Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Rome (Yesterday's Classics) by James Baikie Read Free Book Online Page A

rowers will keep them quiet, and they will be as willing to handle the ship for us as for their late masters. So the Raven's beak is levered out of the deck, and the gangway hauled up again, and the captured galley obediently makes her way, under the gentle persuasion of our prize crew, to the rear of the fleet.
    Meanwhile, the same thing has been happening all round, to the intense surprise and disgust of our enemies. It is, of course, a most unseamanlike business, but we are capturing the ships, and they are losing them. By-and-by, when they have lost fifty, while we have not lost a single ship, they conclude that it is better to live to fight another day, when they shall have had time to consider and meet this strange new way of fighting that we have invented. Their eighty surviving ships make off for Mylæ, greatly crestfallen, but at a speed which makes pursuit hopeless; and we anchor, to make rough repairs, and to attend to our wounded and dispose of our dead.
    Such was Rome's first great sea-victory. With a raw fleet, and with crews as unseasoned as the wood of which the galleys were built, she had met and vanquished the greatest naval power of the world on its own element. Nothing was good enough for Admiral Duilius. A pillar, called the Columna Rostrata, because it was adorned with the "Rostra," or brazen beaks, of the captured vessels, was erected in his honour in the Forum. Moreover, stranger privileges, and more questionable, were conferred on him. It was decreed that when he went forth or returned home at night he should always be accompanied by the music of flutes, and by torch-bearers. To our minds this might seem to be a most refined and ingenious method of torture, and one is tempted to wonder whether the Patrician Senate might not be jealous of the Plebeian Consul who had won so great a triumph, and found this cruel way of avenging their order upon the plain soldier who had deserved well of the Republic. But Duilius was a brave man, and perhaps not even the din of his eternal flute-players could shake the nerves of an ancient Roman.

CHAPTER VI
A Visit to Rome in A.D. 71: The Journey
    N OW we are going to pay a visit to the Eternal City, and since we have the privilege, unlike other travellers, of choosing the year, and the route, and all the circumstances of our journey, we are going to arrive in Rome just in time to see the splendid Triumph by which Vespasian and Titus intend to celebrate the capture of Jerusalem, and we shall travel by the most famous of all Roman roads, the Appian Way. Our long voyage from Alexandria on the big corn-ship Canopus is gradually drawing to a close. We have spent a couple of days in the splendid harbour of Syracuse, and have recalled the memories of the two great sieges of that noble city—the first, when Nikias and the magnificent Athenian fleet and army perished miserably, and the second when the stern Roman Marcellus put the town to fire and sword, and the great Archimedes died in the sack of the city he had tried in vain to save. We have entered the narrow strait that separates Sicily from Italy, and have run through it with a fair south wind, leaving Rhegium on our right. The course is now straight for 182 miles to the famous port of Puteoli, and, as our good ship is doing a steady seven knots, we shall reach harbour in about twenty-six hours, if the wind holds.
    A day and night of perfect sailing brings us to the Bay of Naples. We round the Cape of Minerva, leaving on our left the lovely island of Capreæ, round which the memories of the Emperor Tiberius and his vile pleasures still seem to hover. On our right lies the shapely cone of Vesuvius, green and vine-clad, giving no warning yet of that dreadful burst of fiery destruction that in a few years will make the beautiful country at its base a waste and desolation. There is Pompeii, and about two miles beyond it you can see the villa of our good friend Publius Fannius Synistor, where we shall stay for a night before we