The Hammer and the Shield (Paperback)

He built the victory that made Rome a sea power. The stone carries another man's name.

Rome, 264 BC. Manius Fabricius is the disgrace of his senatorial house: a second son who would rather read a hull than hold a sword, learning the shipwright's trade from a broken Athenian who teaches him one thing above all, to stand before the water and ask what it wants.

His father and brother drown in the Strait of Messina, sent to their deaths by a commander who knew nothing of the sea, and the family calls it valor. Manius reads the wreck for what it was. Years later, when Rome has no answer to Carthage at sea, he gives it one: the corvus, an iron-beaked boarding bridge that drags the land war onto the water and hands Rome its first great naval victory.

The bridge wins the sea, and the column in the Forum names the consul. The device also carries a flaw its maker found too late and was overruled about, and the sea will collect on it, one drowned fleet at a time.

The story is told in two voices. One belongs to the engineer who reads water. The other belongs to Duilia, the consul's daughter, who keeps his drawings and the warning Rome would not hear. The Hammer and the Shield is a novel of the First Punic War about invention and credit, about the men history leaves out, and about the people who decide what the stone remembers.