Pirates of the Mediterranean
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Hey guys, I hope you're doing well. You're hearing from a slightly more tired than usual Tristan today. I'm just out on a walk, getting a bit of fresh air. Had to get up very early this morning to record narration for an upcoming documentary coming out on History Hit.

But builders were appearing at eight o'clock on the dot outside my window doing other work nearby and they get the heavy machinery out straight away. So it was a bit hectic this morning, but got it all done. 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.

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 Attalid kingdom centred 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 Islands to the Levant. They had interactions with several great enemies of Rome, including King Mithridates VI of Pontus and the Roman renegade Quintus Sertorius 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, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Pompey the Great.

In particular, these pirates became associated with one key region, a region in what is today's southeast Turkey, Rough Silesia, 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 Korakhezion 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 Rau 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 Cilician pirates. I mean, Nick, first of all, who are the Cilician 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. So,

Late 2nd, early 1st 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 succession states of Alexander...

Far more vibrant part of the Mediterranean population was larger 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 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.

young boys that had 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 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 in places like Delos. 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 roots, they know the choke points of their former employers. So they're in a position to really cause trouble. You might think of it that way. 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 part of the Mediterranean, it's going to be a larger context too.

I think that's a really good point. And one thing I want 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...

So the scenes 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 curve.

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 'Tarantine cavalry' to describe skirmisher cavalry with 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 part of the Mediterranean. With Cilician, it's the same. There is a strong link to that part of 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 Alanya 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 islets because that's where they get the most nutrient for the animals. So there's a transhumant 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 connected to the sea, but still they

So 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 Luwian because that's the language that they spoke, that has these various centers of gravity, you might call it, little bases, small warlords everywhere.

It's a very charismatic thing, and sometimes some of these warlords are able to build larger empires. Other times they don't. 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 as a 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. 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 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. The successor kingdoms of Alexander the Great, a couple of hundred or more than a hundred years after the death of Alexander, 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? Rome is really on the rise at the moment.

If that's the context, what period of time is this when we start to see this explosion of piracy in Cilicia, but also beyond that too? 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 this stuff happened 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 note, 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 becoming a major commercial site.

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 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. So you start with that to begin with. 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, Seleucid 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 that this may have become the main conflict for the slave trade.

Just context, because you said a few names there. So King Perseus of Macedon, defeated by the Romans, that's Battle 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 Attidid Kingdom, and the kingdom of the Rhodians. The Republic of Rhodes, yeah. The Republic of Rhodes, thank you very much, which has also risen to power at this time as a big 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 of those successor kingdoms of Alexander the Great,

Is it a mixture of maritime and economic policies of the Romans then putting their stranglehold over 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 of 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 the 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 Arpamea, 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 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 Cilicia, there's this huge demand from Rome, and we see the Romans pretty explicitly 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, 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 it, this is really when the Romans start to think of mare nostrum, this idea of our sea. 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, one person's pirate is another person's useful asset kind of thing. So actually,

At this stage, following the Treaty of Appermere, the Eastern Mediterranean is weak. The Cilician pirates are actually doing the Romans a favour, are they? I think very much so, yes. 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 another 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.

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, at what point did the landowners decide pirates are a bad thing, even though they'd 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. Right.

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, Canidos 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 Strabo. What types of sources do we therefore have? I mean, literature first of all that mentioned the Cilician pirates, that really talk about this explosion of piracy in the second and early first centuries BC. Yeah, well, there's the thing.

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 Sinatus consultant, which authorized him the 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'd studied Rhodian law in Rhodes, which was where a lot of the original philosophies on piracy came from. And he

and he'd also been governor of Cilicia a little bit after the pirate ministries 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 servitude.

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 in this time onwards as well.

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 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 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. He was the 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 Butox 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 the normal wars 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 for 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

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 Cilician pirate bases between Corcassion, 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 Gazipasha. And the problems are kind of twofold. I think in general, pirates don't leave a very profound archaeological footprint. And so, for 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, I could just clarify. You mentioned Ptolemaic there, and that's another successor kingdom that had some land holdings in that area, based in Egypt, don't you?

Correct. The Ptolemies controlled Cyprus, I mean, right down until 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 razia in 198-197 BC. All these places were just kind of 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. And 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 mark.

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 of Comagene, in the 50s AD. And so finding Hellenistic evidence there

suggest 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 in there 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 ship's ornament about 18 centimeters long in the form of Bellerophon, the winged horse, Pegasus, the winged horse of Bellerophon who defeated the Shemra 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 talk portion of what I called the head.

of an Italian amphora known as a Lambolia II that comes from the southeast coast, Brindisia mapulia, 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 ephors are showing up all along the coast of Cilicia. They're in the museum at Anamor, they're in the museum at Tassajou, they're in the museum at Silifke, 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 amphorae handles of amphoras from Southeast and 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 the slave 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 point.

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 Piscinum. 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 feeders 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 conquest 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, those places where you could hide ships, as you say. So it

So it almost feels like if there was deterrence of 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 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 Hellenistic forts 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. Intense 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 fall or a pirate fall, 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 that 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 the piracy menace becomes very widespread? I've got in my notes places like Crete and Illyria. Were they equally important 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 Anamur, 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 there's outlets for rivers, but for the most part, this is an ambush zone. 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 that

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 it.

at Rhodes and at Knidos and Kaunos, that corner of the Aegean. That's where the prevailing Northwestern Leagues 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,

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 Sertorius, 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 had 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 and

to retake, first of all, the Balearics, so what we'd call Mallorca and Menorca nowadays, and later on Spain.

Plutarch says that the pirates abandoned 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 as some historians think that potentially he was arranging for Spartacus to come join him in Spain when he was assassinated in 72 BC. 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 Cilicians did have some sort of control over the Mediterranean. And keep in mind that the end of the historian wars is 72 BC, and

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 Phanius, 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 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 Sertorius. 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 of 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. BetterHelp Online Therapy bought this 30-second ad to remind you right now, wherever you are, to unclench your chock.

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Epic views, waterfall mists, summit sunsets. It's all better outside. And with all trails, you can discover the best of nature with over 450,000 trails around the world. Download the free app today and find your next adventure. 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 exist.

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

do much more than the average pirate you think of. 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 sent

where 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 was started, Fasalis in Lycia, go all the way to Spain, to Deannum, and then back in the course of a sailing season. Now, again, that's Cicero exaggerating things, but there is a 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 armies of these successor kingdoms. In a similar sort of way with the Cilician 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 come back in the sailing season, as you say. So that spreads. Correct me if I'm saying this wrong, but it's almost a continual cycle of these pirates 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. As the sea becomes more connected, trade becomes bigger as well. 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 too. 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 the size or just the organization? 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 small

10 cohorts and go out and spread them out and control the land. And so this is the transit 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 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 C-Day. Okay, he could take C-Day, but that doesn't stop the pirates in neighboring places to continue 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 kind of a whack-a-mole thing, where it's small groups of raiding pirates together, and then they retreat to their safety hideout kind of thing. They can be located anywhere they want. They can just keep moving around. There's a big sort of shift at this time between the huge Hellenistic warships that dominated that period that were

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 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, 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 hit-and-run raid kind of things. Well, Poppy 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 the 90 deck ships are probably Quincarines, wherever they were. Maybe a 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 does the general do? Whether it's the orator, whether it's Servilius Wattia, 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 the seas. 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. Yeah.

It's interesting how you mentioned, once again, going back to the start, how the Rhodians 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 forced that to stop. They sow the wind and then a few decades later, they reap the whirlwind, don't they? The great explosion of piracy across the Mediterranean. Am I correct, before we get on to almost the fall of the Cilician pirates with Pompey,

Are there some 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 Cilician pirates. Yeah, so the port of Ostia is probably the big one that really changes the perception of the Cilicians 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's 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 Famagusta 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 they were giving. I think he doubled it from 20 talents to 40 talents, which is quite a significant amount. It'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. Yeah.

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 attack on kind of VIPs, Roman VIPs as 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 Watica actually came to the Pamphylian region and took Lycia and then took Side and then went all the way into the interior and took

Isorah 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

raise 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 a nostrum now, but it's not. Like it's still arsic. There's a lot of porosity to your authority, shall we say. Yeah.

I think one last notable raid to add to that is they also sacked Baiae, which was essentially the Roman holiday home where all the VIPs would 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, then why don't they just kind of guard off Delos? But 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, 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 the fortification wall.

on Delos, which survives in the ruins that cuts right through the neighborhoods. They just, 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

It 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 Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. You've done Sertorius as well, so it feels good that we now do Pompey. Give us a little bit of introduction to Pompey and then explain how he deals with the Cilician 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 their career when they're 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 the Civil War, we see him get a series of increasingly larger commands, the

Sertorius, again, being one of the notable ones, he is the general who defeats Sertorius. 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 Cilicians. 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 Corrkesian, 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 you 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 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 Side, in places like Achaea, 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 seemed to be quite a long run of collaborations with what were the ancient Cilician pirates into Pompey's army afterwards.

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 Cilicians did. It's a lot of cutting the supply lines of Mark Antony, stopping ships from getting across in a very sort of hierarchical way. The actual Battle of Actium is

almost the least important part of the actual battle. It's all about boxing Antony 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 you can think of some things I've not mentioned. 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 Coricassion. 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 Epiphaneia in some of these places, Soli Populopolis, for example. So he's kind of buying 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 so, 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 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 efforts. And, okay, it's formulaic. It could be rhetoric and propaganda, but it's so consistent, it suggests to me,

that the Romans ultimately did 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 say, or 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 seems seemingly heartfelt. The buying was a century later. People really 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 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 Drs. Nick Rau 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. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd also be willing to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts at free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe. Now that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.

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