the Carthaginians. Many of them having
been sent to the bottom, however, by the quinqueremes of that people,
the Romans built a hundred of the latter-sized ships from the model of a
Carthaginian vessel wrecked on the coast of Italy. The Romans must have
had very large merchant-vessels to enable them to transport the enormous
monoliths from Egypt which they erected in Rome. These vast stones,
also, could not have been got on board and brought up the Tiber without
considerable mechanical appliances.

The construction of their ships differed but slightly from that of the
Greek vessels; they had turrets on the decks of their larger men-of-war,
and employed a variety of destructive engines; so that in battle the
soldiers on board fought much as they did when standing on the walls of
a fortress. Of one thing I am sure, that no correct drawings of ancient
ships have come down to us, if any such were really made; those on
medals, cameos, and such as are painted on walls, are probably as far
removed from the reality as a Thames barge is from a dashing frigate.
They give us, certainly, the different parts of the ship, and from them
we may form a pretty correct idea of what a ship really was like.
Certain it is, however, that ships were built of prodigious size, and if
not equal to a line-of-battle ship of late days, they must have been as
large as, if not larger than, the _Great Harry_, and probably quite as
well able to encounter as she was the boisterous seas. Long before the
Christian era, ships boldly struck across the Mediterranean, and even
passing through the Pillars of Hercules, coasted along the shores of
Iberia and Gaul, and thence crossed over to Britain, or coasted round
the African continent.

Advanced as the ancients were in architectural knowledge, there is every
reason to suppose that they were equally capable of building ships to
answer all their requirements, either for war or commerce. They were
probably thus not only of great size, but well built, and were certainly
finished and ornamented in an elegant and even a magnificent manner, far
superior to that of many ages later. The mistaken notion as to the size
of the ships of the ancients arises from the supposition that because
merchantmen of the present day are smaller than men-of-war, that they
were so formerly--the reverse, however, being the case. Men-of-war were
generally long, narrow vessels, constructed for speed, to carry only
fighting men, wi