treated with the
affection of a stepmother; the naval service continued to be little
esteemed in comparison with the high honour of serving in the legions;
the naval officers were in great part Italian Greeks; the crews were
composed of subjects or even of slaves and outcasts. The Italian
farmer was at all times distrustful of the sea; and of the three
things in his life which Cato regretted one was, that he had travelled
by sea when he might have gone by land. This result arose partly out
of the nature of the case, for the vessels were oared galleys and the
service of the oar can scarcely be ennobled; but the Romans might at
least have formed separate legions of marines and taken steps towards
the rearing of a class of Roman naval officers. Taking advantage
of the impulse of the nation, they should have made it their aim
gradually to establish a naval force important not only in numbers
but in sailing power and practice, and for such a purpose they had a
valuable nucleus in the privateering that was developed during the
long war; but nothing of the sort was done by the government.
Nevertheless the Roman fleet with its unwieldy grandeur was the
noblest creation of genius in this war, and, as at its beginning, so
at its close it was the fleet that turned the scale in favour of Rome.

Far more difficult to be overcome were those deficiencies, which could
not be remedied without an alteration of the constitution. That the
senate, according to the strength of the contending parties within it,
should leap from one system of conducting the war to another, and
perpetrate errors so incredible as the evacuation of Clupea and the
repeated dismantling of the fleet; that the general of one year should
lay siege to Sicilian towns, and his successor, instead of compelling
them to surrender, should pillage the African coast or think proper to
risk a naval battle; and that at any rate the supreme command should
by law change hands every year--all these anomalies could not be done
away without stirring constitutional questions the solution of which
was more difficult than the building of a fleet, but as little could
their retention be reconciled with the requirements of such a war.
Above all, moreover, neither the senate nor the generals could at once
adapt themselves to the new mode of conducting war. The campaign of
Regulus is an instance how singularly they adhered to the idea that
superiority in tactics decides everything. The