The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  By coincidence, one of the best preserved ancient Mediterranean merchant ships excavated to date was probably the victim of piracy. The fourth-century BCE vessel was discovered off Kyrenia in northern Cyprus. Built mostly of Aleppo pine with lead sheathing below the waterline, the fourteen-meter-long hull was found with twenty tons of cargo, including some four hundred amphorae, most of Rhodian origin, and ten thousand almonds. Twenty-nine millstones of volcanic stone from an island northwest of Rhodes were carried as ballast. Personal belongings included enough ceramic plates, bowls and cups, and wooden spoons for a crew of four. Finds of lead net-weights suggest that the sailors fished to supplement a diet of olives, pistachios, almonds, hazelnuts, lentils, garlic, herbs, grapes, and figs. Coins depicting Antigonus and Demetrius date the wreck to about 310–300 BCE, but by then she was an old and often repaired vessel. The evidence that the ship had been attacked by pirates is in the form of eight iron spearheads recovered from the site, some embedded in the outer surface of the planking. Enough of the hull remained for a full-scale replica of the one-masted ship to be built. In 1986, the Kyrenia II made a passage from Piraeus to Cyprus, sailing more than four hundred miles at nearly three knots, and in one twenty-four-hour period she averaged almost twice that. Though adequate for trade, such speeds would have made the Kyrenia ship and others like her easy prey for pirate galleys.

  Rhodes’s antipiracy campaigns were complicated by the fact that pirates operated both on their own account and as mercenaries for foreign rulers. At the end of the third century BCE, for example, the island of Crete was a collection of cities joined in a loose commonwealth presided over by Philip V of Macedonia. So Cretans engaged in seizing merchantmen may have been in Philip’s pay and therefore not, strictly speaking, pirates. During the Cretan War of 206–203 BCE, Rhodians faced pirates from at least half a dozen cities, some of which they managed to neutralize and bring into formal alliances. By this time, legitimate maritime commerce was vital to the well-being of individual city-states and kingdoms. No longer an honorable way to make a living, as Thucydides claims it was in Homer’s day, piracy was something to which all those with a stake in sea trade paid close attention. Nonetheless, if the testimony of St. Augustine is to be believed, the question of what differentiated pirates from recognized rulers was already current: “It was a witty and a truthful rejoinder which was given by a captured pirate to Alexander the Great. The king asked the fellow, ‘What is your idea, in infesting the sea?’ And the pirate answered with uninhibited insolence. ‘The same as yours, in infesting the world! But because I do this with my tiny craft, I am called a pirate; because you have a mighty navy, you are called an emperor.’ ”

  Rome Before the Punic Wars, 500–275 BCE

  By the time of the Cretan War, the focus of naval activity was shifting to the western Mediterranean, where Rome predominated. The Romans were relative latecomers to maritime concerns, and although Roman authors maintained a pretentious abhorrence of seafaring, exploitation of the sea played a critical role in the creation and maintenance of the empire in both its republican and its post-Augustan phases, a fact of which its politicians and generals were acutely aware. The Romans were one of a number of tribes that inhabited the plain of Latium south of Etruria, but Rome was favored thanks to its position near an important crossing on the Tiber River, its proximity to the sea, its central position on the Italian Peninsula, and its easily defended seven hills. In about 510 BCE, the Romans overthrew the last of a succession of Etruscan kings to rule them and established a republic. Despite occasional setbacks, by the end of the fourth century Rome was the leading city of the Latin League, and by the 280s BCE the Romans dominated Etruria, Umbria, and Campania and were setting their sights farther afield on the Italian Peninsula. Up to this point, however, they had shown no interest in maritime pursuits, a fact reflected in their long-term relationship with Carthage, the dominant sea power of the western Mediterranean.

  Despite later propaganda intended to demonstrate an ancient animosity, notably Virgil’s account of the relationship between Dido (the Phoenician Elissa) and Aeneas, relations between Rome and Carthage were not always hostile. Although they lived only fifteen kilometers from the mouth of the Tiber, the early Romans all but ignored the sea and could easily afford amicable relations with the Carthaginians, with whom they signed their earliest known treaty in 509/508 BCE. This agreement stipulated that the Romans and their allies were not allowed to sail to Carthaginian Africa except to trade, and Carthage was to have hegemony in Sicily and not build forts in Latin Italy. A subsequent treaty of 348 BCE barred Roman traders from the western Mediterranean (though there is little indication of Roman sea trade and none of naval ships for another half century) and protected coastal cities under Roman control from the Carthaginians.

  The preferred Roman defense against raiders from the sea, whether state enemies or pirates, was the establishment of coloniae maritimae (maritime colonies)—ten in all, including Ostia and Antium (Anzio), among others on the Tyrrhenian Sea, and Sena Gallica (Senigallia), on the Adriatic north of Ancona. The date of Ostia’s founding is uncertain, but Antium was colonized after its capture in 338 BCE, when the Romans confiscated some of its warships “while the rest were burnt, and it was decided to use their prows or beaks to decorate a platform set up in the Forum; this sacred place was named the Rostra, or The Beaks.” (The word “rostrum,” for a speaker’s podium, comes from the fact that orators stood by these monuments to address their audience.) The coloniae maritimae were small settlements of three hundred families. For the men, the only specific benefit of being a colonist was exemption from service in the legions. In return, they were expected to destroy the ships of anyone who came ashore with hostile intent and to slow the advance of any armies marching up the coast. While their settlements were described as “maritime,” the colonists did not necessarily have either ships or maritime experience; they served in a capacity roughly analogous to that of the Minutemen of the American Revolution or Britain’s Home Army in World War II. Although officially Roman citizens, their condition was considered “more dangerous and less free,” they were far removed from the civic life of the capital, and on balance they were probably no better off than those serving in the legions.

  Rome’s reliance on coloniae maritimae rather than a navy was not entirely successful. During their siege of Naples in 327/326 BCE, the Romans had no vessels with which to attack the Campanian port, while the Neapolitans ranged freely against Roman coastal settlements. Still, it was not until 311 BCE that the Romans built a fleet—two squadrons of ten ships stationed at Rome. These saw little action until 282 BCE, when a squadron was sent “on a voyage of inspection along the coast of Magna Graecia,” in violation of a treaty with Tarentum “by which the Romans had bound themselves not to sail past the promontory” at the southern end of the Gulf of Taranto. The Tarentines were suspicious of the Romans, who supported their rivals, Naples and Rhodes, and they responded by sinking or capturing five Roman ships. The ensuing war pitted the Roman armies against the sea-based Tarentines, who widened the conflict by soliciting help from Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, across the Adriatic in northwest Greece. Related by marriage to both Demetrius the Besieger and Ptolemy I and author of a book on military tactics, Pyrrhus was an expansionist in the Alexandrian mold. After several victories over the Romans, he accepted an offer to defend Syracuse from the Carthaginians. Between 278 and 276 BCE, he conquered most of Sicily, but his heavy-handed approach to the Greek cities turned many against him. This combined with reverses in southern Italy and domestic political problems forced him to return to Epirus.

  One reason for Pyrrhus’s Sicilian campaign had been to forestall an alliance between Rome and Carthage. In 279 BCE the Carthaginian admiral Mago had sailed to Ostia with about 120 ships and an offer of a treaty of mutual assistance against Pyrrhus. The war had already stretched the Romans to the limit, while the Carthaginians feared that a Roman peace with Pyrrhus would give him free rein against them in Sicily. Th
e terms of their treaty reflected Rome’s weakness at sea. Whether Carthage provided troops to Rome or vice versa, Carthaginian ships would carry them, and the Carthaginians were bound to provide naval assistance to Rome, although there was no reciprocal requirement. This naval component was especially important given Pyrrhus’s dependence on the sea-lanes between Epirus, Tarentum, and Sicily, and while the most decisive engagements of the Pyrrhic Wars were fought on land, naval and maritime concerns were at the forefront of the various combatants’ strategic considerations.

  The end of the war brought with it a radically changed political landscape. Rome’s hegemony now extended throughout all of southern Italy, and Tarentum became one of Rome’s naval allies (socii navales), from whose lower classes it recruited a majority of its crews. While they had embarked on their war with Pyrrhus in a state of national exhaustion in the wake of their wars with more immediate neighbors, the Romans’ success against overseas aggressors left them at once invigorated and wary. The unexpected appearance of Mago’s fleet at Ostia doubtless heightened their appreciation for the potential of naval power and forced them to reassess their position vis-à-vis Carthage once peace was restored.

  The First and Second Punic Wars, 264–202 BCE

  Within a decade of Pyrrhus’s withdrawal from Italy, Rome and Carthage were at war. The casus belli was a dispute between the people of Carthage and Messina, Sicily, but it quickly became a struggle for control of Sicily and the western Mediterranean, and it launched Rome on a path to mastery over all of the Mediterranean and Black Seas. The first of the three Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage took place chiefly in Sicily, where the land war simmered for twenty-three years. But it was the naval war that proved decisive in ending Carthage’s centuries-long primacy in the western Mediterranean and catapulted Rome into the front rank of military, and naval, powers. As Polybius notes, “those who are impressed by the great sea-battles of an Antigonus, a Ptolemy or a Demetrius would doubtless be amazed … at the vast scale of the [naval] operations” in the First Punic War.

  By the mid-third century BCE, Carthage ruled the most extensive empire west of Asia Minor or Egypt, including vast tracts of North Africa, southern Spain, the Balearics, Sardinia, Corsica, and western Sicily. The city itself was on a peninsula about five kilometers wide in the Gulf of Tunis. On the seaward side, it was protected by a single wall, while from the land it was protected by three fifteen-meter-high walls with towers every sixty meters. The walls had two levels of stables—the lower could house three hundred elephants, the upper four thousand horses—and the barracks could accommodate twenty-four thousand soldiers. By the second century BCE, at least, the double harbor complex was probably the most sophisticated in the world:

  The harbours had communication with each other, and a common entrance from the sea seventy feet wide, which could be closed with iron chains. The first port was for merchant vessels.… Within the second port was an island, and great quays were set at intervals round both the harbour and the island. These embankments were full of shipyards which had capacity for 220 vessels.… Two Ionic columns stood in front of each dock, giving the appearance of a continuous portico to both the harbour and the island … from which … the admiral could observe what was going on at sea, while those who were approaching by water could not get any clear view of what took place within. Not even incoming merchants could see the docks at once, for a double wall enclosed them, and there were gates by which merchant ships could pass from the first port to the city without traversing the dockyards.

  The Carthaginians posed a constant threat to the Romans, who according to Polybius “were handling the operations in Sicily capably enough. But so long as the Carthaginians held unchallenged control of the sea, the issue of the war still hung in the balance.” After a three-year stalemate, during which they depended on their allies’ ships to reach Sicily, the Romans decided to build “100 quinqueremes and twenty triremes. They faced great difficulties because their shipwrights were completely inexperienced in the building of a quinquereme, since these vessels had never before been employed in Italy.” The initial difficulty was overcome when they seized a Carthaginian patrol vessel that had run aground: “It was this ship which they proceeded to use as a model, and they built their whole fleet according to its specifications.”

  Reverse engineering is notoriously difficult under the best of circumstances, but according to Pliny the Elder, from a standing start with virtually no shipbuilding industry of their own, the Roman fleet “was on the water within 60 days after the timber left the tree.” This is all the more astonishing when compared with the three years that experienced Athenian shipwrights had taken to build two hundred ships under Themistocles. Archaeological finds suggest that the Romans may have benefited from Carthaginian construction techniques. Examination of the so-called Punic Ship, a third-century BCE liburnian found off Marsala, Sicily, showed that the Carthaginian shipbuilders had written on the various hull pieces to mark their placement in relation to one another, not unlike the system employed in the Khufu ship twenty-two hundred years before. (A liburnian was an oared vessel—this one had seventeen sweeps on either side—with two men per oar and employed for carrying dispatches and for scouting.) If the ship the Romans used as their template included such builders’ marks, it would have made the job of creating a fleet of ships from scratch far easier than it might otherwise have been.

  Because the Carthaginian ships were better built and more capably manned, consul Gaius Duilius determined to offset the Carthaginians’ superior seamanship by replicating the conditions in which the Romans were unrivaled in battle, and to beat the Carthaginians in boarding actions. Central to the Romans’ tactics was the corvus (literally, raven), a boarding ramp 11 meters long by 1.5 meters wide with rails along the sides. One end of the corvus was hinged at the base of an eight-meter-high mast mounted forward in the ship. When dropped on the deck of an enemy ship, an iron spike at the outer end held the corvus fast and the Roman soldiers swept aboard the enemy ship. When Duilius caught a Carthaginian fleet off the northeastern coast of Sicily near Mylae in 260 BCE, the effectiveness of the corvi told early. As the Roman marines swarmed the enemy ships, “the fighting seemed to have been transformed into a battle on dry land.” Carthaginian attempts to round on the Roman ships from astern were ineffective because the corvus could be dropped across a broad arc from port to starboard, thus ensuring that the Romans never lost their advantage. By the battle’s end, the Carthaginians had lost 50 of their 130 ships.

  Dissatisfied with the lack of progress in Sicily, four years later the Romans took the war to North Africa and came close to forcing an onerous peace on the Carthaginians before their army was soundly defeated. A relief expedition captured more than 100 Carthaginian ships, but en route home the Romans lost more than 280 ships and thirty-five thousand soldiers and crew to storms. Polybius blames the disaster on the commanders’ utter disregard for their pilots’ advice about the weather and their destination, “the southern coast of Sicily … a rocky shore which possesses few safe anchorages.” He goes on to draw some general observations about Roman character, their reliance on brute strength, and their stubbornness, and why these are incompatible with success at sea. On land, the Romans frequently prevailed against other men and their machines because they could apply “one kind of force against another which is essentially similar.… But when they are contending with the sea and the atmosphere and try to overcome these by force, they meet with crushing defeats. So it turned out on this occasion, and the process will no doubt continue until they correct these preconceptions about daring and force.” One theory attributes the heavy losses to the corvus, which in an elevated position would have made the ships top-heavy and prone to capsize. If the Romans realized this, they may have decided that the corvus was more dangerous than it was worth, which would explain why it is not mentioned after the start of the North African campaign.

  The war dragged on another fourteen years punctuated by triumphant success
es and epic failures, none of them conclusive. The keystone of Carthaginian strategy was the security of Lilybaeum (Marsala, Sicily), which the Romans blockaded off and on for nearly a decade, though they lost more than a thousand ships in storms. The Carthaginians were able to slip the blockade at crucial junctures until 241 BCE when a fleet laden with grain and manned by relatively unseasoned seamen and marines was intercepted in the battle of the Aegates Islands north of the port. The Carthaginians lost 120 ships and the Romans took ten thousand prisoners. With no possibility of support from home, Lilybaeum’s position was untenable and the Carthaginians surrendered.

  Despite their longer tradition of seafaring, the Carthaginians never came close to victory in the First Punic War. In some respects this is understandable. Carthaginian sea power depended on its people’s role as merchant-sailors. They had never fought a major naval war, and while they were not ignorant of warfare—they frequently fought their Numidian neighbors, even during the war with Rome—it was not a hallmark of their civic life. The Romans’ martial spirit and relentless military ambition enabled them to adapt readily to ships and naval warfare, and once they learned to respect the sea, they mastered it.