Battle of Mylae, 260 BC: Duilius, the Corvus and Rome's First Victory at Sea

For the first four years of the war with Carthage, Rome was a land power fighting a sea power. Then, in a single season, the Romans built a war fleet almost from nothing, and in 260 BC its first real test came off the town of Mylae on the north coast of Sicily. The battle there made the name of a new man, the consul Gaius Duilius, and gave Rome its first naval triumph and a monument that still stood in the Forum centuries later. This is the story of why Rome took to the sea, how the device called the raven worked, how each side read the fight, and what the ancient figures really tell us. It belongs to our account of the Punic Wars and of Rome against Carthage.²

Why was the Battle of Mylae fought?

The First Punic War began in 264 BC over Messana, the city on the Sicilian side of the strait, and by 262 the Romans had taken Agrigentum on the south coast. On land they were winning. But Polybius, the Greek historian who is our main source, explains that while Carthage held the sea unchallenged, many coastal towns of Sicily stayed loyal to it out of fear of its fleet, Italy's coasts were raided again and again, and Africa itself was never touched. So the Romans decided to put to sea.³

Carthage had its own logic. Its province in western Sicily, which modern historians call the epikrateia, was a loose network of tribute paying towns rather than a state, and Walter Ameling points out that when Pyrrhus overran the epikrateia in 278 to 276, Carthage kept only the fortress port of Lilybaeum, which could not be taken without a large fleet, a lesson for Rome. Like other city states, he adds, Carthage could not afford a standing army; mercenaries had to be recruited and shipped across before it could answer an attack. The fleet was therefore the hinge of its whole position, and Boris Rankov notes that Carthage could bring reinforcements into Sicily almost at will.⁴

In Rome the decision ran through the Senate and the consuls. Bruno Bleckmann argues that the consul Duilius pushed the plan for a great fleet through the Senate and the popular assembly after the Carthaginian navy had cost Rome many positions in Sicily over the winter of 261 to 260, and that command of the new fleet became a prize the two consuls of 260 fought over. Treccani, the Italian national encyclopedia, describes how Duilius prepared the fleet with great care before he led it.⁵

How did Rome build its first fleet?

Polybius says the Romans ordered 100 quinqueremes, the heavy warships rowed by five files of oarsmen, and 20 triremes. No quinquereme had ever been built in Italy, he writes, but in 264 a Carthaginian decked ship had run aground while attacking the Roman crossing to Messana and fallen into Roman hands, and the shipwrights copied it. Rankov notes that the story suits Polybius' theme of Roman inexperience and suggests the Romans may simply have wanted to match features of the Punic design.⁶

While the hulls were built, the crews learned to row on benches set up on dry land. Adrian Goldsworthy reckons the fleet needed over 30,000 rowers, many of them probably poor citizens and men of the allied coastal cities. The ancient tradition also made the building famously fast: Florus says 160 ships rode at anchor within sixty days of the felling of the timber, and Orosius gives 130 ships in the same sixty days.⁷

Was Rome really so new to the sea? Christa Steinby has argued that Polybius exaggerated Roman inexperience, that Rome already had ships and a seafaring tradition before the war, and that the silence of the sources may owe something to the question of who started the war. Rankov answers that the evidence for an earlier Roman navy is limited and that the sources are unequivocal about Rome's reliance on the ships of its allies.⁸

What happened before the battle?

The fleet's first operation was a disaster. Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio went ahead with 17 ships to Messana and then to Lipara, the main port of the islands off the northeastern tip of Sicily, hoping the town would be handed over. Boodes, an officer of the Carthaginian commander Hannibal, sailed from Panormus and trapped him in the harbor, and Scipio was taken prisoner. Zonaras and the summary of Livy say he was lured to a parley and seized. Roman tradition gave him the nickname Asina, the she-ass.⁹

The sources disagree about who was meant to command the fleet. In Polybius, Scipio was the fleet commander, and Duilius, who led the army in Sicily, took over only after Scipio's capture. In the account preserved by Zonaras, Duilius had charge of the fleet from the start. Bleckmann thinks Zonaras may be right and that Polybius played down Scipio's blunder, in line with the Scipio family tradition, and with it Duilius' merit.¹⁰

Polybius also tells of Hannibal running into the main Roman fleet off the toe of Italy with 50 ships and losing most of them. W. W. Tarn, writing in 1907, believed this was a Carthaginian version of Mylae itself that Polybius had copied by mistake; Goldsworthy sees no reason to accept that and treats it as a real skirmish.¹¹

What was the corvus?

The Romans knew their ships were slower and clumsier than the enemy's. Polybius says someone suggested a device that came to be called the raven (korax in his Greek, corvus in Latin): a gangway four feet wide and six fathoms, about 36 feet, long, fixed to a pole four fathoms high in the bow, with a knee high rail on each side and a heavy iron spike like a pestle under its end. Hauled up by a rope and pulley, it was dropped onto an enemy deck, the spike bit into the planks, and marines crossed two abreast behind their shields.¹²

The name of the inventor is not recorded. Goldsworthy notes that some have guessed at a Sicilian Greek, even the young Archimedes, and calls these conjectures; Steinby thinks the idea most likely came from Syracuse, Rome's ally since 263. Steinby also reads Polybius as saying the bridges were fitted only after the fleet reached Sicily and its ships had proved heavy on the voyage.¹³

The later tradition remembered something simpler. Zonaras says Duilius learned that the Carthaginian ships were lighter and quicker than his and fitted his own with grappling irons on long poles and similar devices, so that his men could bind the ships together and fight as on land. Florus speaks of grappling irons and strong appliances that the enemy laughed at before the battle.¹⁴

Modern scholars have argued about the device for over a century. Tarn suspected that the bridge was an embellishment of the Roman annalist Fabius Pictor and that the Romans used a kind of grapnel on a pole. In 1956 the Dutch historian H. T. Wallinga worked through Polybius' description with a naval architect and showed that the bridge could work and weighed only about a ton, too little to make a quinquereme unstable. Most historians since have accepted Polybius' account in outline.¹⁵

The debate is not closed. Bryant Ahrenberg argued in 2026 that the corvus should be seen as one form of ship binding, the old Mediterranean practice of lashing ships together, and that it shows a Roman grasp of naval practice rather than the landlubber image of Romans turning sea battles into land battles out of inexperience. Polybius mentions the device only at Mylae and in the campaign of 256 BC, which included the Battle of Cape Ecnomus.¹⁶

How many ships fought at Mylae?

Polybius says the Carthaginians put out 130 ships and does not give the Roman total. Diodorus tells a story in which Hannibal's messenger asks the Carthaginian council whether a fleet of 200 should fight a Roman fleet of 120, and Goldsworthy judges Polybius' 130 more likely than that 200.¹⁷

The Roman number has to be worked out. Tarn reckoned about 140, starting from a fleet he put at about 160 and taking away the 17 lost at Lipara; Goldsworthy adds whatever prizes and allied ships had joined and concludes that neither fleet was markedly bigger. Most ships on both sides were probably quinqueremes, with some triremes.¹⁸

How was the Battle of Mylae fought?

Duilius joined the fleet and heard that the Carthaginians were ravaging the land around Mylae, west of Messana on the same north coast, so he sailed against them with his whole force. Hannibal came out to meet him in a seven, a galley of seven files of oars that had once belonged to King Pyrrhus of Epirus. The Carthaginian commanders expected an easy win. Polybius says they despised Roman inexperience and sailed straight at the enemy without troubling to keep formation, as if falling on certain prey. Seeing the ravens nodding on the Roman bows puzzled them, but the leading ships attacked anyway. Every ship that struck was held fast, Roman soldiers poured across, and the fight became like a battle on land. The first 30 Carthaginian ships to engage were taken with their crews, Hannibal's seven among them; he escaped in a small boat.¹⁹

Zonaras gives a fuller picture of the Carthaginian tactics: their ships circled the heavier Roman vessels and darted in, and for a while the fight was even until the Romans gained the upper hand. Hannibal's flagship became entangled with what Zonaras calls a trireme, and he fled to another vessel. Goldsworthy notes that Zonaras uses the word loosely for any warship and thinks the Roman ship that caught the seven was more likely a quinquereme.²⁰

The rest of the Carthaginian fleet then tried to swing round and strike the Romans on the flank or stern, out of reach of the bridges. Polybius says the bridges could be swung round in every direction and came down on those ships too, and the Carthaginians finally fled; Wallinga's reconstruction, as Steinby and Goldsworthy report, allows a much narrower arc, ahead and a little to either side, so the Roman ships had to turn to meet them. Steinby reads this as a failed attempt to break through the Roman line and then to outflank it, met by Roman ships drawn up in two lines; Goldsworthy, discussing Thiel's similar idea of a second line, finds it plausible but warns that the brief sources can neither confirm nor deny it.²¹

How many ships did Carthage lose at Mylae?

Polybius puts the Carthaginian loss at 50 ships, the 30 captured in the first clash among them, and Britannica follows him. The later Roman tradition counts differently: Eutropius says Duilius captured 31 ships and sank 14, killed 3,000 men and took 7,000 prisoners, and Orosius gives 31 taken, 13 sunk, 3,000 killed and 7,000 captured.²²

Those later figures match the column of Duilius, which records one seven and 30 quinqueremes and triremes captured and 13 sunk. No source records the Roman losses; Tarn could only guess they were lighter than the Carthaginian.²³

What happened after the Battle of Mylae?

Duilius landed in Sicily, broke the siege of Segesta, an ally of Rome, and took the town of Macella by storm. Zonaras says Hamilcar did not dare to meet him, and Duilius went home at the end of the campaigning season.²⁴

The war on land did not turn. Hamilcar, the Carthaginian commander in Sicily, moved his people and valuables from Eryx to the harbor of Drepanum, razed Eryx and took back several towns once Duilius had gone. Bleckmann concludes that the victory brought great spoil and prestige but had only slight strategic effect.²⁵

Carthage was hard on beaten generals, but Hannibal escaped punishment this time. Diodorus and Zonaras tell how, before news of the defeat reached home, he sent a friend to ask the council whether he should fight; when it shouted yes, the messenger said the battle had been fought and lost on its orders. Zonaras adds that he kept his life but lost his command.²⁶

He was given another fleet all the same. In 259 the Romans, now able to act at sea, carried the war to Corsica and Sardinia, and in 258 Hannibal's fleet was beaten off Sardinia and its surviving ships trapped in a harbor there. Polybius says his own surviving men seized him and crucified him; Zonaras has him killed by his mutinous men at Sulci, and Orosius has him stoned to death by his troops.²⁷

How was Duilius honored?

Duilius celebrated the first naval triumph in Roman history, the summary of Livy's book 17 says, and the rostra taken from the enemy ships decorated columns raised in his honor; Platner and Ashby record two such columns, one by the Circus and the more famous one at or near the speakers' platform in the Forum.²⁸

He also enjoyed an odd lifelong privilege: when he came home from dinner, a torch bearer and a piper went before him. Cicero has the elder Cato recall seeing the old man escorted like this when Cato was a boy, and says Duilius took the honor for himself, as no private citizen had done before; Florus says he ordered it, as if celebrating a daily triumph.²⁹

His later career was more modest. He was censor in 258 and, as an old man, dictator in 231 only to hold elections. Bleckmann sees aristocratic jealousy at work: the patrician Scipio Asina, the man captured at Lipara, was consul again by 254.³⁰

What is the column of Duilius?

Part of an inscription from the column was found in Rome in 1565 and is kept in the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline. In it Duilius is praised as the first Roman to fight successfully with ships at sea and the first to equip and train fleets. It credits him with relieving Segesta and taking Macella, defeating the Punic fleets on the high sea in the presence of Hannibal, capturing ships, taking gold and silver as booty, being the first to give the people booty from a sea battle, and leading freeborn Carthaginians in his triumph.³¹

The stone we have is not the original. Platner and Ashby thought the inscription was restored about 150 BC and again under Augustus, Tiberius or Claudius, and Treccani calls the surviving piece part of a reworking of the imperial age; how far its old fashioned spellings are genuine is disputed. Bleckmann still treats its content as a genuine record of the prestige Duilius won, while noting that its authenticity is debated.³²

Today the Capitoline Museums use the column to tell the story of Rome's first naval victory over Carthage in the waters off Milazzo, in the exhibition Cursus Honorum on the magistrates of the Republic. The engraving at the top of this page, published by Antonio Lafreri in Rome in 1575, shows how Renaissance antiquarians imagined the column with its rams.³³

Who won the Battle of Mylae, and why did it matter?

Rome won, and won clearly. Britannica sees Mylae as the moment Rome gained dominance in Sicilian waters, and Treccani calls it the first naval victory of the Romans. For Carthage, a navy that had ruled these waters for generations had lost a battle to a fleet that was months old.³⁴

Mylae also set the pattern for the next years at sea. Steinby notes that Thiel credited the corvus with the Roman wins of the following battles, including Ecnomus in 256, and the war at sea went on until the Romans finally won it at the Aegates Islands in 241. Ahrenberg argues that the device shaped the lasting image of the Romans as landsmen at sea, an image his own reading challenges. For the other great sea fights of antiquity, see the greatest naval battles in history.³⁵

Where was the Battle of Mylae fought?

Mylae is the modern town of Milazzo, on the north coast of Sicily west of Messina, and the Capitoline Museums speak of the victory in the waters off Milazzo. The fleets met at sea off this coast; no ancient source fixes the exact spot.³⁶

Mylae saw a second sea battle two centuries later, in Octavian's war against Sextus Pompey, when Octavian's admiral Agrippa beat Pompey's commander Papias off the same coast; Appian describes it, and Tarn noted that Appian has Agrippa's ships there use ravens too. That is a different battle from the one told here.³⁷