The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (26 page)

With Carthage defeated and Rhodes marginalized, by the end of the second century
BCE
there were few external threats to Rome’s Mediterranean trade, the commercial center of which was the free port of Delos. The island’s prosperity was shattered in 88
BCE
, when
Mithridates VI of
Pontus ordered the murder of a hundred thousand Romans and Italians in Asia Minor and on Delos. The culmination of decades of tension and intermittent hostilities over Roman rule in Greece and Asia Minor precipitated the first of the three
Mithridatic Wars fought between 88 and 63
BCE
. These involved extensive naval campaigning, and it could be argued that they were not brought to a faster conclusion because the Roman commander,
Sulla, advanced into Greece without a supporting fleet. As a result, when Sulla besieged Athens and Piraeus, Mithridates could replenish his forces by sea just as the Athenians had in the
Peloponnesian War. When the port fell in 86
BCE
,
“Sulla burned the
Piraeus, which had given him more trouble than the city of Athens, not sparing the Arsenal, or the navy yard, or any other of its famous buildings” that had graced the port for four centuries. Detailed descriptions of the naval campaigns are lacking, although we get glimpses of the magnitude of the effort. In his summary of the wars,
Appian notes that “
Many times [Mithridates] had over 400 ships of his own,” a numerical advantage that enabled him to land an army in Greece but was insufficient for taking Rhodes, still a Roman ally. Mithridates drew support not only from his own territories and immediate neighbors, but from the Roman general
Sertorius, who was leading the opposition to Sulla in the civil war in Spain, from which he sent forces to Mithridates by sea. The celebrated general
Licinius Lucullus learned from Sulla’s error—from which he had in fact rescued Sulla—and although he spent much of his time on the march in the heart of Asia Minor during the second war, his success so depended on the capture of the Black Sea ports of
Sinop and Amasus that when he celebrated his triumph at Rome, his procession included “
a hundred and ten bronze-beaked ships.”

The widespread fighting in the Aegean since the second half of the second century
BCE
, together with the Roman practice of divesting potential rivals of their fleets, had led to a resurgence in piracy. This did not attract official Roman notice until the turn of the century, and even then the problem was addressed haphazardly. A succession of campaigns against individual pirate bands failed because of their mobility and networks of mutual assistance. Although concentrated in
Cilicia in Asia Minor, pirates threatened maritime commerce throughout the Mediterranean. No one and no place was safe. In a speech given in 66
BCE
, after piracy had been eradicated, the Roman orator
Cicero reminded his audience how dire the situation had been:

The most famous victim of piracy was a young
Julius Caesar, who on a winter crossing to Rhodes in 75
BCE
was captured and held for nearly forty days. Ransomed for
twelve thousand gold pieces, Caesar returned to hunt down and crucify his erstwhile captors. Six years later, the senate assigned Pompey the Great to lead a new effort against the pirates. Despite its importance, his campaign is known only from brief descriptions that focus on his overall strategy. Entrusted with extraordinary powers for three years, Pompey raised a force of 500 ships, 120,000 soldiers, and 5,000 cavalry. Dividing the Mediterranean into thirteen naval districts, he ordered his captains to flush out any pirate bands they might find, but not to leave the zones to which they had been assigned. The one area left unguarded was the coast of Cilicia, which quickly became the last refuge of those pirates who could reach it. The Romans eradicated piracy in the western Mediterranean within forty days, and seven weeks later Pompey received the surrender of the last of the pirates in Cilicia. Sources say that ten thousand pirates died during the campaign, and between four hundred and eight hundred ships were seized. Most unusual is the clemency Pompey showed his prisoners, many of whom he transplanted to the nearby port of Soli, which was renamed Pompeiopolis. His leniency paid off and Pompey had their allegiance when he commanded the Roman armies in the Third Mithridatic War.

The long preoccupation with piracy impressed itself deeply on the Roman psyche. For
Cicero especially, pirates and piracy were all that true Romans were not: barbarous, ignoble, perfidious. It was a theme to which he returned repeatedly over a quarter century. In a celebrated letter to his son, Cicero asserts that a pledge made to a pirate is not binding, “
for a pirate is not included in the category of public enemies [of the state], but is the common enemy of everyone.” This concept was honed to a fine point by the seventeenth-century English jurist
Sir Edward Coke:
Pirata est hostis humanis generis,
“the pirate is the enemy of mankind,” a phrase still used in reference to people engaged in terrorism, torture, and genocide.

Rome’s overseas success in the east and against the pirates contributed to the erosion of its republican institutions, which were inadequate for running such
vast and far-flung provinces and colonies. Reforms proposed in the 130s
BCE
were rebuffed by a senate protective of its privileges and as tensions mounted, the senate increasingly resorted to martial law, and strongmen began levying large armies by recruiting soldiers with promises of land and booty. Empowered and enriched by his campaign against the pirates, in 60
BCE
Pompey formed a secret triumvirate with
Crassus and Caesar, who agreed to support each other “
to oppose all legislation of which any one of them might disapprove.” Two years later Caesar began his conquest of
Gaul and over the next nine years annexed Gaul to Rome, invaded
Germany, and twice landed in Britain.

Caesar’s victories increased his popularity with the people and the resentment of old-line republicans, and it put him at odds with Pompey, who in 52
BCE
was appointed sole consul, a first in republican history. In 49
BCE
, Caesar precipitated a civil war by leading his army across the Rubicon River into Italy proper, an action punishable by death. Pompey’s hastily recruited forces were no match for Caesar’s veterans, and Pompey crossed the Adriatic to gather an army. Caesar entered
Rome and then sailed to Spain, where he overcame Pompey’s supporters there. Returning to Greece, he defeated Pompey at the
battle of Pharsalus in central Greece. Pompey fled to Egypt in a merchant ship and blamed himself “
for having been forced to do battle with his land forces, while he made no use of his navy, which was indisputably superior.… And, in truth,” continues his biographer, “Pompey made no greater mistake, and Caesar showed no abler generalship, than in removing the battle so far from naval assistance.” The mistake was irreversible, and as he landed on the coast of Egypt, Pompey was murdered by order of the Ptolemaic court. When Caesar reached Egypt, he killed Pompey’s murderers and installed
Cleopatra, sister and wife of
Ptolemy XIII, as queen.

In 44
BCE
, upholders of the old republican order assassinated Caesar, only to witness the rise of a new triumvirate: Caesar’s ally and general, Marc
Antony; his eighteen-year-old nephew and designated heir, Octavian (the future emperor Augustus); and the general
Lepidus. At the
battle of Philippi, Greece, in 42
BCE
, Antony and Octavian defeated their opponents, but part of the republican fleet escaped and joined the renegade
Sextus Pompey in Sicily. Designated by the senate as
prefect of the fleet and the coastlines (
praefectus classis et orae maritimae
) the previous year, the son of Pompey the Great was keen to avenge his father’s death on Caesar’s heir. Though outnumbered, he defeated Octavian in the
Strait of Messina in 38
BCE
but was unable to press his advantage. Two years later, Octavian’s trusted general
Marcus Vipsanius
Agrippa took command of the fleet and developed a naval training station called
Portus Julius near
Puteoli on the Bay of Naples. After a summer of strenuous
campaigning in the waters around Sicily, in September 36
BCE
Agrippa won a momentous victory at the battle of Naulochus, which cost Pompey all but seventeen of perhaps two hundred ships. With Pompey in flight, when Lepidus quit the triumvirate, the contest for absolute supremacy was now between Antony and Octavian.

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.

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.