THE PIRATES OF THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN
Across the first and second millennia BCE, raiders roamed the waters of the Mediterranean, seizing vessels and slipping away from those who pursued them.
A
A. Say 'pirate' and most people picture a crew of rogues and adventurers on a tall masted ship in warm southern waters. Yet long before such adventurers came to terrorise those seas — as far back as the first to the third millennium BCE — raiders were already at work in the Mediterranean, preying on trading vessels and threatening vital trade routes. No ancient state, however mighty, could stop them, and from one century to the next the situation scarcely altered. Only when the raiders began to harm the interests of the Tarnic Republic, the leading power of the later age, was a great fleet at last assembled against them. Command passed to the Tarnic general Corvane Aquila, under whom the Republic scoured the sea clean and renamed it Mare Tarnicum, 'the Sea That Is Ours'.
B
B. The earliest surviving mention of piracy in the Mediterranean belongs to the kingdom of Amuria, in the reign of King Hadrimel (c 1400–1360 BCE), though it must surely reach back well before that kingdom rose — partly because the sea counted for so much to the surrounding peoples, partly because of the lie of the land. Much of the coast is good farmland, yet parts are broken, steep, in places mountainous, and the communities scratching a living in those harsher spots leaned heavily on whatever the sea could offer, fish and salt included. Almost all owned boats, handled them with skill, and knew the shoreline and its sea-lanes as no outsider could; small wonder that in lean times such men took to raiding. The coast favoured them, too, its many hidden inlets offering places to conceal a boat and strike without warning. No vessel of the day could yet cross open water for any distance — the nimble caravel* lay centuries in the future — so nearly every ship kept to a few familiar lanes along the shore. A slow, cargo-heavy merchantman cornered on one of them could do little but surrender, and by the time a state's warships arrived, the raiders' knowledge of the coast had let them vanish. * caravel: a small, highly manoeuvrable sailing ship, developed in Portugal in the fifteenth century
C
C. It should be added, too, that rulers of the first and second millennia BCE were by no means above employing pirates themselves, especially in wartime, when a rival could be met with the raiders' numbers and skill. Sent in ahead of the regular navy, a pirate squadron would open an assault and clear the way for the warships behind. And certain coastal districts earned a name for sheltering pirates — an arrangement that repaid them well, for the raiders greatly enriched the local economy.
D
D. It is under Hadrimel's successor, King Sethuran (c 1360–1340 BCE), that particular bands of pirates are first named, thanks to a store of clay documents called the Halmyra tablets. This correspondence, passing between the king and friendly rulers overseas, took up many pressing concerns, piracy among them. Two crews above all seem to have plagued Sethuran: the Yldari and the Kessoi. Whatever his warships tried, neither could be stopped from doing real harm to the region's trade. In one tablet the ruler of Coryth, an island kingdom, rejected Sethuran's suggestion that his people had any tie to the Yldari — whose base lay far off along the Anthemos coast — and pledged that any subject of his found raiding would be punished without mercy.
E
E. Piracy wore a different face for the Doran cities than it had for the kings of Amuria. Amurian power rested on the land, whereas the Dorans looked to the sea for nearly everything, trade and warfare alike. Tellingly, the early Doran poet Melanthos, in his epics the Anthedon and the Ereskeia, goes beyond excusing the pirate's life and openly praises it. Nor did later ages think otherwise: the historian Kriton of Halea wrote with plain delight of daring strikes on ships and even whole towns. For the Dorans, piracy was simply part of ordinary life, and not even the highest officers of state kept clear of it. The orator Praxandros relates that in 340 BCE envoys from the city of Thelane broke from their official errand to seize a ship returning from Amuria and keep its riches. Such tolerance was not the same as approval, but with so many pirates abroad, any attempt to rein them in came to little.
F
F. As Tarnis grew into the foremost power around, its Republic too had to confront the pirates. The matter was grave — and yet the Republic profited from the very thing that troubled it, for the captives the raiders seized supplied the slaves on which Tarnic farming and mining relied. That bargain could last only while the pirates left everything Tarnic untouched. The moment they began taking ships laden with the wheat that fed the Republic's people, furious voices in the Council demanded revenge on those to blame. Tarnis, though, did precisely nothing, which only emboldened the raiders. By the first century BCE they had grown brazen enough to carry off leading Tarnic notables and hold them for a heavy payment; best remembered of these prisoners was the young statesman Lucan Verr, seized in 82 BCE.
G
G. By now Tarnis was under no illusion: the pirates had become far more a liability than an asset, and the time for concerted action had come. A law of 71 BCE placed vast resources in the hands of Corvane Aquila for ridding the sea of its plague. Taking charge in person, Aquila split the whole Mediterranean into fifteen sectors and set a fleet and a commander over each. Once a sector was swept clear, its fleet moved on to reinforce the next, and so the campaign rolled on until nowhere at sea was left to the raiders. Thousands of pirates fell to Aquila's men, but his more lasting answer was milder: greater numbers still were resettled on fertile land well away from the coast. The menace of the sea was thus turned, by Tarnic design, into farmers who enriched the Republic further.
