Ships of ancient Rome
had a variety of ships that played crucial roles in its military, trade, and transportation activities. Rome was preceded in the use of the sea by other ancient, seafaring civilizations of the Mediterranean. The galley was a long, narrow, highly maneuverable ship powered by oarsmen, sometimes stacked in multiple levels such as biremes or triremes, and many of which also had sails. Initial efforts of the Romans to construct a war fleet were based on copies of Carthaginian warships. In the Punic Wars in the mid-third century BC, the Romans were at first outclassed by Carthage at sea, but by 256 BC had drawn even and fought the wars to a stalemate. In 55 BC Julius Caesar used warships and transport ships to invade Britain. Numerous types of transport ships were used to carry foodstuffs or other trade goods around the Mediterranean, many of which did double duty and were pressed into service as warships or troop transports in time of war.
Introduction
Terminology
Roman ships are named in different ways, often in compound expressions with the word. These are found in many ancient Roman texts, and named in different ways, such as by the appearance of the ship: for example, navis tecta ; or by its function, for example: navis mercatoria, or navis praedatoria. Others, like navis frumentaria, navis lapidaria, and navis vivaria, are about the cargo. The Althiburos mosaic in Tunisia lists many types of ships.The expression naves longae is the plural of the noun phrase navis longa, following the rules for pluralization of feminine, third declension nouns in Latin, and inflectional agreement of the adjective longus to match.
Scope
In modern historiography, ancient Rome refers to Roman civilization from the founding of the Italian city of Rome in the 8th century BC to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. It encompasses the Roman Kingdom, Roman Republic, and Roman Empire until the fall of the western empire.For coverage of later developments, see Medieval ships.
History
Punic wars
The First Punic War between Rome and Carthage began in 264 BC with the Romans landing on Sicily. The Romans had the stronger army, while Carthage had overwhelming maritime superiority. By 260 BC the war had reached a stalemate, as the Carthaginians focused on defending their well-fortified Sicilian towns and cities; these were mostly on the coast and so could be supplied and reinforced without the Romans being able to use their superior army to interdict. The focus of the war shifted to the sea, where the Romans had little experience; on the few occasions they had previously felt the need for a naval presence they had usually relied on small squadrons provided by their Latin or Greek allies. Warships of the time were specialised vessels known as galleys and which relied on oars for maneuverability. The Romans set out to construct a war fleet and used a shipwrecked Carthaginian quinquereme as a blueprint for their own. As novice shipwrights, the Romans built copies that were heavier than the Carthaginian vessels, and so slower and less maneuverable.There were repeated naval clashes during the rest of the war, including the 256 BC battle of Ecnomus, possibly the largest naval battle in history by the number of combatants involved. In 241 BC the Romans destroyed the Carthaginian fleet at the Battle of the Aegates Islands, forcing the cut-off Carthaginian troops on Sicily to negotiate for peace and ending the war. The Romans and Carthaginians now had rough equivalence in terms of naval strength in the western Mediterranean.
Invasions of Britain
Julius Caesar employed warships and transport ships in order to carry out his invasion of Britain in 55 BCE.Battle of Actium
Types
The generic Roman term for an oar-driven galley warship was "long ship", as opposed to the sail-driven navis oneraria, a merchant vessel, or the minor craft like the scapha.Merchant vessels
The city of Rome was heavily reliant on the delivery by ship of the large amounts of grain it consumed. Rome imported about 150,000 tons of Egyptian grain each year over the first three centuries AD. Not only were insufficient amounts available in the agricultural areas around the city, but it was cheaper to transport it substantial distances by sea than short distances by land. It has been estimated that it cost less for a sailing ship of the Roman Empire to carry grain the length of the Mediterranean than to move the same amount by road.Merchant ships, such as naves onerariae, had always been pressed into service for military purposes such as for transporting troops to North Africa in the Second Punic war. In 204 BCE, Scipio Africanus ordered the impressment of merchantmen for the invasion of Africa, four hundred ships according to Livy.
''Actuaria''
An actuaria was a type of merchant galley used primarily for trade and transport throughout the Roman Empire. The actuaria was equipped with sails as well as oars. It was more expensive to operate than merchant sailing ships, and was used where speed and reliability were a priority. It could carry both passengers and wares such as honey, cheese, meat, and even live animals intended for gladiator combat.Variants of the actuaria were used as troop transports, for example in the invasion of Britain. In 47 BCE, Publius Vatinius equipped actuariae at Brindisi with temporary rams to support Julius Caesar's forces in Illyricum, on the other side of the Adriatic, though these were only suitable to combat smaller enemy vessels. Actuariae were also employed along the major rivers by Germanicus in his campaigns against the Germanic tribes around 16 AD.
''Navis oneraria''
Roman naves onerariae could have up to three square-rigged masts. They depended on the wind and could not leave port on oar power alone, where the more maneuverable galleys could. If winds were not favorable, warping or towing were alternatives. There is some evidence from Claudian in De Bello Gildonico that naves onerariae were in use until late antiquity.Images of two naves onerariae were pictured in an ancient mosaic floor discovered in Lod, Israel in 1996. Despite damage to the floor, students of maritime history have been able to glean a great deal of information from the images. The ships are of the navis oneraria type, a Roman merchant ship typically displacing 80–150 tons, used to carry such commodities as garum and grain from Egypt to Rome.
Transportation
''Corbita''
Corbitae were grain ships going back to the Greeks in the 5th c BCE, with loads of around 150 tons. In the first century BCE, they could haul 1300 tons of grain and liquids; the latter in large amphorae. The hulls of the Roman corbitae were little changed from the Greek design, and were large, with high sides. Steering was provided via twin steering oars which were very adequate to the task, and not inferior to medieval rudders from later centuries. The oars could be boxed in to the hull with reinforced planking for protection.Obelisk ship
Warships
Bireme
Biremes were typically about 80 feet long with a maximum beam width of around 10 feet.''Liburna''
Originally, the liburna was similar to the ancient Greek penteconter. It had one bench with 25 oars on each side, while in the late Roman Republic, it was equipped with two banks of oars, remaining faster, lighter, and more agile than triremes. The liburna design was adopted by the Romans and became a key part of the Roman navy in the second half of the 1st century BCE. Liburnae played a key role in the Battle of Actium in Greece, which saw the establishment of Augustus as the undisputed ruler of the Roman world.The architecture of the liburna differed from that of the battle triremes, quadriremes and quinqueremes. It was long and wide with a draft. Two rows of oarsmen pulled 18 oars per side. The ship could make up to fourteen knots under sail and more than seven knots under oar power.
After adopting the liburna, the Romans made adaptations to add rams and protection from missiles, in order to improve the ships' use as navy ships. The benefits gained more than made up for the slight loss of speed.
The Romans made use of the liburna particularly within the provinces of the empire, where the ships formed the majority of the fleet, while it was included in smaller numbers in fleets in Ravenna and Misenum, where a large number of the Illyrians were serving.
''Navis lusoria''
A navis lusoria is a type of a small military vessel of the late Roman Empire that served as a troop transport. It was powered by about thirty soldier-oarsmen and an auxiliary sail. Nimble, graceful, and of shallow draft, such a vessel was used on northern rivers close to the Limes Germanicus, the Germanic borderlands, and thus saw service on the Rhine and the Danube. Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus mentioned the navis lusoria in his writings, but not much was learned about them until the discovery of such boats at Mainz, Germany in 1981–82.Olaf Höckmann claimed that the Mainz boats are probably lusoriae, and have some architectural similarity with earlier liburnae. The type A Mainz ships 1 and 7 appear to be identical in form to the ships Ammianus Marcellinus described in his reports on 4th century Rhine battle vessels, and which he always referred to as naves lusioriae. Höckmann finds that ships 1, 4, 7, and 9 are likely lusoriae.
Quinqueremes
, meaning "five-oared" and indicating that there were five oarsmen per bank of oars, were the first warships the Romans built and provided the workhorse of the Roman fleet throughout the Punic Wars. So ubiquitous was this type of ship that the historian Polybius uses it as a shorthand for "warship" in general. Hexaremes, quadriremes and triremes are occasionally mentioned in the sources. A quinquereme carried a crew of 300: 280 oarsmen and 20 deck crew and officers. It would also normally carry a complement of 40 marinesusually soldiers assigned to the shipif battle was thought to be imminent this would be increased to as many as 120.Image:Trireme cut-fr.svg|thumb|upright=1.1|right|alt=A diagram depicting the positions of the rowers of the three different oars in a trireme|Cross-sectional diagram of a trireme, showing the positions of the rowers in one file
The quinquereme was a galley, long, wide at water level, with its deck standing above the sea, and displacing around 100 tonnes. Galley expert John Coates suggested that they could maintain for extended periods. The modern replica galley Olympias has achieved speeds of and cruised at for hours on end. Average speeds of were recorded on contemporary voyages of up to a week.
The generally accepted theory regarding the arrangement of oarsmen in quinqueremes is that there would be sets – or files – of three oars, one above the other, with two oarsmen on each of the two uppermost oars and one on the lower, for a total of five oarsmen per file. This would be repeated down the side of a galley for a total of 28 files on each side; thus 28 × 3 × 2 or 168 oars in total.
Getting the oarsmen to row as a unit, let alone to execute more complex battle maneuvers, required long and arduous training. At least half of the oarsmen would need to have had some experience if the ship was to be handled effectively. As a result, the Romans were initially at a disadvantage against the more experienced Carthaginians. To counter this, the Romans introduced the corvus, a bridge wide and long, with a heavy spike on the underside of the free end, which was designed to pierce and anchor into an enemy ship's deck. This allowed Roman legionaries acting as marines to board enemy ships and capture them, rather than employing the previously traditional tactic of ramming.
All warships were equipped with rams. See details at.