the sea; and of the three things in his life which Cato regretted one was, that he had travelled by sea when he might have gone by land.  This result arose partly out of the nature of the case, for the vessels were oared galleys and the service of the oar can scarcely be ennobled; but the Romans might at least have formed separate legions of marines and taken steps towards the rearing of a class of Roman naval officers.  Taking advantage of the impulse of the nation, they should have made it their aim gradually to establish a naval force important not only in numbers but in sailing power and practice, and for such a purpose they had a valuable nucleus in the privateering that was developed during the long war; but nothing of the sort was done by the government.  Nevertheless the Roman fleet with its unwieldy grandeur was the noblest creation of genius in this war, and, as at its beginning, so at its close it was the fleet that turned the scale in favour of Rome.

Far more difficult to be overcome were those deficiencies, which could not be remedied without an alteration of the constitution.  That the senate, according to the strength of the contending parties within it, should leap from one system of conducting the war to another, and perpetrate errors so incredible as the evacuation of Clupea and the repeated dismantling of the fleet; that the general of one year should lay siege to Sicilian towns, and his successor, instead of compelling them to surrender, should pillage the African coast or think proper to risk a naval battle; and that at any rate the supreme command should by law change hands every year—­all these anomalies could not be done away without stirring constitutional questions the solution of which was more difficult than the building of a fleet, but as little could their retention be reconciled with the requirements of such a war.  Above all, moreover, neither the senate nor the generals could at once adapt themselves to the new mode of conducting war.  The campaign of Regulus is an instance how singularly they adhered to the idea that superiority in tactics decides everything.  There are few generals who have had such successes thrown as it were into their lap by fortune:  in the year 498 he stood precisely where Scipio stood fifty years later, with this difference, that he had no Hannibal and no experienced army arrayed against him.  But the senate withdrew half the army, as soon as they had satisfied themselves of the tactical superiority of the Romans; in blind reliance on that superiority the general remained where he was, to be beaten in strategy, and accepted battle when it was offered to him, to be beaten also in tactics.  This was the more remarkable, as Regulus was an able and experienced general of his kind.  The rustic method of warfare, by which Etruria and Samnium had been won, was the very cause of the defeat in the plain of Tunes.  The principle, quite right in its own province, that every true burgher is fit for