The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
Page 25
The ascendancy of Rome in the Mediterranean Sea depended on three factors: provisions to feed the vast city, ports through which the provisions could arrive and protection of its merchants – the defeat of the pirates whose presence in the eastern Mediterranean threatened the stability of the trading systems built around Alexandria, Delos and other partners of Rome.
II
Pirates go in search of prosperity. The flourishing state of trade in the second century BC created the ideal circumstances in which pirates too could flourish, especially since neither the Rhodians nor the Delians had the naval strength to clear the eastern Mediterranean of rogue shipping, particularly after Rhodes set into decline. Pirates were as much a scourge in the west as in the east. In 123–121 BC Metellus ‘Balearicus’ earned his sobriquet after suppressing a particularly pestilential form of piracy practised in the Balearic islands, which now fell under Roman rule: its pirates would paddle out to sea on what were little better than rafts, but proved an enormous nuisance.4 After the Punic capital was destroyed, there were no more Carthaginian merchants to police these waters. The Romans began to realize that they had responsibilities, and took them seriously. In 74 BC the young patrician Gaius Julius Caesar was captured by pirates while he was travelling to Rhodes, where he planned to study rhetoric (he was a man of considerable learning). A big enough prize to be worth a ransom, he was treated with honour by the pirates, but even before his release he had the courage to taunt them with the promise that he would return and destroy them. He gathered together a flotilla, captured his captors, and crucified them. Since they had been so polite, he graciously had their throats cut before they were raised on their crosses.5
Small, agile fleets preyed on the shipping routes from bases in Crete, Italy and the rocky shores of south-eastern Turkey, the precipitous area known appropriately as ‘Rough Cilicia’, lying due north of Cyprus and a couple of hundred miles east of Rhodes. As trade through the once-great Etruscan cities declined, the shipowners of Etruria turned to less orthodox ways of making a profit. An inscription from Rhodes commemorates the death of the three sons of Timakrates who were killed in engagements against Tyrrhenian pirates active in the eastern Mediterranean.6 Sometimes, too, navies encouraged privateers to patrol the seas looking for particular enemies. This is what Nabis, king of Sparta, did around 200 BC, entering into an unholy alliance with Cretan pirates who raided supply ships heading towards Rome.7 Rebel Roman generals in Sicily, such as Sextus Pompeius, the son of the famous Pompey, launched their own ships and tried to block grain supplies bound for Rome, which Sextus Pompeius could easily do – as well as Sicily he had Sardinia in his grasp.8 The lords of islands and coastal ports demanded transit taxes from commercial shipping that passed through their waters, and responded to any refusal with violence. Pirates required places where they could unburden themselves of the money, goods and slaves they had seized, and their operations therefore depended on the willing collaboration of the inhabitants of several minor ports such as Attaleia that attracted innumerable fences, hustlers, traffickers and tricksters. The Cilician pirates managed to sustain whole communities on the southern edges of the Taurus Mountains. They were speakers of Luvian, living in clan-based societies in which both male and female descent was taken seriously, and they were governed by elders or tyrannoi.9 The crews of the pirate ships were mountain men who migrated down to the coast and took to ships, though they cannot have learned the skills of seamanship without a great amount of help from the sailors of Side and Attaleia on the coast. According to the geographer Strabo, the people of Side allowed the Cilician pirates to hold slave auctions on the quayside, even though they knew that the captives were freeborn.10 Plutarch described the lightly built boats that they used so effectively:
Their ships had gilded masts at their stems; the sails woven of purple, and the oars plated with silver, as if their delight were to glory in their iniquity. There was nothing but music and dancing, banqueting and revels, all along the shore.11
By 67 BC pirates had reached the doorstep of Rome itself, with attacks on the port of Ostia and along the coast of Italy.12 Plutarch added:
This piratic power having got the dominion and control of all the Mediterranean, there was left no place for navigation or commerce. And this it was which most of all made the Romans, finding themselves to be extremely straitened in their markets, and considering that if it should continue, there would be a dearth and famine in the land, determined at last to send out Pompey to recover the seas from the pirates.13
Pompey had already distinguished himself (or made enemies, depending on which side one supported) in the power struggles within Rome.14 He intended to provide a permanent, global solution to the problem of piracy. In 66 BC he divided the Mediterranean into thirteen zones, each of which would be systematically cleared of pirates. First, he addressed the problem of piracy close to home, sweeping the Tyrrhenian Sea clean of pirates. He took a fleet to Sicily, North Africa and Sardinia, placing garrisons in what Cicero called ‘these three granaries of the state’ and guaranteeing the lifeline of Rome herself.15 This work is said to have taken forty days. After that he was ready to pounce on Cilicia, but news of his achievements in the west outpaced his fleet, and as soon as he hove into sight of the Cilician coast towns began to surrender to him. Fighting at sea and on land was quite limited.16 He had arrived with perhaps fifty warships and fifty transports: not a massive fleet, though the light boats of the Cilicians would be no match in battle, and the Roman People had voted him 500 ships if that was what he needed.17 Pompey’s aim was not to exterminate the pirates but to end piracy: instead of massacring his enemy he accepted their surrender and resettled them, offering them agricultural land.18 The Senate had offered to support Pompey for three years; Pompey’s campaign took three months. Piracy was henceforth a low-level irritant rather than a great scourge that threatened Rome’s supply lines.
Pompey used the war against the pirates as a springboard for the creation of a large Roman dominion in Syria and Palestine, whose stability depended not just on Roman armies but on the recognition by local kings that an alliance with Rome was the best way to guarantee their own authority.19 Pompey did not, however, intend to make the East his sole domain. Roman domination of the eastern Mediterranean was a by-product of the vicious civil wars that pitched Pompey the Great against Julius Caesar, Brutus against both Mark Antony and Octavian, and Mark Antony against Octavian, the future Augustus Caesar. In 48 BC the partisans of Pompey and those of Gaius Julius Caesar met in battle at Pharsalus in north-western Greece (‘this is what they wished on themselves’, Julius Caesar remarked as he contemplated the enemy dead).20 Pompey fled to Egypt; lured into a trap, he was stabbed to death just as he reached what he imagined to be the safety of the shore. The one great territory in the eastern Mediterranean that still remained outside Roman control was Egypt: ‘a loss if destroyed, a risk to annex, a problem to govern’.21 But Julius Caesar arrived in hot pursuit of Pompey two days after his rival was killed; he immediately saw an opportunity to build Roman influence within Egypt, by offering his support to the charming, intelligent and wily (though probably not very beautiful) Queen Cleopatra in a struggle for power with her brother King Ptolemy XIII. As has been seen, Caesar achieved his aims by bombarding Alexandria and has been accused of destroying all or part of the Library. He was able to station Roman troops in Egypt, nominally for the protection of the still independent queen. Whether or not he had conquered Egypt, Cleopatra conquered him, and a son was born, named Ptolemy Caesar, whom the queen took with her to Rome and who was generally assumed to be Caesar’s child. The sight of a Roman general whose son might be a future Pharaoh alarmed Roman politicians, suggesting that Caesar too had royal ambitions – even if most historians would argue that ‘Caesar was slain for what he was, not for what he might become’.22
After Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, the rivalries of the Roman politicians threatened to take Egypt out of the Roman sphere once again. Although Caesar’s heir, Oc
tavian, and Caesar’s friend Mark Antony wreaked revenge on his assassins at the battle of Philippi near the northern shores of the Aegean in 42, their own relations deteriorated. The victorious leaders appointed themselves as Triumvirs and divided the Roman world, Octavian taking charge of the west, Mark Antony of Egypt and the east, and Lepidus gaining rights in Africa. The idea was not to carve Rome’s dominions into three but to assert the new regime and reorganize the provinces. Mark Antony granted Cleopatra several Phoenician cities, towns in ‘Rough’ Cilicia and the whole of Cyprus (annexed in 58 BC). Cilicia was worthwhile, because it had long been used as a source of timber, as were Phoenicia and Cyprus. Nonetheless, Antony was the next great Roman to be seduced by the charms of Cleopatra, and his detractors insisted that he saw himself as a future king of Egypt. Or was it his wish that Alexandria would become the new capital of a pan-Mediterranean empire? After a campaign against the Armenians he conducted a Roman Triumph in the streets of Alexandria, an event without precedent there.23 After this, the mistrust between Octavian and Antony was increasingly obvious, and their struggle for power became an open war.
Octavian’s great public victory was won in 31 BC not in Egypt but in north-western Greece, at sea at Actium, close to the Ionian islands. Antony had the larger fleet and a good supply line all the way to Egypt; what he lacked was the loyalty of those he saw as his allies. They began to desert, and, faced by a blockade of Octavian’s ships, Antony managed to break through with forty vessels and fled to Alexandria.24 Whether this was really a great battle is far from certain, but Octavian was fully alive to its propaganda value.
Young Caesar, on the stern, in armour bright,
Here leads the Romans and their gods to fight:
His beamy temples shoot their flames afar;
And o’er his head is hung the Julian star.
And on the other side is the miscreant Antony:
Ranged on the line opposed, Antonius brings
Barbarian aids, and troops of eastern kings,
The Arabians near, and Bactrians from afar,
Of tongues discordant, and a mingled war:
And, rich in gaudy robes, amidst the strife,
His ill fate follows him – the Egyptian wife
(Sequitur, nefas, Aegyptia coniunx).25
Actium has thus been celebrated for millennia as one of the decisive battles in world history. Its result was to win for Octavian the fame and approval back in Italy of which he had been short; his victory ensured that the eastern Mediterranean would remain tied to Rome for three centuries, until the founding of a New Rome at Constantinople created a new balance of power.
Antony survived for a year in Egypt, until Octavian’s armies invaded from east and west; defeated in battle, he killed himself, and was followed a few days later by the last of the Pharaohs, Cleopatra. Whether she poisoned herself with an asp is a detail. What is important is that Octavian was now master of Egypt. He showed an immediate understanding of the heritage he had seized. He would rule like a Pharaoh, to all intents keeping Egypt as his personal domain, and governing through viceroys directly accountable to him rather than to the Senate and People of Rome who notionally exercised sovereign authority there.26 He understood that Egypt’s greatest treasure was not emeralds or porphyry, but ears of Nilotic wheat.
The war against piracy, the acquisition of large tracts of land in the eastern Mediterranean and the Roman civil wars therefore had dramatic political and economic consequences for the Mediterranean. The Romans henceforth guaranteed the safety of the seas from the Straits of Gibraltar to the coasts of Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor. The integration of the Mediterranean into a Roman lake was complete. The process had taken 116 years. The first phase stretched from the fall of Carthage and Corinth to the Cilician campaign of 66 BC. The second, much shorter, phase culminated in Octavian’s acquisition of Egypt. Having defeated his rivals, Octavian transformed himself into Augustus Caesar, the Princeps or leader of the Roman world. His victory in the civil wars is often seen as the moment when a new order came into being and Imperial Rome was born, with the added help of propagandist poets and historians such as Virgil, Horace and Livy. But the new, imperial order was also created by the extension of Roman rule as far east as Egypt. The Mediterranean had become mare nostrum, ‘our sea’, but the ‘our’ referred to a much larger idea of Rome than the Senate and People of Rome itself, Senatus Populusque Romanus. Roman citizens, freedmen, slaves and allies swarmed across the Mediterranean: traders, soldiers and captives criss-crossed the sea. They carried with them a predominantly Hellenistic culture, which had penetrated deeply into Rome itself (the poets and dramatists such as Virgil, Plautus and Terence owed concepts, contents and metre to Greek models); it was a culture that was increasingly infused with themes of eastern origin, long familiar on the streets of Alexandria but now common currency in Rome herself: the cult of Isis, portrayed by Apuleius in his burlesque novel The Golden Ass; the cult of the God of Israel, brought to Rome by Jewish merchants and captives even before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70. At the centre of the network lay Rome, a swarming, cosmopolitan city whose million inhabitants needed to be fed. The acquisition of Egypt assured supplies of grain, and thereby guaranteed the popularity of imperial rule.
III
The grain trade was not simply a source of profit for Rome’s merchants. In 5 BC Augustus Caesar distributed grain to 320,000 male citizens; he proudly recorded this fact in a great public inscription commemorating his victories and achievements, for holding the favour of the Romans was as important as winning victories at sea and on land.27 The era of ‘bread and circuses’ was beginning, and cultivating the Roman People was an art many emperors well understood (baked bread was not in fact distributed until the third century AD, when Emperor Aurelian substituted bread for grain).28 By the end of the first century BC Rome controlled several of the most important sources of grain in the Mediterranean, those in Sicily, Sardinia and Africa that Pompey had been so careful to protect. One result may have been a decline in cultivation of grain in central Italy: in the late second century BC, the Roman tribune Tiberius Gracchus already complained that Etruria was now given over to great estates where landlords profited from their flocks, rather than from the soil.29 Rome no longer had to depend on the vagaries of the Italian climate for its food supply, but it was not easy to control Sicily and Sardinia from afar, as the conflict with the rebel commander Sextus Pompeius proved. More and more elaborate systems of exchange developed to make sure that grain and other goods flowed towards Rome. As Augustus transformed the city, and as great palaces rose on the Palatine hill, demand for luxury items – silks, perfumes, ivory from the Indian Ocean, fine Greek sculptures, glassware, chased metalwork from the eastern Mediterranean – burgeoned. Earlier, in 129 BC, Ptolemy VIII, king of Egypt, received a Roman delegation led by Scipio, conqueror of Carthage, and caused deep shock when he entertained his guests to lavish feasts dressed in a transparent tunic made of silk (probably from China), through which the Romans could see not just his portly frame but his genitals. But Scipio’s austerity was already unfashionable among the Roman nobility.30 Even the equally austere Cato the Elder (d. 149 BC) used to buy 2 per cent shares in shipping ventures, spreading his investments across a number of voyages, and he sent a favoured freedman, Quintio, on these voyages as his agent.31
The period from the establishment of Delos as a free port (168–167 BC) to the second century AD saw a boom in maritime traffic. As has been seen, the problem of piracy diminished very significantly after 69 BC: journeys became safer. Interestingly, most of the largest ships (250 tons upwards) date from the second and first centuries BC, while the majority of vessels in all periods displaced less than 75 tons. Larger ships, carrying armed guards, were better able to defend themselves against pirates, even if they lacked the speed of the smaller vessels. As piracy declined, smaller ships became more popular. These small ships would have been able to carry about 1,500 amphorae at most, while the larger ships co
uld carry 6,000 or more, and were not seriously rivalled in size until the late Middle Ages.32 The sheer uniformity of cargoes conveys a sense of the regular rhythms of trade: about half the ships carried a single type of cargo, whether wine, oil or grain. Bulk goods were moving in ever larger quantities across the Mediterranean. Coastal areas with access to ports could specialize in particular products for which their soil was well suited, leaving the regular supply of essential foodstuffs to visiting merchants. Their safety was guaranteed by the pax romana, the Roman peace that followed the suppression of piracy and the extension of Roman rule across the Mediterranean.