Mare Nostrum: Roman Naval Power

Most people, if they were asked to list the great seafaring peoples of history, or more specifically the great naval fighting traditions, would come up with a fairly uniform list. There are obviously the two great naval powers of modernity in the British Empire and the United States (though the latter is now not without challengers), and the navigators of the first transatlantic empires in Portugal and Spain. China had a brief period of prolific shipbuilding and navigation in the early modern period, but was disinterested in trying to leverage this into durable power projection. Modern China seeks to rectify this missed opportunity. A deeper dive into the mental archives might churn up the ancient Phoenicians, or perhaps the Genoese and Venetian city states that dominated the Mediterranean in the early modern period. There are those wonderful Vikings, who managed to reach the Americas in their open hulled longboats, and terrorized and colonized much of Europe with their nautical reach. Few, however, would immediately think of the Romans.