Hellenistic-era Warships - Roman

Roman

The large galleys must have been very sluggish and could be defeated by large numbers of smaller ships. The Roman navies consisted of triremes, quadriremes and quinqueremes. Though armed with a ram, these ships usually fought by boarding rather than ramming. The Romans during the First Punic War used a special wooden boarding ramp 36 ft (11 m) long and 4 ft (1.22 m) wide, with a long metal spike on the bottom that could be dropped onto an enemy ship to immobilize the ship and facilitate boarding. This device was called a corvus or "crow". But this invention led to the destruction of complete fleets during storms. Therefore at the decisive battle of the Aegates Islands and afterwards it was no longer employed by the Roman navy. According to Polybius another invention was called the "bear" and simply hit the enemy ship like a ram, but did not penetrate the hull. It was used to unbalance it and throw parts of the crew out of their rowing benches or from deck.

In the last great naval battle of the ancient world, at Actium in 31 BC, Octavian's lighter and more manoeuvrable ships defeated Antony's heavy fleet. These lighter ships increasingly relied on shooting and burning the enemy. After that, with the Roman Empire in charge of the entire Mediterranean, a heavy navy was no longer needed. By 325 there were no more quinqueremes. Still there were naval wars to fight piracy from time to time and the fleet was politically influential because it controlled the grain supply.