in disguise for the
change to Imperialism.

On the height where he had camped before the battle, Nicopolis, the City of
Victory, was erected. The ground where his tent had stood was the
marble-paved forum, adorned with the brazen beaks of conquered warships.
The temple of Apollo, on the point of Actium, was rebuilt on more ambitious
lines, and on the level expanse of sandy ground behind it, every September,
for some two hundred years, the "Actian games" were held to celebrate the
decisive victory.

Augustus did not forget that to the fleet he had owed his success in the
civil war, and naval stations were organized and squadrons of warships kept
in commission even in the long days of peace that followed his victory.
They served to keep the Mediterranean free from the plague of piracy, and
to secure the growing oversea commerce of the Empire which had made the
Mediterranean a vast Roman lake.

CHAPTER III

THE BATTLE OF SVOLD ISLAND

A.D. 1000

In the story of the battles of Salamis and Actium we have seen what naval
warfare was like in Greek and Roman times. It would be easy to add other
examples, but they would be only repetitions of much the same story, for
during the centuries of the Roman power there was no marked change in naval
architecture or the tactics of warfare on the sea.

We pass, then, over a thousand years to a record of naval war waged in the
beginning of the Middle Ages by northern races--people who had,
independently of Greek or Roman, evolved somewhat similar types of ships,
but who were better sailors, though for all that they still used the ship
not so much as an engine of war as the floating platform on which warriors
might meet in hand-to-hand conflict. Norseman, Dane, and Swede were all of
kindred blood. The land-locked Baltic, the deep fiords of the Scandinavian
Peninsula, the straits and inlets of the archipelago that fringes its North
Sea coast, were the waters on which they learned such skill in seamanship
that they soon launched out upon the open sea, and made daring voyages, not
only to the Orkneys and the Hebrides, and the Atlantic seaboard of Ireland,
but the Faroes, and to still more distant Iceland and Greenland, and then
southward to "Vineland," the mainland of America, long after rediscovered
by the navigators of the fifteenth century.

There is a considerable intermixture of Norse blood in the peoples of Great
Britain and Ireland, and perhaps from this sea