The Boarding Bridge at Mylae

When the First Punic War began in 264 BC, Carthage ruled the western Mediterranean and Rome had little experience of war at sea. Polybius says the Romans copied a Carthaginian warship that had run aground, built a fleet of a hundred quinqueremes, and trained their rowers on benches set up on land. Knowing they could not match Carthaginian seamanship, they fitted each ship with a boarding bridge, the corvus or raven: a gangway about six fathoms long, pivoting on a pole at the bow, with a heavy spike beneath its far end.

At Mylae in 260 BC the consul Gaius Duilius met the Carthaginian fleet under Hannibal Gisco. The Carthaginians, Polybius says, came on with contempt, expecting easy prey. As they closed, the ravens swung down, the spikes bit into their decks, and Roman soldiers poured across. Polybius puts the Carthaginian losses at about fifty ships, among them the commander's flagship, a seven-banked galley that had once belonged to Pyrrhus. Duilius celebrated Rome's first naval triumph, and a column decorated with the rams of captured ships was raised in his honor in the Forum.