How Rome Bested Carthage (For the First Time)

A History of Mankind (162)

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A lack of strategic focus hurt the Roman cause during the First Punic War too: the latest Cornelius eager for military glory, Lucius Cornelius Scipio, led a campaign against Corsica and Sardinia that only managed, at best, to secure temporary control of Alalia, Corsica’s largest and perhaps only city.

In true Scipio fashion, this disappointment was propagandized as a major victory. However, as it coincided with several fruitless sieges across Sicily, easily countered by Carthaginian fleets supplying the threatened towns, the Senate became convinced that Rome needed a real war fleet, so one was constructed.

Using a shipwrecked Carthaginian boat as blueprint and Carthaginian mass-production methods including numbered timbers, Rome built 120 warships that were dispatched to Sicily in 260 BC under Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, brother of Lucius and son of the fantasy-inclined Barbatus. As he led a small squadron to capture the Lipari Islands to the north of Messana, he ended up trapped in port by Hannibal Gisco’s fleet; his men panicked and left the ships and Scipio was ignominiously captured, earning for himself the cognomen “Asina” or “Female Donkey.” The Scipios again managed to survive this.