Cilician pirates

With the destruction of Carthage, the demise of the Seleucid Empire, and Ptolemaic Egypt on the wane, there was no strong naval power left in the Mediterranean.

Rome was the only major Mediterranean power left, but, being land-based, it had a reduced navy at that time and relied on hiring ships as needed.

Rome protected the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic seas, on account of their proximity, with expeditions sent against the pirate bases on the Ligurian and Illyrian coast.

Like Crete, Cilicia enjoyed excellent natural harbours which geography rendered easily defensible.

Rome was affected through shortages of imports such as grain, but the Romans did not pay proper attention to the problem.

Towns in Italy were also attacked, including Ostia, the port of Rome: ships were burnt and there was pillaging.

Plutarch claimed that pirates had more than 1,000 ships, that they captured 400 towns and plundered temples in Greece and sacred and inviolable sanctuaries, listing fourteen of them.

They sailed in squadrons, besieged towns or took them by storm and plundered them, and kidnapped rich people for ransom.

In Appian's opinion Lucius Licinius Murena and his successor Publius Servilius Vatia Isauricus (78–74 BCE) did not accomplish anything against them.

He received his agnomen of Isaurus because he defeated the Isauri who lived in the core of the Taurus Mountains, which bordered on Cilicia.

When the Republic was not at war, it needed an alternative supply and so it turned to the pirates, who were Rome's most consistent supplier.

That had the additional effect of powerful interest groups in Rome (mainly the business class) who lobbied for inactivity.

The pirates were no match for this onslaught so they fled, Antonius proclaimed victory, and the Senate awarded him a triumph.

In 79 BCE, Publius Servilius Vatia Isauricus was allocated the province of Cilicia and a command against the pirates.

In 68 BCE, the pirates launched a raid at Ostia, barely fifteen miles from Rome, by sailing into the harbour and burning the consular war fleet.

[6] Finally, after heated debate, under the lex Gabinia Pompey was granted extraordinary powers to eliminate the Cilician pirates.

In total, Pompey's campaign removed the Cilician pirates, who had held a stranglehold on Mediterranean commerce and threatened Rome with famine, in a mere 89 days in the summer of 66 BCE.

Pompey then swept through the western Mediterranean with his own powerful fleet, driving the pirates out or into the paths of his other commanders.

Pompey spared the lives of numerous Cilician pirates who had been taken prisoner, realizing that many had been driven to such recourse by desperation.

When Quintus Sertorius, the renegade Roman general, was driven from Hispania, he fell in with Cilician pirates.

When the governor of Hispania Ulterior found out he sent a war-fleet and almost a full legion which drove Sertorius and the pirates from the Balearics.

Caesar felt insulted at the twenty talents (480,000 sesterces) ransom and insisted that the pirates raise the demand to fifty talents (1,200,000 sesterces) more suitable for his status; his retinue quickly raised the money in the local cities, before returning to the pirate stronghold.

[8] During the slave rebellion known as the Third Servile War, Spartacus was said to have brokered a deal with the Cilician pirates, hoping to smuggle a force of rebels across to Sicily.

In 67 BC, the Roman governor of Cilicia, Quintus Marcius Rex, sent his brother-in-law, Publius Clodius Pulcher, with a war fleet to patrol the coastline of his province.

Hoping to win his release, Clodius promised his captors a substantial reward, and they solicited a ransom from Ptolemy of Cyprus, an ally of the Romans.

The amount offered was so paltry (two talents) that it was clear that Clodius had greatly overestimated his worth, the amused pirates released him anyway.

If the prisoner took the pirates' mockery in earnest, they would dress him in Greek athletic shoes and a toga so that they might not repeat the mistake.

[14] When some of them were resettled in Apulia by Pompey, they might have brought the religion with them, thus sowing the seeds of what would in the latter part of the 1st century AD blossom into Roman Mithraism.