trusting for victory to her speed, her manœuvring qualities and her ram.
It may, and indeed has been argued that the rowers merely moved the ship and did not fight it. Academically this is true, but otherwise it is incorrect. The free Athenian citizens who toiled at the oars knew perfectly well that with those oars they propelled the ram upon which they trusted for victory,—the ram was their weapon and it needed oars being pulled to use it just as a gun needs loading for use. They, using the oars, replaced the bulk of the fighting men who added weight to hostile warships. The end of this Athenian seamanship was disaster. They had built their ships too light in the pursuance of their ideal, and the day came when weight told. Incidentally of course fitness to win had passed from them to their enemies, also the circumstances were peculiar, so that it is hard or impossible to say how much their defeat was due to the failure of the cruiser idea opposed to the battleship idea and how much to lack of fitness to win. At Ægospotami the latter was painfully in evidence; but there still remains the fact that the fitter to win relied on the battleship idea and the specialisation necessitated by carrying out what constituted the battleship idea in those days.
The Carthaginians failed in exactly the same way. Different conditions obtained, but still there was the main fact that the fitter to win relied, like the Peloponnesians, upon the military as opposed to the purely
