e
command of the sea to Agrippa and Octavian.

The Egypto-Roman army was ordered to concentrate on the southern shores of
the Ambracian Gulf. A division of the fleet was moored in the winding
strait at its entrance, but directed to act only on the defensive. Inside
the Gulf the rest of the fleet lay, the largest ships at anchor, the
smaller hauled up on the shore.

The crews had been brought up to full strength by enlisting mule-drivers,
field-labourers, and other inexperienced landsmen, and would have been
better for training at sea; but except for some drills on the landlocked
waters they were left in idleness, and sickness soon broke out among them
and thinned their numbers. The ships thus inefficiently manned presented a
formidable array. There were some five hundred in all, including, however,
a number of large merchantmen hastily fitted for war service. Just as
modern men-of-war are provided with steel nets hanging on booms as a
defence against torpedoes, so it would seem that some at least of Antony's
ships had been fitted with a clumsy device for defending them against
attack by ramming. Below the level of the oars, balks of timber were
propped out from their sides at the water-line, and it was hoped that these
barricades would break the full force of an enemy's "beak." But the
invention had the drawback of diminishing the speed of the ship, and making
quick turning more difficult, and thus it increased the very danger it was
intended to avert.

Another feature of the larger ships, some of them the biggest that had yet
been built for the line of battle, the "Dreadnoughts" of their day, was
that wooden castles or towers had been erected on their upper decks, and on
these structures were mounted various specimens of a rude primitive
substitute for artillery, ballistae, catapults, and the like, engines for
discharging by mechanical means huge darts or heavy stones. These same
towers were also to be the places from which the Eastern bowmen, the best
archers of the ancient world, would shower their arrows on a hostile fleet.

But locked up in the bottle-necked Ambracian Gulf the great fleet, with its
tower-crowned array of floating giants, had as little effect on the opening
phase of the campaign as if its units had been so many castles on the
shore. Agrippa soon felt that there was no serious risk of any attempt
being made by Antony to interrupt the long and delicate operation of
ferrying over an army of a hundre