Trade between Rome and Carthage revived after the war, but despite an avowed policy of nonintervention in Carthaginian affairs, in 238 BCE Rome seized Sardinia; nine years later, this and western Sicily became the first two Roman provinces. Meanwhile, the Carthaginians began enlarging their territory in southern Spain. They certainly needed to increase their revenues from Spanish silver mines to pay Rome; they may have wanted to make up for the loss of Sardinia and Sicily; and it may have been a way to employ disgruntled soldiers who had been forced to abandon the field without themselves suffering a defeat. Chief among these was Hamilcar Barca, who conquered new lands around the Guadalquivir River and founded Carthago Nova (Cartagena) on the southwest coast. Roman interest in the Iberian Peninsula was limited to alliances with individual towns, notably the port of Saguntum. Nonetheless, a treaty of 226 BCE made the Ebro River (which enters the sea about seventy-five miles southwest from Barcelona) the border between the Carthaginian and Roman spheres of influence.
Five years later, Hamilcar’s son Hannibal became the supreme leader in Carthaginian Spain and in 219 BCE he seized Saguntum to start the Second Punic War. Marching on Italy via southern France and the Alps, Hannibal defeated the Romans repeatedly between 218 and 216 BCE; at Cannae, on the Adriatic coast east of Naples, fewer than fifteen thousand of eighty thousand Roman soldiers escaped death or capture. Yet Carthage never challenged Rome at sea, and although Hannibal remained at large in Italy for fifteen years, only one fleet reached him there, while Rome received steady supplies of grain from Sicily, Sardinia, and possibly Egypt. Hannibal finally left the peninsula in 203 BCE, when he was recalled to lead the defense of Carthage against the armies of Publius Cornelius Scipio. Although there were no major naval battles, maritime strategy was as important to the outcome of the Second Punic War as it had been in the first, a fact that Scipio appreciated better than anyone.
Scipio’s fortunes were inextricably linked to the war in Spain, where he led the capture of Saguntum in 212 BCE and of Carthago Nova three years later. Polybius credits Scipio with perceiving the latter’s strategic value. “He discovered first of all,” writes Scipio’s friend, “that it was virtually unique among the cities of Spain in possessing a harbor which could accommodate a fleet and naval forces, and that it was also conveniently situated for the Carthaginians to make the direct sea crossing from Africa.” Scipio further reckoned that if his attempt to take the port failed, “he could still ensure the safety of his men because of his command of the sea.” The loss of Carthago Nova left the Carthaginians with only one major overseas port, at Gadir. Returning to Rome, Scipio began planning an invasion of North Africa. Hannibal was recalled to Carthage, where in 202 BCE Scipio defeated him at the battle of Zama, thus earning the honorific Africanus. Hannibal urged the Carthaginians to accept the Roman peace terms before fleeing to the Seleucid court of Antiochus III, “the Great.”
Rome Masters the Mediterranean
It has been said that the Romans did not display a “naval mentality” during the Second Punic War, but in fact their naval strategy was tailored precisely to the Carthaginian threat. The Romans had not abandoned their fleet after the First Punic War, but there were excellent reasons for them to avoid the expense of building and manning more ships than they did. With Hannibal’s army ravaging Italy, there was little manpower available for a larger fleet, especially considering that most naval losses in the first war had been to the elements and there was no Carthaginian naval threat to speak of. More to the point, the Romans were fighting simultaneously the First Macedonian War (215–197 BCE), in which their fleet played a critical role in the Adriatic and Aegean. Their involvement in the Adriatic began in 229 BCE, in response to pleas from Italian merchants who had been harassed by ships from Illyria, on the Balkan shore. The Romans launched a two-hundred-ship expedition and pressured the Illyrians to guarantee that they would never sail south of Lissus (Lezhe, in northwest Albania) with more than two lightly armed lembi, a type of single-or double-banked galley they had developed. (Ideally suited for fast scouting and raiding expeditions, the lembus was later adopted by other maritime powers.)
Fighting resumed on the eve of Hannibal’s invasion of Italy, when Demetrius of Pharos (the island of Hvar, Croatia) took a fleet of lembi for a raiding expedition in the Aegean. Defeated by the Romans, he fled to Philip V of Macedonia, whose anti-Roman tendencies he encouraged. Rome did not commit many resources to the Adriatic, but a lot could be done with relatively few. Ten ships drove off a fleet of a hundred Macedonian lembi in 216 BCE, after which the Romans assigned up to fifty ships to the coast between Tarentum and Brundisium. They also forged an alliance with the Aetolian League under which the Romans provided a fleet and were entitled to any movable property in places it seized, terms appropriate to a maritime-based strategy, while the Greek city-states of the league fought the land war and received any captured territories. The war ended in 205 BCE, but five years later the Romans renewed the fight because of Philip’s threats to their Greek allies, including Athens and Rhodes, and for fear that he would soon be in a position to attack Italy. “It took Hannibal four months to reach Italy from Saguntum,” declared one consul, “but Philip, if we let him, will arrive four days after he sets sail from Corinth.” Titus Quinctius Flamininus took his legions to Illyria and in 197 BCE smashed the Macedonian army. Philip surrendered all but five of his regular warships and a “sixteen,” and withdrew his garrisons from around Greece. Flamininus grandly proclaimed the Greeks a free people, a contention they would soon dispute.
In the interim, the Seleucid Antiochus the Great had crossed the Hellespont to exercise his dynastic claims to Thrace, which trumped any interest the newly arrived Romans could assert in Greece or the Balkans. In 192 BCE, he landed at the city of Demetrias (north of Euboea) whose citizens believed that they were “free in appearance only, while in reality everything was done at the Roman’s nod.” The Romans shattered Antiochus’s army at Thermopylae, but the experience forced them to reevaluate their view of the Aegean world and their relationship to it. As a modern historian has put it, “The essential unity of the Aegean basin, of the Greek world of Asia and of Europe as a geopolitical system, had been revealed with dazzling clarity.” The late date at which the Romans received this epiphany attests to just how removed politically and culturally they had been from the Hellenistic world of the eastern Mediterranean.
Armed with this new awareness, Scipio Africanus and his brother took up the challenge of asserting Roman hegemony in the Aegean. Antiochus’s fleet posed a real threat, so rather than cross the Aegean they marched their armies north to the Hellespont. The Roman fleet was under command of Marcus Livius, who drew his crews from the coloniae maritimae despite their previous exemption from conscription. Notwithstanding its small size and the crews’ reluctance to serve, the value of the Roman navy was acknowledged by no less an authority than Hannibal, who advised Antiochus that “Roman arms were quite as powerful at sea as on land.” As if to prove the point, the Romans and their Rhodian allies bested a succession of Seleucid fleets, including one under Hannibal. These defeats rattled Antiochus, as the Roman historian Livy explains, “because with the loss of his command of the sea he was doubtful of his ability to defend his distant possessions.” He withdrew his army from the Hellespont, and Scipio’s legions crossed into Asia unopposed. After a final battle on land, the Romans dictated a peace that eliminated Seleucid influence from Ionia. Rome now exercised its hegemony over the entire Aegean and after centuries of fending off an eastern despotism, the Greeks had succumbed to a western one.
To preserve their dominance, the Romans embarked on a campaign of divide and rule, one of the first victims being its faithful ally Rhodes, which it repeatedly undermined. After the Third Macedonian War (172–167 BCE), Rome transferred the island of Delos to Athens with the stipulation that Delos be made a duty-free port, which cost Rhodes an estimated 140 talents (about 3,500 kilograms of silver) in income per year in harbor dues alone. A further blow came
at the conclusion of the Third Punic War (149–146 BCE) and the destruction of Carthage, which had been an important trading partner. This war had been preceded by Rome’s refusing the Carthaginians permission to defend themselves against attacks from neighboring Numidia; forcing it to surrender its arms to Rome; and insisting that the city itself be destroyed and its inhabitants moved eighty stades inland—coincidentally, the same distance that Plato recommended to preserve a city from the corrupting influences of maritime trade. The Carthaginians declined these outrageous demands, but half a century of subservience to Rome in foreign and military affairs had left their navy undermanned, ill-equipped, and poorly trained. Yet even with their overwhelming advantages in preparation, weapons, and experience, it took the Romans three years to win the last of the Punic Wars. When the city finally fell to the army of Scipio Aemilianus, he heeded the war cry of Cato, the Roman senator who with puritanical zeal had long urged his fellow citizens to war by closing his speeches with the words “Carthage must be destroyed.” So it was, and with it a maritime power that had flourished for more than seven centuries.b
With Carthage defeated and Rhodes marginalized, by the end of the second century BCE there were few external threats to Rome’s Mediterranean trade, the commercial center of which was the free port of Delos. The island’s prosperity was shattered in 88 BCE, when Mithridates VI of Pontus ordered the murder of a hundred thousand Romans and Italians in Asia Minor and on Delos. The culmination of decades of tension and intermittent hostilities over Roman rule in Greece and Asia Minor precipitated the first of the three Mithridatic Wars fought between 88 and 63 BCE. These involved extensive naval campaigning, and it could be argued that they were not brought to a faster conclusion because the Roman commander, Sulla, advanced into Greece without a supporting fleet. As a result, when Sulla besieged Athens and Piraeus, Mithridates could replenish his forces by sea just as the Athenians had in the Peloponnesian War. When the port fell in 86 BCE, “Sulla burned the Piraeus, which had given him more trouble than the city of Athens, not sparing the Arsenal, or the navy yard, or any other of its famous buildings” that had graced the port for four centuries. Detailed descriptions of the naval campaigns are lacking, although we get glimpses of the magnitude of the effort. In his summary of the wars, Appian notes that “Many times [Mithridates] had over 400 ships of his own,” a numerical advantage that enabled him to land an army in Greece but was insufficient for taking Rhodes, still a Roman ally. Mithridates drew support not only from his own territories and immediate neighbors, but from the Roman general Sertorius, who was leading the opposition to Sulla in the civil war in Spain, from which he sent forces to Mithridates by sea. The celebrated general Licinius Lucullus learned from Sulla’s error—from which he had in fact rescued Sulla—and although he spent much of his time on the march in the heart of Asia Minor during the second war, his success so depended on the capture of the Black Sea ports of Sinop and Amasus that when he celebrated his triumph at Rome, his procession included “a hundred and ten bronze-beaked ships.”
Pompey the Great’s Campaign Against the Pirates, 69 BCE
The widespread fighting in the Aegean since the second half of the second century BCE, together with the Roman practice of divesting potential rivals of their fleets, had led to a resurgence in piracy. This did not attract official Roman notice until the turn of the century, and even then the problem was addressed haphazardly. A succession of campaigns against individual pirate bands failed because of their mobility and networks of mutual assistance. Although concentrated in Cilicia in Asia Minor, pirates threatened maritime commerce throughout the Mediterranean. No one and no place was safe. In a speech given in 66 BCE, after piracy had been eradicated, the Roman orator Cicero reminded his audience how dire the situation had been:
Need I lament the capture of envoys on their way to Rome from foreign countries, when ransom has been paid for the ambassadors of Rome? Need I mention that the sea was unsafe for merchantmen, when twelve lictors [official bodyguards] have fallen into the hands of the pirates? Need I record the capture of the noble cities of Cnidus and Colophon and Samos and of countless others, when you well know that your own harbours and those, too, through which you draw the very breath of your life, have been in the hands of the pirates?…Why should I lament the reverse at Ostia, that shameful blot upon our commonwealth, when almost before your own eyes the very fleet which had been entrusted to the command of a Roman consul was captured and destroyed by the pirates?
The most famous victim of piracy was a young Julius Caesar, who on a winter crossing to Rhodes in 75 BCE was captured and held for nearly forty days. Ransomed for twelve thousand gold pieces, Caesar returned to hunt down and crucify his erstwhile captors. Six years later, the senate assigned Pompey the Great to lead a new effort against the pirates. Despite its importance, his campaign is known only from brief descriptions that focus on his overall strategy. Entrusted with extraordinary powers for three years, Pompey raised a force of 500 ships, 120,000 soldiers, and 5,000 cavalry. Dividing the Mediterranean into thirteen naval districts, he ordered his captains to flush out any pirate bands they might find, but not to leave the zones to which they had been assigned. The one area left unguarded was the coast of Cilicia, which quickly became the last refuge of those pirates who could reach it. The Romans eradicated piracy in the western Mediterranean within forty days, and seven weeks later Pompey received the surrender of the last of the pirates in Cilicia. Sources say that ten thousand pirates died during the campaign, and between four hundred and eight hundred ships were seized. Most unusual is the clemency Pompey showed his prisoners, many of whom he transplanted to the nearby port of Soli, which was renamed Pompeiopolis. His leniency paid off and Pompey had their allegiance when he commanded the Roman armies in the Third Mithridatic War.
The long preoccupation with piracy impressed itself deeply on the Roman psyche. For Cicero especially, pirates and piracy were all that true Romans were not: barbarous, ignoble, perfidious. It was a theme to which he returned repeatedly over a quarter century. In a celebrated letter to his son, Cicero asserts that a pledge made to a pirate is not binding, “for a pirate is not included in the category of public enemies [of the state], but is the common enemy of everyone.” This concept was honed to a fine point by the seventeenth-century English jurist Sir Edward Coke: Pirata est hostis humanis generis, “the pirate is the enemy of mankind,” a phrase still used in reference to people engaged in terrorism, torture, and genocide.
From Caesar to Augustus: The Roman Civil Wars, 49–31 BCE
Rome’s overseas success in the east and against the pirates contributed to the erosion of its republican institutions, which were inadequate for running such vast and far-flung provinces and colonies. Reforms proposed in the 130s BCE were rebuffed by a senate protective of its privileges and as tensions mounted, the senate increasingly resorted to martial law, and strongmen began levying large armies by recruiting soldiers with promises of land and booty. Empowered and enriched by his campaign against the pirates, in 60 BCE Pompey formed a secret triumvirate with Crassus and Caesar, who agreed to support each other “to oppose all legislation of which any one of them might disapprove.” Two years later Caesar began his conquest of Gaul and over the next nine years annexed Gaul to Rome, invaded Germany, and twice landed in Britain.
Caesar’s victories increased his popularity with the people and the resentment of old-line republicans, and it put him at odds with Pompey, who in 52 BCE was appointed sole consul, a first in republican history. In 49 BCE, Caesar precipitated a civil war by leading his army across the Rubicon River into Italy proper, an action punishable by death. Pompey’s hastily recruited forces were no match for Caesar’s veterans, and Pompey crossed the Adriatic to gather an army. Caesar entered Rome and then sailed to Spain, where he overcame Pompey’s supporters there. Returning to Greece, he defeated Pompey at the battle of Pharsalus in central Greece. Pompey fled to Egypt in a merchant ship and blamed himself “for having been forced to do batt
le with his land forces, while he made no use of his navy, which was indisputably superior.… And, in truth,” continues his biographer, “Pompey made no greater mistake, and Caesar showed no abler generalship, than in removing the battle so far from naval assistance.” The mistake was irreversible, and as he landed on the coast of Egypt, Pompey was murdered by order of the Ptolemaic court. When Caesar reached Egypt, he killed Pompey’s murderers and installed Cleopatra, sister and wife of Ptolemy XIII, as queen.
In 44 BCE, upholders of the old republican order assassinated Caesar, only to witness the rise of a new triumvirate: Caesar’s ally and general, Marc Antony; his eighteen-year-old nephew and designated heir, Octavian (the future emperor Augustus); and the general Lepidus. At the battle of Philippi, Greece, in 42 BCE, Antony and Octavian defeated their opponents, but part of the republican fleet escaped and joined the renegade Sextus Pompey in Sicily. Designated by the senate as prefect of the fleet and the coastlines (praefectus classis et orae maritimae) the previous year, the son of Pompey the Great was keen to avenge his father’s death on Caesar’s heir. Though outnumbered, he defeated Octavian in the Strait of Messina in 38 BCE but was unable to press his advantage. Two years later, Octavian’s trusted general Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa took command of the fleet and developed a naval training station called Portus Julius near Puteoli on the Bay of Naples. After a summer of strenuous campaigning in the waters around Sicily, in September 36 BCE Agrippa won a momentous victory at the battle of Naulochus, which cost Pompey all but seventeen of perhaps two hundred ships. With Pompey in flight, when Lepidus quit the triumvirate, the contest for absolute supremacy was now between Antony and Octavian.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 18
