T HE history of Rome as a maritime Power might well
occupy the attention and the lifetime of a competent historian. The part played by sea-power in the upbuilding of the Roman sway has, of course, been recognised both by Mommsen and by Mahan ; but that part forms one chapter only in a story of singular fascination. The Latins were geographically compelled to play a sea-part in the drama of history. The mouth of the Tiber was the-natural refuge from an exposed coast, and centuries before the Emperor Claudius built the great port of Ostia the river was a vast emporium of traffic and a fortress repelling inroad by land or sea. To this fact Rome owed her earliest importance and her latest great- ness. Her enemies were the first to realise the potentialities of the position. Syracuse and • Carthage successively ex- cluded her from the Mediterranean, and Rome, unarmed by sea, was unable to protest. When in 348 B.C. the raids of Greek adventurers made it necessary for Carthage and Rome to join hands for the protection of commerce, the treaty of commerce and navigation concluded for this purpose excluded the Latin traders from the Libyan coast west of Cape Bon. This humiliating treaty was confirmed in the year 306 B.C., and extended to the Atlantic, while an agreement previous to the year 282 B.C. with Tarentum excluded Rome from the basin of the Eastern Mediterranean. The energy of traders, no doubt, largely evaded these compacts, for the story is told of a Phoenician trading vessel deliberately leading a Roman ship, which had followed her past the Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic, on to a sand-bank in order that the secret of the trade with Britain should not be disclosed. Rome never forgot a lesson, and in this event may perhaps be seen the origin of the Roman lighthouses in Britain.
The first Punic War brought before Rome the necessity of sea-power. The boast of Carthage that no Roman could even wash his hands in the sea without her leave awakened the Latins. The sea-coast towns of Italy were occupied in force, the nucleus of a fleet was formed, two Fleet Masters were appointed in 311 B.C., five years later an alliance was con- tracted with the Greek adventurers, and by the year 267 B.C. there was a respectable navy under the control of four questors. But on the outbreak of war the Roman fleet was found to be a negligible quantity. The magnificently equipped quinqueremes of Carthage controlled the seas and determined the limits of war. In the year 260 B.C. it became plain that a sufficient fleet to meet Carthage on her own waters must be provided. Within two years a hundred great quinqueremes and twenty triremes were ready. Undismayed by the capture of seventeen of these new vessels, a successful action was fought off the coast of Italy, and this was followed by the decisive victory. of Mylae, where Carthage lost fifty ships of the line. Rome had found sea-power, and with it had found herself.
In view of the extraordinary developments that sprang from this event, it is difficult to appreciate Gibbon's dictum that " to the Romans the ocean remained an object of terror rather than of curiosity." It is true that he is writing of a later age, but there seems to be little doubt that the Romans during long centuries had hardened their hearts and armed their ships against the terrors of the sea. Their very inven- tiveness, and their close familiarity with the iron coasts of Spain and Western Britain, stand against Gibbon's theory, which is weakly enough supported by Cato's hatred of sea-travel. It was a Roman improvement on the warship that enabled the Republic to defeat Carthage, and it was Roman genius that safeguarded the remotest coasts with lighthouses. But it was the immediate developments after Mylae that proved how truly a maritime nation Rome was. In one storm she lost no fewer than two hundred and forty of her finest vessels. Eighty ships only of the greatest Armada of ancient times rode out the tempest. Yet within a few months the total loss was replaced. Again, when some twenty years later the State had begun to ignore sea-power, a Roman Navy League built and presented as a gift to the nation two hundred ships, manned by sixty thousand sailors. It was this voluntary fleet that defeated the Carthaginians with fearful slaughter off the Aegates Islands in the year 241 B.C., and thus enabled the Republic to secure victory and peace.
The quiet years that followed the Punic Wars witnessed the entire decay of Roman naval power. The seas were solely policed by the volunteer fleets of Italy and the mercenaries of Greece. The huge commerce of Rome was at the mercy of the pirates and privateers that haunted every island and coast of the Mediterranean. Sulk did something to revive the fleet; but it was not until the year 67 B.C. that the seas were cleansed. In that year Pompeius destroyed no fewer , than thirteen hundred privateers and captured four hundred, while ten thousand pirates were killed and twenty thousand captured. The commerce in the Mediterranean must at this date have been vast to have supported and survived this intolerable horde. Under the Caesars a moderate navy sup: plied the needs of an unrivalled Empire. Augustus stationed permanent fleets at Ravenna on the Adriatic and at Misenum, whilst subsidiary divisions at this date or later operated in the British Channel, at Forum Julii off the coast of Provence, on the Rhine, the Danube, the Euxine and the Euphrates, and off Seleucia, Alexandria, Carpathos, and Aquileia. These squadrons of swift triremes sufficed to secure the water communicationt of the Empire.
The dangers of navigation were necessarily ever present to the Roman mind. Sea-marks were then, as always, a need of a maritime people. The erection of beacons, lighthouses, and sea-marks has been in this country since the memory of man a function of the prerogative power. In the same way the building of lighthouses seems in Roman Imperial times to have been a duty of the central Government. Yet evidence on the subject of ancient lighthouses is singularly scanty, We have no knowledge whatever of the lighthouses that guided the Carthaginian ships in their great epoch of trade and war. Homer mentions the use of land fires as guides to sailors, but Dr. Talfourd Ely in his recent learned and ex; haustive monograph upon the subject does not regard this aff a reference to any definite practice. Yet doubtless the earliest lighthouses took this rude form, and the wreckers fires that survived into modern times were certainly illegitimate de- scendants of beacons lit to guide the mariner. The use of beacons for transmitting messages across immense areas of sea and land was quite familiar in ancient times, for news was flashed from the confines of Syria to the pharos of the. Bosphorus, and the lighthouse was clearly an extension of this idea. Yet our first definite record of the lighthouse belongs to a period when maritime trade had reached an advanced stage of efficiency. The many-storied white marble tower (one of the seven wonders of the world) built at Alexandria on the island of Pharos by Sostratus of Cnidos, in the year 270 B.C., for Ptolemy Philadelphus, at a cost of eight hundred talents, and said to have been de.: stroyed by earthquake in the year 1303 A.D., was the proto- type of the lighthouses of ancient times. Dr. Ely tells us of some nine lighthouses in Eastern Europe of which some memory survives, including the lights of Ostia and Ravenna, of Capreae and Messina, of Alexandria, Constantinople, and the Piraeus.
When the Romans at last controlled the West Atlantic coasts they endeavoured to light those dangerous seas, where sailing ships were used for war and commerce alike, and new possibilities of sea-power involved new dangers on the deep. The Augustan Tower of Hercules at Corunna stands to this day; the Turris ordens, or Turris ordensis—a possible variant of Turris ardens, the Tower of Flame—which the Boulogne folk corrupted to "Tour d'Ordre," was destroyed in 1644. It was " an octagonal tower, about 124 ft. high, rising in twelve stages, which diminished gradually from base to summit. Among English sailors it went by the name of The Old Man.' " It is possible that Caligula built this lighthouse, for it is certainly on record that he built a tower to light the Channel. To Caligula also is attributed the twin Roman lighthouses at Dover, one within, the Castle and still extant, the other on the site of the Western Redoubt. Traces of lighthouses have also been detected or suspected at Richborough and at Reedham, That there were others on our coasts can be little doubted, and it would be a matter of great interest if local antiquaries would turn their attention to this interesting question, and investigate the rained towers that occur at rare intervals on the coasts of England and Ireland. Of course, it is always possible that these towers may belong to .the Middle Ages, when for a brief period the forgotten art of lighthouse building revived. The watch-towers built in the vicinity of
Aigues-Mortes in the thirteenth century by Louis IX. and Philip III., and in the late fourteenth century by Charles VI., are examples of this revival, to which may be added the fourteenth-century beacon in the Fort of St. Jean at Marseilles and the Tour de la Lanterne, of the same date, at La Rochelle. The sixteenth-century pharos at Genoa and the slightly later Tour de Cordouan at the mouth of the Gironde were efforts of the Renaissance to revive the glories of a classic age.
But Dr. Ely has shown that the quest for Roman light- houses in Britain is not hopeless. It is true that he has not found a new instance, but he has carefully investigated the structure of an old tower on the Flintshire coast at Garreg, and confirms the eighteenth-century view that this was a Roman lighthouse, as against the suggestion that it was merely a mediaeval mill or a monkish summer retreat. It answers all the structural tests that the rare references to lighthouses in ancient literature and the representations on ancient coins supply, and there can be no doubt that this lighthouse at Garreg on the Dee is a survival of the days when the Romans, greatly daring, circumnavigated the island and encouraged trade on the far-off dangerous waterway of the Seteia Portus. It is an interesting and pathetic memorial of the days when Rome, by virtue of her sea-power, had obtained the empiry of the known world, and it is one of a class of monuments that can hardly be too closely guarded by a race which also depends for its existence on its capacity for maintaining its sea-power.
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