The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  The little port of Cosa on a promontory off the Etruscan coastline provides impressive evidence for the movement of goods around the Mediterranean at this time. Its workshops turned out thousands of amphorae at the instigation of a noble family of the early imperial age, the Sestii, who made their town into a successful industrial centre. Amphorae from Cosa have been found in a wreck at Grand-Congloué near Marseilles: most of the 1,200 jars were stamped with the letters SES, the family’s mark. Another wreck lying underneath this one dates from 190–180 BC, and contained amphorae from Rhodes and elsewhere in the Aegean, as well as huge amounts of south Italian tableware on its way to southern Gaul or Spain. Items such as these could penetrate inland for great distances, though bulk foodstuffs tended to be consumed on or near the coasts, because of the difficulty and expense of transporting them inland, except by river. Water transport was immeasurably cheaper than land transport, a problem that, as will be seen, faced even a city such a short way from the sea as Rome.33

  Grain was the staple foodstuff, particularly the triticum durum, hard wheat, of Sicily, Sardinia, Africa and Egypt (hard wheats are drier than soft, so they keep better), though real connoisseurs preferred siligo, a soft wheat made from naked spelt.34 A bread-based diet only filled stomachs, and a companaticum (‘something-with-bread’) of cheese, fish or vegetables broadened the diet. Vegetables, unless pickled, did not travel well, but cheese, oil and wine found markets across the Mediterranean, while the transport by sea of salted meat was largely reserved for the Roman army.35 Increasingly popular was garum, the stinking sauce made of fish innards, which was poured into amphorae and traded across the Mediterranean. Excavations in Barcelona, close to the cathedral, have revealed a sizeable garum factory amid the buildings of a medium-sized imperial town.36 It took about ten days with a following wind to reach Alexandria from Rome, a distance of 1,000 miles; in unpleasant weather, the return journey could take six times as long, though shippers would hope for about three weeks. Navigation was strongly discouraged from mid-November to early March, and regarded as quite dangerous from mid-September to early November and from March to the end of May. This ‘close season’ was observed in some degree right through the Middle Ages as well.37

  A vivid account of a winter voyage that went wrong is provided by Paul of Tarsus in the Acts of the Apostles. Paul, a prisoner of the Romans, was placed on board an Alexandrian grain ship setting out for Italy from Myra, on the south coast of Anatolia; but it was very late in the sailing season, the ship was delayed by the winds, and by the time they were off Crete the seas had become dangerous. Rather than wintering in Crete, the captain was foolhardy enough to venture out into the stormy seas, on which his vessel was tossed for a miserable fortnight. The crew ‘lightened the ship and cast out the wheat into the sea’. The sailors managed to steer towards the island of Malta, beaching the ship, which, nevertheless, broke up. Paul says that the travellers were treated well by the ‘barbarians’ who inhabited the island; no one died, but Paul and everyone else became stuck on Malta for three months. Maltese tradition assumes that Paul used this time to convert the islanders, but Paul wrote of the Maltese as if they were credulous and primitive – he cured the governor’s sick father and was taken for a god by the natives. Once conditions at sea had improved, another ship from Alexandria that was wintering there took everyone off; he was then able to reach Syracuse, Reggio on the southern tip of Italy and, a day out from Reggio, the port of Puteoli in the Bay of Naples, to which the first grain ship had probably been bound all along; from there he headed towards Rome (and, according to Christian tradition, his eventual beheading).38

  Surprisingly, the Roman government did not create a state merchant fleet similar to the fleets of the medieval Venetian republic; most of the merchants who carried grain to Rome were private traders, even when they carried grain from the emperor’s own estates in Egypt and elsewhere.39 Around 200 AD, grain ships had an average displacement of 340 to 400 tons, enabling them to carry 50,000 modii or measures of grain (1 ton equals about 150 modii); a few ships reached 1,000 tons but there were also, as has been seen, innumerable smaller vessels plying the waters. Rome probably required about 40 million measures each year, so that 800 shiploads of average size needed to reach Rome between spring and autumn. In the first century AD, Josephus asserted that Africa provided enough grain for eight months of the year, and Egypt enough for four months.40 All this was more than enough to cover the 12,000,000 measures required for the free distribution of grain to 200,000 male citizens.41 Central North Africa had been supplying Rome ever since the end of the Second Punic War, and the short, quick journey to Italy was intrinsically safer than the long haul from Alexandria.42

  Large numbers of merchants travelled from the grain-exporting cities of the North African coast to Ostia, where they gathered around the portico now known as the Piazzale delle Corporazioni.43 Desiccation and erosion had not yet spoiled the African soil, which benefited from an ideal cycle of winter rains followed by dry summers.44 The emperor himself saw excellent opportunities there: Nero confiscated estates from six of the greatest landowners, and was credited by the Elder Pliny with acquiring half of the province of Africa (roughly modern Tunisia).45 It was transformed from a prosperous region that mainly supplied its own cities, especially Carthage, into a region that supplied much wider areas of the central Mediterranean, especially Rome and Italy. Not just lands under Roman rule but the territories of the autonomous Mauretanian kings were drawn into this network, while other goods also reached Rome from Africa: figs (Cato the Elder alleged they arrived in three days), truffles and pomegranates for the tables of the richer Romans; lions and leopards for the Roman amphitheatres.46 From the second century AD onwards, the emperors encouraged African peasants to occupy marginal lands, for Italian production was falling and was insufficient even for the Italian population, let alone the rest of the empire. Hadrian’s officials in North Africa wrote: ‘our Caesar, in the untiring zeal with which he constantly guards human needs has ordered all parts of land which are suitable for olives or vines, as well as for grain, to be cultivated’.47 Irrigation and damming were practised, to capture and distribute the winter rains, and the system put in place disintegrated only in the eleventh century, following Arab raids; a mixed agricultural economy flourished, as did the pottery industry – ‘African red-slip ware’ exported overseas provides important evidence for patterns of trade in the later Roman Empire.48 The intensification and commercialization of African agriculture was thus the result of Roman initiatives. The Mediterranean had become a well-integrated area of exchange as Roman power and influence spread to every corner of the sea.

  From the perspective of the imperial fisc, Egyptian grain had some advantages over African. It was not directed solely towards Rome, for Egypt continued to supply large areas of the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean. Alexandria was seen as a highly reliable source, guaranteed by the annual Nile floods, whereas the grain supplies of what are now Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya fluctuated, and had to be obtained from a large number of centres.49 Most importantly, the grain supply of the Roman Empire did not depend on a single, fragile source in an age when famine occasionally struck fertile lands such as Sicily; there were even rare and frightening famines in Egypt.50 With access to the supplies of the entire Mediterranean, these shortages became a minor anxiety. Rome was fed; the emperors celebrated the grain distribution on their coins. In AD 64–6, Nero alluded directly to the grain supply on some exceptionally elegant bronze coins (as one might expect from this self-proclaimed arbiter of taste). Ceres holds ears of wheat and faces another figure, Annona (‘Harvest’), who holds a cornucopia; in the middle there is an altar on which a grain measure has been placed, and in the background the stern of a grain ship is visible.51

  IV

  Once the grain, oil and wine had arrived in Italy, they had somehow to be brought to Rome, whose position ten miles from the sea was compromised by the winding route of the river Tiber and the lack of good qu
ays in Rome itself. The solution in the age of Augustus was to bring the grain first of all to the Bay of Naples, where a large, well-sheltered port existed at Puteoli, now the Neapolitan suburb of Pozzuoli. From there it was loaded on to smaller vessels that carried it up the Campanian and Latin coast to the Tiber, for there were no good harbours between Cosa in Etruria and Gaeta on the border between Latium and Campania. Accordingly, Nero (d. AD 68) planned to construct a great canal wide enough for two quinquiremes to pass one another, linking the port of Ostia to the Bay of Naples, so as to avoid cumbersome and sometimes perilous journeys along the Italian coast. When this massive project faltered, some impetus was given to the expansion of the ports at the mouth of the Tiber, most importantly Ostia, whose extensive remains bear witness to its business links with Africa, Gaul and the East: more of Ostia shortly.

  Puteoli received advance news of the arrival of grain fleets:

  Today without warning the Alexandrian tabellariae came into view. These are the ships which they always send on ahead to give the news that the fleet is on its way. This is a very welcome sight for the Campanians; the whole population of Puteoli settles down on the quayside and tries to spot the Alexandrian ships by the type of rigging.52

  This could be done because a special type of sail was reserved to the Alexandrian grain fleet, ‘and all the ships hoist it high on their masts’. Emperor Gaius Caligula (d. AD 41) was proud of the Alexandria fleet based at Puteoli, and discouraged the Jewish prince Herod Agrippa from returning to Judaea by way of Brindisi, Greece and Syria, urging him to take ship from Puteoli – the Alexandria captains were famous for driving their ships like charioteers. Within days of his departure from Puteoli, Herod Agrippa had arrived in Egypt.53 Puteoli became famous for its cement, made out of volcanic dust and used in concrete all over Italy. Most importantly, this cement was used in the building of jetties and moles to accommodate even the largest ships.54 Puteoli was already a centre for trade in luxury goods such as Greek marble or Egyptian papyrus and glass when Egypt fell into Roman hands. Puteolan merchants were active at Delos, where there was a lively contingent of south Italian traders. The Delian connection brought many slaves to Italy by way of Puteoli. Like Rome itself, Puteoli was host to a very heterogeneous population, with little colonies of Phoenician merchants from Tyre, of Nabataeans from the desert lands beyond Palestine, of Egyptians who introduced the cult of Sarapis.55 The Phoenicians had once been a great force in Puteoli, but by AD 174 they had fallen on hard times, and wrote to the city fathers in Tyre asking them to defray the large rent they had to pay for their offices and warehouses, which, they said, were grander than those of other nations:

  In former days the Tyrians living at Puteoli were responsible for its maintenance; they were numerous and rich. But now we are reduced to a small number, and owing to the expenses that we have to meet for the sacrifices and the worship of our national gods, who have temples here, we have not the necessary resources to pay for the rent of the station, a sum of 100,000 denarii a year.56

  A temple was also erected to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva by the merchants ‘who trade in Alexandria, Asia and Syria’.57 Fine public buildings were constructed, at the expense of the wealthiest families of the city. Puteoli was probably the unnamed Campanian city in which Petronius, a courtier of Nero, situated his scandalous novel the Satyricon. One of the central figures, Trimalchio, is a freed slave who has made his fortune at sea, lost it (‘Neptune devoured 30,000,000 sesterces in a single day’), started again from scratch, and has now retired with assets of many millions of sesterces.58

  Whether or not there existed freedmen as successful as the fictional Trimalchio, the evidence that freedmen played a major role in the business life of the port is clear. A remarkable series of wax tablets, discovered in Pompeii, bears witness to the financial affairs of the Sulpicii, bankers of Puteoli; 127 documents survive, mostly from between AD 35 and AD 55.59 One of the documents is a loan of a thousand denarii made to Menelaus, a free-born Greek from Caria in Asia Minor, by the slave Primus, agent of the merchant Publius Attius Severus. Severus’ name also appears in a completely different place: stamped on amphorae that contained fish-sauce exported from the Iberian peninsula to Rome. Menelaus owned his own cargo vessel, and the loan is thought to have been an advance payment for the carriage of a consignment of garum being shipped from Puteoli to Rome.60 All this suggests how Puteoli was linked into the wider Mediterranean world – home to a Greek skipper, with links to a wealthy Roman trader in Spanish fish-sauce. The presence of a slave acting as Severus’ trusted agent some way from his home base in Rome was far from unusual. Greek bankers in the heyday of Athens had been familiar with some of the banking techniques adopted at Puteoli. What is novel is the way such operations now encompassed the whole Mediterranean, from the garum factories of Spain to Egypt. Credit consisted not just of cash advances in hard coin or commodities: the word ‘credit’ (meaning ‘he believes’ in Latin) conveys a sense of trust. Cooperation and trust were easier and more effective in the era of Roman peace.

  It was grain that really made the fortune of Puteoli; it has been estimated that 100,000 tons passed through it each year around this time.61 Handling grain generated a myriad of tasks for slaves and paid labourers: whether grain was loaded in sacks or poured into containers, it had to be unloaded at its Italian port of arrival and reloaded on to smaller ships or barges for the journey to Rome. It was checked for quality and it was, of course, taxed. It had to be stored either in the ports or in Rome itself, and storing grain is not a straightforward operation, since it must be protected from dangerous moulds, insects and mice, meaning that it has to be aerated and kept at the right temperature.62 The grain merchants had to rent rooms in storehouses, some of which were enormous: the Horrea Galbana in Rome offered over 140 rooms on the ground floor, and the Grandi Horrea on the coast at Ostia provided sixty ground-floor rooms.63 Puteoli was also well placed for those in search of a market for eastern luxuries, such as the products of the India trade that passed through Alexandria, for it gave access to the summer retreats of the senatorial aristocracy at Baiae, Herculaneum and Stabiae; it stood close to Naples, still a thriving city, and the satellite towns of Naples such as Pompeii.

  Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber, gradually took the lead, replacing Puteoli as the principal port of call for the ships carrying goods intended for Rome. Its origins can be traced back to the fifth century BC when Rome and Veii competed for control of the saltpans at the Tiber mouth, but for long Ostia consisted of little more than a roadstead in an estuary. There were building programmes under Augustus and Tiberius, but only under Claudius was a real effort made to provide harbour facilities close to Rome, and in AD 42 a new harbour two miles north of the Tiber began to be constructed, known by the simple name Portus. The aim was not to undercut Puteoli, so much as to provide safe access for Rome’s grain. Unfortunately, Claudius’ breakwaters and moles proved inadequate: in AD 62, 200 ships within the harbour were wrecked by a sudden tempest. Within a century, the Emperor Trajan enhanced Ostia’s Portus by building a more secure and spectacular hexagonal harbour inside Claudius’ harbour. Under his successor Hadrian large areas containing warehouses and shops were rebuilt. Ostia was full of solid brick-built apartment blocks on several floors – it had a somewhat middle-class atmosphere right through to the fourth century, and many of the poorer migrants who set foot on its quayside headed for the tenements of Rome instead.64

  V

  After Octavian won power, all the shores of the Mediterranean and all its islands were under Roman rule or within the Roman sphere of influence: it was indeed mare nostrum.65 His victory ushered in a remarkable period of over 200 years of peace across the Mediterranean. Of course, there were occasional outbursts of piracy, for example by the Mauretanians in the far west of North Africa, an area where Roman control was relatively weak: in AD 171–2 Moorish pirates raided Spain and Africa, and the emperor, Marcus Aurelius, enlarged the Roman fleet to deal with this menace. But when Roman n
avies engaged in warfare, they generally did so away from the Mediterranean, for there were also large fleets as far away as Britain and along the Rhine and Danube, where they kept Germanic raiders at bay. Even instability at the very heart of the empire did not fundamentally destroy the peace of the Mediterranean. During the tumultuous ‘Year of the Four Emperors’ in AD 68–9, following the suicide of Nero, Emperor Otho recruited thousands of sailors to block the threat posed by his rival, and eventual supplanter, Vitellius. Otho could count on the support of the two Italian navies, based at Ravenna and at Misenum, very close to Puteoli. The final victor in 69, Vespasian, also used naval power, but differently: from his base in Egypt he first blocked the grain traffic to Rome, and then, as he approached Rome, he showed generosity by releasing these food supplies to the Roman People, fatally undermining Vitellius.66 Later, navies served the emperors when armies had to be transported to (say) Africa, to quell regional revolts. Trajan sent fleets to Cyrenaica, Egypt and Syria to suppress a widespread Jewish rebellion in 115–16.67 Sailors were sometimes expected to fight on land once they reached their destination, but great naval battles similar to those of the Punic Wars were the stuff of literature, not something sailors could expect to experience.

  It is not surprising that the Roman navy has received far less attention than Greek navies or that relentless, ruthless arm of the state, the Roman army. The assumption is that the navy did not do very much in the era of pax romana. Service in the navy was not rated as highly as army service. In the second century a legionary soldier transferred of his own volition to the navy; he was punished for unacceptable behaviour.68 Yet there were many for whom service in the navy was a matter of pride. An Egyptian papyrus of the early second century AD records how a certain Sempronius was grieved to hear that his son Gaius had been persuaded not to join the fleet, as he had originally planned: ‘see to it that you are not so persuaded, or else you will no longer be my son … You will do well to enter a fine service.’69 But recruitment to the fleet had important social consequences. Sailors in the Mediterranean hailed from right across the Roman world, including men from inland regions such as Pannonia (along the Danube); there were very many Greeks, not surprisingly, and also a large number of Egyptians, not just Greeks settled in Egypt but people of native Egyptian descent. These people brought their gods with them, and Sarapis was widely venerated by sailors in the Roman navy, whether or not the sailors were of Egyptian origin: ‘Sarapis is great on the sea, and both merchantmen and warcraft are guided by him.’70 The mixture of gods was entirely typical of the Roman world. But there were also pressures in the other direction. Entering a service where Latin was the language of command, recruits sought to Latinize and Romanize themselves, taking Latin names: