As I have already remarked, Carthage’s supremacy rested on her sea-power, and her sea-power, in turn, rested on her vast armada of triremes—galleys with three banks of oars, each manned by ten soldiers and 130 rowers, the latter being slaves who never left the benches to which they were chained. It has been estimated that the average length of a trireme was about 130 feet, or approximately that of a small destroyer. The naval tactics of the Carthaginians, be it understood, consisted in sinking the enemy by ramming, not in boarding and hand-to-hand fighting. Now they turned their attention to the development of a much larger class of fighting ship, the quinquereme, its five banks of oars manned by 300 rowers, and each carrying about twenty marines. The Romans improved on this, however, for they not only copied the quinqueremes, but they fitted them with gangways which could be lowered upon contact with an enemy vessel, so as to permit the complement of 120 legionaries which each Roman war craft carried to gain access to the adversary’s decks. Relying on this combatant superiority of six to one, they endeavored always to get alongside and board the enemy by means of the “flying-bridges”; with the Romans, as with Nelson and John Paul Jones, it was always, “Broadside to broadside! Boarders up and away!” The first sea-battle under these new conditions was fought off Lipara in 260 B.C. and ended in complete disaster for the Romans, their admiral and his entire squadron being captured. But shortly thereafter the fortunes of war were reversed, for in a second encounter, near Palermo, fifty Carthaginian vessels were captured or sunk. Four years later, off Agrigentum, was fought one of the greatest sea-battles of all time, in which upward of three hundred thousand men were engaged and in which nearly a hundred Carthaginian galleys, together with a like number of Roman, went down. Though the Carthaginian fleet was only temporarily put out of action, the Romans were enabled to bring their transports in safety across the narrow seas and to effect a landing on the eastern side of Cape Bon, their army under Marcus Attilius Regulus capturing Tunis and menacing Carthage itself. But the Carthaginians summoned to their aid the renowned Spartan general, Xanthippus, thanks to whose brilliant leadership the invaders were all but exterminated, Regulus himself being taken prisoner.