Antiochus now confined himself to holding out with his fleet against the Rhodians and the ships of Eumenes, amongst which there were only a very few Roman ones. An unimportant battle was fought, in which these had the best of it; but after the fleets had separated, the Rhodians were shamefully deceived, surprised, and defeated by the Syrians. The Roman admiral, M. Æmilius Regillus, now came up with a new fleet of not more than eighty ships: the Romans were so little made for the sea-service, that they kept no fleet whatever, when they did not actually want one. Hence likewise, at least one half of their crews were then Rhodians; for these were the best seamen of the age, being yet in their prime, as in the best days of Greece. The fleet of Antiochus had been furnished almost entirely by the Phœnician towns, which, however, important as they were during the Persian rule, must now have very much gone down; and it was commanded by Hannibal. Yet though led by Hannibal, it was not able to effect a junction with another division, when a battle was fought near Myonnesus. The victory was altogether on the side of the Romans and their allies: the fleet of Antiochus was all but destroyed; the ships which were left, fled away into two harbours in Caria. This success had been achieved by the Rhodians; it was won, however, by means of fire, the Rhodians having engines on board their ships which hurled fire upon the enemy, most likely a kind of what was afterwards called Greek fire: it was not thrown with rockets, and from the way in which historians speak of it, this at least is certain, that the masses of it were quite extraordinary, and that it could not be quenched. This naval victory decided the war. Antiochus, by the advice of Hannibal, had meant to occupy the Chersonesus, which is joined to Thrace only by a narrow tongue of land about half a mile in length; on this lay Lysimachia, a well fortified town, from whence strong walls stretched out to the Melas Colpos and the Propontis, so that on the landside it could only be taken by a siege: one could land indeed at several places, but the Syrian fleet might have prevented it, and ought to have done so. He would then have been unassailable in Asia, so long as he chose to keep on the defensive. Yet such was the blindness of this king, that he sent Hannibal, as a hateful reminder of rejected counsels to Pamphylia, and banished him from his presence. It is possible that Antiochus by occupying the Chersonesus might have protected Asia, although he could not have kept it in the long run; but what was senseless, was his giving it up without making even so much as an attempt to defend it: the rich magazines there, which had been laid up for a long campaign, were abandoned to the Romans, and the garrisons withdrawn from the towns. He beguiled himself, or his subjects, with the thought that he should be able to make a stand behind the Hellespont; yet this