The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  Apion to Epimachos his father and lord, many greetings. Before all I pray that you are in good health and, prospering continually, fare well along with my sister and her daughter and my brother. I give thanks to the Lord Sarapis that he saved me at once when I was in danger on the sea … I send you a little picture of myself by Eukremon. My name is now Antonius Maximus.71

  A few years later he had married and had three children, two with Latin and one with a Greek name; ‘Antonius Maximus’ was now less interested in Sarapis, for he prayed for the welfare of his sister before ‘the gods here’.72

  The Roman navy had less prestige because it was less of a fighting force and more of a police force. Its existence ensured the safety of the civilian sea routes, even though convoys were not sent out to accompany merchant shipping – partly because merchant shipping was privately managed, and partly because there was rarely much need. The sheer presence of the fleet at Misenum near Naples, at Ravenna and at a number of coastal stations such as Forum Julii (Fréjus) in Provence was sufficient to ensure security. Carthage, rebuilt in 29 BC as a centre of trade and administration formally known as the Colonia Iulia Concordia Carthago, was not used by the fleet even though it became the principal Roman city in North Africa (setting aside Alexandria).73 There was, however, a Roman naval presence at Caesarea (Cherchel) some way to the west, because beyond it lay the occasionally troublesome region of Mauretania.74 This is what the pax romana meant for the Mediterranean: it was not an active process of suppressing foes to impose the peace of victors – ‘they make a devastation and call it peace’, as Tacitus ironically remarked of Roman armies in the north of Europe – so much as a benign presence. There was sufficient awareness, at least until the mid-third century, of the need to keep the fleet in good repair. The ships themselves were the traditional quadriremes and quinquiremes of the late classical world; there is no evidence of significant innovations in ship design until the Byzantine period, so navies faced the traditional problems of vessels with low gunwales, generally barely four metres above the water: an inability to expose themselves to choppy seas or to sail in winter.75 The fleet was also available to convey officials around the empire, but (unlike medieval ships) these galleys did not double as trading vessels, partly because of their design and partly because the emperor did not wish to be a mere trader.

  The idea of establishing Misenum and Ravenna as the prime command centres can be traced back to Augustus.76 Misenum was the control hub for operations in the western Mediterranean, but its brief also extended much further to the east. Since the grain shipments from Egypt arrived at Puteoli, next door, Misenum kept an eye on movements along this sea route. An inland lake behind Misenum was dredged and connected to the coast, so that the fleet possessed a safe inner harbour; around the port were arrayed the villas of wealthy Romans; Tiberius spent some of his last days here.77 From Ravenna, on the other hand, fleets were despatched to keep an eye on the Dalmatian coast, always a hideaway of pirates and brigands, and the Aegean also fell within its purview. Ravenna was surrounded by lagoons (the modern shoreline is several miles from the ancient one), and was not the ideal location for a harbour, so its port was constructed two miles away at a place called Classis, that is ‘Fleet’; a canal linked Classis to Ravenna. This harbour is portrayed in the Ravenna mosaics of the sixth century, for it long retained its importance; all that remains of the glory of Classis is the mosaic-encrusted church of Sant’Apollinare in Classe, also of the sixth century.78 The ability of the Romans to keep a watchful eye on the Mediterranean, principally from command posts in the Tyrrhenian Sea and the northern Adriatic, is very impressive.

  A trader of the second century might well have wondered what could possibly shatter the unity of the Mediterranean. It was a political unity, under Rome; it was an economic unity, allowing traders to criss-cross the Mediterranean without interference; it was a cultural unity, dominated by Hellenistic culture, whether expressed in Greek or in Latin; it was even in many respects a religious unity, or unity in diversity, as the peoples of the Mediterranean shared their gods with one another, unless they were Jews or Christians. Single rule over mare nostrum ensured freedom of movement and resulted in cultural mixing in the Mediterranean on a scale never seen before or since.

  9

  Old and New Faiths, AD 1–450

  I

  As in any port city of the Roman world, the population of Ostia was very mixed. An extraordinary discovery was made on the outskirts of Ostia in 1961, while a road was being constructed linking Rome to its new door to the world, Fiumicino airport: the synagogue of Ostia, the oldest synagogue structure to have survived in Europe. The earliest part dates from the first century AD, but the building was repaired or partly rebuilt in the fourth century. It was in continuous use for Jewish prayer for at least 300 years. An inscription from the second century commemorates the building of the Ark for the scrolls of the Law, at the expense of a certain Mindis Faustos; the inscription is mainly in Greek, with a few Latin words, for the Jews of Rome, with their connections to the East, continued to use Greek as their daily language. The building and its annexes have an area of 856 square metres, and everything suggests that this was the major synagogue of a prosperous community of hundreds of Jews. More than a synagogue, by the fourth century the complex contained an oven, possibly for the baking of unleavened bread for Passover, and a ritual bath. There were side rooms that were probably used for teaching and for meetings of the Jewish council and of the rabbinical court. A carved architrave portrayed the great candlestick that had stood in the Temple, the ram’s horn blown at New Year, and the symbols of the Feast of Tabernacles, the citron and decorated palm branch.1 Nor was Judaism the only eastern cult with many followers in Ostia. A small brick-built temple elsewhere in the city has been identified as a shrine of Sarapis. Within the precinct there was a courtyard paved with a black-and-white mosaic of Nile scenes. Plenty of inscriptions refer to the cult of Isis; there were several shrines to Mithras, much favoured in the Roman army; during their wild ecstasies, male devotees of the mother-goddess Cybele, who was also worshipped at Ostia, were said to castrate themselves.2

  Carried along the trade routes, ancient systems of belief transplanted themselves into Italy and other lands from Judaea or the Nile, and were modified by their own contact with the Hellenistic culture of the eastern Mediterranean. Sometimes individuals travelled across the Mediterranean bearing with them a new rather than an old faith. Paul of Tarsus has been encountered on his way to Rome, and in the same city a line of succession developed that traced itself back to another traveller from the East, his fellow-believer Simon Peter. On his travels in Syria, Asia Minor, Greece and Italy, Paul preached that a man acclaimed by his followers as the Jewish Messiah was actually God Incarnate. The slowly maturing seeds of a great religious revolution in the Mediterranean had been sown.

  II

  The two obvious transformations of the Mediterranean in the late Roman period were the Germanic invasions and the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman emperors. Christianization took place slowly in the teeth of vigorous opposition from pagans and Jews. Eastern cults spread easily across the surface of the Mediterranean, but neither Judaism nor Christianity could be compared to the pagan cults, as the Romans were aware. Jews and Christians were seen as ‘atheists’, in the sense that they straightforwardly denied the very existence of the pagan gods. They refused to sacrifice to the deified emperor. Yet the Romans, as they gained power in the eastern Mediterranean, were careful to make an exception of the Jews; the Jews were willing to sacrifice to their God in honour of the emperor, and were understood to have an eccentric way, therefore, of guaranteeing their loyalty. All other subjects were expected to make the required sacrifice to the deified emperor, and the refusal of Christians to do so placed them outside the law and exposed them to the risk of violent death in the amphitheatre. By vigorously preaching the word of Christ beyond the Jewish community, St Paul and his successors had created a gro
wing community of Christians whom the Romans could no longer classify as a branch of the Jewish people. Nor did they follow Jewish observances: circumcision was to be of the heart, not of the body; avoidance of pork was understood to mean avoidance of pig-like behaviour. The very fact of persecution strengthened the Christians in their resolve: they revered as martyrs those who were executed by the Romans and, discarding the Jewish concept that the bones of the dead were unclean, they developed a cult of the martyrs’ remains. In the view of some enthusiasts, even their suffering was an illusion, for Christ would anaesthetize them against the claws of the lions, though others rejoiced in pain and suffering, as proof that they had won the mercy of Christ and the reward of eternal life.3

  Although the Jews were generally guaranteed the right to practise their religion, Roman policy was not consistent. As punishment for a fraud perpetrated in Rome, by four crooks who claimed to be collecting money for the Temple, Emperor Tiberius had already shunted 4,000 Roman Jews to Sardinia, a traditional land of exile. One of those they defrauded was the wife of a Senator, who (not unusually) was sympathetic to Judaism. Claudius agreed to restore to the Jews in Alexandria civil rights they had lost under the mad emperor Gaius Caligula, but there is no evidence that the Jewish communities of the diaspora were united in opposition to the powers-that-be; when there was trouble on the streets of Alexandria it was the result of a long-established dislike between Jews and Greeks, not of government policy, which the Greeks thought too favourable to the Jews. However, pressure on the Jews in Palestine resulted in both the forced and voluntary diffusion of the Jews across the Mediterranean. From the perspective of Mediterranean history the significance of the destruction of the Temple by Titus in AD 70, and of Jerusalem itself by Hadrian in AD 131, lies in the single word ‘diaspora’. It is unlikely, as the Jewish historian Josephus pointed out, that the Romans intended to destroy the Jewish Temple when they quashed the Jewish revolt in 70; but, once it had been burned and pillaged, the new emperor Vespasian and his son Titus saw the political advantage of a great triumph in which they could parade the Temple treasures, and Titus commemorated this procession in the famous reliefs inside the arch of Titus which still stands at the southern end of the Roman Forum.4 Large numbers of Jewish slaves were deported to Italy and beyond.

  What was unusual was that Rome did not allow the Jewish sacrificial cult to resume in Jerusalem. It was not as if the capture of the Temple could have resulted in the complete destruction of the vast sanctuary and its colonnaded courts (large parts of the perimeter walls survive to this day). With extensive repairs, restoration of the cult could have begun. The kindly old emperor Nerva (d. 98) was happy to relieve the Jews of a special tax imposed after the Jewish War and it seemed that restoration of the cult was not far off.5 But his soldier successor Trajan adopted a tough policy, and at the end of his reign he ruthlessly suppressed Jewish rebellions in Syria, Egypt and Cyrenaica (115–16): as Jews dispersed across the Mediterranean, tensions previously largely confined to Palestine and Alexandria became more widespread. Indeed, Palestine was relatively quiet during these revolts. His successor Hadrian had an uncompromising solution: he rebuilt Jerusalem as a city dedicated to Jupiter Capitolinus, under the name Aelia Capitolina; he banned circumcised males from entering the city. He set his mind against the Jews and the God of Israel in a manner completely at odds with traditional Roman respect for other religions. The revolt that followed in Palestine in 132–6 was fierce but hopeless; short-term successes, including the recovery of Jerusalem and possibly even the restoration of the sacrificial cult, culminated in massive defeat and in horrific massacres by Hadrian’s armies, and as many as 600,000 Jews may have lost their lives.6 Once again these events had a wider Mediterranean impact: very many Jews were dispersed westwards, as slaves or fugitives; Jews were certainly living in Spain a century later.7 The effects of defeat in Jerusalem were not simply political and demographic. Judaism was already changing its character in the late Temple period, as sects such as the Pharisees challenged the authority of the old Temple priesthood. The loss of the Temple gave further impetus to these changes, led by the rabbis, learned laymen rather than Temple priests; and the synagogue, not in itself a novelty, became the focus of Jewish study and prayer.

  Persecution of the Christians had also come in waves. In the first century, Nero had blamed Christians for the great fire that gave him the opportunity to rebuild parts of Rome in gilded magnificence. In the middle of the third century the emperors renewed the persecution of Christians across the empire. The emperor Decius was commemorated in the Tuscan port of Cosa as restitutor sacrorum, ‘restorer of the holy things’, a reference, apparently, to his enthusiastic hunt for Christians. One way to avoid persecution was to make outward compromises, worshipping in public but maintaining the faith behind closed doors. Disagreement about the validity of this policy, and, even more seriously, about the validity of the priestly orders of those who ‘handed over’ (donaverunt) the scriptures to the Roman authorities, generated bitter recriminations and schism: the Donatist Church, active in Africa in the fourth century, saw itself as the standard bearer of true belief in the face of the appeasers. Another way out of the dilemma presented by the Roman authorities was for Christians to pose as Jews: ‘synagogue on Saturday, church on Sunday’, a position condemned in vigorous anti-Jewish sermons at Antioch in the 390s.8 By then, of course, the Christians had the upper hand, but throughout the Mediterranean the boundaries between Christianity and Judaism were less clear to observers (including even many Jews and Christians) than the angry prophets of Christian orthodoxy such as St Cyprian would have us believe. The vituperation expressed towards Judaism derived from a sense of bitter competition, not a wish to kick those who were already down. No quarter was given by either side. And yet the wider public was not much interested in the finer points of doctrine, and was probably attracted by ethical codes and religious aspirations that were not vastly different – love for one’s neighbour, the hope that God would offer rewards in the next world if not in this one. Many Jews were probably quite liberal in their approach to the rules of the religion, which were still being finely honed in the academies of Babylonia, and this rendered movement back and forth between religions and sects much easier.

  An account of the life and trial of the Christian martyr Pionius, who died at Smyrna in the Decian persecutions, constantly alludes to the ‘Greeks, Jews and women’ who formed a hostile crowd in the public squares of Smyrna when he was arrested; Pionius refused to take part in the pagan cult at a time when both Jews and pagans were celebrating their festivals (possibly the Jewish festival of Purim and the pagan Dionysia – both times when drunkenness was more than tolerated). On such occasions the celebrations of Jews and Gentiles merged imperceptibly, despite any number of rabbinic injunctions.9 In Smyrna and elsewhere there existed large and respected Jewish communities that attracted many converts, as well as the ‘God-fearers’ who attended Jewish rites without converting, so that the Jewish population was ethnically quite mixed.10

  As galling to many Christians as the success of the Jews was the presence of heretic Christians. Of course, one man’s heretic was another man’s orthodox Christian. Yet there were certainly some very radical movements. On his cross the dying Pionius found himself side by side with an adherent of the Marcionite creed, a movement of Christian origin that regarded the God of the Jews as Satan, and rejected the Hebrew Bible.11 For all their disagreement with the Jews, mainstream Christians accepted the Hebrew Bible and did not seek to emend its text; finding in it prophecies of the coming of Christ, they valued it highly but read it quite differently from the Jews. For St Augustine (d. 430), the Jews were the bearers of the holy books, occupying the place of servants ordered to look after their masters’ property, though this did not mean that they understood what they preserved.12

  Jews and Christians also came into contact on the surface of the Mediterranean Sea. There were Jewish shipowners. Ports frequented by Jews included Gaza. The rabbi
s debated whether the Jews of Gaza could take part in the local fair held in honour of a Greek god, a debate which once again reveals the often fuzzy boundaries between Jewish and pagan communities in the late Hellenistic and Roman world.13 Yet some maritime Jews were very meticulous in their observance. In 404 a bishop from Asia Minor sailed to his see from Alexandria, where the Jews had their own guild of navicularii and owned and operated a good many ships. The captain of this ship was Amarantus, and he and his crew were Jews, whom the bishop lampooned; he feared for his life when the captain let the ship drift after nightfall on Friday. It was the Sabbath eve and he was permitted (he said) to navigate the ship only when the passengers were in danger of their life. In that case, virtually all Jewish laws could be abrogated. Everything that is reported about the ship makes one wonder how it ever arrived: the rigging was broken, so its sails could not be unfurled; the captain had sold the spare anchor. In the same period, the discussions of the rabbis recorded in the Talmud reveal that Jews had become quite used to crossing the Great Sea. As well as examining issues in commercial law, they debated whether it is licit for Jews to travel across the sea on the Sabbath and what actions are permissible on the day of rest (such as the drawing of water, or even taking a stroll on the ship’s deck).14