the Romans to acquiesce in her prohibitive system, to submit to be excluded from the seats of production in the west and east (connected with which exclusion is the story of a public reward bestowed on the Phoenician mariner who at the sacrifice of his own ship decoyed a Roman vessel, steering after him into the Atlantic Ocean, to perish on a sand-bank), and to restrict their navigation under the treaty to the narrow space of the western Mediterranean—­and all this for the mere purpose of averting pillage from their coasts and of securing their ancient and important trading connection with Sicily.  The Romans were obliged to yield to these terms; but they did not desist from their efforts to rescue their marine from its condition of impotence.

Quaestors of the Fleet—­
Variance between Rome and Carthage

A comprehensive measure with that view was the institution of four quaestors of the fleet (-quaestores classici-) in 487:  of whom the first was stationed at Ostia the port of Rome; the second, stationed at Cales then the capital of Roman Campania, had to superintend the ports of Campania and Magna Graecia; the third, stationed at Ariminum, superintended the ports on the other side of the Apennines; the district assigned to the fourth is not known.  These new standing officials were intended to exercise not the sole, but a conjoint, guardianship of the coasts, and to form a war marine for their protection.  The objects of the Roman senate—­to recover their independence by sea, to cut off the maritime communications of Tarentum, to close the Adriatic against fleets coming from Epirus, and to emancipate themselves from Carthaginian supremacy—­were very obvious.  Their already explained relations with Carthage during the last Italian war discover traces of such views.  King Pyrrhus indeed compelled the two great cities once more—­it was for the last time —­to conclude an offensive alliance; but the lukewarmness and faithlessness of that alliance, the attempts of the Carthaginians to establish themselves in Rhegium and Tarentum, and the immediate occupation of Brundisium by the Romans after the termination of the war, show clearly how much their respective interests already came into collision.

Rome and the Greek Naval Powers

Rome very naturally sought to find support against Carthage from the Hellenic maritime states.  Her old and close relations of amity with Massilia continued uninterrupted.  The votive offering sent by Rome to Delphi, after the conquest of Veii, was preserved there in the treasury of the Massiliots.  After the capture of Rome by the Celts there was a collection in Massilia for the sufferers by the fire, in which the city chest took the lead; in return the Roman senate granted commercial advantages to the Massiliot merchants, and, at the celebration of the games in the Forum assigned a position of honour (-Graecostasis-) to the Massiliots by the side of the platform for the senators.  To the same category belong the treaties of commerce and amity concluded by the Romans about 448 with Rhodes and not long after with Apollonia, a considerable mercantile town on the Epirot coast, and especially the closer relation, so fraught with danger for Carthage, which immediately after the end of the Pyrrhic war sprang up between Rome and Syracuse.(23)