Great Names in History

It wasn’t the Carthaginians that seized Messana. It was a bunch of silly mercenaries.

Messana is in Sicily. And just down the island is the city of Syracuse, which was an old Greek colony run by a king or what the Greeks called a tyrant.
Not long after the Romans had eliminated their last enemy on the peninsula, a band of mercenaries who had been working for that tyrant of Syracuse got the bright idea to take Messana on their own, for themselves. They massacred a lot of people and set themselves up in the citadel. The tyrant immediately tried to get Messana free and laid siege. The mercenaries, who hadn’t planned too far ahead, now realized they couldn’t hold out and called for help. Some called to Rome and some called to Carthage.

Both Rome and Carthage showed up with forces; Carthage, because it didn’t want Rome in Sicily; and Rome, because it didn’t want Carthage to grab any more of Sicily than it already had, which was about half. Carthage already ruled Africa and the best part of Spain and all the islands in the Sardinian and Tyrrhenian Seas. If they got hold of Messana they would soon take the rest of the island. And once they had Sicily, they would strangle Rome. They could close the whole Mediterranean to Roman shipping.

At one moment there were three armies parked out in front of Messana. Seeing the trouble that was ahead, the Syracusan tyrant decided to let the giants slug it out and took his troops home. That left Carthage and Rome facing each other. That is how the First Punic War began. The fight was about Sicily.

The First Roman Fleet

The first thing a Roman commander always did was to get his troops off the water as fast as he could. He was helpless against those Carthaginian ships, which came on with great speed and rammed a Roman transport and sank it with all its soldiers. The Romans didn’t have a single warship. They didn’t even know how to build one. They had never paid attention to ships. A ship was just a floating container, wasn’t it?
But now if they were going to fight Carthage they needed warships. “So let’s build a fleet of warships and go out there and get those bastards.”

“This fact illustrates better than any other the extraordinary spirit and audacity of the Romans,” says Polybius, the Greek historian who went to see Rome just after the wars with Carthage. “It was not a question of having adequate resources for the enterprise, for they had in fact none whatsoever, nor had they ever given a thought to the sea before this. But once they had conceived the idea they embarked on it so boldly that without waiting to gain any experience in naval warfare they immediately engaged the Carthaginians, who had for generations enjoyed an unchallenged supremacy at sea.”

How do you make a warship? “See if you can’t get hold of one of those Carthaginian quinqueremes,” the Roman consuls told their engineers, “and discover how the darned things are constructed.”

What is a quinquereme? Warships couldn’t depend on the wind so they had oarsmen to make them go. The bigger the ship and the faster you wanted it to go, the more oarsmen. Carthaginian ships liked to ram an enemy; so they needed a lot of oarsmen to get up speed. And they were outfitted with a brass beak just under water-level to pierce the enemy hulls. Quinqueremes had long rows of oars with five [quinque=five] men to an oar. This gave them the strong motor they needed.

Lucky Rome. One day a Carthaginian quinquereme ran aground while trying to sink a Roman transport and the Roman soldiers captured it and called their engineers to come and study it. Now they had a model. Right away they set about building one hundred quinqueremes on this model.

Next problem: Rome was going to have a fleet of quinqueremes but where would it get all the sailors to row them?
The Carthaginians heard about Rome’s shipbuilding fantasies and scoffed.
“In the first place,” they said, “we’d be awfully surprised if their ships were as good as ours. And even if they were, it isn’t ships that make a fleet, but sailors. We’ve been sailors all our lives and for generations. You don’t become a sailor overnight. And what about oarsmen? Do they think they can learn to row a quinquereme in a month or two? It’s going to be fun to see that fleet of theirs on parade—we can hardly wait.”

Reader: I don’t think I can wait either. I have been waiting too long for the crow and there is no crow. I started to read this post because of your title and now I feel tricked.

Thank you for staying. The crow will appear in Part Three. When you see it you will be glad you held out through the history lesson.

Reader: I wonder.

See: The Crow: or the First Punic War (Part 3)

What if you are a great army but your enemy is a great navy?

You know how to march with fine discipline over hill and dale. You pitch a dandy camp, a real fortress with high walls and a ditch, that nobody is fool enough to attack. On the field, man to man, with your spear, your sword and your shield, you can beat any enemy that is brave enough to stand up to you. But your enemy is out there on the sea, floating on big ships, and just laughing at your predicament. You don’t have any warships, only a few barges and ferries. You can’t go out there and get him—you don’t even know how to swim.

That happened to Rome. The enemy out there calling him a landlubber was Carthage; and if anybody was a sailor, it was a Carthaginian. Those fellows had been sailing around the Mediterranean for hundreds of years. They had even been brave enough to push on past the Pillars of Hercules into an unknown ocean, and south down the coast of Africa. They loved the mist and the smell of the salt-sea . At night when they lay down on the rolling deck, they felt as cosy as the Roman soldier in his square camp and pup-tent. They looked up at the same sky, though the Carthaginian liked to imagine the old heroes and figures he saw in the constellations, and the Roman wondered how he could organize that mess of stars a little.

Rome had been fighting its neighbors for five hundred years and chasing them around the peninsula. Rome was busy with the Gauls, the Etruscans, the Latins, the Sabines, the Samnites, and the occasional Greek. She worked her way south on the Boot and finally came to its toe. When the soldiers lifted their heads after the last battle, they saw the sea. No more Italy, no more neighbors to fight—they had conquered them all. They saw the sea and of course those grinning Carthaginian ships.

They knew Carthage controlled the Mediterranean but up till then they didn’t care about the Mediterranean. “You stay out of my hair and I’ll stay out of yours,” the Romans had told the Carthaginians, who signed a treaty or two with them about staying out of waters where Carthage had no intention of going anyway. “When we feel like it, we’ll go anywhere we want to,” the Carthaginians said to themselves, even while they signed the treaties and shook hands with those rude Romans who didn’t seem to understand the world.

The Romans weren’t sailors but they had always done some trade along the coast with the Greek colonies in the sole and the heel of their Boot and with Greece itself. Roman ships were barely sea-worthy—just barges and transport vessels like wooden boxes; but they were good enough to haul the goods as long as they watched for storms and hugged the coast and went slowly. The boats left Ostia, the port nearest Rome, sailed down the west side of the Boot, slipped between the toe and Sicily, which it kicks, and then headed east for the heel, Tarentum, or right on to Greece. And back.

That route, if it can be called a route, was the one Rome had taken for centuries. It was a very low-profile route: no one had ever tried to block it. Rome knew there was one very vulnerable point—just the place somebody COULD cause trouble if he wanted to. That was Messana—or rather, the Straits of Messana—the narrow sea between the tip of the Boot and Sicily. Block that and all trade would stop. No ship would get by. Life in Rome could get hard if the Straits were blocked for long. Every time the Romans looked out to sea and saw those cocky Carthaginian ships jumping up and down, they worried a little. “If we ever get into war with Carthage and Carthage blocks those straits, we’re going to have big trouble,” they warned each other. “What kind of sacrifices do you make to Pluto? Have to check up on those.” They knew what to do to make Mars happy; but, to be honest, they had neglected Pluto, who was the sea-god.

Reader: Where is the crow? I keep waiting for the crow to appear.

The crow will appear in a minute. First you need background. You saw that the Straits of Messana were the Achilles’ Toe of the Boot of Italy, if you will; and that the worst thing that could happen to Rome was a war with Carthage, who controlled the seas. Guess what is going to happen.

See The Crow (Part Two)

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In old Rome buildings collapsed all the time.  They were too tall for their base and the walls were too thin.  Hear that distant rumble?  That’s another rickety building going down somewhere in the City.

According to a census of buildings made at the time of Septimius Severus the usual city block (insula) was around 300 square meters—hardly broad enough to carry a structure twenty meters high, which was a typical height by then—three or four stories of shaky construction.   Greedy builders found ways of thinning the walls by adding rows of bricks to strengthen the concrete or the adobe; and they kept pushing skyward.

The poet Juvenal lived in a tipsy third-floor apartment but he had neighbors who had to climb higher to reach home. “Who at cool Praeneste, or at Volsinii amid its leafy hills,” he whined,” was ever afraid of his house tumbling down?….But here we inhabit a city propped up for the most part by slats: for that is how the landlord patches up the crack in the old wall, asking the boarders to sleep peacefully under the ruin that hangs above their heads.”

Augustus was so alarmed by the frequent collapse of buildings that he issued an edict forbidding private citizens to construct an edifice higher than twenty meters.  But buildings kept growing tall and keeling over.  A hundred year later Trajan in desperation tried reducing the legal height to eighteen meters but he could not buck the greedy builders or the need for more housing.

By the fourth century Rome was world-famous for her tall buildings—many were five and six stories high.

And one skyscraper towered above them all: the legendary INSULA OF FECULA. That monstrosity was an apartment building so tall that it became a  tourist attraction, like Trajan’s Column and the Pantheon.  No one knows just how tall it was or how it met its end.  Maybe a storming Visigoth toppled it with a swat of his sword.

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I was puzzled by what the old Greek historian Herodotus wrote on the construction of the Great Pyramid.

He visited Egypt in about 450 BC and talked with the old priests there and heard their account of the construction of the pyramids. That was at least a thousand years after Pharoah Cheops had built his pyramid but it is the oldest account that has come down to us and has to be taken pretty seriously. Those stones weighed about two and a half tons and were transported for miles after they were quarried, by barge and then over land. How?

The Great Pyramid didn’t look then like it does now. It wasn’t a pile of steps but a perfect geometrical pyramid that shone in the sun. It was polished. After the big building blocks were set up as we see them today, they were covered with a layer of flat slabs and polished till they shone.
Herodotus had known that. What he hadn’t known, and what surprised him, was what he learned about the road the Egyptian engineers had built for hauling the stones to the construction site. IT TOO WAS POLISHED!

“For ten years the people were afflicted in making the road whereon the stones were dragged, the making of which road was to my thinking a task only a little lighter than the building of the pyramid, for the road is five furlongs long and ten fathoms broad, and raised at its highest to a height of eight fathoms, and it is all of stone polished and carved with figures. Those ten years went to the making of this road and of the underground chambers of the hill the pyramids stand on….” (Herodotus, pp. 425-426 Loeb Classical Library, translated by A.D.Godley)

Now, I had seen how men moved blocks in a stoneyard and I assumed that the Egyptians had done the same: that they hadn’t dragged those big blocks of theirs but used rollers and planks. The problem I saw was the rollers. Probably, though not surely, the huge stones would have crushed wooden rollers or logs. And I wasn’t even sure if bronze rollers could take that weight without being flattened. Later I learned that the Bronze Age hadn’t yet begun at the time of the building—that only copper instruments were used—so I had to throw out the idea of metal rollers altogether.

Then I read Herodotus and got the surprise, the same as he had. Why had they polished the road to the pyramid? It couldn’t be that they dragged the stones over that polished avenue—that they polished thousands of square feet of pavement with the aim of smoothing the dragging of the blocks—to reduce friction. Anyone, at any stage of human inventions, can see that to reduce friction you have to get the stone OFF the ground, not polish the ground. And if they used rollers of some kind and planks, the smooth surface of the road would actually hinder the hauling. You wouldn’t want the planks on the ground to slide around but stay put while the stone rolled over them. And how could the poor slaves and oxen that pulled the stones get a firm foothold on that slippery road?

But Herodotus seems not to have thought of the problem. What awed him was the vastness of the project and the results. Perhaps he took for granted what I discovered later while reading a modern study of the pyramids: that the Egyptians, like the people who carried the boulders to Stonehenge, must have hauled their stones ON SLEDS. That is how they reduced the drag and pulled their stones down that polished avenue. Only the tracks of the sleds were in contact with the pavement and its smoothness did make the pulling easier.

Yet then wasn’t the polish unnecessary? Wasn’t it still an impediment to the pulling? The men and oxen would slide all over the place unless they worked off the polished road, to one side of the stone. They would pull a little left and right of the block, the way mules used to pull barges on canals from the paths along the banks. But the road—ten “fathoms” wide—was no dinky canal or creek, so pulling from its shoulder or berm would have meant doing so at a great angle, thus losing effectiveness.

I re-read my Herodotus and found the solution:
“Cheops compelled all the Egyptians to work for him, appointing to some to drag the stones from the quarries in the Arabian mountains to the Nile: and the stones being carried across the river in boats, others were charged to receive and drag them to the mountains called Lybian.” Ibid., p.425

I realized that the polished road leading up to the Great Pyramid was only the last bit of work, the last “mile”. The real feat was bringing—dragging—those blocks up and down the mountains, where the roads were surely not polished or even paved. If the workmen were able to perform that feat, using sleds or any other means, they had solved the problem of transporting big stones. Without polishing their roads until they were slippery.

Conclusion: the broad avenue leading up to the Great Pyramid was polished after the blocks were hauled through on sleds, just as they had been hauled for hundreds of miles on other, worse roads. The polish Herodotus saw on that road had nothing to do with reducing friction: it was there as part of the vast general design and meant to dazzle.

See Egyptologist Mark Lehner’s theory that the great blocks were quarried not in the mountains but right at the foot of the Pyramid.

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There is nothing harder than old Roman concrete. Around the former empire you still see their walls and constructions of all kinds made of poured concrete.

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This is a Roman cistern from the town of Segóbriga, Spain. It has been standing in the open for two thousand years. Try to scratch it. Try to pick out one of the little stones.

Poured concrete was a Roman invention.

People had known about lime for a long time. They whitewashed their dirt walls to seal them from the rain. They still do that in much of Spain and Africa. And the Greeks mixed sand with the lime, trowelled it onto their walls, and painted it sometimes. It dried very hard and was even waterproof—perfect to seal the brick walls of cisterns.

Everyone also used the lime, sand, and water mixture to cement stones together for building. They continued to do that all through history until the nineteenth century. Look at what holds the big stones of a castle wall together: a thin layer of lime and sand. It is a wonderful glue.

At first the Romans used lime like everyone else. Then, at a time that must have been around the second century BC, they began to make walls by pouring the lime, sand, fine stones (aggregate), and water mixture into molds: concrete (they called it opus caementicium). Until then, they had made their walls by laying down two parallel rows of stones and then filling the space between them with rubble. That was fine until the rain or ground moisture got into the rubble and made it swell.
Someone now had the idea to strengthen the rubble pile by pouring the mixture of lime mortar on top of it. That strengthened it very well: the rubble became a hard mass and got harder and harder over weeks as it dried. If you took away the big stones on either side, the rubble kept its shape.

Pouring the mix into molds was an obvious next step. You could make a wall any thickness or shape you wanted to. When the concrete had dried, you simply kicked away the mold.
From then on, the Romans began building walls with poured concrete.

The most outstanding Roman building made of poured concrete is the Pantheon in Rome. It also happens to be one of the most beautiful works of architecture ever made.

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The dome is a virtuosistic creation of poured concrete. All the edges of the squares are still sharp after two thousand years and there are no little holes from air bubbles, difficult as that is to achieve with concrete.

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