The Corrupting Sea. 121
based self-sufficient Italian days before their expansion outside the peninsula, and
their collision with Carthage over Sicily was commemorated as the defining mo-
ment when they finally had to learn to sail: according to Polybius’s already heav-
ily idealizing account, before the First Punic War the Romans had no maritime
resources at all and had never had a thought for the sea.^70 The standard modern
authority on ships in the ancient world has subscribed to this dominant Roman ide-
ology and speaks of “Romans being by nature little interested in the sea,”^71 but the
real energy of the Roman debate over seafaring comes precisely from their guilty
cognitive dissonance on the subject. They knew perfectly well that they were a
mighty thalassocracy and that their city was the center of global maritime trade,^72
while simultaneously they were in thrall to a landowning value system that went
so far as to ban senators from engaging in trade or owning their own commercial
cargo ships.^73 The concept of the wickedness of the ship, as the marker of a divorce
from a happier primal state, derives much of its energy from this guilty conscious-
ness of double-think.^74
The far-reaching ramifications of the ship’s transgressiveness are expressed
with unmatched compression in Horace ’s third ode. This poem is addressed to
Virgil, the poet of the Georgics,and it addresses the main theme of the Georgics,the
paradoxical place of human beings in nature, as simultaneously guilty violators of
nature and upholders of the apparently natural order of agriculture.^75 Virgil in the
Georgicshad said very little about sailing, because the Georgicsconcentrate even
more relentlessly on farming than Hesiod ’s Works and Days.Virgil does little more
than mention the ship as one of the tokens of the Iron Age, along with fire, hunt-
ing, domestication of animals, fishing, ironworking, and agriculture (G.1.134 – 48);
he passes from riverine craft (136), “early experiments in navigation,” to the astro-
nomical skill needed for maritime navigation (137 – 38).^76 When Horace writes a
poem to the poet of the Georgicsabout the themes of the Georgics,however, he
ignores agriculture and concentrates on what lyric poets know about — sailing.^77
The occasion is a sea voyage Virgil is undertaking, and Horace prays for his safe
arrival, before turning to denounce the firstman to sail, the first to undertake the
paradoxical human mission of using fragile technology to impose his will on a
stronger nature, “entrusting a breakable ship to the cruel sea” (qui fragilem truci/
commisit pelago ratem/primus, Carm.1.3.10 – 12). The audacity of Virgil’s embark-
ing upon martial epic is part of what Horace is catching here, as his friend leaves
the Georgicsand sets course for the Aeneid;he is exploiting a Hesiodic paradigm
whereby working the land and composing poetry about working the land are both