Who won the Battle of the Aegates Islands?
Rome won. On 10 March 241 BC the consul Gaius Lutatius Catulus caught a Carthaginian relief fleet under Hanno off the Aegates Islands, west of Sicily. Polybius says 50 Carthaginian ships were sunk and 70 captured. Carthage could no longer supply its army in Sicily and made peace, ending the First Punic War.1
After twenty-three years of war, Rome and Carthage were both close to exhaustion. Hamilcar Barca, the father of Hannibal, was still holding out on Mount Eryx in western Sicily, and the Roman treasury was empty. Rome's leading citizens then lent the state a new fleet, and in March 241 BC it caught Carthage's last relief convoy off a cluster of small islands west of Trapani. One morning's fighting decided a war that years of sieges had not. This is the story of why both sides staked everything on the sea, how each commander read the wind that morning, what the battle cost, and what divers have found on the seabed since 2004. It belongs to our history of the Punic Wars and of Rome against Carthage.2
Why was the Battle of the Aegates Islands fought?
The First Punic War began in 264 BC as a struggle for Sicily, and by the 240s it had narrowed to the island's western tip. Carthage still held the ports of Lilybaeum, modern Marsala, and Drepana, modern Trapani, both under Roman siege. Rome had lost three great fleets to battle and storm, and its command of the sea seemed gone.3
The war on land was stuck. In 247 or 246 BC Carthage gave the Sicilian command to Hamilcar Barca, who raided the Italian coast and held a fortified mountain near Panormus for about three years before seizing the town of Eryx on the slopes of Monte San Giuliano, today's Erice. The Romans kept the summit and the foot of the mountain, so neither side could break the other. Nepos says he defended Eryx so well that there seemed to be no war there at all.4
Hamilcar's men depended on supplies brought by sea, which meant that ships had to pass the Aegates Islands, the archipelago of Favignana, Levanzo and Marettimo off Trapani. Whoever controlled those waters controlled the war. Read more about Hamilcar's long Sicilian campaign in our profile of Hamilcar Barca.5
How did Rome pay for its last fleet?
Rome decided to go back to sea for a third time. There was no money in the public treasury, so, Polybius says, the leading citizens undertook to provide a fully equipped quinquereme each, alone or in groups of two or three according to their means, on the understanding that they would be repaid if the venture succeeded. In this way two hundred quinqueremes were built. Scullard describes it as a loan repayable only in the event of victory.6
The Italian historian Gaetano De Sanctis cautioned against romanticizing the gesture. In his view it was simply an internal loan, voluntary in name and perhaps forced in practice, and he rejected Theodor Mommsen's claim that private citizens had also paid the crews.7
The new ships were built on the model of a fast quinquereme captured from a Carthaginian captain known as Hannibal the Rhodian, taken as he tried to run the Roman blockade of Lilybaeum. Sebastiano Tusa and Jeffrey Royal argue that this faster design led to a marked standardization of warship construction by the end of the war. Scullard adds that the new quinqueremes were lightly built and no longer carried the corvus, the boarding bridge Rome had used in its early sea battles.8
Command went to the consul Gaius Lutatius Catulus. His colleague Aulus Postumius Albinus never left Rome: the pontifex maximus, Lucius Caecilius Metellus, kept him in the city because he was also the priest of Mars. The praetor Quintus Valerius Falto sailed with Lutatius.9
The fleet put to sea at the beginning of summer 242 BC and appeared off Drepana, where it found no Carthaginian warships to oppose it. Lutatius attacked the town by land and sea, but he was wounded in the assault, in the thigh according to Orosius, and the attack failed.10
What was Carthage thinking?
Carthage had its own logic. After its great victory at Drepana in 249 BC no Roman fleet challenged it at sea, and Polybius says that, never expecting the Romans to dispute the sea again, the Carthaginians had neglected their navy out of contempt for them. The Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency's summary of the war puts it the same way: Carthage had let its fleet run down in the years before the battle.11
Money and attention had also gone to Africa. In these years the general Hanno, later called the Great, campaigned in the interior: Diodorus describes him forcing the city of Hecatompylus to surrender, and Jona Lendering dates his capture of Theveste to 247 BC. The Algerian historian Karima Noureddine sees two Carthaginian policies at odds: the oligarchs around Hanno favored expansion in Africa and saw the Sicilian army as a drain on the treasury, while Hamilcar's party insisted on holding Drepana and Lilybaeum; in her reading, Sicily mattered far more to Rome than to the Carthaginian oligarchy. Lendering cautions that the two programs were not mutually exclusive: after the war Carthage pursued both at once.12
De Sanctis also blamed Hamilcar himself, absorbed in his mountain war, for letting the fleet that protected his supply line run down. Scullard suggests that Carthage needed the crews for its wars in Africa. Whatever the reason, when news came that a Roman fleet was at sea again, Carthage had to improvise.13
It loaded ships with grain and other supplies and sent them under a commander named Hanno. The plan was sensible: cross to the Sicilian coast, unload the supplies, take Hamilcar and his soldiers on board, and only then seek battle. Zonaras adds that the ships also carried money. Noureddine notes that the fleet was manned in haste with new recruits, and the warships, heavy with cargo, were in no condition to fight.14
How many ships sailed is unknown. Polybius gives no figure. Diodorus speaks of 250 warships and a number of cargo ships, Eutropius and Orosius of 400, while Scullard estimated that Carthage had manned, with difficulty, 170 to 200 vessels. The RPM Nautical Foundation describes a fleet of more than 200 warships and transports.15
What happened at the Battle of the Aegates Islands?
Hanno anchored at Hiera, the westernmost island, today Marettimo, and waited for a wind to carry him to Sicily. Lutatius guessed his intention, took picked soldiers on board and, Polybius says, sailed to Aegusa, today Favignana, the island off Lilybaeum, to block the crossing.16
The date was 10 March 241 BC. Eutropius gives it as the sixth day before the Ides of March, and modern scholars accept it: Jonathan Prag notes that F. W. Walbank and M. G. Morgan both judged the Roman and Julian calendars to be close at this point and the date probably accurate.17
At daybreak a strong breeze rose behind the Carthaginians, and the sea was heavy. De Sanctis calls it a libeccio, the southwesterly. Lutatius hesitated. Then, Polybius says, he reasoned that if he attacked now he would fight only Hanno's sailors in heavily laden ships, while if he waited for calm weather he would face lightened ships carrying Hamilcar and his best troops. He rowed out against the wind and formed his fleet in a single line, bows toward the enemy, across the Carthaginian course.18
The Carthaginians, seeing their crossing barred, lowered their masts and closed. Zonaras records a portent: a star like a torch rose above the Romans and plunged into the Carthaginian ranks. Diodorus describes hard fighting in which commanders on both sides led from the front, and men who went down with their ships were taken from the water as prisoners.19
Polybius explains why the fight was soon decided. For months Lutatius had drilled his crews every day, and on the eve of the battle he took on board picked soldiers from the army as marines. The Roman ships, stripped of everything but what battle required and rowed by trained crews, had the better of it almost everywhere. The Carthaginian ships were too heavy to maneuver. Then the wind changed. The surviving Carthaginian ships raised their masts again and ran before it to Hiera, and, Diodorus says, on to Carthage. Lutatius took his prizes and prisoners back to Lilybaeum.20
Who really commanded the Roman fleet?
The question was argued in Rome soon afterwards. Eutropius says Lutatius boarded his ship still ill from his wound. Valerius Maximus tells how, when the Senate voted Lutatius a triumph, Valerius Falto claimed one too, arguing that the consul had lain lame in a litter during the battle while he, the praetor, had carried out every duty of a commander. The arbitrator, Atilius Calatinus, ruled for Lutatius because the consul held the higher command and the auspices.21
Both men triumphed in the end. De Sanctis, following the triumphal records, dates the triumph of Lutatius to 4 October and that of Valerius to 6 October 241 BC, both for the naval victory. Zonaras, who calls the praetor Quintus Valerius Flaccus, also records that Catulus triumphed at the end of the war.22
How many ships and men were lost?
Polybius says that fifty Carthaginian ships were sunk and seventy captured with their crews, and that the prisoners numbered very nearly ten thousand. He gives no Roman losses. Other ancient writers disagree. Diodorus says the Carthaginians lost 117 ships, 20 of them with all hands, and the Romans 80, of which 30 were destroyed and 50 damaged; for prisoners he quotes the Carthaginian historian Philinus, 6,000, and other writers, 4,040.23
A later Latin tradition gives larger numbers: Eutropius has 63 Carthaginian ships captured, 125 sunk, 32,000 men taken and 13,000 killed, against 12 Roman ships lost, and Orosius repeats most of it with 14,000 dead.24
What were the terms of the peace of Lutatius?
Hamilcar's garrisons at Eryx, Drepana and Lilybaeum were still unbeaten, as Noureddine stresses, but with Rome in command of the sea they could no longer be supplied. Carthage, exhausted by the cost of the war, left the decision to Hamilcar. Nepos says that he longed to fight on but saw that his country could bear no more, and he chose to negotiate.25
Hanno, the defeated admiral, fared worse: according to Zonaras the Carthaginians crucified him on his return. Lendering repeats that he was put to death because Sicily was now lost.26
Lutatius, aware that Rome too was worn out by the war, readily agreed to negotiate. Polybius records the terms they agreed: Carthage would evacuate the whole of Sicily, make no war on Hiero of Syracuse or his allies, return all Roman prisoners without ransom and pay 2,200 Euboean talents over twenty years. Nepos adds that when Catulus demanded that Hamilcar's men lay down their arms and leave Sicily, Hamilcar answered that he would rather die, and Catulus gave way.27
The Roman people refused to ratify the first draft and sent ten commissioners to Sicily. They kept its substance but added 1,000 talents to the indemnity, halved the time to pay it to ten years and required Carthage to leave all the islands between Sicily and Italy. Zonaras records further clauses: Carthaginian warships were not to sail past Italy and Carthage was not to hire mercenaries there. Scullard judged the first terms lenient, given the wealth of Carthage, and the additions of little practical weight except the extra money.28
What have divers found off the Aegates Islands?
Since 2004 bronze warship rams have been recovered from the sea west of Sicily, some caught in fishermen's nets and most found by a systematic survey begun in 2005 by the Soprintendenza del Mare of the Sicilian Region under Sebastiano Tusa and by the RPM Nautical Foundation under Jeffrey Royal. Eleven rams had been found by July 2014. According to the RPM Nautical Foundation, only two ancient warship rams were known before the project began.29
The main concentration of wreckage lies about eight kilometers off the island of Levanzo, at an average depth of about 80 meters, and spreads over roughly ten to twelve square kilometers. By the end of the 2024 field season the project had recorded 27 rams, each marking a warship whose timbers have long since rotted away. The divers also found bronze helmets and cheek pieces, among them, in 2025, a well-preserved Roman helmet of the Montefortino type with its neck and cheek guards, as well as lead sling bullets, coins and scattered amphoras that seem to have been thrown overboard.30
The rams carry writing. By July 2014 Prag had identified Latin inscriptions on seven of the first eleven rams, naming the Roman officials, mostly quaestors, who approved them, and one ram has a Punic text, which the panel abstracts describe as a prayer for good fortune to one or more Punic deities. On ram 25, the Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency reports, the quaestor Servius Sulpicius, son of Gaius, recorded that he approved it; the agency also notes eleven Roman lead anchors lying in a straight line, as if ships had cut their cables to sail in a hurry.31
What do historians still debate?
Several questions remain open. The first is where exactly the fleets met. Tusa traced his search back to a spear fisherman's reports of hundreds of lead anchor stocks off eastern Levanzo, which he suspected marked the anchorage of the Roman fleet, and the RPM team now reconstructs a Roman fleet waiting east of Levanzo, out of sight, and moving into a blocking position at first light. Polybius, by contrast, has the Roman fleet sail out from Aegusa, the island off Lilybaeum, and Prag describes the finds as probably one part of the battle site rather than the whole of it.32
The second is what kind of ships fought. Polybius describes fleets of quinqueremes, but William Murray has argued that the Egadi rams so far recovered come from smaller classes of ship, and asked whether Polybius could be wrong. The third is whose ships carried the Latin rams: the RPM team holds that the Carthaginians had been using hulls captured from the Romans in the previous decade, which would mean that some ships with Roman-made rams fought for Carthage.33
Who won, and why did it matter?
Rome won, and the victory ended what Polybius called the longest, most continuous and greatest war he knew of. He thought its fleets dwarfed those of the Hellenistic kings and even the trireme navies of the Persian Wars, and reckoned that Rome had lost about 700 quinqueremes and Carthage about 500 over its course. De Sanctis checked his total against the losses recorded battle by battle and found it roughly borne out, although Polybius wrongly assumed that every warship was a quinquereme.34
Sicily, apart from the kingdom of Hiero of Syracuse, passed to Rome; Zonaras adds that the Romans disarmed its inhabitants. It was Rome's first territory overseas. Carthage paid a heavy price at home: its unpaid mercenaries rose in revolt soon after the peace, and it took Hamilcar and Hanno the Great until 238 BC to put them down. From there the road led to Spain, to Hannibal and to a second war, told in our articles on Hannibal and the Battle of Zama.35
At sea, the Aegates closed a war that had begun with Rome's first naval victory at Mylae in 260 BC, under the consul Gaius Duilius, and seen Regulus win off Cape Ecnomus in 256 BC before his defeat and capture near Tunis the next year. For where the Aegates ranks, see our lists of the greatest naval battles and the greatest battles of Carthage.36
