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Updated: June 3, 2025
Therefore he burned all the vessels which had survived from the sea-fight and had been cast up against the ramparts, and started out himself as if to proceed to Mylae. For the enemy came close, whenever there was good opportunity, and again turned back with rapidity.
They chose, in the first instance, the former plan of operations. In the year after the battle of Mylae the consul Lucius Scipio captured the port of Aleria in Corsica we still possess the tombstone of the general, which makes mention of this deed and made Corsica a naval station against Sardinia.
Then there was a sudden end to Carthaginian victories. At the battle of Mylae their fleet was badly defeated. Carthage was obliged to sue for peace, and Sicily became part of the Roman domains. Twenty-three years later new trouble arose. This made Carthage a direct neighbour of the Romans.
As matters went well with him and his activity supplied him with soldiers and money, he sailed to Sicily, where he seized Mylae and Tyndaris without effort but was repulsed from Messana by Pompeius Bithynicus, then governor of Sicily.
At first, as might be expected, the Romans were defeated; but in 260, under the consul Caius Duilius, they won their first naval victory at Mylae, west of Messana. The Roman Senate decided to invade Africa. A fleet of three hundred and thirty vessels sailed under the command of the consul M. Atilius Regulus, which was met by a Carthaginian fleet at Ecnomus, on the south coast of Sicily.
But at last, having built a new fleet, and obtained twenty thousand manumitted slaves , who were given him for the oar, he formed the Julian harbour at Baiae, by letting the sea into the Lucrine and Avernian lakes; and having exercised his forces there during the whole winter, he defeated Pompey betwixt Mylae and Naulochus; although just as the engagement commenced, he suddenly fell into such a profound sleep, that his friends were obliged to wake him to give the signal.
But for this purpose too there was need of a fleet; and, since that which had conquered at Mylae, at Ecnomus, and at the Hermaean promontory was destroyed, they built a new one. Keels were at once laid down for 220 new vessels of war they had never hitherto undertaken the building of so many simultaneously and in the incredibly short space of three months they were all ready for sea.
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