A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (12 page)

As well as coin portraits and sculpture, a remarkable image of Severus exists on a gold finger ring from the Kushan Empire in India showing him face-to-face with his wife Julia Domna. By the late second century
AD
Roman portraiture had reached its height, combining the ‘verism' of the Republican period – stern, ‘warts and all' images of men such as Julius Caesar – with the idealism of Greek sculpture, something that had found favour in Rome from the time of the philhellene emperor Hadrian earlier in the century. Hadrian was the first emperor to be bearded, a fashion that continued through the century and makes emperors of this period readily distinguishable from their early Imperial forebears, and Severus was particularly luxuriant in that respect, with a full beard, curly hair and distinctive facial features, making his portrait stand out as an icon of the time just as those of other emperors do for other periods. What makes the ring so fascinating is that it was manufactured in India and has a Gupta Brahmi inscription beneath the portraits. Rome never attempted to conquer India, but by the early empire trade contact was extensive by land and sea, with ships leaving the Red Sea ports of Egypt annually with the monsoon to take gold coins to exchange for pepper and other goods in the south, where Roman traders made contact with merchants coming across the Bay of Bengal from Indonesia and China – the furthest maritime trade links yet in history.

The equal images of Severus and Julia Domna on the ring reflect their joint role as partners in running the Empire, with Julia eventually having the title ‘Augusta'. Born in Syria of Arab background, and therefore, like Severus, an outsider in Rome, she was a powerful influence on his decision-making as well as on the upbringing of their sons Caracalla and Geta. Like the English king Henry VIII's first wife Katherine of Aragon, who we shall encounter in the chapter on the
Mary Rose
, Julia Domna was an intellectual who drew around her a learned circle including the philosopher Philostratus – encouraged by her to write his life of Apollonius of Tyana, a work that became influential from the seventeenth century because of comparisons that were made between Apollonius and the life of Jesus – and the physician
Galen, giving another connection between the height of Imperial power and the story that can be told from the finds in the wreck.

The life of Julia Domna also has a close bearing on the fate of Caius Fulvius Plautianus, whose image survives for us in a sculpture showing a bearded man with a pugnacious appearance. In
AD
203 he was appointed consul – the highest civic office in Rome – and his daughter Plautilla married Caracalla, bringing him ever closer to the reins of Imperial power. In that year the Imperial court was temporarily based in Leptis Magna, after Severus and probably Plautianus had successfully campaigned against the Garamantes, a Berber people on the desert frontier. According to Cassius Dio, Julia Domna became increasingly concerned by the threat to her own power posed by Plautianus and ordered his murder in Rome in 205; Caracalla in turn had Plautilla murdered in 212. Because Plautianus suffered ‘
damnatio memoriae
', meaning that all inscriptions and references to him were erased where possible, the discovery on an amphora in the wreck of a stamp that most probably refers to him is particularly poignant, and a remarkable link to the power struggle in Rome at the time.

Investigation of the Plemmirio wreck and its place in Roman history allows us to look back at the rise of Rome and the other episodes of seaborne trade in the lead-up to the time of Severus on which wreck evidence sheds major new light. The Roman historian Livy, writing at the time of the first emperor Augustus (37
BC
–
AD
14), explains better than any modern historian could the extraordinary success of Rome as a city:

It is not without good reason that gods and men chose this place to build our city: these hills with their pure air; this convenient river by which crops may be floated down from the interior and foreign commodities brought up; a sea handy to our needs, but far enough away to guard us from foreign fleets; our situation in the very centre of Italy. All these advantages shape this most favoured of sites into a city destined for glory.

From its traditional founding date in 753
BC
– though with a history of settlement stretching back to the Bronze Age in the second millennium
BC
– the clusters of huts on the ‘seven hills' coalesced into a single community focused on the valley that was to become the forum,
and with the river Tiber forming a conduit to the sea as described by Livy. While the city-states of Greece were sending out colonists to the west Mediterranean, Rome focused on its internal development and the gradual conquest of the surrounding peoples in the land between the Apennine mountains and the sea. These included the Etruscans, a confederation of city-states to the north which provided the first big exposure of the Romans to Greek culture – the Etruscans traded with the Greeks, importing high-quality painted pottery, armour and other goods, artefacts seen in Etruscan tombs and in shipwrecks of the west Mediterranean of the seventh and sixth centuries
BC
.

This early period shaped Rome's militaristic outlook, but it was the foundation of the Roman Republic in 509
BC
that explains the later success of the Empire. The institutions of the Republic, including the senate, two elected consuls, tribunes of the people and offices to manage public works, water supply and other matters, were retained by Augustus and his successors, providing the machinery necessary to put their ambitions into practice. Men of senatorial and equestrian rank followed the
cursus honorum
, a succession of offices that gave them wide experience of civic and military matters before they took command of legions, became provincial governors and stood for consul. Even after the Roman army became professional in the early first century
BC
, commanders such as Julius Caesar were not ‘career' soldiers but aspirants to the highest civic offices as well, meaning that their personal ambition was not just focused on military victory but on glory serving Rome on the floor of the Senate House as well.

The history of the Roman Republic was dominated by the titanic struggle with Carthage, the city founded by the Phoenicians – called ‘Punic' by the Romans – who had colonised the western Mediterranean from the ninth century
BC
, their area of influence extending along the coasts of North Africa, southern Spain, western Sicily and Sardinia, while the Greeks colonised eastern Sicily, southern Italy and the south coast of France. In the fourth and third centuries
BC
, Rome conquered or assimilated the Greek colonies – known as Magna Graecia, ‘Greater Greece' – including Neapolis and Syracuse, two cities whose size and influence had surpassed that of many of the old city-states of Greece by that period. In 218–202
BC
Rome fought the war against Carthage that saw the Punic general Hannibal lead his elephants across the Alps and march on Rome. The pivotal year was 146
BC
, when Rome conquered not only Carthage but also Greece, leading to the subjugation
of the ‘Hellenistic' kingdoms of Alexander the Great's successors and eventually to the Roman annexation of Egypt in 31
BC
. All of this had been achieved under the Republic, though latterly during a devastating civil war that ended when Julius Caesar's adoptive son Octavian assumed the title ‘Augustus' in 27
BC
and established the Roman Empire.

As we saw in the last chapter, the shipping of spoils of conquest from the east towards Rome has given us one of the greatest underwater discoveries ever made in the Mediterranean – the Riace bronzes, two magnificent fifth-century
BC
statues found by a snorkeller in 1972 off the southern Italian port of that name and perhaps originally in the panhellenic sanctuary at Delphi. But it is in humble pottery amphoras that the evidence of shipwrecks provides the clearest corollary to the events of Roman history, on a scale that allows patterns of trade to be traced through hundreds of known cargoes.

The most extraordinary of these episodes is reflected in the first-ever excavation of a Roman wreck in the west Mediterranean, by Jacques Cousteau's divers off south France in the same period that they discovered the Plemmirio wreck. In 1948 a local diver, one of the first to use the aqualung invented by Cousteau and Gagnan, discovered a mound of amphoras off the island of Grand Congloué near Marseilles. The excavation in 1952–7 was directed by an archaeologist on the surface, and it was not until 1980 that a re-evaluation of the project records showed that the site had in fact contained two very similar wrecks lying one on top of the other – the earlier of about 200
BC
carrying wide-bodied wine amphoras typical of Greek production in Sicily and Campania near Naples, and the later of about 120–90
BC
with more than 1,200 Roman amphoras. Known as ‘Dressel I' after the nineteenth-century German scholar who first categorised them, they were a cumbersome form, with the empty amphora weighing almost as much as the contents, but robust enough to withstand the sea and river voyages required to take them from Italy into central Gaul and beyond. Both ships were also carrying consignments of black-glazed cups and bowls from Campania, showing that they were transporting not only wine, but also the vessels that were needed to consume it.

From the sixth century
BC
the focus in south France had been the Greek colony of Massalia, modern Marseilles, which was a hub for trade with the Iron Age tribes of Gaul and a base for exploration,
similar to the role of Genoa in the medieval period – it was from Massalia that Euthymenes in the sixth century
BC
explored the coast of West Africa as far as Senegal, and Pytheas in the fourth century
BC
went north and circumnavigated Britain. Massalia supported Rome in her struggle with Carthage, and when the Massaliotes were threatened with attack by the Gallic tribes of the hinterland, Rome sent an army that defeated them – as a result, in 121
BC
, founding the first Roman province, known simply as Provincia, a name that survives in Provence. Three years later they founded the city of Narbo at the head of the river Garonne, a conduit to the Atlantic and the Iron Age chiefdoms of Gaul that opened up large swathes of territory to Roman entrepreneurs.

Much of what we know about those societies comes from the
Gallic War
of Julius Caesar, whose campaign in 58–52
BC
resulted in the conquest of Gaul as far as the English Channel and his brief foray into Britain. Though decried as ‘barbarians', they were a formidable foe and equal to the Romans in many respects – they were the people who built the huge earthwork hillforts in Britain such as Maiden Castle and the citadel of Alesia in Gaul, where the Gallic king Vercingetorix was besieged and defeated by Caesar. He and the other Roman authors described a chieftain society in which competitive wealth display and feasting were fuelled by a taste for wine that had been acquired from the Greeks. The first-century
BC
historian Diodorus Siculus provides a vivid account of the trade that followed the foundation of the first Roman province:

The Gauls are exceedingly addicted to the use of wine and fill themselves with the wine which is brought into their country by merchants, drinking it unmixed, and since they partake of this drink without moderation by reason of their craving for it, when they are drunken they fall into a stupor or a state of madness. Consequently many of the Italian traders, induced by the love of money, which characterises them, believe that the love of wine of these Gauls is their own godsend. For these transport the wine on the navigable rivers by means of boats and through the level plain on wagons, and receive for it an incredible price; for in exchange for an amphora of wine they receive a slave, getting a servant in return for the drink.

The key to Roman interest in the trade is contained in that passage: the acquisition of slaves, many of whom were used to work on the estates in Italy that produced the wine. We know the names of some of these estate-owners from amphora stamps, including
SES
for Sestius from the Grand Congloué wreck. The scale of this transport in the years just before Caesar's campaign is revealed by another wreck off the south coast of France, at Madrague de Giens, discovered by French navy divers in 1967 and excavated over eleven seasons from 1972 by the University of Provence and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique. At some 40 metres in length and with a cargo of at least 6,500 Dressel 1 amphoras, it is one of the largest ships known from classical antiquity, and testament to the wealth of the Italian estate-owner willing to risk sending such a large cargo with the prospect of huge returns from a successful venture. In central France sites have been found where amphoras were ditched after the contents had been offloaded, and the discovery of five intact amphoras in a grave of the first century
BC
at Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire – on display in the British Museum – shows the geographical reach of the trade. Large-scale transport ended with Caesar's conquest of Gaul, but not before it had transformed Roman society – increasing the wealth of the landowners who exported the wine, bringing in slaves which displaced free labour from the countryside, and in so doing creating an upsurge in the population of poor people in the city of Rome that resulted in the greater need for foodstuffs import, as evidenced in wrecks of the Imperial period.

The jobs taken by men such as Julius Caesar in the
cursus honorum
included being an urban ‘prefect', responsible for practical aspects of city management such as water supply. Even men ambitious to be generals and provincial governors took on such roles, ensuring that they had a good understanding of the workings of the city and how jobs with no obvious glory attached to them were as essential to the success of Rome as military victories and extending the frontiers. One of those jobs was
praefectus annonae
, prefect of the
annona
– the office responsible for food supply. With a population of a million by the early Imperial period, the city of Rome had far outstripped its local hinterland and relied on import for staple foodstuffs. The conquests of the late Republic period provided the solution, with Sicily being the first ‘breadbasket of Rome' and then the hinterlands of Spain
and North Africa from Egypt to Morocco providing the necessary surplus.