Roman ships carrying Emperor Trajan and his army across the Danube during the first campaign against the Dacians in what is now Romania. This reproduction from a section of Trajan’s Column (ca. 113 CE) in Rome, which is attributed to the sculptor Apollodorus of Damascus, is in the Museum of Ancient Shipping, Mainz, Germany. Photograph by the author.
Relations between the two had soured when Antony, already married to Octavian’s sister, married Cleopatra. In 33 BCE, Antony and Cleopatra—as a queen in her own right rather than the mere bride of a Roman general—assembled eight squadrons of sixty-five warships (up to “nines” and “tens”), and three hundred transports. By the spring of 31 BCE, most of this fleet was on the Actium peninsula on the Gulf of Ambracia, north of the Gulf of Corinth, where Agrippa and Octavian caught up with them. With an army hungry, diseased, and dispirited by widespread defections of commanding officers to Octavian, Antony had to force the issue with his fleet. On the morning of September 2, he put to sea with six squadrons facing Agrippa, and Cleopatra’s squadron in the rear guard. Shortly after battle was joined, three squadrons withdrew, two surrendered, and Cleopatra’s ships turned south. Antony joined her with forty ships and sailed for Egypt. (Sails were usually left ashore when battle was imminent, and the fact that their ships had them suggests that this retreat was premeditated.) Pursued there by Octavian the next year, Antony made a feeble last stand before falling on his sword. When Cleopatra killed herself to avoid the humiliation of becoming Octavian’s prisoner, Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire, which it would help feed for the next six centuries.
Mare Nostrum
Octavian’s victory in Egypt brought the entire Mediterranean basin under the command of a single imperial rule. To guarantee the safety of the empire and its sea trade, Augustus (as Octavian styled himself) established Rome’s first standing navy, with bases at Misenum just south of Portus Julius, and at Ravenna in the northern Adriatic. These fleets comprised a variety of ships from liburnians to triremes, “fours,” and “fives.” As the empire expanded, provincial fleets were established in Egypt, Syria, and North Africa; on the Black Sea; on the Danube and Rhine Rivers, which more or less defined the northern border of the empire; and on the English Channel. Over the next two centuries there was nearly constant fighting on the empire’s northern and eastern borders, but the Mediterranean experienced a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity during which Greco-Roman culture circulated easily around what everyone was entitled to call Mare Nostrum—Our Sea. It was the only time that the Mediterranean has ever been under the aegis of a single power, with profound results for all the cultures that subsequently emerged on its shores.
As trade within the Mediterranean basin flourished, the Romans set about improving old and building new ports at an unprecedented rate. Augustus’s choice of Misenum for a naval base owed much to its proximity to Puteoli. The most important commercial port of republican Rome, Puteoli thronged with craftsmen and traders, especially from Alexandria and the Levant, whose prosperity depended on Rome’s voracious appetite for Egyptian grain and eastern luxuries. A major spectacle at Puteoli was the arrival of the Alexandrian grain fleets. On his last journey away from Rome, Augustus took a ship down the coast of Campania and across the Bay of Puteoli, where he was saluted by the crew and passengers of a ship from Alexandria who “put on white robes and garlands, burned incense, and wished him the greatest good fortune—which, they said, he certainly deserved, because they owed their lives to him and their liberty to sail the seas: in a word, their entire freedom and prosperity.” Puteoli underwent numerous improvements at the hands of local entrepreneurs and at the direction of various emperors well into the first century ce. By coincidence, the region was an abundant source of one of the materials best suited for work in harbor construction, pozzolana, a volcanic ash that when mixed with water and lime forms hydraulic cement, which can set and cure underwater.
As well as a commercial and naval center, the Bay of Naples was a resort for Rome’s richest and most influential citizens. A list of people with seaside villas and estates there in the first century BCE reads like a who’s who of Rome’s elite. At Puteoli itself were Caesar’s father-in-law and Cicero, who also had estates at Pompeii and Cumae. After leaving public life, the general Lucullus divided his time in ostentatious refinement between his estates at Misenum and Naples, while Pompey the Great had a villa at Cumae, Caesar himself an estate at Baiae, and Augustus a villa on the island of Capri. Emperors continued to frequent the Bay of Naples for centuries, and in the late 400s the last emperor in the west was exiled to Lucullus’s villa. Although the villas were off-limits to the general population, the cultivated fish ponds of the larger estates around Baiae were widely known attractions (Cicero scorned several of his political opponents as “fish-pond fanciers”), as were the region’s fish farms. According to one theory, Augustus’s decision to move Agrippa’s naval base from Portus Julius to Misenum was to preserve the local oyster beds. If so, this is one of the earliest known examples of environmental considerations influencing waterfront development.
The popularity of the Bay of Naples belies any suggestion that the Romans viewed sea travel as anything unusual. Boats were the preferred means of transport for visitors from Rome, and there was even a night service from Ostia to Puteoli. So routine was the practice of sailing from the capital that Nero’s elaborate conspiracy to kill his mother, Agrippina, was predicated on her traveling by boat between her villa at Bauli and his at Baiae. While she was dining with her estranged son, her ship was rammed “accidentally,” and when she left Nero offered her “a collapsible cabin-boat” specially designed to “either sink or fall in on top of her.” The ship foundered as intended, but Agrippina was rescued by a passing vessel. Nothing daunted, Nero had her murdered by less contrived means.
Puteoli’s successor as Rome’s premier port was Ostia. Although its location at the mouth of the Tiber had long made it strategically important, Ostia was not integral to the city’s prosperity until the first century BCE. The dictator Sulla authorized some improvements, partly in appreciation for Ostia’s loyalty during the civil war, when opposing troops sacked the port, and partly in acknowledgment of its growing commercial significance. In the middle of the first century ce, silting at the mouth of the Tiber forced Claudius to build a large harbor at Portus, just north of Ostia proper. This was enclosed by two breakwaters more than eight hundred meters long, “massive Piers that reach out to embrace the deep, and leave Italy far behind—a man-made breakwater that no natural harbor could equal.” A mole was erected across the entrance by sinking a ship in which an obelisk had been brought from Heliopolis, in Egypt: “it was first sunk, then secured with piles, and finally crowned with a very tall lighthouse—like the Pharos at Alexandria—that guided ships into the harbour at night by the beams of a lamp.” Half a century later, Trajan ordered the excavation of a large hexagonal basin with numbered slips and he established a new port up the coast at Centumcellae, the modern Civitavecchia.
Even after the construction of Portus, Ostia remained the seat of the area’s commercial and cultural life. The remains of the city, which rival those of Pompeii, reveal a town of ordinary citizens rather than wealthy estate owners and their retinues. The essentially rectilinear streets were lined with three-and four-story apartment houses, many with street-level stores and offices. The main avenue extends from the Porta Marina, near the ancient shorefront, to the Porta Romana on the road to the capital. In addition to houses, offices, workshops, and laundries, the city boasted an astonishing array of religious buildings that reflect the inhabitants’ strong ties to the Roman east. Side-by- side with temples to the gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon and the imperial cults stand Christian baptisteries, a Jewish synagogue, and a host of temples to Near Eastern deities, including a dozen dedicated to the Zoroastrian divinity Mithras, the god of contracts and thus revered by merchants. For rest and relaxation Ostians could visit a number of bathhouses decorated with maritime scenes,
while the theater seated between three and four thousand people. Behind the theater is the so-called Piazzale of the Corporations, a pillar-lined square onto which open rooms decorated with floor mosaics advertising shipwrights, stevedores, caulkers, rope dealers, chandlers, and merchants, and their destinations or specialties: grain traders from Narbo (in Gaul), Caesarea in Mauritania (Cherchel, Algeria), Alexandria, or Carthage; importers of wild animals for the Colosseum; grain measurers; tanners; and so on. Long thought to have been business offices, these rooms may have been gathering places for people attending the theater while the insignia advertised groups that contributed in some way to the theater or the cultural life of the city in general.
A sculptural relief of the early second century CE showing the arrival of a ship at Ostia as it passes the Pharos (lighthouse) with its flame blazing in the distance. Among the other figures on board, two men and a woman are offering thanks for a safe passage on a portable altar abaft the sail. The port of Rome teems with life as a man in a small boat works his way under the stern while in the lower right a man is carrying an amphora off a docked ship. The large figure gripping a trident in the center of the scene is Neptune, god of the sea. Photograph by Faraglia, D-DAI-Rom 7898. Courtesy of the Museo Torlonia/Deutsche Archäologische Institut, Rome.
Although the average freighter of antiquity carried about 120 tons of cargo, the scale of the grain trade to Rome required larger ships with a capacity of well over 1,000 tons. The description of one such vessel survives in a second-century work entitled “The Ship or the Wishes,” by Lucian of Samosata, which tells of a grain freighter called the Isis that is blown off course en route from Alexandria to Rome and forced to put in at Piraeus. Though the passage occurs in a work of fiction, the Isis was likely modeled on a real ship. The appearance of the huge grain carrier apparently created a minor sensation in Piraeus, where such large vessels were now a rarity.
Incidentally, what a huge ship! A hundred and twenty cubits long, the shipwright said, and well over a quarter as wide, and from deck to bottom, where it is deepest, in the bilge, twenty-nine. Then, what a tall mast, what a yard to carry! What a forestay to hold it up! How gently the poop curves up, with a little golden goose below! And correspondingly at the opposite end, the prow juts right out in front, with figures of the goddess, Isis, after whom the ship is named, on either side. And the other decorations, the paintings and the topsail blazing like fire, anchors in front of them, and capstans, and windlasses, and the cabins on the poop—all very wonderful to me. You could put the number of sailors at an army of soldiers. She was said to carry enough [grain] to feed all Attica for a year.
On the basis of the linear measurements given by Lucian the capacity of the Isis has been estimated at 1,200 to 1,300 tons. The captain tells how the ship ended up at Piraeus after seventy days of foul winds and storms in a passage that provides important information on the route normally taken by the grain fleet: north-northeast from Alexandria, passing to the west of Cyprus, then westward along the south coast of Asia Minor as far as Rhodes or Cnidus. From there, the captain explains, “They should have kept Crete to starboard, and sailed beyond Malea,” the peninsula at the southern end of the Peloponnese, “so as to be in Italy by now.” In a similar incident, the apostle Paul was aboard another Alexandrian grain carrier that was driven south and wrecked on Malta, although all of her complement of 276 people survived.
To avoid food shortages the government made strenuous efforts to guarantee the shipment of between 150,000 and 300,000 tons of grain annually to Rome. An estimated 15 to 30 percent of this was grain paid as taxes and freighted in government ships for free distribution to the masses—the annona—but most grain and other cargoes were handled by merchants whose cargoes went in smaller, privately owned ships. Investing in trade was common, commercial loans being capped at one percent per month or 12 percent per year. However, repayment of the loan depended on the safe completion of the transaction, and as a result it was a given that “Money lent on maritime loans can bear interest at any rate because it is at risk of the lender as long as the voyage lasts.” Shippers may have had recourse to some form of insurance. According to a biography of Claudius, “he held out the certainty of profit by assuming the expense of any loss that they [the merchants] might suffer from storms.” Yet this measure seems to have been intended specifically for grain traders, for whose benefit Claudius also made improvements to Ostia, offered bounties for new ship construction, and exempted shippers from a variety of laws.
Second only to the grain trade was the wine trade. According to one estimate, during the first century BCE between 50,000 and 100,000 hectoliters (1.3–2.6 million gallons) of wine were shipped annually from Italy to Gaul, carried in upward of 350,000 amphorae. Because wooden hulls are biodegradable and ceramic amphorae are not (although their contents leak out over time), the remains of sunken wine ships are often identified by mounds of amphorae lying on the seabed nested as they were stowed. The waters of western Italy and southern France have yielded an impressive number of finds. One of the largest is that of a forty-meter-long ship found off La Madrague de Giens, France, where it sank in the first century BCE with seven or eight thousand amphorae and a secondary cargo of black-gloss tableware and coarse-ware pottery, a cargo of more than three hundred tons. The wreck site was littered with large stones from the nearby Giens peninsula left by divers who recovered a significant part of the sunken cargo shortly after it sank. As sponge and pearl divers have done for centuries, the ancient salvors used the stones to speed their twenty-meter descent to the seabed. They managed to recover all but one layer of amphorae on the starboard side, while three layers were still in place to port.
Modern appreciation of Roman seafaring has been shaped by the Romans’ own ambivalence about the sea. Maritime trade and naval power were vital to their prosperity, and according to their own foundation stories, they owed their very existence to Aeneas’s successful flight by sea from Troy. The maritime milieu of the first half of Virgil’s Aeneid consciously echoes that of Homer’s Odyssey, and when Virgil has Aeneas burn his ships upon reaching Italy it does not signify that the future rulers of Rome must abandon the sea, but that they had to fight for their land. Yet in the early imperial period, when Virgil wrote, there was a tendency to revile maritime trade, and by extension the sea itself, because commerce was at odds with the elite’s martial values. Yet there is no better indication of the importance the Romans attached to seafaring than a saying attributed to Pompey the Great, who in 56 BCE led a fleet to Africa for grain to ease a shortage at Rome. “When he was about to set sail with it,” writes Plutarch, “there was a violent storm at sea, and the ship-captains hesitated to put out; but he led the way on board and ordered them to weigh anchor, crying with a loud voice: ‘To sail is necessary; to live is not.’ ” Although Pompey’s biographer wrote in Greek, many medieval European merchant communities later adopted the Latin motto “Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.”
It would be excessive to claim that the Roman Empire was a product of sea power and sea trade alone, but these were as central to its creation as the Mediterranean was to the empire itself. The empire could not have survived had Roman institutions or sensibilities been in any practical way hostile to maritime enterprise. Perhaps the last word belongs to Seneca, who wrote in the first century of “god, our author…[who] gave us winds that we might get to know distant lands.… He gave us winds in order that the advantages of each region might become known to all; but not in order to carry legions and cavalry or to transport weapons to destroy mankind.” While the Romans never beat their swords into plowshares, they did contribute to the economic integration of the world they occupied, and both shaped and were shaped by the wealth of lands well beyond the Mediterranean, including those bordering the Indian Ocean.
a This Hamilcar should not be confused with Hamilcar Barca, who fought in the First Punic War and fathered Hannibal Barca, who fought in the Second. The Greek historian Polybius mentions five Hanni
bals, two Hamilcars, four Hannos, and four Hasdrubals.
b Scipio Aemilianus was the adopted son of Publius Scipio, whose father was Scipio Africanus.
Chapter 6
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Chasing the Monsoons
The maritime history of the Indian Ocean unfolded in ways completely different from that of the confined seas of the Mediterranean world. The great distances, the lack of enclosure by opposing shores, and the paucity of island chains linking landmasses ensured that the interactions of Indian Ocean mariners and their respective societies were less intense and immediate than those of the Mediterranean. Seafaring allowed for the transmission of goods and ideas, but without generating the violent rivalries and naval clashes that accompanied such exchanges in the Mediterranean. At the same time, long-distance maritime trade had less impact on political developments, and seafaring never attained the cultural significance it did for people of the Mediterranean. Yet if maritime-driven change was more subtle here than elsewhere, it proved no less durable.
Mediterranean traders became directly involved in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean in the fourth century BCE and their contacts intensified following Rome’s annexation of Egypt three hundred years later. The vitality of Mediterranean engagement is borne out by Roman complaints about the drain of precious metals to pay for eastern luxuries, by hoards of Roman coins found in India and Southeast Asia, and even by a Chinese account of a Roman merchant at the Han court in the second century ce. Despite outsiders’ interest and participation in the Indian Ocean trade, sailors native to its shores were the primary agents of exchange. Indian investors guaranteed the loans of Mediterranean merchants, and Indian merchants traded in Egyptian Red Sea ports. Early Hindu and Buddhist scriptures and secular laws offer glimpses of the maritime world from the perspective of the Indian Ocean; and Tamil epics from the second century CE on paint a dazzling portrait of a maritime commerce that southern Indians have engaged in, and often dominated, ever since. Connecting the Red Sea and Persian Gulf to the Bay of Bengal and Southeast Asia, and intersecting with coastal and land routes of the subcontinent, these trading networks became the thoroughfares along which successive waves of long-distance navigators penetrated the Indian Ocean world from the birth of Islam in the seventh century to the arrival of European traders at the end of the fifteenth.
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