Pirates of the Mediterranean

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Now, getting some fresh air before going back this afternoon to prepare for upcoming ancients interviews tomorrow now today's episode it's all about pirates in the ancient mediterranean great topic really interesting conversation i'm also very excited about this one because it's another of our irregular but i'd say special episodes where we have not one but two interviewees i've been keen to get more of these episodes on the podcast ever since we did the fall of roman britain last year and i'm delighted to say that we are continuing to do that i love the rapport that you have with two interviewees who get on really well together.

This was a really fun chat.

I hope you enjoy.

Without further ado, let's get into it.

150 BC.

The Roman Republic has expanded to conquer the western Mediterranean and mainland Greece.

They had recently defeated the Macedonian king Perseus, ending the Antigonid dynasty and taking direct control of Alexander the Great's former kingdom.

Further east, across the Aegean, other Hellenistic successor kingdoms of Alexander still exist, but are in decline.

Kingdoms like the Seleucids in Syria and the Ptolemies in Egypt.

The Romans now dominated the central Mediterranean, supported by allies such as the island of Rhodes and the Atelid kingdom centered on Pergamum in what is today western Turkey.

Times were changing.

Rome was coming more and more onto the scene, impacting kingdoms, but also the maritime trade routes that hugged the eastern Mediterranean coastlines.

Trade routes that went from Alexandria in Egypt to the island of Delos in the central Aegean to Athens and beyond.

The Romans wanted to replace the strong powers that once dominated this region with weaker factions they could control.

The result was a power vacuum and the emergence of rampant piracy.

Sailors turning from trading to raiding and ultimately becoming a menace for the Romans themselves, a terrifying problem of their own making.

In the second and first centuries BC, piracy exploded across the ancient Mediterranean.

Groups of fast light ships soon spread across the seas, raiding trade routes, capturing Roman diplomats and nobles, and acting everywhere from the Balearic Balearic Islands to the Levant.

They had interactions with several great enemies of Rome, including King Mithridates VI of Pontus and the Roman renegade Quintus Satorius in Spain.

These pirates challenged the fledgling Roman idea that the Mediterranean was their sea, until their power was finally curbed by the famous Roman statesman Gennaeus Pompeius Magnus, Pompey the Great.

In particular, these pirates became associated with one key region, a region in what is today southeast Turkey, Rough Cilicia, a narrow stretch of coastline between present-day Alanya and Silifke, with the Mediterranean to its front and Great Mountains to its rear.

So who were the Cilician pirates?

Why did they rise to prominence at this time?

What do we know about their strongholds on Turkey's southern coastline, places like Korakesion and Kragas?

And how did they challenge Roman control in the Mediterranean?

Joining me to talk all about this and more, we have two experts on the topic, Dr.

Nick Rao from Purdue University and Dr.

Adam Dawson.

Both Nick and Adam are experts on the Cilician pirates and the archaeology associated with them, particularly in Cilicia.

So enjoy as we delve deep into the story of these fascinating ancient pirates and how they spread across the entire Mediterranean.

Nick, Adam, it is a pleasure to have you both on the podcast today.

Yes, great to be here.

And it's great to have both of you here to talk about the Silician pirates.

I mean, Nick, first of all, who are the Silician pirates and can we call them pirates of the ancient Mediterranean?

Yes, I think we can.

You have to put it in its proper historical context.

I often say it's this moment sort of at the end of the period of Roman conquest of the Mediterranean.

late second, early first centuries BC.

And we have this polarity, if you want.

You have the western Mediterranean, which had been pretty well taken over by the Romans.

Everything's provincial.

It's all kind of under their control.

And then we have the vestiges of the Hellenistic world.

So the successor states of Alexander, far more vibrant part of the Mediterranean population was large and what have you, but it was kind of tiltering.

Things were collapsing, the Seleucid Empire, for example.

And it's precisely at this juncture when Rome was on the verge of, if you want, finishing its conquest, that I like to think of of it as sort of all these loose nuts are rolling around.

They haven't quite been locked in one way or the other.

And in particular, maritime laborers have the advantage of mobility.

They tend to be people of a very low economic status.

They tend to be, as far as we know, we don't have a lot of sources about them, but they tend to be sort of runaway slaves, convicts.

young boys that have been sold into slavery by their families.

And so sort of the labor element that was sort of pushed off the soil onto these rickety ships in this dangerous maritime environment.

So you got to start with the fact that sailing in particular was a dangerous enterprise and sort of the lowest of the lower are stuck on doing this labor.

At the same time, the Mediterranean, this is how the economy worked.

This is how communications worked.

And in this period, despite all the violence, Really vibrant trade, really vibrant trade.

We're seeing these networks, the Rhodians sending sending trade all the way up the rivers of the Rhone, all the way to the central part of Gaul, the Romans moving from the west to the east and dumping all this wine and oil at places like Belos.

And so these sailors play an integral role in the economy of the Mediterranean.

And as some sailors, let's just say, slip over to piracy because of harsh treatment, because of harsh conditions.

They are skilled in the sense that they know how to sail, they know the routes, they know the choke points of their former employers.

And so they're in a position to really kind of cause trouble.

You might think of it that way.

And Adam, what's the whole idea behind these pirates seeming to get this general name of Cilicia, if in fact, when we're talking about this, we're not just going to be talking about that past the Mediterranean, it's going to be a larger context too?

I think that's a really good point.

And one of the things it's important to know about the Romans is they really liked using a regional term in a pejorative sense.

So every single untrustworthy person becomes a Phoenician, every single luxurious person becomes a Greek, every single person who's sailing the seas and doing it in a way that the Romans aren't really on board with, they become a Cilician or they become a pirate and then that pirate becomes a Cilician.

So while we do sort of see

Cilicians mentioned everywhere, they sort of span from Spain all the way up into the Seleucid Empire, so right where what we would call the Levant is now, we're probably looking at a very broad, diverse group of people that the Romans have kind of lumped in together into one sort of general term.

Is it kind of like, I mean, I might think of with my Hellenistic background and military history, how you see quite a lot in the texts around this time and before the use of like Tarentine cavalry to describe skirmisher cavalry with like javelin and shield linking to that particular city of Tarentum in southern Italy.

But actually, it's not actually saying that they all come from Tarentum.

It was just a particular style that becomes associated with that that part of the mediterranean with cilician it's the same there is a strong link to that past the mediterranean that region in what is today southeast turkey but it is not just exclusively that i think that's a really good point yes when we sort of talk about cilician pirates cilicia is on a choke point it has these very jagged coastlines which are very good for hiding ships in it's very amenable to sort of fast light ships that you can beach very easily on land and i think when we see cilicians in other parts of the Mediterranean, they're doing that same sort of thing, that same sort of practice in other areas.

So in the Balearics, for example, we have what are called Cilician pirates, even though, again, it's in the Spanish seas as opposed to the Cilician seas.

And it's again, this very same sort of tactic, fast ships, jagged coastlines.

And I think you're right.

Once they have this idea of a style or a strategy, they just loop it to various groups in different places.

Yeah, I would add there may be cultural affinities as well.

I mean, when we look at Cilicia, especially this coast that we call rough Cilicia, which begins approximately at Silifke in the east and goes all the way around to Walanya in the west, you're talking about a very mountainous region, literally where the mountains drop to the sea.

So there's no plains where you can develop an agricultural economy or have large settlements.

So these people are already kind of impoverished, if you think of it that way.

There's no big places.

They depend on certain features.

They do a lot of transhumance.

They would drive the herds up into the islands because that's where they get the most nutrient for the animals.

So there's a transhumid population that is operating.

And they also engage in timbering because this place was famous, this region was famous for its cedar trees, which are rot resistant and really useful for shipping.

So there are certain components that connect it to the sea, but still.

It creates a more tribal, even smaller than tribal segmentary populations in which we see the emergence of petty warlords.

That's the way I would describe it.

So there is this culture, this indigenous culture, which we call Luwyan because that's the language that they spoke, that has these various centers of gravity, you might call it, little bases, small warlords.

It's a very charismatic thing.

And sometimes some of these warlords are able to build kind of larger empires.

Other times they don't.

And the question becomes, what is the symbiosis between that and the coastal population in these small harbors along the shore people trying to eke out an existence there is kind of a semi-semi-periphery between the mainstream mediterranean economy and society and this backward sort of indigenous population which is xenophobic and resistant to all external influences as well so and and so these small ships maybe these warlords whenever they did control some harbors on the sea, which may have been very frequently, had small fleets of these small ships and they regarded this as their waters.

And when people are passing through it, they're demanding tolls.

They see themselves as this is this is their territory.

But if you're Rhodes, if you're Athens or the Rhodians, you see this as piracy.

And this is the argument that my friend Philip D'Souza expresses, that

it's slogans, it's not really characterizing people properly.

I'd like to ask a bit more on something you touched on in your first answer, which is regarding the time period that we're talking about.

So the successor kingdoms of Alexander the Great, a couple of hundred or more than a hundred years after the death of Alexander, to the Eastern Mediterranean, the Hellenistic world, but also you have the rise of Rome in the Western Mediterranean following their defeat of Carthage, and I think the kingdom of Macedon as well, isn't it?

So, Rome is really on the rise at the moment.

If that's the context, I mean, what period of time is this when we start to see this explosion of piracy in Cilicia, but also beyond that, too?

All right.

Well, now we get into a complicated issue, which is the veracity of our sources.

And our sources try to always make this a single moment at which all this stuff occurs, right?

There's a reason why all these stuff happen this way.

So what we're told in particular is that at the end of Rome's war against King Perseus of Macedonia, so 168, 167 BC, the Romans were kind of amazed at the fact that many of their former allies, Rhodes, Pergamum, had kind of sat on the fence in this war with Perseus for a moment.

And so they lashed out very harshly toward all these powers.

They expelled the population on the island of Delos.

This was a major communications node, the sanctuary.

We know that Perseus actually announced freedom for the slaves at the festival at Delos, for example.

It's a sanctuary of Apollo, but it was a major, it was becoming a major commercial hub in the Aegean.

And so the Romans expelled that population, gave the island back to Athens.

thank you very much as far as Athens was concerned, on the condition that it be a duty-free zone, that no taxes could be charged on anything transiting the island, anything going in, okay, you can charge taxes on that, but transiting the island.

And it became a duty-free port for a lot of Italian and Sicilian merchants.

trying to make their way to the what I call the luxury trade of the eastern Mediterranean, starting with Alexandria and the Finnish products such as perfume or silk and things like that coming out of Alexandria, but along the whole Syria-Palestine coast, because trade routes from the Mesopotamia came over at any different junctures.

And since the Seleucid Empire was collapsing, these towns were becoming kind of vibrant once again as independent entities, Ascalon, places like that.

And so you start with that to begin with: that now the Romans have got a trading hub in the Aegean.

This is 167 BC.

It really takes off by about 140 BC, where they now can maybe bypass the Rhodian monopoly of this trade and work their way further east.

And what we are told is that as the Seleucid Empire imploded at this juncture, Cilician pirates, who may have begun as part of brigades of squadrons that had worked in the civil wars in Syria, began to bring prisoners to Delos to exchange to the Romans.

And then this may have become the main contrast for the slave trade.

Just context, because you said a few names there.

So King Perseus of Macedon defeated by the Romans, that's battled of Pydna and stuff like that.

And after that, the Romans very much dominant in mainland Greece.

And as you said, their Delos as well.

So the Cyclades and the Aegean.

But to the east, you also mentioned powers like Pergamum, which is now western Turkey, western Anatolia, the Atlidid kingdom, and the kingdom of and well, the Rhodians.

The Republic of Rhodes, yeah.

The Republic of Rhodes, thank you very much, which has also risen to power at this time and it's a big kind of trading and maritime nation.

So, Adam, is it fair to say that with the arrival of Rome on the stage at this time, and with also the decline of that other great superpower in the East that you've mentioned, the Seleucid Empire and other successor kingdoms of Alexander the Great?

Is it a mixture of kind of maritime and economic policies of the Romans then putting their stranglehold over this area of the Mediterranean?

Does that contribute to the rise of piracy which would follow?

I think you're quite right.

And I think you could even see the rise as piracy as almost part of a Roman strategy to increase their influence over the eastern Mediterranean.

So Nick talked about the founding of Delos as a free port.

And this was hugely damaging to the Republic of Rhodes in particular, because it really did undermine their sort of economic hegemony at the time.

And another role that Rhodes had been doing for about a century by this point is they were the region's anti-piracy forces.

They were the only ancient power at the time that had a standing navy, and they took a lot of pride in their anti-piracy operations.

We have a lot of inscriptions from this time about sailors who died fighting pirates, and they're very proud of this fact, and it's very prominent on their gravestones.

So we see their decline.

We also see the decline of Macedonia in the Macedonian Wars, the other major power in the sort of central Mediterranean.

And then with the Treaty of Achemea, which is in about 188 BC, the Romans ordered the destruction of the Seleucid fleet as well.

So in this very short timeframe, you see three major Mediterranean powers be destroyed, which would have led to vast instability and a lot of unemployment as well.

Keep in mind that the wars with Macedonians would have left a lot of war refugees and dissidents fleeing from Rome too.

So you have this very volatile situation in the eastern Mediterranean.

And you have this huge demand for slaves coming from the Roman Empire as well.

They have these huge plantations, which are getting bigger bigger and bigger in Italy and forming in Greece as well, where they're producing things like olive oil and wine and need this constant trickle of slaves just to keep the plantations running.

And now in Seleucia, you have this very populated region, which no longer has a navy to defend it and has all these pirates which are being empowered to raid and attack it.

So now there's this huge supply of slaves coming from Seleucia.

There's this huge demand from Rome.

And we see the Romans pretty explicitly say say this is something they approve of because about 140 BC a delegation is sent to Cilicia to determine what is the cause of piracy in the region and first of all they say well it's the Cilicians fault they've not been administering the region well not really mentioning the reason why they didn't administer it's because they didn't have a fleet anymore and they also say that this is essentially a good thing because it keeps all the powers in the eastern Mediterranean weak, which means they won't be serious enemies to Rome.

If you think about, this, it is really when the Romans start to think of Mare Nostrum, this idea of our sea.

And you can see them seeing how they want the sea to work at this time and how they want people to operate within the sea and who they don't want operating within the sea as well.

So it's like actually at this time, so one person's pirate is another person's useful asset kind of thing.

So actually, at this stage, you know, following the Treaty of Apamea, the Eastern Mediterranean is weak.

The Cilician pirates are actually doing the Romans a favor, are they?

I think very much so, yes.

And it's only really when the Romans become more interested in actually administrating the Eastern Mediterranean themselves that they take more of an issue with what the pirates are doing.

So they're very much useful up until a point for the Romans, I would say.

That's actually a good point when you think about it, because one other thing we need to mention is the decision by the hierarchy at Pergamum when Attalus III passed away and he left his estate to the Romans, and the Romans accepted it.

So the Romans took over the territory of the king.

This now became the Roman province of Asia.

In Cicero's time, he says that 40% of the revenues of the empire came from that one province.

And that's the first time that Rome directly controls land in what they considered Asia and Anatolia.

Macedonia was a province by then, you might think of it, you know, but not as rich as this one.

But that's the point I'm getting at: is that, okay, now suddenly they have vested interests in the region, and maybe piracy is affecting, much like the colonial experience in America.

Now, suddenly, at what point did the landowners decide pirates are a bad thing, even though they've been colluding with them for decades before that, right?

Because they had nothing, and the pirates were giving them things they couldn't get by other means.

So there seems to be this.

The Romans seem to have colluded with the pirates until officially 102 BC when they passed this law.

And now the pirates were adversaries, openly expressed adversaries.

This law, we should point out,

has been found inscribed in two different places, Kenidos and also at Delphi.

So we have to distinguish between, I like to say, literary sources, which have a tendency for hyperbole and you don't quite know what to make of them, and then what I would call kind of hard sources, such as records like this, governmental records, which are formulaic and don't tell us a lot, except they say what they say.

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What literary sources then do we have?

You mentioned earlier Strabo, the Greek geographer at Strabo, but what types of sources do we therefore have?

I mean, literature, first of all, that mention the Cilician pirates, that really talk about this explosion of piracy in the second and early first centuries BC?

Yeah, well, this is the thing.

I mean, first of all, if you look at contemporary, we have the speeches of Cicero, where he has to speak on behalf of Pompey in his command, and he exaggerates, we think, exaggerates the degree of the crisis this way.

We also have, and I like to point these things out in the sort of universal histories, Appian's Wars of the Romans.

Cassius Dio's Universal History of Rome, although he's a bit fragmentary, but he has information there.

Plutarch's lives of Pompey and Caesar discusses the pirates as well.

Now, these are all 100 years or more later.

But it's interesting, especially Appian, when he describes Pompey's triumph, he's reading from the actual records of the Roman government on behalf of Pompey's triumph.

In one case, a Sonatus consultum, which authorized him to triumph, and says he's triumphing because of all his victories, including that over the pirates.

So officially saying this was a threat.

as well as there were these bronze tablets that Pompey carried in his triumph, which listed the number of towns he defeated and number of ships he conquered and so on and so forth.

Again, official records in that sense that people are referring to.

Just to add to that, I think it's worth focusing on Cicero a bit more as well, as he was our sort of most contemporary source for pirates, and it's had a very big influence in how we've seen piracy ever since.

So he knew a little bit more about pirates than the average Roman did who was writing about them at the time.

He had studied Rhodian law in Rhodes, which was where a lot of the original philosophies on piracy came from.

And he'd also been governor of Cilicia, a little bit after the pirate minutes officially ended, but it was probably still very prominent at the time there, regardless.

And he talks a lot more about piracy in a philosophical sense.

He's the one who coins the phrase hosti humani generis, which means enemies of all mankind, which would go on to dominate sort of legal discourse on piracy for about a thousand years after this point.

And he has this very strong sense of disliking pirates.

He claims that even if you swear an oath to a pirate, you don't have to keep it because pirates aren't people who sort of abide by the natural laws of nature.

And his big sort of issue with piracy seems to be that they're individuals that don't serve any larger state.

They're largely self-interested people.

And he sees this very antithetical to his own philosophy, which is very much based around service to the state and good government.

And a lot of legal theory in English law today and in American law traces origins back to writings by Cicero at this point.

So it really does cast quite a wide net over piracy and this time, but onwards as well.

So do Romans almost see pirates, at least Cilician pirates and the like at this time, almost as mercenaries of the sea, so skilled sailors, but who have, you know, they're not loyal to a particular king or warlord, they're loyal to whoever pays them the most or whichever most serves their own interests?

I think that's fair.

And I think Plutarch in particular has a very sort of consistent depiction of pirates.

If you keep in mind that the lives he wrote were written quite far apart from one another, he always returns to these same sort of traits in the Cilicians, that they're these leaderless people.

He never mentions any of them by name, except for one notable example who was Minas, who was a lieutenant of Pompey's son.

But this was decades after the actual pirate menace was over.

So he doesn't really fit into the actual characterization of the Cilician pirates as Plutarch's usually describing them.

And again, he does see them as this kind of force of nature almost.

They don't seem to be governed by like the normal laws of man.

They have very strange religious practices.

They don't really pay attention to the precedents that you see in normal warfare.

They would kidnap people's children.

They'd kidnap senators who are meant to be protected from this sort of thing.

They would sack temples.

They really did seem to be loyal, at least in Plutarch's mind, to whoever was paying them or whoever they could get on their side.

And Nick, how important is archaeology to aiding in the portrayal of the Cilician pirates and understanding their motives, understanding how they were recruited, their organization, and so on, to get more of an insight into the pirates that are so consistently derided by the surviving literature?

Yeah, this is the most problematic aspect of this is that, again, I conducted an archaeological survey in the area of the

pirate bases between corkesion the great base that pompey took at the end of his combat and the kragos mountain which supposedly surrendered without a fight alanya is really populated so we really concentrated on the eastern end around the kragos and in that area of what is modern day gasipasha and the problems are kind of twofold i think in general pirates don't leave a very profound archaeological footprint.

And so, for example, example, we can give you what we have, which is that we were able to demonstrate there's a relatively shallow, dispersed context of Hellenistic settlement in that region.

We found lots of Hellenistic pottery.

We found some fortress-like towers that probably could be Ptolemaic at places like Lamos at Hamaxia, for example.

We could definitely demonstrate there's a population living there, however small, and it gets buried under Roman settlements that also were pretty small in this region.

Again, bearing in mind that it's mountains to the sea.

Sorry, Nick, just clarify: you mentioned Ptolemaic there, and that's another successor kingdom that had some land holdings in that area, at least in Egypt, though, yeah.

Correct.

The Ptolemies controlled Cyprus, I mean, right down until the 90 BC.

And as they lost their influence in the Aegean, the theory is that they hardened their defenses along that coast of Cilicia, although it was taken from them by Antiochus III during his big Razi in 198

BC.

All these places were just kind of swallowed swallowed up by him before he got defeated by the Romans and so on.

This creates that power vacuum that we're talking about before.

But Cyprus was still pretty much in Ptolemaic hands right down to 90 BC.

And at that point, we see them kind of, there were two kings, one was at Cyprus, and he kind of colluded with the pirates as well.

I mean, they were all colluding with the pirates, according to the Roman sources in that respect.

So the main thing is this: they don't leave a very profound archaeological footprint.

And let's take the case of our big finds at the Kragos.

We had a maritime survey team explore what they found was the harbor of this place.

We should point out it was created as a town by a Roman client king Antiochus IV at Colmagene in the 50s AD.

And so finding

Hellenistic evidence there

suggests that somebody's using the place.

So we start with that.

It was clearly in use, but you know, there are these fjords.

There's a hidden sea cave.

You could go with a fishing boat to go into today.

And in this sea cave, there's a beach right behind it, kind of a shallow beach, but there's five different springs of water coming down right there.

So you've got a place where you can hide ships.

You've got water right there.

You've got lookout points, all that sort of thing.

And our survey found, first of all, a bronze ships ornament about 18 centimeters long in the form of Bellerophon, the winged horse.

Pegasus, the winged horse of Bellerophon, who defeated the Shimmera in mythology.

It had a socket end on the back end, and there were fragments of wood in it, and we took a sample of the wood.

We got a carbon date of 126 BC.

So presumably the wood itself was cut in 126 BC, fashioned into a stave to hold this ornament on the superstructure of a ship, and it ends up in the harbor at the Kragos.

We also found the amphora evidence we were looking for.

We found the top portion of what I called the head of an Italian amphora known as a Lambolia II that comes from the southeast coast, Brindisium Apulia of Italy.

And these are the kinds of amphoras we were looking for because these are the kinds of amphoras that are found at Delos.

Here's the problem.

These amphoras are showing up all along the coast of Cilicia.

They're in the museum at Anamur, they're in the museum at Tasaju, they're in the museum at Silifge, they were found in the excavations at Tarsus.

There are reports of large quantities of them in israel and in fact

maybe a couple thousand of stamped amphora handles of amphoras from southeastern italy are in the banaki collection from egypt as well so can we say first of all this is evidence of piracy at the kragos somebody's there with the kind of jars we were looking for from delos indicating the exchanges between the two places, if you need that for this late trade.

Or could it simply be the residue of Italian trade as it wended its way into the Mediterranean?

For some reason, Egypt was a really important end destination for these jars.

Or could it be that Pompey, when he conducted his campaigns, he's got a logistical supply line and he depended extensively on materials from the eastern coast of the Mediterranean.

He's from, I mean, Italy, he's from Piscenum.

Could this be the residue of his campaigns, a command economic residue?

So it's tantalizing.

We get these little bits and pieces, but they're easy to dismiss.

That is the issue.

Again, pirates tend to live in tipped over ships.

They drank excessively.

They wenched.

They were escaping hard-working lives and creating kind of utopian sort of environments for themselves.

And so we don't expect them to build theaters and council houses and cities this way.

And so they don't leave an archaeological footprint.

That's the main issue.

But it sounds like topographically, if you've got the demise of these great Hellenistic superpowers at that time, and in the years previously, that coastline, given how much trade is going through that area of the Mediterranean, following the conquests of Alexander the Great and the rise of the Ptolemies and Seleucids and so on, that you do have those great fortified strongholds in that area of the world.

You do have those coves, you know, those places where you could hide ships, as you say.

So it almost feels like if there was to turn to lawlessness and piracy, like Cilicia and other places on that southern coast of present-day Anatolia, Turkey, topographically, there's a good location for pirate coves and bases to be.

It seems a location in the Mediterranean where that, where it was beneficial, where there was good resources for that.

Yeah, one point I make repeatedly to my critics, there's nothing in the archaeological record that contradicts what our sources are saying.

And if you look at D-Law, I mean, everything seems to match.

Everything seems to match.

Now, with respect to pirate environments, I really wanted to, this is where Adam has been really useful.

Adam is a specialist in GIS technologies, and so he's analyzed our topographical maps, our three-dimensional maps of the region.

And I might just turn it over to him with, in other words, the landscape itself seems to work toward piracy in itself.

So why don't you go ahead, Adam?

Yeah, so I think what you said about sort of second phase occupation of these big Hohenzik ports is very interesting.

One of the things we tend to see in Cilicia at this time is there's not actually that much coastal settlement.

Intents like coastal occupation only really occurs sort of in the Roman imperial period, sort of towards the end of the first century BC, but more seriously in the first and second centuries AD.

But what we did was look at the fortresses sort of a little bit further inland, but still had very good views of the sea.

And we wanted to see is well which one of these places would be best for pirates?

Where would it be ideal for pirates to be situated?

And overseas ships coming across.

So while you need very good spaces or very good sight lines to be a pirate, you also need to not be seen for the obvious reason that if someone sees a promontory four or a pirate four, it's probably someone they're going to try and sail away from.

So what we did was something called covert spaces analysis, which was this geospatial technique pioneered by an archaeologist called Mark Gillings.

which shows you not only the areas which are most visible, but also the areas that simultaneously remain very hidden.

And when we did that, we found there's these little sort of

lines of fortresses scattered sort of further upland on the Cilician coast, which do have this Hellenistic settlement, which has a lot of these very surprisingly high-status fine wares in them, and also a lot of imports, which doesn't make a lot of sense considering where they are on the landscape, unless it's something that you could link to piracy.

So they are these late Hellenistic eras, the time the pirates are very prominent.

We have them in areas which are very hidden, but also offer very good views.

And these are some of the things we're trying to see could be part of what you might call the cultural landscape of piracy.

This idea that they are inhabiting these sort of second phase fortresses, and while they're not adding much to them, they still use them for piracy.

And we see this going on even until like the 17th century.

There are people using the same spots written about by people like Appian for piracy in the area as well.

So we've been doing some work and we think we're building up a bit of a profile, but it's true.

The material is scant and it takes a lot of persuasion to convince some people that it's there.

Do we think it's a similar case elsewhere in the Mediterranean at this time, if like the piracy menace becomes very widespread?

I mean, I've got in my notes places like Crete and Illyria.

Were they equally important kind of topographical areas for pirates to be based and emerge and spread from?

Yeah, I think so, but maybe for different regions.

I do think that certain coastlines, and it's interesting that Theophrastus says there are certain areas where you get the best cedar timber, and one is Cilicia and one is Illyria and one is Phoenicia, which may have been exhausted at this point.

However, you get that same kind of situation where jagged coast, you've got these sort of rugged coastal areas.

And the thing that always struck me about Cilicia, if I can, from the Kragos all the way to Annamore, which is about 40 kilometers as the crow flies, it is a sheer wall of mountains to the sea.

It just drops precipitously.

There's a couple of outlets where, you know, there's outlets for rivers, but for the most part, this is an ambush.

So, I mean, where are you going to go if you're being pursued at this point?

There's no place even to pull in.

There's no point of refuge.

And I think Illyria, similar situation there, just a very much similar situation there where they can kind of trap you in ways where there's no safe harbor to run to this way.

Crete might have been a little bit different, although the eastern part of Crete is very jagged, very rugged, mountainous coast.

But one thing about the ancient Mediterranean is the tendency for shipping to kind of cluster in certain areas where you have to kind of sit and wait for the winds to favor you to continue on your trip.

So that's what the real attraction was at Rhodes and Achinidos and Kaunos, that corner of the Aegean.

That's where the prevailing northwesterly sort of subside because of the mountains of Anatolia.

But if you're coming into the Aegean, you're going to hit those winds and you may have to wait for them to subside so you can make your way further westward.

So it's a choke point where a lot of shipping tended to assemble.

And if you want to raid, there's the place to raid.

Crete, Sicily.

Malta, very similar places where you just try to get there and then make your way across to the African coast when the weather prevails, when the weather provides this way.

But these are places where trade tends to collect.

It's not surprising that shipwrecks tend to be a lot more in these areas where there are these kind of joke points this way as well, because of hazards besides piracy this way.

But yes, I do think so.

I think if we want to think about how widespread piracy was or how effective it was throughout the Mediterranean, a really interesting case study for this is the career of Quintus Satorius, who was interesting because he's the only Roman we know of that actually had collaborated with the pirates for quite a long time.

So he was a Roman rebel who had the bad luck of being on the wrong side of one of Rome's many, many civil wars at this time.

This is Sulla, isn't it?

Against Sulla, yes.

Yes.

So he's on the wrong side of Sulla's civil war and he ends up fleeing to Spain where the losers have made him the governor of Spain, but that didn't really matter anymore because they were the losers.

And when he's kicked out of Spain, he ends up collaborating with pirates to retake, first of all, the Balearics, so what we'd call Majorca and Menorca nowadays, and later on Spain.

Plutarch says that the pirates abandon him at this point, but it seems like that's not completely true because he ends up waging this very effective naval campaign afterwards where he defeats several Roman fleets and he has this very effective naval fortress in Dianium.

And what's really interesting is he has these really good lines of communication throughout the entirety of the Mediterranean, despite only having a political and military base in Spain.

So we see he gets messages from Roman senators who write to him saying,

in case you do want to take over Rome, you'll have my support.

We know he was talking to Spartacus, and some historians think that potentially he was arranging for Spartacus to come join him in Spain.

when he was assassinated in 72 BC.

And he also worked a lot with Mithridates.

And we knew that he actually sent troops to Mithridates and the Mithridates sent him money in return.

So he was able to make it throughout the entirety of the Roman Empire at this time, essentially, without being intercepted by Roman fleets or Roman navies, which does seem to imply that the Silicians did have some sort of control over the Mediterranean.

And keep in mind that the end of the Storian Wars is 72 BC.

And Pompey's campaign starts in about 67 BC.

So it does seem like this is something they saw was a pressing concern and took action to try and sort of prevent happening again afterwards.

Yeah, I could add to that.

We had these two deserters who were aristocrats, Magius and Fannius, who had been on the losing side and they ended up hiding out with Mithridates.

And he sent them as ambassadors to see if he could form an alliance.

And they supposedly sailed with Cilician pirates.

They went to Italy.

They supposedly discussed things with people in Rome.

By the time that the Senate Senate heard they were there and put out an all-points bulletin, they had moved on.

They supposedly went on to Spain, even talked to Pompey before they made the deal with Satorius.

So this is an era of civil war.

Like I said, there's a lot of loose nuts rolling around, but it kind of shows you, because of different sympathies, because of the extreme behavior of Sulla with his prescriptions and things like that.

why you can see there are these renegades and people who are hostile to the Republic at Rome, even though they're Romans, who were, you know, working against them in some ways.

And so, and they made it all the way back to Mithridates, and supposedly the next year, there was this concerted attempt to kind of choke off grain to the city of Rome in 74 BC.

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It's fascinating that you said the Cilicians have that such a wide reach across the Mediterranean.

I know we've covered at the start that it becomes an overarching term, but still the Cilicians do

evidently do have an important role in that, in that they're traversing far and wide.

Do we have any idea from their organization, their structure, how they came to be able to do much more than the average pirate you think of, you know, do much more than just conducting raids and so on in your nearby geographical area, but in fact, traverse much further than that so that the name Cilician is known all the way to Spain and Italy and beyond.

Well,

one argument comes from Plutarch where he says that because of

the effect of the conflicts, it drove a lot of the best and the brightest people throughout the Mediterranean into the arms of the pirates.

Just people, refugees.

Here's a place of asylum.

And so they're getting, let's say, maybe they're getting educated people with connections to make things more likely that way.

And the other thing, this comes from Dio, is that the pirates would engage in relations with various pirate bands throughout the Mediterranean to the point where they had letters where you could, they could swap money with each other.

things like that.

They kind of would alert each other.

And then Cicero says that, you know, the pirates supposedly engaged in a pirate round, which would start at Fasilis in Lysia, go all the way to Spain, to Dianum, and then back in the course of a sailing season.

Now, again, that's Cicero exaggerating things, but there is this sense, again, of the mobility, the fact that maritime culture was kind of separate from the land-based culture.

If you were a sailor, you could pull into a port, but you couldn't go inland.

First of all, you probably had no shoes.

You were probably destitute.

And so they lived in this grimy world of ports and bars and taverns and brothels.

And that's the limits they saw of land.

But they're all part of that culture.

It was almost like a separate culture existing in the Mediterranean, full of all kinds of nefarious types who would form networks of their own this way.

So it is almost like when you get the mercenaries, lots of mercenaries in the Hellenistic period, and they would roam far and wide, seeking service in various various armies of these successor kingdoms in a similar sort of way with the Silician pirates and pirates at the time that we're talking about.

We shouldn't be imagining them all under one flag and united like a country or something.

But word does spread and, you know, through the ports, which is obviously one of the main ways of communication as well, because, you know, ports are through itinerant people going through.

They hear of these almost, I guess, I don't want to say raiding routes, but routes through the Mediterranean that they can follow, which they have a good opportunity to gain a lot of money, gain a lot of success themselves, and then, you know, then come back in the sailing season, as you say.

So that spreads.

And so then you get almost this, correct me if I'm saying this wrong, it's almost a continual cycle of these pirates almost going around and around and around, doing a route that they've heard works.

It is this huge time of increased maritime connectivity.

Ports are getting bigger and they can store larger ships.

Navigation techniques are getting more sophisticated.

So sailors can be at sea for longer.

And there is this opportunity for a network of sailors and seafarers to connect in this way and there's a lot of people who also have a lot of grief with the romans so they start sharing this information of where's good to attack where's weak where are there holes in the roman defense mechanisms and there's also just a huge amount of wealth moving around the seas at this time too you know as trade as sort of the sea becomes more connected trade becomes bigger as well and And there's a lot of money to be made, and there's a lot of ways for people to share information about the ways to make this money.

And does it feel that, at least before we get to Pompey, which we will in a second, does the Roman navy almost feel quite inadequate to deal with it, whether it's the size or just the organization?

And does that lead to these pirates?

Do they get quite audacious in where they decide to attack?

We're in a period where you've got a Roman military that has these big field armies and navies to confront big field armies and navies.

But the resistance is now sort of dispersed, sort of guerrilla warfare, synchronous guerrilla warfare, where you don't need a big navy because it's just a small group over here and a small group over there.

And the Romans were actually transiting at this point

from these field armies with manipulative legions to these cohortal legions where you could take the army of 6,000 men and break them into 10 cohorts and go out and spread them out and control the land.

And so this is the

transitory moment when the Romans are having to deal with sort of brush wars.

And so, it's almost like taking a sledgehammer to deal with a fly almost.

And just how do you, how do you get at them that way?

You know, this is a big problem, a big problem for them.

They would go with these battle fleets.

Marcus Antonius the Orator went all the way to Sea Day.

Okay, he can take Sea Day, but that doesn't stop the pirates in neighboring places from continuing what they were doing, unless you disperse and kind of whack-a-mole it away.

And that seems to be where they failed.

It's a kind kind of a whack-a-mole thing isn't where it's kind of small groups of raiding pirates together they're going and then they retreat to their safety hideout kind of thing

they can relocate anywhere they want you know they can just keep moving around so there's a big sort of shift at this time between sort of the huge hellenistic warships that had dominated that period that were you know 10 20 sometimes even 40 decks tall to these much more smaller mobile ships which were being used by the Cilicians.

And I think it's fair to say, at least at the beginning of the period, it's something the Roman Navy hadn't really caught up to.

And also, the Roman Navy was never a premier fighting force in the world.

It was sort of where the losers would gather who couldn't make it into the army.

It was considered much less reputable.

It was considered a bit Greek and a little bit foreign.

You'd get less pay, you'd get less rights.

So they weren't equipped, you know, in terms of ships, and they also just weren't equipped physically to deal with the complex problem that pirates presented, at least initially.

And the pirates, I mean, no matter where you are, Cilicia, Illyria, Crete, or wherever, they're defined by the smaller ships, are they?

The swift-moving smaller ships that are good for kind of hit and run raid kind of things.

Well, Pompey in his triumph says that he actually acquired, he conquered 90 deck ships, but more than a thousand ships, more than a thousand ships.

So I wanted to sue.

So the 90 deck ships are probably Queen Corines, wherever they were, maybe at Corcassia, but the rest of it were these Lemboy, these smaller ships that are made for raiding, and you can plunder a ship and sink it and move on this way.

I was going to say, when you look at the Rhodian Navy's pattern dealing with piracy, it really reflects kind of policing of the seas.

They would go out with these three ship squadrons, kind of perennially, they'd be cruising out there.

There'd be squadrons out there looking for piracy.

It's a sort of policeman's job where you have to be on the beat this way.

So just sending a big fleet once in a while, like the Romans did.

okay and what what does the general do whether it's uh the orator whether it's servilius uh watia he's just looking for tiles to plunder he's got to pay for this thing right so he wants to sack places he's not really interested in policing disease he's interested in you know making a big killing so he can pay off his army and become enrich himself and his officers as well so different mentality different sort of strategies and mentalities are required in dealing with this sort of a problem

it's interesting how you mentioned once again kind of going back to the start how the Rhodians, you know, they had a solution to dealing with the piracy problem in that world with the policing.

Then the Romans wanting to weaken that area of the Mediterranean, they kind of force that to stop.

So they sow the wind and then a few decades later, they reap the whirlwind, don't they?

You know, the great explosion of piracy across the Mediterranean.

Am I correct?

Before we get on to almost the fall of the Silician pirates with Pompey, are there some bold, very, very bold raids that deserve mention from the literature?

I think I've got in my notes, there's an attack on Ostia, so the port of Rome, and also Julius Caesar.

He has a run-in with Silician pirates.

Yeah, so the port of Ostia is probably the big one that really sort of changes the perception of the Silicians in the Roman world, because this is them right at the Romans' front door.

It's their main port.

It's the entrance to Rome, and they're able to sack and burn it.

which really shows how vulnerable the Romans were at sea at this point.

They also attack Delos, which is very interesting if it was their main market.

But also at this time, it seems there was a lot of frustration being built up as it was the market of the Romans and they were attacking and they were working for Mithridates at this time.

So that seems like it could have been more of a military target.

And yes, they captured Julius Caesar in the Cyclades, I think.

I think it's the island of Pharmagusta they find him in.

So again, you can see areas near Mithridates where I think he was serving as an envoy to the king of Bithynia at the time when he was captured.

and again you can see them just getting very bold very confident attacking diplomats would have been a very big taboo at the time and julius caesar the sources say they took it in his stride but they would i suppose he was described as being very casual and relaxed when he was with the pirates he would read them poetry he would demand that actually they increase the ransom note that they were giving yes i think he doubled it from 20 talents to 40 talents which is quite a significant amount.

That's quite something, isn't it?

Yes.

That's definitely your ego, especially when you're a young Julius Caesar.

I'm worth more than that.

You know, they also supposedly engaged in scorched earth operations in Italy.

They kidnapped the aunt of Mark Antony while his father was conducting the pirate campaign in the Aegean.

They took his sister.

They got Publius Clodius, who, according to Cicero, enjoyed it.

apparently and so on.

I mean, they were, it was definitely an attack on kind of VIPs, roman vips is sort of terrorism to kind of put the fear which ended up working it panicked everybody let's think of it that way but one theory i have is that they were when servilius wattica actually came to the panphilian region and took lycia and then took side and then went all the way into the interior and took isora wetus the pirates decided we have to create more trouble in the west to pin them down over there because now they're threatening our bases And so they may have raised the tempo in the West with all these kidnappings and all these attacks in Italy proper.

They supposedly grabbed two breeders while marching on the Appian Way with their full emblems of office with the lictors and all of that.

But it was almost an affront.

It was sort of to let the Romans know they're not in charge.

Yes, you think it's more nostrum now, but it's not.

Like it's still not really

kind of there's a lot of ferocity to your authority, shall we say?

I think one last notable raid to add to that is they also sucked Baiae, which was essentially the Roman holiday home where all the VIPs were like to vacation and their time off.

So there really was this sort of message of we're going to get you everywhere.

We'll get you where you trade.

We'll get you where you live.

We know where you live.

Exactly.

There you go.

It's also interesting, as you mentioned, that they raid Delos.

It's always fascinating to me how if the Romans know that Delos is the key marketplace for them, why don't they just kind of guard off Delos?

But I I guess that doesn't work with a trade idea.

Because it's so exposed.

But interestingly enough, when they attacked in the second assault, the first one in 86, they did a lot of damage, but it seemed to have gotten restored.

Then in the second wave, the Roman magistrate in charge of the region, his name was Valerius Triarius, he built a fortification wall on Delos, which survives in the ruins that cuts right through the neighborhoods.

Obviously, the houses were destroyed.

He just took their blocks and he built this wall around a small fraction of what had been this amazing settlement on the island, really reflecting how, you know, people were abandoning the place at that point because it just becomes such a dangerous target.

On the other hand, again, another feature to this is by this point, by the 60s BC, the Romans now have a major footprint in Anatolia, the province of Asia.

the governor's headquarters at Ephesus and Pergamum.

And also they've worked their way around to the east through contacts, avoiding roads.

And so a lot of the trading population that had been at Delos for the previous generation or two had moved further eastward.

And the need for the island diminished, shall we say.

It wasn't as important.

Well, last but certainly not least, let's get to the end of this almost ancient golden age of piracy, especially for the Cilician pirates.

Adam, talk us through the story of Geneus Pompeius Magnus.

You've done Storius as well, so it feels good that we now do Pompey.

And I mean, give us a little bit of introduction to Pompey is and then explain how he deals with the Silician pirates.

A nice way to end this chat.

Yeah, I think that's great.

So Pompey's, I think it's fair to say he is the villain of the Roman Republic period.

He's sort of the great counterpart to Caesar, and he's a little bit before Caesar, and he's this very sort of fancy, audacious politician.

Villain.

That depends if you're talking to a pro-Caesar or an anti-Caesar.

In other ways, he could be the hero, the man who defends it.

I've just got to put that in there, but continue.

No, that's very fair.

I wouldn't want to give off a pro-Caesarian bias.

He makes his start in his career very young.

Most Romans only really enter the twilight of the Coro in their 40s, when they're eligible for big commands.

Pompey sort of takes advantage of the civil wars to become successful much earlier.

He earns the name the adolescent butcher.

because when he was serving under Sulla, he was so violent and so vicious and so successful and so young that he just sort of blew away all his contemporaries.

And after his Civil War, we see him get a series of increasingly larger commands.

Satorius, again, being one of the notable ones, he is the general who defeats Satorius.

He's also the general who claims credit for defeating Spartacus, but there's some debate there.

And it leads to sort of one of the crowning achievements of his life, which is the Cilician campaign.

This was actually a very controversial campaign.

While the Romans knew that this needed to be dealt with, they didn't really have the structures in place to deal with this extended sea campaign, the one that they needed to to deal with the Silicians.

So they gave Pompey this extraordinary command, which essentially gave him government of the entirety of the Mediterranean, but also crucially, any point within 10 leagues of the coast of the Mediterranean as well.

which essentially made him the de facto ruler of the entire Roman world at this point.

And this was hugely unpopular.

There were riots in the streets about this.

Pompey at one point was afraid to go into the Senate because he was afraid he was going to be lynched as a result of this campaign.

And they were afraid he was going to use this sort of as a staging ground to launch a coup over their own republic.

And this was the sort of the backdrop which Pompey's campaign started in.

However, it actually ended up being a fairly brief campaign.

It lasted a little bit over a month, I think.

or just Sunday.

It was either side of a month.

And

there are battles.

There's the Siege of Corakesion, which is the great battle, but it seems like it's much more of an administrative matter than what we might see as a traditional military campaign, like he would fight against Mithridates later.

He takes a lot of care and precision into dividing up the Mediterranean into these separate quadrants, and they make sure each quadrant is assigned to a legate.

It's much more of almost like what the Rhodians were doing before.

This more of a policing operation than a big campaign.

And he's very crafty in the way he deals with the the Cilicians as well.

He offers them a blanket pardon, very similar to the one in the more modern Golden Age of Piracy that Woods Rogers offered.

And he says that any Cilician who wishes to surrender to him will be treated very well.

And it seems they were treated very well.

They were given colonies in places like Siday, in places like Akea, these very sort of rugged coastlines by the coast where

If they wanted to continue committing piracy, it seems like that would have been allowed.

It seems like he also took a lot of them into his employ too, and they became his personal attendants.

I mentioned earlier that one of the Cilicians, Minas, served his son as an admiral.

So it seems like there seem to be quite a long run of collaborations with what were the ancient Cilician pirates into Pompey's army after this.

We sort of lose custody of what happened to them after Minas, but it seems they might even join Octavian and they become part of the Battle of Actium as well, which is of course fairly close to the Cilicians.

And a lot of the tactics used there in the Battle of Actium is actually very similar to what the Silicians did.

It's a lot of cutting the supply lines of Mark Antony, stopping ships from getting across in a very sort of piratical way.

The actual Battle of Actium is almost the least important part of the actual battle.

It's all about boxing Antony in and keeping him from going.

But that's getting off topic a little bit.

I think that's the main point for the campaign.

Nick, I'm sure.

Yeah, the main thing is, again, he has these legates with small squadrons to pin down pirates locally throughout the Mediterranean.

He then started from Gibraltar, basically, with a battle fleet, and he swept from west to east, kind of pushing whoever was still loose to the east, where they all went back to Coricion, and that's where the great battle took place.

But it was sort of...

combination police force and then a sweeping movement at the same time while at the same time making it public that if they put down their weapons and surrender before a certain point, he would treat them fairly.

So, you know,

they understood what he was saying.

And again, I would point out if many of these people were former nobles from the province of Asia, former nobles from various places, then these are people that would know how to be a part of a founding of a colony at Epiphanea in some of these places, solely Papiopolis, for example.

So he's kind of buying off off a renegade element of elite population to some degree at the same time, who were looking for an out, looking for a way out at the same time.

So it was masterful.

It was sophisticated how he knew how to deal with this situation.

And I guess those pirates who had become pirates because they'd had enough of being treated badly as just merchantmen or soever those really bad conditions they had, they kind of were then embraced by the Romans and

their naval skills, as you say, could help in the Battle of Actium later.

So some of their naval skills, the Romans don't just remove the pirates completely and kill them all.

They bring them into the fold almost.

Right.

They co-opt.

That tends to be what they did with their most significant adversaries.

Don't beat them.

Bring them into the system.

And I was going to say one more thing about that, because we're talking about this period of conflict.

the period when the Romans are absorbing the Eastern Mediterranean.

And it's not going very well.

There's a lot of conflict.

But it is interesting in Cilicia afterwards and throughout this region,

a century later, by the time you get get to the five good emperors, Trajan and Hadrian, these emperors who spent, kind of like Pompey, most of their career outside of Rome, in the provinces, dealing with locals, we see these dedications, dozens and dozens of dedications, basically from the elites of these regions.

praising these emperors.

And okay, it's formulaic.

It could be rhetoric and propaganda, but it's so consistent to suggest to me that the Romans ultimately did find find a way to get the elites of the Mediterranean to buy into the system through upward mobility and prospects of becoming senators or whatever you want to serve in the Roman military.

But it does change for the better.

I do think the Pax Romana really was something significant that way.

Maybe, unfortunately, they had to go through this violent, violent period to get there, I suppose.

I don't know.

But it is interesting how it seemingly heartfelt the buy-in was a century later.

People really believed believed in the oikumene, this notion of a civilized world under Roman auspices.

This way, well, Nick, Adam, this has been brilliant, and I'm glad that there was this period of hostility so we could do an episode on the Cilician pirates.

And we've covered a lot in nerdy detail over the last hour or so, and we are all the better for it.

It just goes for me to say thank you so much to both of you for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Yeah, thank you so much.

Well, there you go.

There was Doctors Nick Rao and Adam Dawson talking you through the story of the Cilician pirates, these ancient pirates of the Mediterranean.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode.

I really loved recording it.

Please follow the ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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If you'd also be willing to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that.

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Now that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.

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