the ancient mediterranean 67
control should not be overstated. If the sea was to be controlled more generally, it had
to be through the supervision of landing places, rather than through engagement
between ships at sea. The early treaties about maritime matters between Rome and
Carthage (Polybius, Histories, 3.21–6) show how it was through what happened in
ports that states sought to impose their will on seafarers. The normality of seafaring,
and the large numbers of people potentially engaged, at least locally, with the sea,
made political and social control difficult. It was an aspect of the suspicion of the
maritime that ancient cities closely policed their harbors; it might be better to say that
an ancient harbor was essentially a place where sea travel was subject to surveillance—
and to taxation, since one of the basic structures through which ancient cultures
depended on the world of the sea was through the revenues which communities
received from duties on travelers and on exchange. The emporion in particular, which
in some respects resembled the comptoir or the funduq of the later Mediterranean,
was an institutional as much as an economic phenomenon.
As important as the practicalities is the notion that such control could be exerted
at all, with the implication that there might be embargoes, or open and closed seas or
parts of seas. That became significant in the western Mediterranean in perceptions on
the part of Greeks at least of the aspirations of the city of Carthage to making large
parts of the sea an exclusive Carthaginian zone, though such control over maritime
spaces so much larger than the Aegean was still less plausible than in the case of the
Athenians.
Polities which were heavily involved in maintaining control of this sort successfully
represented those who escaped it and conducted exchange and predation unlicensed
and untaxed as pirates. Such seafarers could be represented, as they were most notably
when Cicero won Pompey a Mediterranean-wide command against them, as an
organized political threat, a dominion based wholly in the maritime interstices of the
networks of Mediterranean communication, an Athenian hegemony without the
hegemon. Such systems were usually labeled as criminal, piratical, as the protagonists
of maritime power had succeeded in establishing a moral domination to match their
physical power, and a framework for the recognition of acceptable, indeed, legal eco-
nomic and political activities with which to stigmatize those who failed in compliance
to the demands of the system.
The idea that traders criss-crossing the seas might be seen to form a network some-
how analogous to the malignant control of the seas by pirates was promoted by a
general hostility to commercial profiteering. Ideology apart, in their recourse to pre-
dation, and in their involvement in the slave trade, pirates and other traders often had
much in common. In reality, their behavior was not so different from other beneficiar-
ies of economic interdependence. Despite Roman commanders’ boasts—“846 ships
captured or sunk” (Pliny, Natural History, 7.97, of Pompey)—which at least help
calibrate what scale of seafaring was plausible, it was once again not the imposition of
military control but the homogenizing of governmental structures through the pro-
vincialization of all Mediterranean coastlines and their ports after Augustus that meant
that it was no longer possible to maintain such alternative circuits of exchange.
What matters here is the elaboration of concepts of larger and smaller tracts of sea
space, assigned to activities such as trade or its anti-type piracy, to sea-power based
hegemonies, or the delineation of opportunities for new settlement, and through
which the filaments of social and political loyalty ran to mesh distant shores together.