A Companion to Mediterranean History

A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

chapter eleven

Maritime thievery is as old as the sea itself, and indeed there is good reason to regard
the Mediterranean as the birthplace of piracy. Not only the thievery itself, but the
social and legal customs that regulated it. As an extra-jurisdictional space beyond the
authority of any government, the sea was literally a lawless place, a floating frontier,
and in a place without law nothing can be, strictly speaking, illegal. What came to
regulate piracy in the Mediterranean was nothing more than custom and even a type
of professional courtesy. The societies of the sea basin hardly approved of the practice,
and they certainly never romanticized it; with time, however, they evolved their own
practical methods to deal with it and to mitigate its interruptive impact on trade.
Commerce has always entailed risks. Merchants who took to the sea tacitly accepted
piracy as one of the risks of doing business. They had to. After all, many of them were,
frequently enough, pirates themselves.

Three vignettes

Pompey the Great

Plutarch’s Life of Pompey is the star witness for information about piracy in the ancient
Mediterranean. In six vivid chapters (nos. 24–29: Perrin, 1955: 172–190) he
describes how a vast fleet of sea marauders, more than 20 000 pirates aboard 1000
ships and based in coastal hideaways in Cilicia and Crete, harassed Roman commerce,
held the populations of 400 port cities for ransom, and ransacked temples and their
treasuries everywhere. So successful were the pirates, he informs us, that many
upstanding citizens—“men of wealth and good birth”—who would otherwise never
have considered sullying themselves with the rough side of trade, rushed to get
involved, not only by investing in pirate adventures but by taking active part in them.
“For the whole business seemed to convey a degree of status and distinction.” The
pirates flaunted their daring and brio, Plutarch tells us, by rigging out their ships with
“gold-plated masts, purple sails, and even silver-plated oars—as though the pirates
took delight in their doings and prided themselves on their thievery.” Adding a splash

Piracy

cliFFord r. Backman