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AFTER DREPANA
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2015
Extract
The Battle of Drepana in 249 b.c. marks the most significant defeat of Roman naval forces at the hands of their Carthaginian opponents during the First Punic War. Attempting to take the Punic fleet in the harbour of Drepana by surprise, the consul P. Claudius Pulcher sailed with his ships from Lilybaeum (a Carthaginian stronghold under Roman siege since the previous year) about midnight, and reached Drepana at dawn. Yet, owing to swift and level-headed counter-measures taken by the Punic commander, Adherbal, the unfolding fight – partly in the harbour, mostly off the shore – turned into a fiasco for the Romans. The consul got away; he returned to Rome, where the Senate instructed him to appoint a dictator. How soon he returned, and by what route, is the question.
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References
1 Polyb. 1.49–51; Diod. Sic. 24.1.5; Liv. Per. 19; Eutr. 2.26.1; Oros. 4.10.3; Schol. Bob. 90.1–3 Stangl; cf. Gell. 10.6.2; Flor. 1.18.29. The Roman fleet strength and losses are discussed below.
2 FC = InscrItal 13.1.42–3; Liv. Per. 19; Suet. Tib. 2.2.
3 Thiel, J.H., A History of Roman Sea-power before the Second Punic War (Amsterdam, 1954), 278 n. 712Google Scholar; see also Lazenby, J.F., The First Punic War: A Military History (Stanford, CA, 1996), 136Google Scholar: ‘most improbable’.
4 The movements and positioning of the respective forces during the battle are not in doubt: see e.g. Thiel (n. 3), 275–81; Walbank, F.W., A Historical Commentary on Polybius (Oxford, 1957–79), 1.112–15Google Scholar; Lazenby (n. 3), 133–6.
5 See Kappelmacher, A., ‘Iulius (243)’, RE 10.1 (1917–18), 591–606Google Scholar, at 599–600; Bendz, G. (ed.), Frontin: Kriegslisten (Berlin, 1963; Darmstadt, 19873), 7Google Scholar.
6 Plutarch (Vit. Pomp. 19.6–7) reports the same stratagem, but after the Battle of the Sucro against Pompeius – either from confusion or because his narrative in that Life had no room for what happened at Segontia: see Konrad, C.F., Plutarch's Sertorius: A Historical Commentary (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1994), 176Google Scholar.
7 On Commius’ later career as king of the Atrebates in Britain, see Münzer, F., ‘Commius’, RE 4.1 (1900), 770–1Google Scholar.
8 Strat. 1.4.13, 8.11; 2.11.1, 11.2; 3 pr. 2, 2.4, 3.6, 6.1, 6.4, 9.2, 10.7, 12.2, 16.5, 17.1; 4.7.22.
9 Strat. 2.5.31, 7.14; 3.11.2; 4.1.5, 7.35.
10 Strat. 1.4.14; 3.9.5, 10.8, 13.6.
11 Livy 22.50.4–12; cf. 22.49.13, 52.4. Livy ignores Octavius, and makes the number of escapees from the lesser camp about 600 (22.50.11), against Frontinus’ 62. The latter's version evidently did not come from Livy, but nothing warrants the assumption that his source(s) represented the situation in a materially different way. On the much-debated authenticity of Book 4 of the Strategemata, see most recently Campbell, J.B. and Purcell, N., ‘Iulius Frontinus, Sextus’, OCD4 (2012), 762–3Google Scholar, judging doubts ‘probably unjustified’.
12 Strat. 1.5.23, 5.27; 2.6.5; 3 pr. 3, 10.1, 10.4, 17.3, 17.4, 17.8, 17.9.
13 Strat. 2.5.4; 3.10.7, 17.1, 17.2, 17.5.
14 Cf. Liv. 35.11.2–13, telling the story in greater detail. Frontinus contains nothing not in Livy.
15 Polyb. 1.18.2, 19–20; cf. 1.19.11, 25.9, 30.1, 38.2, 53.7; Diod. Sic. 22.10.2; 23.8.1; Zonar. 8.10.
16 Polyb. 1.56.3–7, for a description. Diod. Sic. 23.20 implies that Heircte was Carthaginian in 252/1, when a Roman attempt to take it by assault failed; Polybius’ καταλαμβάνει τὸν ἐπὶ τῆς Εἱρκτῆς λεγόμενον τόπον need not imply that Hamilcar, when occupying the place in 247, captured it from the Romans by force.
17 The incident belongs in 396 b.c., when a Spartan squadron under Pharacidas came to the aid of Dionysius I of Syracuse (Diod. Sic. 14.63.4; cf. Polyaenus 2.11).
18 E.g. Tarn, W.W., ‘The fleets of the First Punic War’, JHS 27 (1907), 48–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 54; Thiel (n. 3), 89–90, 270 n. 716; Walbank (n. 4), 1.103, 1.114; Lazenby (n. 3), 123–4, 133; explicitly thus Oros. 4.10.3.
19 Cf. Lazenby (n. 3), 133; and see Eutr. 2.26.1: 220 ships; 30 escaped, 90 captured, the rest (i.e. 100) sunk.
20 The only other surviving figure is the Bobbio scholiast's note (90.1–3 Stangl) that 120 Roman ships perished, without specifics or mention of vessels escaped. Bleckmann, B., Die römische Nobilität im Ersten Punischen Krieg (Berlin, 2002), 188CrossRefGoogle Scholar n. 2, insists that more ships than just the 30 with Claudius escaped: misreading Oros. 4.10.3, he argues for a fleet of 200 ships, of which 120 were sunk or captured, but the rest escaped. That defies all evidence.
21 See Lazenby (n. 3), 123. For the transport of armies, see Morgan, M.G., ‘Calendars and chronology in the First Punic War’, Chiron 7 (1977), 89–117Google Scholar, at 97–8; and Lazenby (n. 3), 81–2.
22 Thiel (n. 3), 273, 280 n. 717, makes a strong case that the Roman fleet at Drepana was undermanned in terms of rowers; Lazenby's objections (n. 3), 132–3, are unpersuasive.
23 This was clearly seen by Tarn (n. 18), 54 n. 35.
24 Polyb. 1.53.3–6, noting some ships dragged off, others burnt or broken up. In Diod. Sic. 24.1.7, Carthalo with 120 ships sinks several Roman ones: τῶν δὲ νεῶν τῶν ὁρμουσῶν εἰς γῆν ἀπέσπασε πέντε. Clearly the excerptor did not understand what was going on: the five ships were dragged off the beach, not on to it, and those at anchor must have been the ones sunk.
25 E.g. Tarn (n. 18), 55; Thiel (n. 3), 282; Walbank (n. 4), 1.116.
26 Consuls in 260 (Polyb. 1.21.4), 256 (1.25.7), 255 (1.36.10, 37.1), 254 (1.38.6), 253 (1.39.1, 6), 250 (1.41.3), 249 (1.52.5–6) and 242 (1.59.8–9). For armies, see above, n. 21.
27 The warships picked up in Sicily – not all of them from the camp, clearly – brought his total to about 120: Polyb. 1.52.5–6.
28 W.R. Paton's Loeb translation (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1922; unchanged in the revision by W.F. Walbank and C. Habicht, 2010), ‘the ships from Lilybaeum’, although – as often – more periphrastic than precise, meets the substance of the matter. See Polyb. 1.42.8, 43.1, 48.10, 49.3, esp. 52.5, 7 (on either side of the passage in question!), 53.4, 7, 55.8.
29 Thus e.g. Tarn (n. 18), 55 n. 38; Thiel (n. 3), 88 n. 84 (rejecting the words ἀπὸ τοῦ στρατοπέδου as ‘mak[ing] no sense’); Walbank (n. 4), 1.116; Lazenby (n. 3), 124 with n. 1 (‘it is surely impossible that Claudius could have got any ships past Adherbal at Drepana after the latter's victory’). Caven, B., The Punic Wars (New York, 1980), 51Google Scholar, accepts the obvious implication of Polybius’ statement, arguing – without discussing how – that these ships were transferred from Lilybaeum to Messana after the battle off Drepana.
30 Carthalo had just arrived at Drepana with 70 ships (Polyb. 1.53.2), and Adherbal's fleet may be estimated at anywhere between 100 and 130: see Tarn (n. 18), 54; Thiel (n. 3), 90; Lazenby (n. 3), 133. Tarn (ibid.) surmised, plausibly enough, that Claudius knew already before the battle of Carthalo's reinforcements being on their way – indeed, that this intelligence had prompted him to launch the attack on Drepana before they could arrive there.
31 Thus also Bleckmann (n. 20), 189, concluding that Claudius returned to Rome soon after the battle, and noting – correctly – that the defeat had deprived him of any means to continue the war.
32 For the date, see Eutr. 2.27.3.
33 Thiel (n. 3), 270 n. 687, is inclined to reject Zonaras’ information; similarly (by implication), Lazenby (n. 3), 130–2.
34 Thiel (n. 3), 263–6, and Lazenby (n. 3), 126, offer good reason to believe that the relief operations in Diod. Sic. 24.1.2 and Polyb. 1.44 are not one and the same, although certainty is impossible: see Walbank (n. 4), 1.109.
35 Supply by sea: Polyb. 1.55.2–4, 56.7–11, 58.3, 59.5; see also Lazenby (n. 3), 150. On the withdrawal of Punic naval forces from Sicily, see Polyb. 1.59.9; also Tarn (n. 18), 56; Thiel (n. 3), 296, 306–7; Lazenby (n. 3), 149. Although the Roman decision to abandon the war at sea did not become official until 247, it is evident that no attempts were made in the preceding year to re-build the fleet, or employ its remaining ships for anything but coastal defence in Italy and hiring out to privateers (Zonar. 8.16; cf. Polyb. 1.55.2): see Thiel (n. 3), 293; and especially Bleckmann (n. 20), 192–3, 209–11.
36 Lazenby (n. 3), 136, by implication.
37 Val. Max. 1.4.3 Nep.: P. Claudius … classem apud Aegates insulas cum multo rei pub. damno et suo exitio amisit. Strictly speaking, it is the excerptor Nepotianus who places the consul's demise at the Aegates Islands; but it seems improbable that the excerptor would have inserted such a detail from his own – mistaken – recollection of a notice in an entirely different section of Valerius Maximus. (Obviously, the Aegates could not furnish any examples under the heading of this entry, de auspicio; and Valerius himself seems to have had trouble locating events at them correctly: his reference [2.8.2] to the actual battle off those islands, in 241 b.c., does not mention them, offering a vague apud Siciliam instead; and what appears to be another reference to that battle at 1.3.2 Nep. erroneously ascribes the victory to Catulus’ brother, C. Lutatius Cerco, cos. 241.)
38 Diod. Sic. 24.1.7.
39 On average sailing speeds, see Casson, L., Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World (Princeton, NJ, 1971), 270–96Google Scholar. For the view that Claudius left promptly, see also Bleckmann (n. 20), 189.