Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/218

 were much the same as the ships of the Greeks and Carthaginians, or of the merchant vessel, already described, in which St. Paul made his celebrated voyage, and that their form and dimensions were regulated by the services they were expected to perform. In a note we subjoin a list of the number of fleets the Romans are known to have had in the brief space of twenty years, as they will give a better idea than anything else of the vigour of their administration, and of the energy wherewith, in the best days of the republic, they surmounted disasters which would have crushed to the ground a less self-reliant people.

But so far as commerce is concerned, it was only when they had brought the third Punic war to an end, and had destroyed the great trading cities of Carthage and Corinth, that the Romans really began to devote their abilities to commercial pursuits, and recognize in the site of one of them (Corinth), a great centre of trade for Asia, Western Greece,