rome built the greatest war fleet of its age in order to beat carthage. what wiped it out in a single afternoon was not carthage: it was the sea.
the year is 255 bce. after the disaster of regulus on the bagradas, the senate hurriedly fitted out a relief fleet of some three hundred and fifty warships and sent it to africa to pick up the survivors. the operation went well, and it went better than planned: on the way out the fleet ran into a carthaginian squadron off cape hermaeum, defeated it and captured more than a hundred ships. three hundred and sixty-four vessels, polybius writes, were sailing for sicily: fewer than his own figures add up to.
skirting the southern coast of sicily, the pilots —men who knew that stretch of water and its winds— warned the consuls that a colossal storm was coming and asked to change course. polybius records what the roman commanders decided: to ignore the warning and hold the planned heading. it is the same flaw that had just cost rome an army in africa, applied now to a fleet.
it was not a storm that sank that fleet. it was a storm and an order.
off camarina the sky came down. the gale caught the fleet against a cliff-bound coast with no shelter, which is the worst possible position for an oared ship: with no room to ride it out in open water, the wind drove them onto the rocks. two hundred and eighty-four warships were lost. eighty survived.
it is worth being precise about the figure usually quoted. the casualties —on the order of a hundred thousand men— are not a transmitted fact but an estimate calculated from the number of ships polybius gives and the usual complement of a quinquereme. and those dead were not legionaries for the most part: they were rowers, sailors and italian allies, the invisible workforce of roman naval power. with that caveat, it remains the greatest loss of life in a single mass shipwreck of which we have any record.
carthage did not have to lift a finger to see its enemy ruined. and the most revealing thing of all is what rome did next: it built the fleet again. that stubbornness —absorbing a catastrophe that would have taken any other power out of the war, and carrying on— is the underlying explanation of why it won in the end. meanwhile, in sicily, a general was about to take the weapon that had terrified the legions since the bagradas and turn it into a trap.
