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more of color, he credits the pirates with introducing the rites of the cult of Mithras
into Mediterranean life—“rites that survive to the present day”—that being the end
of the first century ce, when Plutarch was writing.
So great was the piratical scourge, he says, that in 67 bce the Senate coaxed Pompey
(106–48 bce) out of his post-consular retirement, gave him command of an armada
of 500 warships manned with 120 000 legionaries, and authorized him to pursue the
pirates throughout the entire sea basin and to a distance of 400 stades (roughly 47
miles or 75 kilometers) inland from the coast. Short of a dictatorship, no comparable
command had ever been awarded to an individual. Moreover, the lex Gabinia that
bestowed such extraordinary authority on Pompey awarded him his powers for a
term of three full years. He did not need them. Dividing the sea into 13 zones,
Plutarch confidently tells us, Pompey methodically delegated his forces and cleared
the entire Mediterranean of the pirates in three months: a triumph of strategic and
tactical brilliance. Then comes the moral of Plutarch’s story: recognizing that evil
men can be turned to good by changing their habits, their surroundings, and their
mode of living, Pompey decided to settle the pirates as farmers, working the soil,
rather than leave them to their maritime ways. He knew that once they had got used
to town-life they would acquire all the habits of civilized living. The real lesson of this
episode, however, is cautionary: beware of your sources, even when they bear witness
to greatness. Perhaps, especially then. Maritime thievery may well require a bit of
panache, but no seaman who intends to stay in the game very long will draw attention
to himself and waste his wealth by plating his ships’ masts and oars with precious met-
als and dyeing their sails purple. Plutarch’s tale thus rings false from the start.
Moreover, the whole history of piracy makes clear that it is a problem for which there
is no military solution; even the “golden age” of Caribbean piracy ended not because
of effective policing but because the slave trade that formed its financial backbone was
outlawed. Pompey’s 500 warships could not possibly have cleared the sea of 1000
smaller and faster pirate vessels, nor captured and/or defeated all 20 000 pirates within
50 miles of the basin’s 46 000-kilometer (28 000-mile) coastline. To believe they did
is to confess a kind of critical impotence. And yet, piracy did abate (although it never
entirely disappeared) in the aftermath of Pompey’s great sweep through the sea.
Plutarch slyly hints at the real outcome: Pompey must have simply bought off the
pirates—by offering them lands, estates, properties, annuities, and perhaps even busi-
nesses and offices that he had confiscated while in the pursuit of his well-publicized
mission to make the sea safe for commerce. Piracy, in other words, was a way to enter
the highly-competitive Mediterranean commerce, and if one was fortunate enough to
pose a significant disruption to that trade one could secure a guaranteed share of it via
a government buyout. Pompey figuratively beat the pirates’ oars into plowshares—
maybe stripping off the gold and silver in the process?—and found them some jobs.
Bernat de SarriàIn 1308, the Catalan nobleman Bernat de Sarrià, sometime admiral and ambassador
of King James II in Barcelona (r. 1295–1327), sailed to Messina on a diplomatic
errand. A decade earlier James’ younger brother, Frederick, had accepted the crown
as king of Sicily from the people of the island and was enjoying the popularity of his
first years in power. The diplomatic trouble that prompted Bernat’s visit was that the