The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (27 page)

As well as a commercial and naval center, the
Bay of Naples was a resort for Rome’s richest and most influential citizens. A list of people with seaside villas and estates there in the first century
BCE
reads like a who’s who of Rome’s elite. At Puteoli itself were Caesar’s father-in-law and
Cicero, who also had estates at
Pompeii and Cumae. After leaving public life, the general Lucullus divided his time in ostentatious refinement between his estates at Misenum and Naples, while
Pompey the Great had a villa at Cumae, Caesar himself an estate at
Baiae, and Augustus a villa on the island of Capri. Emperors continued to frequent the Bay of Naples for centuries, and in the late 400s the last emperor in the west was exiled to
Lucullus’s villa. Although the villas were off-limits to the general population, the cultivated fish ponds of the larger estates around Baiae were widely known attractions (Cicero scorned several of his political opponents as “
fish-pond fanciers”), as were the region’s fish farms. According to one theory, Augustus’s decision to move
Agrippa’s naval base from Portus Julius to Misenum was to preserve the
local oyster beds. If so, this is one of the earliest known examples of environmental considerations influencing waterfront development.

The popularity of the Bay of Naples belies any suggestion that the
Romans viewed sea travel as anything unusual. Boats were the preferred means of transport for visitors from Rome, and there was even a
night service from
Ostia to Puteoli. So routine was the practice of sailing from the capital that
Nero’s elaborate conspiracy to kill his mother,
Agrippina, was predicated on her traveling by boat between her villa at Bauli and his at Baiae. While she was dining with her estranged son, her ship was rammed “accidentally,” and when she left Nero offered her “
a collapsible cabin-boat” specially designed to “either sink or fall in on top of her.” The ship foundered as intended, but Agrippina was rescued by a passing vessel. Nothing daunted, Nero had her murdered by less contrived means.

Puteoli’s successor as Rome’s premier port was Ostia. Although its location
at the mouth of the Tiber had long made it strategically important, Ostia was not integral to the city’s prosperity until the first century
BCE
. The dictator
Sulla authorized some improvements, partly in appreciation for Ostia’s loyalty during the civil war, when opposing troops sacked the port, and partly in acknowledgment of its growing commercial significance. In the middle of the first century ce, silting at the mouth of the Tiber forced
Claudius to build a large harbor at Portus, just north of Ostia proper. This was enclosed by two breakwaters more than eight hundred meters long, “
massive / Piers that reach out to embrace the deep, and leave Italy far behind—a man-made breakwater / that no natural harbor could equal.” A mole was erected across the entrance by sinking a ship in which an obelisk had been brought from Heliopolis, in Egypt: “
it was first sunk, then secured with piles, and finally crowned with a very tall lighthouse—like the
Pharos at Alexandria—that guided ships into the harbour at night by the beams of a lamp.” Half a century later, Trajan ordered the excavation of a large hexagonal basin with numbered slips and he established a new port up the coast at Centumcellae, the modern
Civitavecchia.

Even after the construction of Portus, Ostia remained the seat of the area’s commercial and cultural life. The remains of the city, which rival those of Pompeii, reveal a town of ordinary citizens rather than wealthy estate owners and their retinues. The essentially rectilinear streets were lined with three- and four-story apartment houses, many with street-level stores and offices. The main avenue extends from the Porta Marina, near the ancient shorefront, to the Porta Romana on the road to the capital. In addition to houses, offices, workshops, and laundries, the city boasted an astonishing array of religious buildings that reflect the inhabitants’ strong ties to the Roman east. Side-by- side with temples to the gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon and the imperial cults stand Christian baptisteries, a Jewish synagogue, and a host of temples to Near Eastern deities, including a dozen dedicated to the Zoroastrian divinity
Mithras, the god of contracts and thus revered by merchants. For rest and relaxation Ostians could visit a number of bathhouses decorated with maritime scenes, while the theater seated between three and four thousand people. Behind the theater is the so-called
Piazzale of the Corporations, a pillar-lined square onto which open rooms decorated with floor mosaics advertising shipwrights, stevedores, caulkers, rope dealers, chandlers, and merchants, and their destinations or specialties: grain traders from Narbo (in
Gaul), Caesarea in Mauritania (Cherchel,
Algeria), Alexandria, or Carthage; importers of wild animals for the Colosseum; grain measurers; tanners; and so on. Long thought to have been business offices, these rooms may have been gathering places for people attending the theater while the insignia advertised groups that contributed in some way to the theater or the cultural life of the city in general.

A sculptural relief of the early second century
CE
showing the arrival of a ship at Ostia as it passes the Pharos (lighthouse) with its flame blazing in the distance. Among the other figures on board, two men and a woman are offering thanks for a safe passage on a portable altar abaft the sail. The port of Rome teems with life as a man in a small boat works his way under the stern while in the lower right a man is carrying an amphora off a docked ship. The large figure gripping a trident in the center of the scene is Neptune, god of the sea. Photograph by Faraglia, D-DAI-Rom 7898. Courtesy of the Museo Torlonia/Deutsche Archäologische Institut, Rome.

Although the average freighter of antiquity carried about 120 tons of cargo, the scale of the grain trade to Rome required larger ships with a capacity of well over 1,000 tons. The description of one such vessel survives in a second-century work entitled “The Ship or the Wishes,” by
Lucian of Samosata, which tells of a grain freighter called the
Isis
that is blown off course en route from Alexandria to Rome and forced to put in at
Piraeus. Though the passage occurs in a work of fiction, the
Isis
was likely modeled on a real ship. The appearance of the huge grain carrier apparently created a minor sensation in Piraeus, where such large vessels were now a rarity.

On the basis of the linear measurements given by Lucian the capacity of the
Isis
has been estimated at 1,200 to 1,300 tons. The captain tells how the ship ended up at Piraeus after seventy days of foul winds and storms in a passage that provides important information on the route normally taken by the grain fleet: north-northeast from Alexandria, passing to the west of Cyprus, then westward along the south coast of
Asia Minor as far as Rhodes or
Cnidus. From there, the captain explains, “
They should have kept
Crete to starboard, and sailed beyond Malea,” the peninsula at the southern end of the
Peloponnese, “so as to be in
Italy by now.” In a similar incident,
the apostle Paul was aboard another Alexandrian grain carrier that was driven south and wrecked on
Malta, although all of her complement of 276 people survived.

To avoid food shortages the government made strenuous efforts to guarantee the shipment of between 150,000 and 300,000 tons of grain annually to Rome. An estimated 15 to 30 percent of this was grain paid as taxes and freighted in government ships for free distribution to the masses—
the
annona
—but most grain and other cargoes were handled by merchants whose cargoes went in smaller, privately owned ships. Investing in trade was common, commercial loans being capped at one percent per month or 12 percent per year. However, repayment of the loan depended on the safe completion of the transaction, and as a result it was a given that “
Money lent on maritime loans can bear interest at any rate because it is at risk of the
lender as long as the voyage lasts.” Shippers may have had recourse to some form of insurance. According to a biography of
Claudius, “
he held out the certainty of profit by assuming the expense of any loss that they [the merchants] might suffer from storms.” Yet this measure seems to have been intended specifically for
grain traders, for whose benefit Claudius also made improvements to Ostia, offered bounties for new ship construction, and exempted shippers from a variety of laws.

Second only to the grain trade was the
wine trade. According to one estimate, during the first century
BCE
between 50,000 and 100,000 hectoliters
(1.3–2.6 million gallons) of wine were shipped annually from Italy to
Gaul, carried in upward of 350,000 amphorae. Because wooden hulls are biodegradable and ceramic amphorae are not (although their contents leak out over time), the remains of sunken wine ships are often identified by mounds of amphorae lying on the seabed nested as they were stowed. The waters of western Italy and southern France have yielded an impressive number of finds. One of the largest is that of a forty-meter-long ship found off La Madrague de Giens, France, where it sank in the first century
BCE
with seven or eight thousand amphorae and a secondary cargo of black-gloss tableware and coarse-ware pottery, a cargo of more than three hundred tons. The wreck site was littered with large stones from the nearby Giens peninsula left by divers who recovered a significant part of the sunken cargo shortly after it sank. As sponge and pearl divers have done for centuries, the ancient salvors used the stones to speed their twenty-meter descent to the seabed. They managed to recover all but one layer of amphorae on the starboard side, while three layers were still in place to port.

Modern appreciation of
Roman seafaring has been shaped by the Romans’ own ambivalence about the sea. Maritime trade and naval power were vital to their prosperity, and according to their own foundation stories, they owed their very existence to
Aeneas’s successful flight by sea from
Troy. The maritime milieu of the first half of
Virgil’s
Aeneid
consciously echoes that of
Homer’s
Odyssey,
and when Virgil has Aeneas burn his ships upon reaching Italy it does not signify that the future rulers of Rome must abandon the sea, but that they had to fight for their land. Yet in the early imperial period, when Virgil wrote, there was a tendency to revile maritime trade, and by extension the sea itself, because commerce was at odds with the elite’s martial values. Yet there is no better indication of the importance the Romans attached to seafaring than a saying attributed to
Pompey the Great, who in 56
BCE
led a fleet to Africa for grain to ease a shortage at Rome. “
When he was about to set sail with it,” writes
Plutarch, “there was a violent storm at sea, and the ship-captains hesitated to put out; but he led the way on board and ordered them to weigh anchor, crying with a loud voice: ‘To sail is necessary; to live is not.’ ” Although Pompey’s biographer wrote in Greek, many medieval European merchant communities later adopted the Latin motto “
Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse
.”

It would be excessive to claim that the Roman Empire was a product of sea power and sea trade alone, but these were as central to its creation as the Mediterranean was to the empire itself. The empire could not have survived
had Roman institutions or sensibilities been in any practical way hostile to maritime enterprise. Perhaps the last word belongs to
Seneca, who wrote in the first century of “
god, our author…[who] gave us winds that we might get to know distant lands.… He gave us winds in order that the advantages of each region might become known to all; but not in order to carry legions and cavalry or to transport weapons to destroy mankind.” While the Romans never beat their swords into plowshares, they did contribute to the economic integration of the world they occupied, and both shaped and were shaped by the wealth of lands well beyond the Mediterranean, including those bordering the Indian Ocean.