I
The relationship between Rome and the Mediterranean was already changing significantly before the fall of Carthage and of Corinth. This relationship took two forms. There was the political relationship: it was clear before the Third Punic War that the Roman sphere of influence extended to Spain in the west and to Rhodes in the east, even when the Roman Senate did not exercise direct dominion over the coasts and islands. Then there was the commercial relationship that was creating increasingly close bonds between Rome’s merchants and the corners of the Mediterranean. Yet the Senate and the merchants were distinct groups of people. Like Homer’s heroes, Roman aristocrats liked to claim that they did not sully their hands in trade, which they associated with craft, peculation and dishonesty. How could a merchant make a profit without lies, deception and bribes? Rich merchants were successful gamblers; their fortune depended on taking risks and enjoying luck.1 This condescending attitude did not prevent Romans as eminent as the Elder Cato and Cicero from commercial dealings, but naturally these were effected through agents, most of whom were Romans in a new sense.
As it gained control of Italy, Rome offered allied status to the citizens of many of the towns that fell under its rule, and also established its own colonies of army veterans. ‘Romanness’ was thus increasingly detached from the experience of living in Rome and, besides, only part of the population of the city counted as Roman citizens, with the right to vote, a right denied to women and to slaves. There may have been about 200,000 slaves in Rome around 1 BC, about one-fifth of the total population. Their experience forms an important part of the ethnic history of the Mediterranean. Captives from Carthage and Corinth might be set to work in the fields, having to endure a harsh existence far from home, ignorant of the fate of their spouses and children. Iberian captives were put to work in the silver mines of southern Spain, in unspeakable conditions. But those who could demonstrate their talents might serve as Greek tutors in a noble household, or as commercial agents for their master, even travelling overseas to trade (despite the risk that they would disappear in the fleshpots of Alexandria). Accumulating funds in the peculium, the slave’s private pot of money – though legally, like everything the slave had, this was the property of the slave’s master – a slave might eventually be able to buy freedom, or a grateful master might free his favourite slaves, often under the terms of his will. Freedmen could prosper greatly as bankers and merchants, and their children could aspire to Roman citizenship. Thus a massive immigrant population of Greeks, Syrians, Africans, Spaniards grew in Rome, and it is not surprising that Greek, the standard means of communication in the eastern Mediterranean, was the everyday language of many quarters of the city. The poet Lucan, writing in the first century AD, grumbled: ‘the city population is no longer native Roman, but the refuse of humanity: such a hodge-podge of races that we could not fight a civil war, even if we wished’.2 His snobbery possessed a tinge of self-hatred: he was born in Córdoba in southern Spain, and had been brought to Rome as a small child. Yet even the ranks of the Senate were infiltrated by the sons of freedmen, not to mention well-born Etruscans, Samnites and Latins.3 The comedian Plautus livened up one of his plays, which were awash with crafty merchants and clever slaves, with passages in the Punic language of North Africa. The confusion of languages was made even greater because the city and its outports attracted large numbers of foreign merchants: Tyrians, for the merchants of the once great Phoenician city had recovered their role in trade by the time of Augustus; Jews, who at this period included a number of shippers and sailors; south Italians, for, as will be seen, the Bay of Naples occupied a special role in Rome’s system of supply. The term ‘Roman merchant’ therefore means ‘merchant under the protection of Rome’ rather than ‘merchant of Roman descent’.
The ascendancy of Rome in the Mediterranean Sea depended on three factors: provisions to feed the vast city, ports through which the provisions could arrive and protection of its merchants – the defeat of the pirates whose presence in the eastern Mediterranean threatened the stability of the trading systems built around Alexandria, Delos and other partners of Rome.
II
Pirates go in search of prosperity. The flourishing state of trade in the second century BC created the ideal circumstances in which pirates too could flourish, especially since neither the Rhodians nor the Delians had the naval strength to clear the eastern Mediterranean of rogue shipping, particularly after Rhodes set into decline. Pirates were as much a scourge in the west as in the east. In 123–121 BC Metellus ‘Balearicus’ earned his sobriquet after suppressing a particularly pestilential form of piracy practised in the Balearic islands, which now fell under Roman rule: its pirates would paddle out to sea on what were little better than rafts, but proved an enormous nuisance.4 After the Punic capital was destroyed, there were no more Carthaginian merchants to police these waters. The Romans began to realize that they had responsibilities, and took them seriously. In 74BC the young patrician Gaius Julius Caesar was captured by pirates while he was travelling to Rhodes, where he planned to study rhetoric (he was a man of considerable learning). A big enough prize to be worth a ransom, he was treated with honour by the pirates, but even before his release he had the courage to taunt them with the promise that he would return and destroy them. He gathered together a flotilla, captured his captors, and crucified them. Since they had been so polite, he graciously had their throats cut before they were raised on their crosses.5
Small, agile fleets preyed on the shipping routes from bases in Crete, Italy and the rocky shores of south-eastern Turkey, the precipitous area known appropriately as ‘Rough Cilicia’, lying due north of Cyprus and a couple of hundred miles east of Rhodes. As trade through the once-great Etruscan cities declined, the shipowners of Etruria turned to less orthodox ways of making a profit. An inscription from Rhodes commemorates the death of the three sons of Timakrates who were killed in engagements against Tyrrhenian pirates active in the eastern Mediterranean.6 Sometimes, too, navies encouraged privateers to patrol the seas looking for particular enemies. This is what Nabis, king of Sparta, did around 200 BC, entering into an unholy alliance with Cretan pirates who raided supply ships heading towards Rome.7 Rebel Roman generals in Sicily, such as Sextus Pompeius, the son of the famous Pompey, launched their own ships and tried to block grain supplies bound for Rome, which Sextus Pompeius could easily do – as well as Sicily he had Sardinia in his grasp.8 The lords of islands and coastal ports demanded transit taxes from commercial shipping that passed through their waters, and responded to any refusal with violence. Pirates required places where they could unburden themselves of the money, goods and slaves they had seized, and their operations therefore depended on the willing collaboration of the inhabitants of several minor ports such as Attaleia that attracted innumerable fences, hustlers, traffickers and tricksters. The Cilician pirates managed to sustain whole communities on the southern edges of the Taurus Mountains. They were speakers of Luvian, living in clan-based societies in which both male and female descent was taken seriously, and they were governed by elders or tyrannoi.9 The crews of the pirate ships were mountain men who migrated down to the coast and took to ships, though they cannot have learned the skills of seamanship without a great amount of help from the sailors of Side and Attaleia on the coast. According to the geographer Strabo, the people of Side allowed the Cilician pirates to hold slave auctions on the quayside, even though they knew that the captives were freeborn.10 Plutarch described the lightly built boats that they used so effectively:
Their ships had gilded masts at their stems; the sails woven of purple, and the oars plated with silver, as if their delight were to glory in their iniquity. There was nothing but music and dancing, banqueting and revels, all along the shore.11
By 67 BC pirates had reached the doorstep of Rome itself, with attacks on the port of Ostia and along the coast of Italy.12 Plutarch added:
This piratic power having got the dominion and control of all the Mediterranean, there was left no place for navigation or commerce. And this it was which most of all made the Romans, finding themselves to be extremely straitened in their markets, and considering that if it should continue, there would be a dearth and famine in the land, determined at last to send out Pompey to recover the seas from the pirates.13
Pompey had already distinguished himself (or made enemies, depending on which side one supported) in the power struggles within Rome.14 He intended to provide a permanent, global solution to the problem of piracy. In 66 BC he divided the Mediterranean into thirteen zones, each of which would be systematically cleared of pirates. First, he addressed the problem of piracy close to home, sweeping the Tyrrhenian Sea clean of pirates. He took a fleet to Sicily, North Africa and Sardinia, placing garrisons in what Cicero called ‘these three granaries of the state’ and guaranteeing the lifeline of Rome herself.15 This work is said to have taken forty days. After that he was ready to pounce on Cilicia, but news of his achievements in the west outpaced his fleet, and as soon as he hove into sight of the Cilician coast towns began to surrender to him. Fighting at sea and on land was quite limited.16 He had arrived with perhaps fifty warships and fifty transports: not a massive fleet, though the light boats of the Cilicians would be no match in battle, and the Roman People had voted him 500 ships if that was what he needed.17 Pompey’s aim was not to exterminate the pirates but to end piracy: instead of massacring his enemy he accepted their surrender and resettled them, offering them agricultural land.18 The Senate had offered to support Pompey for three years; Pompey’s campaign took three months. Piracy was henceforth a low-level irritant rather than a great scourge that threatened Rome’s supply lines.
Pompey used the war against the pirates as a springboard for the creation of a large Roman dominion in Syria and Palestine, whose stability depended not just on Roman armies but on the recognition by local kings that an alliance with Rome was the best way to guarantee their own authority.19Pompey did not, however, intend to make the East his sole domain. Roman domination of the eastern Mediterranean was a by-product of the vicious civil wars that pitched Pompey the Great against Julius Caesar, Brutus against both Mark Antony and Octavian, and Mark Antony against Octavian, the future Augustus Caesar. In 48 BC the partisans of Pompey and those of Gaius Julius Caesar met in battle at Pharsalus in north-western Greece (‘this is what they wished on themselves’, Julius Caesar remarked as he contemplated the enemy dead).20 Pompey fled to Egypt; lured into a trap, he was stabbed to death just as he reached what he imagined to be the safety of the shore. The one great territory in the eastern Mediterranean that still remained outside Roman control was Egypt: ‘a loss if destroyed, a risk to annex, a problem to govern’.21 But Julius Caesar arrived in hot pursuit of Pompey two days after his rival was killed; he immediately saw an opportunity to build Roman influence within Egypt, by offering his support to the charming, intelligent and wily (though probably not very beautiful) Queen Cleopatra in a struggle for power with her brother King Ptolemy XIII. As has been seen, Caesar achieved his aims by bombarding Alexandria and has been accused of destroying all or part of the Library. He was able to station Roman troops in Egypt, nominally for the protection of the still independent queen. Whether or not he had conquered Egypt, Cleopatra conquered him, and a son was born, named Ptolemy Caesar, whom the queen took with her to Rome and who was generally assumed to be Caesar’s child. The sight of a Roman general whose son might be a future Pharaoh alarmed Roman politicians, suggesting that Caesar too had royal ambitions – even if most historians would argue that ‘Caesar was slain for what he was, not for what he might become’.22
After Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, the rivalries of the Roman politicians threatened to take Egypt out of the Roman sphere once again. Although Caesar’s heir, Octavian, and Caesar’s friend Mark Antony wreaked revenge on his assassins at the battle of Philippi near the northern shores of the Aegean in 42, their own relations deteriorated. The victorious leaders appointed themselves as Triumvirs and divided the Roman world, Octavian taking charge of the west, Mark Antony of Egypt and the east, and Lepidus gaining rights in Africa. The idea was not to carve Rome’s dominions into three but to assert the new regime and reorganize the provinces. Mark Antony granted Cleopatra several Phoenician cities, towns in ‘Rough’ Cilicia and the whole of Cyprus (annexed in 58BC). Cilicia was worthwhile, because it had long been used as a source of timber, as were Phoenicia and Cyprus. Nonetheless, Antony was the next great Roman to be seduced by the charms of Cleopatra, and his detractors insisted that he saw himself as a future king of Egypt. Or was it his wish that Alexandria would become the new capital of a pan-Mediterranean empire? After a campaign against the Armenians he conducted a Roman Triumph in the streets of Alexandria, an event without precedent there.23 After this, the mistrust between Octavian and Antony was increasingly obvious, and their struggle for power became an open war.
Octavian’s great public victory was won in 31 BC not in Egypt but in north-western Greece, at sea at Actium, close to the Ionian islands. Antony had the larger fleet and a good supply line all the way to Egypt; what he lacked was the loyalty of those he saw as his allies. They began to desert, and, faced by a blockade of Octavian’s ships, Antony managed to break through with forty vessels and fled to Alexandria.24 Whether this was really a great battle is far from certain, but Octavian was fully alive to its propaganda value.
Young Caesar, on the stern, in armour bright,
Here leads the Romans and their gods to fight:
His beamy temples shoot their flames afar;
And o’er his head is hung the Julian star.
And on the other side is the miscreant Antony:
Ranged on the line opposed, Antonius brings
Barbarian aids, and troops of eastern kings,
The Arabians near, and Bactrians from afar,
Of tongues discordant, and a mingled war:
And, rich in gaudy robes, amidst the strife,
His ill fate follows him – the Egyptian wife
(Sequitur, nefas, Aegyptia coniunx).25
Actium has thus been celebrated for millennia as one of the decisive battles in world history. Its result was to win for Octavian the fame and approval back in Italy of which he had been short; his victory ensured that the eastern Mediterranean would remain tied to Rome for three centuries, until the founding of a New Rome at Constantinople created a new balance of power.
Antony survived for a year in Egypt, until Octavian’s armies invaded from east and west; defeated in battle, he killed himself, and was followed a few days later by the last of the Pharaohs, Cleopatra. Whether she poisoned herself with an asp is a detail. What is important is that Octavian was now master of Egypt. He showed an immediate understanding of the heritage he had seized. He would rule like a Pharaoh, to all intents keeping Egypt as his personal domain, and governing through viceroys directly accountable to him rather than to the Senate and People of Rome who notionally exercised sovereign authority there.26 He understood that Egypt’s greatest treasure was not emeralds or porphyry, but ears of Nilotic wheat.
The war against piracy, the acquisition of large tracts of land in the eastern Mediterranean and the Roman civil wars therefore had dramatic political and economic consequences for the Mediterranean. The Romans henceforth guaranteed the safety of the seas from the Straits of Gibraltar to the coasts of Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor. The integration of the Mediterranean into a Roman lake was complete. The process had taken 116 years. The first phase stretched from the fall of Carthage and Corinth to the Cilician campaign of 66 BC. The second, much shorter, phase culminated in Octavian’s acquisition of Egypt. Having defeated his rivals, Octavian transformed himself into Augustus Caesar, the Princeps or leader of the Roman world. His victory in the civil wars is often seen as the moment when a new order came into being and Imperial Rome was born, with the added help of propagandist poets and historians such as Virgil, Horace and Livy. But the new, imperial order was also created by the extension of Roman rule as far east as Egypt. The Mediterranean had become mare nostrum, ‘our sea’, but the ‘our’ referred to a much larger idea of Rome than the Senate and People of Rome itself, Senatus Populusque Romanus. Roman citizens, freedmen, slaves and allies swarmed across the Mediterranean: traders, soldiers and captives criss-crossed the sea. They carried with them a predominantly Hellenistic culture, which had penetrated deeply into Rome itself (the poets and dramatists such as Virgil, Plautus and Terence owed concepts, contents and metre to Greek models); it was a culture that was increasingly infused with themes of eastern origin, long familiar on the streets of Alexandria but now common currency in Rome herself: the cult of Isis, portrayed by Apuleius in his burlesque novel The Golden Ass; the cult of the God of Israel, brought to Rome by Jewish merchants and captives even before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70. At the centre of the network lay Rome, a swarming, cosmopolitan city whose million inhabitants needed to be fed. The acquisition of Egypt assured supplies of grain, and thereby guaranteed the popularity of imperial rule.
III
The grain trade was not simply a source of profit for Rome’s merchants. In 5 BC Augustus Caesar distributed grain to 320,000 male citizens; he proudly recorded this fact in a great public inscription commemorating his victories and achievements, for holding the favour of the Romans was as important as winning victories at sea and on land.27 The era of ‘bread and circuses’ was beginning, and cultivating the Roman People was an art many emperors well understood (baked bread was not in fact distributed until the third century AD, when Emperor Aurelian substituted bread for grain).28 By the end of the first century BC Rome controlled several of the most important sources of grain in the Mediterranean, those in Sicily, Sardinia and Africa that Pompey had been so careful to protect. One result may have been a decline in cultivation of grain in central Italy: in the late second century BC, the Roman tribune Tiberius Gracchus already complained that Etruria was now given over to great estates where landlords profited from their flocks, rather than from the soil.29 Rome no longer had to depend on the vagaries of the Italian climate for its food supply, but it was not easy to control Sicily and Sardinia from afar, as the conflict with the rebel commander Sextus Pompeius proved. More and more elaborate systems of exchange developed to make sure that grain and other goods flowed towards Rome. As Augustus transformed the city, and as great palaces rose on the Palatine hill, demand for luxury items – silks, perfumes, ivory from the Indian Ocean, fine Greek sculptures, glassware, chased metalwork from the eastern Mediterranean – burgeoned. Earlier, in 129 BC, Ptolemy VIII, king of Egypt, received a Roman delegation led by Scipio, conqueror of Carthage, and caused deep shock when he entertained his guests to lavish feasts dressed in a transparent tunic made of silk (probably from China), through which the Romans could see not just his portly frame but his genitals. But Scipio’s austerity was already unfashionable among the Roman nobility.30 Even the equally austere Cato the Elder (d. 149 BC) used to buy 2 per cent shares in shipping ventures, spreading his investments across a number of voyages, and he sent a favoured freedman, Quintio, on these voyages as his agent.31
The period from the establishment of Delos as a free port (168–167 BC) to the second century AD saw a boom in maritime traffic. As has been seen, the problem of piracy diminished very significantly after 69 BC: journeys became safer. Interestingly, most of the largest ships (250 tons upwards) date from the second and first centuries BC, while the majority of vessels in all periods displaced less than 75 tons. Larger ships, carrying armed guards, were better able to defend themselves against pirates, even if they lacked the speed of the smaller vessels. As piracy declined, smaller ships became more popular. These small ships would have been able to carry about 1,500 amphorae at most, while the larger ships could carry 6,000 or more, and were not seriously rivalled in size until the late Middle Ages.32 The sheer uniformity of cargoes conveys a sense of the regular rhythms of trade: about half the ships carried a single type of cargo, whether wine, oil or grain. Bulk goods were moving in ever larger quantities across the Mediterranean. Coastal areas with access to ports could specialize in particular products for which their soil was well suited, leaving the regular supply of essential foodstuffs to visiting merchants. Their safety was guaranteed by the pax romana, the Roman peace that followed the suppression of piracy and the extension of Roman rule across the Mediterranean.
The little port of Cosa on a promontory off the Etruscan coastline provides impressive evidence for the movement of goods around the Mediterranean at this time. Its workshops turned out thousands of amphorae at the instigation of a noble family of the early imperial age, the Sestii, who made their town into a successful industrial centre. Amphorae from Cosa have been found in a wreck at Grand-Congloué near Marseilles: most of the 1,200 jars were stamped with the letters SES, the family’s mark. Another wreck lying underneath this one dates from 190–180 BC, and contained amphorae from Rhodes and elsewhere in the Aegean, as well as huge amounts of south Italian tableware on its way to southern Gaul or Spain. Items such as these could penetrate inland for great distances, though bulk foodstuffs tended to be consumed on or near the coasts, because of the difficulty and expense of transporting them inland, except by river. Water transport was immeasurably cheaper than land transport, a problem that, as will be seen, faced even a city such a short way from the sea as Rome.33
Grain was the staple foodstuff, particularly the triticum durum, hard wheat, of Sicily, Sardinia, Africa and Egypt (hard wheats are drier than soft, so they keep better), though real connoisseurs preferred siligo, a soft wheat made from naked spelt.34 A bread-based diet only filled stomachs, and acompanaticum (‘something-with-bread’) of cheese, fish or vegetables broadened the diet. Vegetables, unless pickled, did not travel well, but cheese, oil and wine found markets across the Mediterranean, while the transport by sea of salted meat was largely reserved for the Roman army.35Increasingly popular was garum, the stinking sauce made of fish innards, which was poured into amphorae and traded across the Mediterranean. Excavations in Barcelona, close to the cathedral, have revealed a sizeable garum factory amid the buildings of a medium-sized imperial town.36 It took about ten days with a following wind to reach Alexandria from Rome, a distance of 1,000 miles; in unpleasant weather, the return journey could take six times as long, though shippers would hope for about three weeks. Navigation was strongly discouraged from mid-November to early March, and regarded as quite dangerous from mid-September to early November and from March to the end of May. This ‘close season’ was observed in some degree right through the Middle Ages as well.37
A vivid account of a winter voyage that went wrong is provided by Paul of Tarsus in the Acts of the Apostles. Paul, a prisoner of the Romans, was placed on board an Alexandrian grain ship setting out for Italy from Myra, on the south coast of Anatolia; but it was very late in the sailing season, the ship was delayed by the winds, and by the time they were off Crete the seas had become dangerous. Rather than wintering in Crete, the captain was foolhardy enough to venture out into the stormy seas, on which his vessel was tossed for a miserable fortnight. The crew ‘lightened the ship and cast out the wheat into the sea’. The sailors managed to steer towards the island of Malta, beaching the ship, which, nevertheless, broke up. Paul says that the travellers were treated well by the ‘barbarians’ who inhabited the island; no one died, but Paul and everyone else became stuck on Malta for three months. Maltese tradition assumes that Paul used this time to convert the islanders, but Paul wrote of the Maltese as if they were credulous and primitive – he cured the governor’s sick father and was taken for a god by the natives. Once conditions at sea had improved, another ship from Alexandria that was wintering there took everyone off; he was then able to reach Syracuse, Reggio on the southern tip of Italy and, a day out from Reggio, the port of Puteoli in the Bay of Naples, to which the first grain ship had probably been bound all along; from there he headed towards Rome (and, according to Christian tradition, his eventual beheading).38
Surprisingly, the Roman government did not create a state merchant fleet similar to the fleets of the medieval Venetian republic; most of the merchants who carried grain to Rome were private traders, even when they carried grain from the emperor’s own estates in Egypt and elsewhere.39Around 200 AD, grain ships had an average displacement of 340 to 400 tons, enabling them to carry 50,000 modii or measures of grain (1 ton equals about 150 modii); a few ships reached 1,000 tons but there were also, as has been seen, innumerable smaller vessels plying the waters. Rome probably required about 40 million measures each year, so that 800 shiploads of average size needed to reach Rome between spring and autumn. In the first century AD, Josephus asserted that Africa provided enough grain for eight months of the year, and Egypt enough for four months.40 All this was more than enough to cover the 12,000,000 measures required for the free distribution of grain to 200,000 male citizens.41 Central North Africa had been supplying Rome ever since the end of the Second Punic War, and the short, quick journey to Italy was intrinsically safer than the long haul from Alexandria.42
Large numbers of merchants travelled from the grain-exporting cities of the North African coast to Ostia, where they gathered around the portico now known as the Piazzale delle Corporazioni.43 Desiccation and erosion had not yet spoiled the African soil, which benefited from an ideal cycle of winter rains followed by dry summers.44 The emperor himself saw excellent opportunities there: Nero confiscated estates from six of the greatest landowners, and was credited by the Elder Pliny with acquiring half of the province of Africa (roughly modern Tunisia).45 It was transformed from a prosperous region that mainly supplied its own cities, especially Carthage, into a region that supplied much wider areas of the central Mediterranean, especially Rome and Italy. Not just lands under Roman rule but the territories of the autonomous Mauretanian kings were drawn into this network, while other goods also reached Rome from Africa: figs (Cato the Elder alleged they arrived in three days), truffles and pomegranates for the tables of the richer Romans; lions and leopards for the Roman amphitheatres.46 From the second century AD onwards, the emperors encouraged African peasants to occupy marginal lands, for Italian production was falling and was insufficient even for the Italian population, let alone the rest of the empire. Hadrian’s officials in North Africa wrote: ‘our Caesar, in the untiring zeal with which he constantly guards human needs has ordered all parts of land which are suitable for olives or vines, as well as for grain, to be cultivated’.47 Irrigation and damming were practised, to capture and distribute the winter rains, and the system put in place disintegrated only in the eleventh century, following Arab raids; a mixed agricultural economy flourished, as did the pottery industry – ‘African red-slip ware’ exported overseas provides important evidence for patterns of trade in the later Roman Empire.48 The intensification and commercialization of African agriculture was thus the result of Roman initiatives. The Mediterranean had become a well-integrated area of exchange as Roman power and influence spread to every corner of the sea.
From the perspective of the imperial fisc, Egyptian grain had some advantages over African. It was not directed solely towards Rome, for Egypt continued to supply large areas of the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean. Alexandria was seen as a highly reliable source, guaranteed by the annual Nile floods, whereas the grain supplies of what are now Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya fluctuated, and had to be obtained from a large number of centres.49 Most importantly, the grain supply of the Roman Empire did not depend on a single, fragile source in an age when famine occasionally struck fertile lands such as Sicily; there were even rare and frightening famines in Egypt.50 With access to the supplies of the entire Mediterranean, these shortages became a minor anxiety. Rome was fed; the emperors celebrated the grain distribution on their coins. In AD 64–6, Nero alluded directly to the grain supply on some exceptionally elegant bronze coins (as one might expect from this self-proclaimed arbiter of taste). Ceres holds ears of wheat and faces another figure, Annona (‘Harvest’), who holds a cornucopia; in the middle there is an altar on which a grain measure has been placed, and in the background the stern of a grain ship is visible.51
IV
Once the grain, oil and wine had arrived in Italy, they had somehow to be brought to Rome, whose position ten miles from the sea was compromised by the winding route of the river Tiber and the lack of good quays in Rome itself. The solution in the age of Augustus was to bring the grain first of all to the Bay of Naples, where a large, well-sheltered port existed at Puteoli, now the Neapolitan suburb of Pozzuoli. From there it was loaded on to smaller vessels that carried it up the Campanian and Latin coast to the Tiber, for there were no good harbours between Cosa in Etruria and Gaeta on the border between Latium and Campania. Accordingly, Nero (d. AD 68) planned to construct a great canal wide enough for two quinquiremes to pass one another, linking the port of Ostia to the Bay of Naples, so as to avoid cumbersome and sometimes perilous journeys along the Italian coast. When this massive project faltered, some impetus was given to the expansion of the ports at the mouth of the Tiber, most importantly Ostia, whose extensive remains bear witness to its business links with Africa, Gaul and the East: more of Ostia shortly.
Puteoli received advance news of the arrival of grain fleets:
Today without warning the Alexandrian tabellariae came into view. These are the ships which they always send on ahead to give the news that the fleet is on its way. This is a very welcome sight for the Campanians; the whole population of Puteoli settles down on the quayside and tries to spot the Alexandrian ships by the type of rigging.52
This could be done because a special type of sail was reserved to the Alexandrian grain fleet, ‘and all the ships hoist it high on their masts’. Emperor Gaius Caligula (d. AD 41) was proud of the Alexandria fleet based at Puteoli, and discouraged the Jewish prince Herod Agrippa from returning to Judaea by way of Brindisi, Greece and Syria, urging him to take ship from Puteoli – the Alexandria captains were famous for driving their ships like charioteers. Within days of his departure from Puteoli, Herod Agrippa had arrived in Egypt.53 Puteoli became famous for its cement, made out of volcanic dust and used in concrete all over Italy. Most importantly, this cement was used in the building of jetties and moles to accommodate even the largest ships.54 Puteoli was already a centre for trade in luxury goods such as Greek marble or Egyptian papyrus and glass when Egypt fell into Roman hands. Puteolan merchants were active at Delos, where there was a lively contingent of south Italian traders. The Delian connection brought many slaves to Italy by way of Puteoli. Like Rome itself, Puteoli was host to a very heterogeneous population, with little colonies of Phoenician merchants from Tyre, of Nabataeans from the desert lands beyond Palestine, of Egyptians who introduced the cult of Sarapis.55 The Phoenicians had once been a great force in Puteoli, but by AD 174 they had fallen on hard times, and wrote to the city fathers in Tyre asking them to defray the large rent they had to pay for their offices and warehouses, which, they said, were grander than those of other nations:
In former days the Tyrians living at Puteoli were responsible for its maintenance; they were numerous and rich. But now we are reduced to a small number, and owing to the expenses that we have to meet for the sacrifices and the worship of our national gods, who have temples here, we have not the necessary resources to pay for the rent of the station, a sum of 100,000 denarii a year.56
A temple was also erected to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva by the merchants ‘who trade in Alexandria, Asia and Syria’.57 Fine public buildings were constructed, at the expense of the wealthiest families of the city. Puteoli was probably the unnamed Campanian city in which Petronius, a courtier of Nero, situated his scandalous novel the Satyricon. One of the central figures, Trimalchio, is a freed slave who has made his fortune at sea, lost it (‘Neptune devoured 30,000,000 sesterces in a single day’), started again from scratch, and has now retired with assets of many millions of sesterces.58
Whether or not there existed freedmen as successful as the fictional Trimalchio, the evidence that freedmen played a major role in the business life of the port is clear. A remarkable series of wax tablets, discovered in Pompeii, bears witness to the financial affairs of the Sulpicii, bankers of Puteoli; 127 documents survive, mostly from between AD 35 and AD 55.59 One of the documents is a loan of a thousand denarii made to Menelaus, a free-born Greek from Caria in Asia Minor, by the slave Primus, agent of the merchant Publius Attius Severus. Severus’ name also appears in a completely different place: stamped on amphorae that contained fish-sauce exported from the Iberian peninsula to Rome. Menelaus owned his own cargo vessel, and the loan is thought to have been an advance payment for the carriage of a consignment of garum being shipped from Puteoli to Rome.60 All this suggests how Puteoli was linked into the wider Mediterranean world – home to a Greek skipper, with links to a wealthy Roman trader in Spanish fish-sauce. The presence of a slave acting as Severus’ trusted agent some way from his home base in Rome was far from unusual. Greek bankers in the heyday of Athens had been familiar with some of the banking techniques adopted at Puteoli. What is novel is the way such operations now encompassed the whole Mediterranean, from the garum factories of Spain to Egypt. Credit consisted not just of cash advances in hard coin or commodities: the word ‘credit’ (meaning ‘he believes’ in Latin) conveys a sense of trust. Cooperation and trust were easier and more effective in the era of Roman peace.
It was grain that really made the fortune of Puteoli; it has been estimated that 100,000 tons passed through it each year around this time.61 Handling grain generated a myriad of tasks for slaves and paid labourers: whether grain was loaded in sacks or poured into containers, it had to be unloaded at its Italian port of arrival and reloaded on to smaller ships or barges for the journey to Rome. It was checked for quality and it was, of course, taxed. It had to be stored either in the ports or in Rome itself, and storing grain is not a straightforward operation, since it must be protected from dangerous moulds, insects and mice, meaning that it has to be aerated and kept at the right temperature.62 The grain merchants had to rent rooms in storehouses, some of which were enormous: the Horrea Galbana in Rome offered over 140 rooms on the ground floor, and the Grandi Horrea on the coast at Ostia provided sixty ground-floor rooms.63 Puteoli was also well placed for those in search of a market for eastern luxuries, such as the products of the India trade that passed through Alexandria, for it gave access to the summer retreats of the senatorial aristocracy at Baiae, Herculaneum and Stabiae; it stood close to Naples, still a thriving city, and the satellite towns of Naples such as Pompeii.
Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber, gradually took the lead, replacing Puteoli as the principal port of call for the ships carrying goods intended for Rome. Its origins can be traced back to the fifth century BC when Rome and Veii competed for control of the saltpans at the Tiber mouth, but for long Ostia consisted of little more than a roadstead in an estuary. There were building programmes under Augustus and Tiberius, but only under Claudius was a real effort made to provide harbour facilities close to Rome, and in AD 42 a new harbour two miles north of the Tiber began to be constructed, known by the simple name Portus. The aim was not to undercut Puteoli, so much as to provide safe access for Rome’s grain. Unfortunately, Claudius’ breakwaters and moles proved inadequate: inAD 62, 200 ships within the harbour were wrecked by a sudden tempest. Within a century, the Emperor Trajan enhanced Ostia’s Portus by building a more secure and spectacular hexagonal harbour inside Claudius’ harbour. Under his successor Hadrian large areas containing warehouses and shops were rebuilt. Ostia was full of solid brick-built apartment blocks on several floors – it had a somewhat middle-class atmosphere right through to the fourth century, and many of the poorer migrants who set foot on its quayside headed for the tenements of Rome instead.64
V
After Octavian won power, all the shores of the Mediterranean and all its islands were under Roman rule or within the Roman sphere of influence: it was indeed mare nostrum.65 His victory ushered in a remarkable period of over 200 years of peace across the Mediterranean. Of course, there were occasional outbursts of piracy, for example by the Mauretanians in the far west of North Africa, an area where Roman control was relatively weak: in AD 171–2 Moorish pirates raided Spain and Africa, and the emperor, Marcus Aurelius, enlarged the Roman fleet to deal with this menace. But when Roman navies engaged in warfare, they generally did so away from the Mediterranean, for there were also large fleets as far away as Britain and along the Rhine and Danube, where they kept Germanic raiders at bay. Even instability at the very heart of the empire did not fundamentally destroy the peace of the Mediterranean. During the tumultuous ‘Year of the Four Emperors’ in AD 68–9, following the suicide of Nero, Emperor Otho recruited thousands of sailors to block the threat posed by his rival, and eventual supplanter, Vitellius. Otho could count on the support of the two Italian navies, based at Ravenna and at Misenum, very close to Puteoli. The final victor in 69, Vespasian, also used naval power, but differently: from his base in Egypt he first blocked the grain traffic to Rome, and then, as he approached Rome, he showed generosity by releasing these food supplies to the Roman People, fatally undermining Vitellius.66 Later, navies served the emperors when armies had to be transported to (say) Africa, to quell regional revolts. Trajan sent fleets to Cyrenaica, Egypt and Syria to suppress a widespread Jewish rebellion in 115–16.67 Sailors were sometimes expected to fight on land once they reached their destination, but great naval battles similar to those of the Punic Wars were the stuff of literature, not something sailors could expect to experience.
It is not surprising that the Roman navy has received far less attention than Greek navies or that relentless, ruthless arm of the state, the Roman army. The assumption is that the navy did not do very much in the era of pax romana. Service in the navy was not rated as highly as army service. In the second century a legionary soldier transferred of his own volition to the navy; he was punished for unacceptable behaviour.68 Yet there were many for whom service in the navy was a matter of pride. An Egyptian papyrus of the early second century AD records how a certain Sempronius was grieved to hear that his son Gaius had been persuaded not to join the fleet, as he had originally planned: ‘see to it that you are not so persuaded, or else you will no longer be my son … You will do well to enter a fine service.’69 But recruitment to the fleet had important social consequences. Sailors in the Mediterranean hailed from right across the Roman world, including men from inland regions such as Pannonia (along the Danube); there were very many Greeks, not surprisingly, and also a large number of Egyptians, not just Greeks settled in Egypt but people of native Egyptian descent. These people brought their gods with them, and Sarapis was widely venerated by sailors in the Roman navy, whether or not the sailors were of Egyptian origin: ‘Sarapis is great on the sea, and both merchantmen and warcraft are guided by him.’70 The mixture of gods was entirely typical of the Roman world. But there were also pressures in the other direction. Entering a service where Latin was the language of command, recruits sought to Latinize and Romanize themselves, taking Latin names:
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.