The north wind sprang up again after a little, cheering the hearts of the inexperienced, blew in fitful gusts for an hour or more, then died nearly away, again sprang up, and finally faded out as before. The seamen knew what this portended. “Next came a flash of lightning in the southern sky; then a line of foam upon the southern sea; the roaring of Heaven’s artillery in the air above, and of the breakers on the beach below--and the tempest was upon them!” From this time all order was lost, and the counsels and admonitions of the pilots unheeded. The Roman fleet was completely at the mercy of the hurricane, and the veterans who had borne themselves bravely in many a hard fought battle with their fellow man, now, completely demoralized in the presence of this new danger, behaved more like maniacs than reasonable beings. Some advised one thing, some another; but nothing sensible was done--and when the gale broke, out of four hundred and sixty-four quinqueremes (an immense fleet) three hundred and eighty had been dashed upon the rocks and lost. The whole coast was covered with fragments of wreck and dead bodies; and that which Rome had been so many years in acquiring, at the cost of so much blood, labor, and treasure, she lost in a few hours, through the want of experienced seamen in command. * * * * * During the succeeding Punic wars Rome and Carthage had many another well contested naval engagement. Adherbal captured ninety-four Roman vessels off Drepanum, but the dogged courage of the Roman was usually successful. We have few details of these engagements. What the Romans gained in battle was often lost by them in shipwreck; so that, at the end of the first Punic war, which lasted twenty-four years, they had lost seven hundred quinqueremes, and the vanquished Carthaginians only five hundred. At the time spoken of, when the Romans were fighting the Carthaginians, the former were a free, virtuous and patriotic people. No reverses cast them down; no loss of life discouraged them. After a lapse of two hundred years, Marcus Brutus and Cassius being dead, and public virtue scoffed at and fast expiring, an arbitrary government was in process of erection upon the ruins of the Republic.