escaped and 93 were captured. Tarn accepts 123. A second tradition, going back through Diodorus to Philinus, a Greek historian who wrote from the Carthaginian side, makes the fleet 210 or 220 ships: Diodorus gives 210, Eutropius 220.12
Adherbal's numbers are not recorded. Tarn argued that his fleet must have been the smaller one, since Claudius thought it feasible to attack him under the walls of Drepana and Polybius does not count numbers among the Carthaginian advantages; he put it at 100 ships at most. Scullard gives about 100, and Konrad notes modern estimates of 100 to 130.13
How was the Battle of Drepana fought?
The Roman fleet came up the coast in column, and its leading ships were seen from Drepana at daybreak. Adherbal was taken by surprise but recovered at once. Polybius says he gathered his rowers on the beach, called the garrison's mercenaries to arms and told them that a fight at sea gave good hopes of victory while a blockade would bring only hardship. The men shouted to be led out, and he ordered them to embark and follow his ship.14
Drepana stood on a narrow, curved spit of land pointing west, with its harbor on the south side and rocks and islets off its tip. While the first Roman ships were entering the harbor mouth, Adherbal led his fleet out along the opposite side, close under the city walls, threaded it between the walls and the rocks into the open sea, and turned it to face the shore in line of battle.15
Claudius was at the rear of his own column, where, as Meltzer and the Treccani encyclopedia both note, he was badly placed to direct a surprise attack. When he saw that the enemy meant to fight, he ordered the leading ships to turn back. Ships inside the harbor and in its entrance fouled each other and broke their oars; the captains formed a line as best they could, close inshore, bows to the enemy and sterns to the beach. Claudius moved to the left wing, and there Adherbal, with five ships, overlapped the end of the Roman line.16
The fight began evenly, since both sides had picked soldiers aboard as marines. Then the Carthaginian advantages told: better built and faster ships, better trained crews, and open water behind them, so that a Punic ship in trouble could back off and turn, while a Roman ship pressed hard could only run into the shallows or onto the beach. The heavier Roman ships, with their inexperienced crews, could neither break through the enemy line nor come to each other's help.17
When Claudius saw his ships sticking fast and running aground along the line, he fled south along the coast with the 30 ships nearest him. The other 93 were taken, many of them with their crews, though men who drove their ships ashore escaped on foot.18
How many ships and men did Rome lose at Drepana?
The sources disagree. Polybius has 93 ships captured and 30 escaped. Eutropius, from the other tradition, has 220 ships, 30 escaped, 90 captured with their fighting men and the rest sunk. Diodorus puts the Roman loss at 117 ships and 20,000 men; a damaged clause in his text that mentions ten ships is read by De Sanctis and the Treccani encyclopedia as the number that escaped. Frontinus gives 20 escapers.19
Figures for men are even less certain. Polybius gives none. Orosius reports 8,000 Romans killed and, "according to report," 20,000 taken prisoner, numbers the Treccani encyclopedia thought plausible. Scullard notes that a large part of the crews swam to land and reached the camp at Lilybaeum.20
Carthaginian losses were light. Diodorus claims that not one Carthaginian was killed and only a few were wounded, and De Sanctis concluded that the enemy paid for the victory with minimal losses. R. Bosworth Smith repeats the report that the Carthaginians did not lose a single ship.21
How did Carthage follow up its victory?
In Carthage the victory was credited to Adherbal alone, to his foresight and courage, Polybius says. He sent the captured ships and prisoners to Africa and used his command of the sea at once. Diodorus says a squadron of 30 ships under Hannibal sailed to Panormus, carried off Roman grain to Drepana and brought supplies on to the besieged in Lilybaeum; Meltzer and De Sanctis read this as the capture of a Roman supply convoy, and De Sanctis identifies the commander as Hannibal, son of Hamilcar.22
Adherbal then gave Carthalo, who had brought the 70 new ships from Carthage, 30 more and sent him against the Roman ships at Lilybaeum. Carthalo struck just before daybreak, burned some and towed off others, while Himilco, the commander of Lilybaeum, sent his mercenaries out against the Romans who ran to the rescue. Tarn, putting Polybius and Diodorus together, concluded that Carthalo cannot have accounted for more than 10 of the 30 Roman ships there.23
The other consul, Lucius Junius Pullus, was bringing supplies to the army: Scullard, following Polybius, counts some 800 transports and 120 warships setting out from Syracuse. Carthalo waited for him on the south coast and, without a battle, forced first an advance convoy under the quaestors and then Junius' own squadron to anchor off a coast with no harbor, near Phintias and Camarina in Scullard's reconstruction, near Gela and Camarina in Mommsen's.24
Then the weather turned. The Carthaginian pilots, who knew the coast, saw a storm coming and persuaded Carthalo to round Cape Pachynus, the southeastern tip of Sicily, into shelter. The Romans, caught on an open shore, lost their whole fleet. Tarn reckoned that of the roughly 240 warships Rome had at the start of 249 BC only about 20 were left at its end, and Scullard agrees.25
What happened to Claudius Pulcher and Junius Pullus?
Claudius was recalled, and the Senate ordered him to name a dictator. He named Marcus Claudius Glicia, a man the summary of Livy calls of the lowest kind and Suetonius his own attendant, as if making a jest of the public disaster. Glicia was forced to resign, and Aulus Atilius Calatinus became dictator, the first, says the summary, to lead an army out of Italy.26
At home Claudius was prosecuted for treason. The trial broke off when a storm burst over the assembly, which Rosenstein reads as the gods themselves sparing his life; he was then tried again on a lesser charge and heavily fined. De Sanctis cites a late ancient commentator on Cicero, the Bobbio scholiast, for the sum: 120,000 asses.27
He died soon afterwards, before 246 BC, and Münzer suspected suicide. In 246 BC his sister Claudia, caught in the crowd leaving the games, said she wished her brother were alive to command a fleet again, which Suetonius takes to mean losing another and thinning out the city. She was fined for it.28
Junius' fate is told in three ways. Polybius has him reach the camp at Lilybaeum after the wreck and, eager to make good his disaster, seize the town and the temple of Eryx on the mountain above Drepana. Zonaras, summarizing Dio, says Carthalo took him prisoner, and Cicero that he killed himself. The capture of Eryx at least is secure, and it gave Rome the mountain that overlooks Drepana.29
Who won the Battle of Drepana, and why did it matter?
Carthage won, and decisively. After the storm that followed, Polybius wrote that the Romans, though they had met with partial misfortunes before, had never suffered so complete a disaster at sea, and that they now gave up the sea and kept to the land. For Konrad, Drepana marks the most significant defeat of Roman naval forces at the hands of Carthage; Theodor Mommsen called it the first and only great naval victory Carthage ever won over Rome.30
It did not win the war. Lilybaeum and Drepana stayed under siege by land. In 247 BC Hamilcar Barca took command in Sicily and fought on from the mountains above Panormus and Eryx. Rome built one last fleet, and in March 241 BC Gaius Lutatius Catulus defeated the Carthaginians off the Aegates Islands, just west of Drepana. Carthage asked for peace at once, and Drepana passed to Rome with it.31
The battle also left a mark on Roman politics. Rosenstein points out that Claudius' trial was the first known prosecution of a defeated Roman commander in well over a century, but the defeat did his family little lasting harm: his son Appius was consul in 212 BC.32
How do we know what happened at Drepana?
Only Polybius gives a connected account of the battle, and De Sanctis judged it the one trustworthy narrative. Polybius drew on, and criticized, two earlier historians from opposite camps: the Greek Philinus, who in his words thought every Carthaginian action wise and brave, and the Roman Fabius Pictor, who thought the exact opposite. Diodorus, who survives only in excerpts, follows Philinus. Livy's full account is lost, and Cicero, Suetonius, Eutropius and Orosius keep the Roman tradition, chickens included, only in brief.33
Where was the Battle of Drepana fought?
Drepana is modern Trapani, at the western tip of Sicily. Its Greek name comes from the sickle shape of the spit of land on which the town stands. The ancient harbor lay on the south side, sheltered by the islet now crowned by the Colombaia tower, and the fighting took place just off the coast at the harbor mouth, with Lilybaeum, modern Marsala, about 25 kilometers down the coast.34
Nothing from the battle itself has been found, but these waters have given up a Punic warship of the same war. In 1971 a team led by the archaeologist Honor Frost found the remains of a long ship off Marsala, dated to the middle of the third century BC, built for speed and marked by Punic shipwrights. It is shown at the Baglio Anselmi archaeological museum in Marsala, and Frost linked it to the last battle of the war in 241 BC.35
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