The Battle of the Aegates took place on 10 March 241 BC. It was the final and deciding battle of the 23-year-long First Punic War. Carthage had been blockading the Romans in their last strongholds on the west coast of Sicily for several years.
About Battle of the Aegates in brief
The Battle of the Aegates took place on 10 March 241 BC. It was the final and deciding battle of the 23-year-long First Punic War. The Carthaginians had been blockading the Romans in their last strongholds on the west coast of Sicily for several years. Almost bankrupt, the Romans borrowed money to build a naval fleet, which they used to extend the blockade to the sea. Carthage assembled a larger fleet which they intended to use to run supplies into Sicily. But it was intercepted by the Roman fleet and in a hard-fought battle, the better-trained Romans defeated the undermanned and ill-trained Carthaginian fleet. As a direct result, Carthage sued for peace and agreed to the Treaty of Lutatius, by which Carthage surrendered Sicily to Rome and paid substantial reparations. Since 2010 a number of artefacts have been recovered from the battle site, and their analysis and the recovery of further items are ongoing. The modern consensus is to accept it largely at face value, and the details of the battle in modern sources are almost entirely based on interpretations of Polybius’s account. Modern historians usually also take into account the later histories of Diodorus Siculus and Dio Cassius, although the classicist Adrian Goldsworthy states thatPolybius’ account is usually to be preferred when it differs with any of our other accounts. Other sources include inscriptions, archaeological evidence, and empirical evidence from reconstructions such as the trireme Olympias.
In 264 BC, the states of Carthage and Rome went to war, starting the First PunIC War. Both sides wished to control Syracuse, the most powerful city-state on Sicily. During this period the standard Mediterranean warship was the quinquereme, meaning \”five-oared\”. The modern replica Olympias has achieved speeds of 8 knots and cruised at 4 knots for 4 hours on voyages of up to a week. Vessels were built as cataphracts, with a full deck and a separate box to carry marines and catapults to carry the main hull. They had a separate hull which contained a separate section for the main engine, which was attached to the ship’s main hull and attached to a separate deck to carry a crew of around 20 men. The ship was a galley, c. 45 metres long, c 45 metres wide, with its deck at water level standing c. 5 metres above the sea, and displacing 100 tonnes. The galley could maintain 7 knots for extended periods of time, but it could also cruise at 5 knots for up to five hours. The Roman fleet was built as a cataphracted, or closed, hull with a closed hull and a fulldeck and a main deck to contain the main engines and marines, which were attached to separate boxes to carry them. Only the first book of the 40 comprising The Histories deals with the Firstpunic War, and it was written about a century after 146 BC. Other, later, histories of the war exist.
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This page is based on the article Battle of the Aegates published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
