Quantity with Quality
From Asinine to Empire
The first seafaring Romans can teach us a lot about perseverance
This is my next story in a series of articles responding to Dr Mehmet Yildiz’s challenge to produce a short quality article with three take home points each day for thirty days.
I have chosen to use Wikipedia’s main page as inspiration, choosing one item from the “Did You Know” section as topical encouragement.
The Roman’s first ever sea battle was an unmitigated disaster. The Romans were lured into believing that a key enemy garrison in Lipara was on the verge of defecting. In 260 B.C. the Roman fleet commander, known as the senior consul, Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, sailed his fleet into a closed harbor hoping to take over the garrison.
The Romans were still learning how to pilot their ships and effectively engage in battle, but Scipio couldn’t resist the idea of overtaking a key garrison. Meanwhile the vastly more experienced Carthaginian navy moved 20 ships in to block the harbor and very quickly overtook the Roman ships in what amounted to a minor skirmish.
Consul Scipio was taken captive along with many of the Roman command officers, while many of the ships’ crew panicked and fled inland. All of the Roman ships were captured, most with only minimal damage.
Scipio was nicknamed “Asina”, the female version of the word donkey and root of the word “asinine” as a result of the embarrassing defeat. Scipio was eventually ransomed and returned to the Romans, and within five years once again found himself in command of the now much more experienced and potent Roman fleet.
What We Can Learn About Turning Failure into Dominance
The Romans continued to build ships and to work on their sailing and sea battle experience. The Romans also innovated, building ramps on the front of their ships that would allow foot soldiers to board enemy vessels and overtake them in hand-to-hand combat rather than relying on the strategy of ramming and disabling enemy ships.
The Romans were the first to place foot soldiers on board their boats for this purpose, creating the first version of the marine soldier. This innovative tactic allowed them to assume control of enemy ships and use them against the enemy in battle.
This new technology and strategy allowed the Romans to win their next two large naval battles with the Carthaginians. While the war would persist for several years afterward, the shift in maritime dominance would mark the beginning of 600 years of the Roman Empire.
Take home points:
- If something seems too good to be true, it just may be. The lure of an easily captured strategic target turned out to be an ambush and an embarrassing failure for the Romans. A certain level of skepticism can be healthy.
- We learn more from failure than victory. Scipio used the lessons learned in the Liparian harbor battle to significantly improve the Roman’s naval tactics. Scipio and the Romans turned a tactical disadvantage of being less agile at sea due to their heavier ships and inexperience in naval battles into a significant advantage by disrupting the current way of thinking.
- Innovation is the key to success. By adopting a new way to skirmish at sea, the Romans rapidly turned the tables on the Carthaginian navy and assured their military and naval dominance for centuries.
Failures can be painful and sometimes embarrassing but can be fantastic catalysts to help us begin thinking in new and innovative ways.
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Timothy Key spent over 26 years in the fire service as a firefighter/paramedic and various fire chief management roles. He firmly believes that bad managers destroy more than companies, and good managers create a passion that is contagious. Compassion, grace and gratitude drive the world; or at least they should. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and join the mail list.