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merest glance at a few of the details of its equipment. The Romans went upon the principle of leaving nothing to chance if they could help it. They never camped, not even for a single night, without throwing up a fortified camp that would stand anything short of a regular siege, and everything else was attended to in the same solid, methodical way. Tools, weapons, everything that the soldiers used, might be plain and unpretentious indeed, but were all of the best and strongest. And it was this thoroughness of preparation, joined to the stubborn bravery of the Roman private, that so often turned the scale when the legions were engaged against heavy odds.
    But meanwhile Marius has finished his inspection, and the troops are coming back to camp; so we must wish them a good night's rest before the battle, and good luck when they measure the short gladius tomorrow against the long claymores of the Cimbri.

CHAPTER V
Rome's Battle-Fleet
    W E have spent so much time over the Roman army because, after all, it was the army which was the chief weapon of the great city in her conquest of the world. But we must not forget that Rome owed a great deal to her fleet as well, and that in the long wars during which she was fighting for her very life against Carthage, it was the fleet that turned the scale in her favour at last. All the same, the Roman never was a sailor. He was always a soldier, who sometimes had to fight, very unwillingly, at sea. When a Roman felt that he had to do a thing, he did it thoroughly, and generally with success; and this was true of his sea-fighting as well as of other things. He took to the sea because he was obliged to; he made a fleet because he could not help himself; he used it with astonishing success; but he never used it as a seaman.
    His naval victories were not sea-battles at all; they were land-battles fought at sea; and they were won, not by seamanship, but by the same methods of fighting which made the legions victorious on land. Roman seamanship was the kind of thing that allowed the Carthaginian Admiral, with his whole fleet and ten thousand men, to break the blockade of Lilybaeum without the loss of a ship or a man, while the Roman fleet looked on, afraid to lift anchor in the wild gale which swept the Carthaginians safely into port. During the First Punic War, Rome lost, by sheer bad handling and neglect of seamanlike precautions, three entire fleets, with 700 ships of the line and 70,000 men.
    All the same, Rome became a great naval power, and I have now to tell you how she did this. Early in her first great war with Carthage, she found that she must needs have a fleet—not the trifling little squadron of small vessels that she had kept up for a long time, but a real fleet, able to meet the Carthaginians on the open sea. For the war was being fought out in Sicily, and the army there had to be reinforced and supplied, while the Italian coasts had to be protected against Carthaginian raids. So the Romans set to work to make a fleet just as they would have set to work to raise a new army.
    Now you must know that in those days there were two chief kinds of warship. The Greeks, who were real sailors, had gradually developed a fast, smart, and handy middle-sized ship, called a trireme, because it had three rows of oars, one above the other. It had sails too, and when it was cruising, or making a passage, the trireme used its sails, and gave the rowers a rest; but when it was going into battle, masts and sails were struck, and, if possible, sent ashore, for the ship was handiest under oars alone.
    Rome had already some triremes. But the trireme was getting out of date, because a bigger ship had been introduced. She had five banks of oars, and so was called a "pentereme," or "quinquereme." She was not nearly such a smart ship as the trireme, but, as a sea-castle, she was irresistible. A trireme had no more chance against a quinquereme in the kind of fighting that the Romans meant to go in for than a