Piracy, Pillage, and Plunder in Antiquity: Appropriation and the Ancient World 1138341002, 9781138341005

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Piracy, Pillage and Plunder in Antiquity

Piracy, Pillage and Plunder in Antiquity explores appropriation in its broadest terms in the ancient world, from brigands, mercenaries and state-sponsored ‘piracy’, to literary appropriation and the modern plundering of antiquities. The chronological extent of the studies in this volume, written by an international group of experts, ranges from about 2000 BCE to the twentieth century. The geographical spectrum is similarly diverse, encompassing Africa, the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, allowing readers to track this phenomenon in various different manifestations. Predatory behaviour is a phenomenon seen in all walks of life. While violence may often be concomitant, it is worth observing that predation can be extremely nuanced in its application, and it is precisely this gradation and its focus that occupies the essential issue in this volume. Piracy, Pillage and Plunder in Antiquity will be of great interest to those studying a range of topics in antiquity, including literature and art, cities and their foundations, crime, warfare, and geography. Richard Evans has taught at the University of South Africa, Pretoria, and at Cardiff University, UK. Most recently he has been a Visiting Researcher and Research Fellow in the Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies at the University of South Africa. He is the author of a number of monographs, of which the most recent are Fields of Death: Retracing Ancient Battlefields (2013), Fields of Battle: Retracing Ancient Battlefields (2015) and Ancient Syracuse: From Foundation to Fourth Century Collapse (2016). He has also edited Mass and Elite in the Greek and Roman Worlds: From Sparta to Late Antiquity (2017). He is currently an Academic Associate at the University of South Africa. Martine De Marre is an Associate Professor of Ancient History in the Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies at the University of South Africa. Her research to date has focused on the social and cultural history of Roman North Africa during the entire period of antiquity up to the wars of Justinian, particularly in interpreting the role of women. The latter has also been the focus of studies on the literary sources of Late Antiquity, such as the works of Augustine, Fulgentius and Corippus.

Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies

Titles include: Thinking the Greeks A Volume in Honour of James M. Redfield Edited by Bruce M. King and Lillian Doherty Pushing the Boundaries of Historia Edited by Mary C. English and Lee M. Fratantuono Greek Myth and the Bible Bruce Louden Combined Warfare in Ancient Greece From Homer to Alexander the Great and his Successors Graham Wrightson Power Couples in Antiquity Transversal Perspectives Edited by Anne Bielman Sánchez The Extramercantile Economies of Greek and Roman Cities New Perspectives on the Economic History of Classical Antiquity Edited by David B. Hollander, Thomas R. Blanton IV, and John T. Fitzgerald The Bible, Homer, and the Search for Meaning in Ancient Myths Why We Would Be Better Off With Homer’s Gods John Heath Fantasy in Greek and Roman Literature Graham Anderson Piracy, Pillage, and Plunder in Antiquity Appropriation and the Ancient World Edited by Richard Evans and Martine De Marre For more information on this series, visit: https://www.routledge.com/classicalstudies/series/RMCS

Piracy, Pillage and Plunder in Antiquity Appropriation and the Ancient World

Edited by Richard Evans and Martine De Marre

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Richard Evans and Martine De Marre; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Richard Evans and Martine De Marre to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Published in association with Acta Classica as Acta Classica Supplementum X (ISSN 0065–1141). British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Evans, Richard J., 1954- editor. | De Marre, Martine Elizabeth Agnáes, editor. Title: Piracy, pillage, and plunder in antiquity : appropriation and the ancient world / edited by Richard Evans and Martine De Marre. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge monographs in classical studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019013817 (print) | LCCN 2019017295 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429440441 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429803048 (web pdf) | ISBN 9780429803024 (mobi/kindle) | ISBN 9780429803031 (epub) | ISBN 9781138341005 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Pirates–Mediterranean Region–History. | Piracy– Mediterranean Region–History. | Brigands and robbers–Mediterranean Region–History. | Pillage–Mediterranean Region–History. | Pirates in literature. | Brigands and robbers in literature. | Mediterranean Region– History–To 476. | History, Ancient. Classification: LCC DE61.P5 (ebook) | LCC DE61.P5 P57 2019 (print) | DDC 937–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013817 ISBN: 978-1-138-34100-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-44044-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of contributors Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations in this volume Piracy, pillage and plunder in antiquity: An introduction

vii x xii xiii 1

CLIFFORD ANDO

1 By the hand of a robber: States, mercenaries and bandits in Middle Bronze Age Mesopotamia

9

SETH RICHARDSON

2 The limits of nationalism: Brigandage: piracy and mercenary service in fourth century BCE Athens

27

MATTHEW TRUNDLE

3 Piracy and pseudo-piracy in classical Syracuse: Financial replenishment through outsourcing, sacking temples and forced migrations

38

RICHARD EVANS

4 Terra cognita sed vacua?: (Re-)appropriating territory through Hellenistic city foundations

60

ALEX MCAULEY

5 The colonisation of Pontiae (313 BC), piracy and the nature of Rome’s maritime expansion before the First Punic War

84

ROMAN ROTH

6 Campaigning against pirate mercenaries: A very Roman strategy? AARON L. BEEK

97

vi

Contents

7 Pirating pastoral poverty: Poetics in Tibullus 1.1

115

STEPHEN HARRISON

8 The revolt of the boukoloi, class and contemporary fiction in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon

129

JOHN HILTON

9 ‘Bad girls’?: Collective violence by women and the case of the Circumcellions in Roman North Africa

145

MARTINE DE MARRE

10 Piracy, plunder and the legacy of archaeological research in North Africa

170

EVE MACDONALD AND SANDRA BINGHAM

11 Spoils of Empire: Rider Haggard’s appropriation of the katabasis motif in King Solomon’s Mines

185

LILIANA CARRICK-TAPPEINER

Epilogue

203

RICHARD EVANS AND MARTINE DE MARRE

Bibliography Index of ancient sources cited in the chapters General index

205 232 234

Contributors

Clifford Ando is the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor; Professor of Classics, History and Law and in the College; Co-Director, Center for the Study of Ancient Religions, University of Chicago, USA. His research focuses on the history of religion, law and government. His publications include: Law, Language and Empire in the Roman Tradition (2011); Le Droit et l’Empire. Invention juridique et réalités politiques à Rome (2012); Imperial Rome: The Critical Century (A.D. 193–284) (2012); Religion et gouvernement dans l’Empire romain (2012). Aaron L. Beek has a PhD in Classical and Near Eastern Studies and has taught at the University of Memphis, USA, in the Department of History. He is currently on a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of the NorthWest in South Africa. His research interest lies in pirates, bandits and mercenaries, primarily in Hellenistic Greece and Republican Rome. He has published book chapters, encyclopaedia entries and articles on piracy and naval matters in the context of the ancient world. Sandra Bingham is a Senior Teaching Fellow in Classics at the University of Edinburgh, UK, with a research focus on Roman imperial history, specifically the praetorian guard, Roman imperial women, ancient Carthage and the Severans. Her published work focuses on exile, Severan coinage and games in the imperial period, in particular The Praetorian Guard: A History of Rome’s Elite Special Forces (2013). Liliana Carrick-Tappeiner completed her Master’s degree in the field of Classical reception and is a Lecturer at the University of South Africa, where she teaches across the range of Classical Studies and Ancient History. Her main areas of research are in Classical Reception Studies as well as in Italian and South African literature. Martine De Marre is an Associate Professor of Ancient History in the Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies at the University of South Africa. Her research to date has focused on the social and cultural history of Roman North Africa during the entire period of antiquity up to the wars of Justinian, particularly in interpreting the role of women. The latter

viii

List of contributors

has also been the focus of studies on the literary sources of Late Antiquity, such as the works of Augustine, Fulgentius and Corippus. Richard Evans has taught at the University of South Africa, Pretoria, and at Cardiff University, UK. Most recently he has been a Visiting Researcher and Research Fellow in the Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies at the University of South Africa. He is the author of a number of monographs, of which the most recent are Fields of Death: Retracing Ancient Battlefields (2013); Fields of Battle: Retracing Ancient Battlefields (2015); Ancient Syracuse: From Foundation to Fourth Century Collapse (2016). He has also edited Mass and Elite in the Greek and Roman Worlds: From Sparta to Late Antiquity (2017). He is currently an Academic Associate at the University of South Africa. Stephen Harrison is a Professor of Latin Literature and a Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford, UK. His main research interests are in Latin literature and its reception. He has published a number of books on Vergil, Apuleius and Horace, from a Commentary on Vergil Aeneid 10 (1991) to most recently Victorian Horace: Classics and Class (2017) and a commentary on Horace Odes 2 (2017). He has also been the editor or co-editor of over twenty books and numerous articles on Latin literature and Classical reception. John Hilton is a Professor of Classics and a Research Associate at the University of the Free State (UFS), South Africa, and is also the current editor of Acta Classica, the journal of the South African Classical Association. He has published extensively on the ancient novel (especially with regard to Heliodorus), in Reception Studies and in Greek and Latin Linguistics. He is the co-author of Apuleius: Rhetorical Works (2001 & 2007) and Alma Parens Originalis? Classical Receptions in South Africa, Cuba and Europe (2007). Eve MacDonald currently lectures in Ancient History at the University of Cardiff, UK. Her research is focused on the social history and archaeology of the opponents of Rome and the Roman Empire, and she has published articles on the Carthaginians and the Sasanian Persians in particular. Alex McAuley is a lecturer in Hellenistic History at the University of Cardiff, UK. His primary research interest is the society and culture of the Hellenistic world in the Greek mainland, particularly aspects of globalisation and localisation. He has published a number of articles on royal women in the Hellenistic period, and ancient federalism. Seth Richardson is a historian of the Ancient Near East who works in several different areas of ancient history, including problems of violence, rebellion and social histories of the ancient military. He has been a Research Associate at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, USA, and the Managing Editor of the Journal of Near Eastern Studies since 2011.

List of contributors

ix

Roman Roth is an Associate Professor in Classics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, who is interested in the archaeology and history of Roman Italy, particularly ceramic studies and historiography. He has published numerous articles and book chapters as well as a monograph, Styling Romanisation. Pottery and Society in Central Italy (2007), and is also the Director of the Capena Excavation Project. Matthew Trundle was the Chair and Professor of Classics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His research interests are primarily in ancient Greek history, and his publications focus on the social and economic aspects of the classical Greek world. He is the author of Greek Mercenaries from the Late Archaic Period to Alexander (2004) and has edited volumes entitled New Perspectives on Ancient Warfare (2010) and Beyond the Gates of Fire: New Perspectives on the Battle of Thermopylae (2013). He has also published numerous articles and book chapters on aspects of warfare in the ancient world. He died suddenly on 12 July 2019 and will be greatly missed by colleagues and friends.

Preface

The majority of the chapters in this volume had their origins in the Eighteenth Unisa Classics Colloquium held at the University of South Africa in October 2017. The objective of the conference was to explore aspects of a phenomenon which manifested itself in all walks of life: predatory behaviour. While violence may often be concomitant it is worth observing that predation can be extremely nuanced in its application and precisely this gradation and its focus occupies the essential issue in this volume. The objective was to endeavour to come to some understanding of the terminology within its broader context. Descriptions of historical episodes of predation often involve harsh realities, but these just as often lend themselves by elaboration as adventurous tales that are incorporated into plays, poetry, novels and not least histories. In some cases those who indulged in piracy, pillaging and plunder even attain a swashbuckling aura, a romantic characterisation, and this has persisted down to modern times. Piracy was universally feared in the Ancient World and was ubiquitous, whether it was on sea or on land. It is frequently to be seen in association with, or as a by-product of, the employment of mercenary troops in rival armies or naval forces. Unemployed mercenaries easily became privateers. By the first century BCE the Roman republican elite gained considerable political capital, undertaking the suppression of pirates or speaking out against their criminal activities. However, the sceptic might have questioned the efficacy or need for these state responses, and whether they were motivated by self-interest, individual gain or even a justification of imperialism in which state-sponsored ‘piracy’ becomes as evident. Far from the battlefield, the reproduction of a literary work without authorial permission is also termed ‘piracy’, hence the exploration of artistic plundering or appropriation of material from the works of earlier authors, and whether ethical or practical considerations touched these practices. Finally, the pillage and plundering of antiquities in the modern world also warrants some attention because the rediscovery of the Ancient World developed out of pillaging. Places of archaeological interest and importance today were very often for a long time associated with smuggling, an aspect of appropriation which accelerated the rediscovery of the civilisations and cultures of the regions around the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian World.

Preface xi The chronological extent of these studies is indeed a broad one, ranging from about 2000 BCE to almost the current century. Moreover, the geographical spectrum is similarly diverse encompassing Africa, the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. Such breadth will arguably indicate that this theme has had an immense impact on and been of considerable significance to the various societies dealt with here over the last four thousand years. Richard Evans and Martine De Marre, Pretoria, February 2019

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the numerous reviewers of the papers which in due course became the chapters of this volume. This is a time-consuming but often unacknowledged task, and it is essential to the process of ensuring a high standard of scholarship. We take this opportunity to thank all of you for the hard work that went into the compilation of this volume. We also would like to express our thanks to the University of South Africa and its College of Human Sciences for funding to invite speakers to the Eighteenth Unisa Classics Colloquium held in October 2017. Our thanks also to Amy Davis-Poynter, Fiona Hudson Gabuya, Elizabeth Risch and colleagues at Routledge (Taylor & Francis) for their assistance and advice during the preparation of this volume.

Abbreviations in this volume

AASS AbB AHw ARM BDTNS BM CAD CCL CIL CSEL CUSAS ePSD ETCSL IG KAR LAOS LE LH MDP MHET MiAg

Acta Sanctorum, Société des Bollandistes. Turnhout (1643–) Altbabylonische Briefe in Umschrift und Übersetzung. Leiden (1964–) Wolfram von Soden, Akkadisches Handwörterbuch. Wiesbaden (1965–1981) Archives royales de Mari (= TCL 22–31). Paris (1950–) Base de Datos de Textos Neosumerios, http://bdtns.filol.csic.es. Madrid (2002–) British Museum. London The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Chicago (1956–) Corpus Christianorum Series Latina. Turnhout (1954–) Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 16 + Volumes. Berlin (1863–) Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum. Vienna (1866–) Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology Bethesda, (2007–) The Electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary, http://psd. museum.upenn.edu Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, http://etcsl. orinst.ox.ac.uk/catalogue.htm Inscriptiones Graecae. Berlin (1873–) Keilschrifttexte aus Assur religiösen Inhalts I/II (= WVDOG 28, 1919; 34, 1923) Leipziger Altorientalistische Studien. Wiesbaden (2011–) Das Lugalbandaepos. Wiesbaden (1969) Laws of Hammurabi Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse. Paris (1900–). Also cited as MDAI, Mémoires de la Délégation Archéologique en Iran Mesopotamian History and Environment: Texts. Ghent Miscellanea Agostiniana, Sancti Augustini Sermones post Maurinos Reperti. Rome (1930)

xiv Abbreviations in this volume OECT OGIS OLA OSP1 OSP2 PBS PL PSD RIME SEG SIG ŠL UET VS YOS

Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts. Oxford (1923–) Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones Selectae. (1903/5) Orientalia Lovaniensia analecta. Leuven (1975–) Old Sumerian and Old Akkadian Texts in Philadelphia Chiefly from Nippur 1 (BiMes. 1). Malibu (1975–) Old Sumerian and Old Akkadian Texts in Philadelphia 2. Copenhagen (1987–) University of Pennsylvania, Publications of the Babylonian Section. Philadelphia (1911–) Migne, J.-P. (ed.), Patrologia Latina. Paris (1845) The Sumerian Dictionary of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia (1984–) The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia. Toronto (1987–) Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. Leiden (1923–) Dittenberger, W. (ed.) Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum (1915–1924) Anton Deimel, Šumerisches Lexikon. I–IV. Rome (1928–1933) Ur Excavations. Texts. London (1928–) Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmäler der (Königlichen) Museen zu Berlin (1907–) Yale Oriental Series. Babylonian Texts. New Haven (1915–)

Piracy, pillage and plunder in antiquity An introduction Clifford Ando

In an extended reflection on the nature of states, Saint Augustine urged that earthly kingdoms, absent justice, are merely great banditries. Indeed, what is a group of bandits, but a little kingdom? It is a band of persons, ruled by the command of a leader, constrained by the compact of their association, in which booty is divided according to a set rule. If this evil grows to a considerable size through the arrival of demoralized persons, such that it holds territory and establishes a home, and seizes city-states and subjugates peoples, then, obviously, it takes for itself the name of kingdom, which is now conferred upon it not by the setting aside of greed, but the acquisition of impunity. Thus, elegantly and truly did the captured pirate respond once to Alexander the Great. For when the king had asked the man, what had he been thinking, when he infested the sea? To which the pirate replied, with open contempt: ‘The same as you, when you infested the world; but because I do it with a single ship, I am called a bandit; because you do it with a fleet, you are called an emperor.’1 Augustine drew the anecdote about Alexander from the third book of Cicero’s On the Commonwealth, written in the late 50s BCE, but he employs it to very different ends. In the first book of that work Cicero had drawn a sharp distinction between political communities that were united by a consensual commitment of their members toward a shared conception of law and right and bound by common utility, and mere gatherings of persons, who came together for any reason whatever.2 In the spring of 46 BCE, Cicero returned to this theme in his work on Paradoxes of the Stoics. There he poses the question, ‘What is a civitas?’ The term’s most basic meaning is ‘citizenship,’ but by common metonymies could mean ‘political society’ and ‘city-state.’3 What is a civitas? Every coming-together of wild and violent persons? Every multitude of fugitive slaves and bandits, gathered together in one place? No one would allow this. Therefore, there was no political society at that time, when the laws had no force, when the law courts were silent, when ancestral custom had collapsed, when the magistrates were chased

2

Clifford Ando away at the point of a sword and the name of the senate was nowhere heard in the commonwealth. That gathering of marauders and bandits that established itself in the forum, with you as its leader, and the remnants of Catiline’s conspiracy that turned from his ravings to your crime and madness: that was not a civitas. 4

As is clear from the apostrophe to Clodius, Cicero’s normative theorizing is in no way disconnected from its instrumental deployment in the service of contemporary politics. Indeed, he had been provoked to similar reflections by the capture of the state’s legislative machinery in the time of Clodius and his own exile.5 Then, too, he concluded that where standards regarding democratic legitimacy, violence and the rule of law ceased to obtain, the res publica had ceased to exist. But as his invocation of Alexander suggests, these contingent provocations elicited from him theoretical reflections that were far more wide-ranging and of far greater normative purchase than their Roman context. For Cicero and the participants in what we might term the Alexander tradition, piracy and banditry are distinguished by a number of factors. For one thing, they are forms of collective action: this is why it is possible to pose the question whether the conduct of life within a bandit community can or should be understood using the developed tools of political thought. As importantly, banditry exists in the shadows of state power and may be mimetic of it: the aggressive inversion of norms effected by the pirate’s reply to Alexander relies on this foundation. In so thinking, this ancient tradition is largely consonant with modern trends in the study of so-called social banditry: bandit groups (and bandit action) exist in spaces where state power does not quite penetrate; they are defined by statal authorities as illegal, but operate according to sets of imminent norms that allow them to be understood by others in different terms, whether as honorable, or external to the state, or as political and resistant to state power, and so forth. The great analysis of late classical banditry along these lines was performed by Brent Shaw in an essay whose original form continues to inspire.6 But here as elsewhere, social forms exist or evolve in mimetic relation to that which they resist, and in this sense both hermeneutically and in actual reality, banditry in the social-bandit tradition is constituted by the state. It also becomes visible in history through its construction by the state as other to itself. Brent Shaw republished, augmented and revised Bandits in the Roman Empire twenty years after its original publication.7 In the new text, he steps back from the formalism that undergirded the structuralist analysis in the original essay, and he positions this revision of his own work in the context of contemporary scholarship on banditry. In Shaw’s view, this scholarship has, in ways large and small, departed from the framework laid out by Eric Hobsbawm in the works with which he launched the field of bandit studies. Shaw understands his own act of revision as consonant with these trends. In their own ways, both John Hilton and Martine De Marre contribute to this careful recalibration in

Piracy, pillage and plunder in antiquity

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how we read the evidence for systemic social violence in the late ancient world. In Chapter 8 Hilton performs an exemplary act of historicism in regard to the herdsmen-outlaws in the novel Leucippe and Clitophon of Achilles Tatius. The ideological commitments that shape the evolving representation of the boukoloi are laid bare; and the relationship of Achilles Tatius to contemporary politics, and that of his narrative to contemporary events, are greatly clarified. The terror of the civilized at the prospect of unknown and unknowable Egyptians, who form a non-political society (a bandit-village, a le-ste-rion) and speak there a barbarous language, is revealed at once to be based on ethnographic falsehoods and yet justified; the violence of the bandits is real, because the civilized created it. For her part, De Marre (Chapter 9) poses the question of the Roman world in general, and of late ancient North Africa in particular, whether the systematic occlusion of women as agents of violence, but representation of them as integral to violent social movements, can be the whole story, as it were. In particular, she shows how Catholic sources used the presence of women among the Donatists to lay bare the depths of their moral degradation, all the while denying those women the agency that would dignify their deaths as martyrdoms. Attention to the particularities of the sources at this level provokes further reflection on the importance of ideological construal in the history of banditry and piracy—and likewise on the importance of international politics in the rising to salience of each as a problem. In sources of the first century BCE, for example, piracy is associated with regions of the Mediterranean that are not recognized as having macro-regional and juridically-constituted forms of government, including most famously Cilicia and Crete, but also Illyria. It might of course be true that these regions lacked in this period statal authorities that made claims to trans-regional control; certainly in all three cases, topography and ecology militated against the forms of state power that Rome and the Hellenistic monarchies recognized as kindred unto themselves. It is also true that, so far as we know, no government in these regions advanced claims on its own behalf with the sort of metaphysics of sovereignty that had become necessary to peer-polity recognition in the late Hellenistic Mediterranean. This made them problematic, but also rendered them susceptible to forms of unilateral action on the part of Mediterranean powers that would otherwise have been impossible. In the world charted by the Roman law on provincial provinces of 101/100 BCE, for example, the wider Mediterranean is distributed into macro-regional units with a limited number of public-law forms (kingdoms; ethnoi = nationes; provinces; as well as Rhodes—and each of these types of state might contain substituent poleis). Beyond these existed two areas that had had to be incorporated as provinces, for the lack of any alternative way of understanding and therefore governing them: Cilicia, on the one hand, and the Chersonese and Caenice, on the other.8 This pattern in the way Hellenistic states treated as piratic, or given to banditry, regions that resisted (as it were) ‘standard’ forms of macro-regional power, suggests that further investigation of the discourses of banditry in the high Roman period might be instructive. (I exclude from consideration the

4

Clifford Ando

ideological trope whereby emperors labeled usurpers as ‘bandits,’ in order to ascribe to them an illegitimate form of social rather than public power.) These, too, often focused on banditry as a structural feature of certain landscapes and, indeed, of certain types of landscape. On one level, these accounts take as foundational the view that peoples of the hill tend to prey upon peoples of the plain. That is to say, Graeco-Roman texts take agriculture to be normative as a form of economic production, and the settled lifestyle that agriculture requires makes its practitioners vulnerable to predation by non-agricultural populations that opt to dwell in geographical proximity but ecological and topographical distance, one might say, from agricultural ones.9 But there is a further ethnographic or anthropological level to such accounts. They also understand certain forms of social, cultural and political development to be co-constituted by the practice of agriculture. To cite only a famous instance in another Mediterranean tradition, not for naught is Cain at once the first farmer and the founder of urbanism. In consequence, as a matter of the history of ideology, discourses of criminality in respect of structural banditry of this type calque related discourses of ethnographic evaluation that locate politics, culture and law in cities, and understand social life outside those contexts as deficient along each of these indices of evaluation. The remark of the pirate points us in the direction of numerous further considerations in the history of piracy. Chief among these is that the relationship between states and pirates was often symbiotic, and could be so in multiple ways. The most obvious is that intended by the pirate himself: to a neutral observer, and, it seems likely, in the perspective of the victims of such violence, the difference between pirates and kings was negligible. The essays by Richard Evans and Roman Roth (Chapters 3 and 5) pick up on these themes. Evans offers a portrait of primitive state-building in fifth-century Syracuse, studying the efforts of Hieron and Dionysius to shape the demography of the territories under their control through forced resettlement of populations, as well their plundering of the coast of Italy in pursuit of funds. These actions were undertaken both by unaffiliated purveyors of violence—pirates—as well as fleets operating under Syracusan control. Through its own marauding, Syracuse raised the money it needed for the employment of mercenaries; through its relations with pirates, it protected its own ships and ensured that mercenaries were available for its hire when needed. It was therefore through a combination of alliances with small powers, and networked, destabilizing actions by Syracuse and its friends that Syracuse could persist in a Mediterranean dominated by larger powers with more stable sources of revenue. States might also tolerate or promote piracy because one or another of its effects was understood to conduce their contingent interests, especially in situations of multistate competition. This was, of course, the situation in the seventeenth-century Atlantic, when English pirates preyed upon Spanish ships, even as their status as pirates was intended to give the English crown plausible deniability with the Spanish crown. Likewise, although people commonly write that piracy in the eastern Mediterranean waxed in the

Piracy, pillage and plunder in antiquity

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vacuum created by the decline in Seleucid power, there is every reason to believe that several players in the region understood themselves to benefit from the destabilization that piracy furthered—and many will have exploited the slave trade, which was perhaps the chief economic interest of the pirates themselves. Roman Roth describes the Roman colony at Pontiae as existing in an international system of this nature. Rejecting in this and other instances the interpretive tradition that sees Roman so-called maritime colonies as bulwarks against naval powers, Roth urges that Pontiae was intended to be an affiliate of Rome as well as a full participant in an ecology of naval violence. Only this, Roth argues, makes sense of the stipulations in the fourth-century treaty between Carthage and Rome, which assumes that the two states pursued symmetric goals using similar means: the clauses against raiding and slave-trading are pointless if Rome was not understood to engage in these practices. Nor did it escape the attention of observers in the later fourth century that colonies of Rome—and of Syracuse, for that matter—served the interests of their founders in their selection of targets for their piratical raiding. As Roth makes clear, the request by Demetrios Poliorcetes that Rome should force its colony at Antium to desist from piracy puts paid to the notion that colonies were believed to be independent from their mother-cities in their foreign policy—to use an elevated term that their brigandage does not deserve. The same issue lies at the heart of Matthew Trundle’s chapter on fourth-century Athens (Chapter 2). Trundle studies two episodes in Athenian history in which individual Athenians became in their private capacity, or threatened to become, entrepreneurs of violence. The cases pose questions about the responsibility of ancient political communities for members of their community when they acted as free-agents of social violence (how easily might a pirate who happens to be Athenian provoke a war between another state and Athens itself ?) and also about the ability of ancient states to constrain such citizens, by forbidding all citizens to seek employment as soldiers-for-hire in foreign wars. Episodes like those studied by Trundle call our attention to an essential fact about the history of piracy in relation to the state, namely, that pirates, bandits and soldiers were often the same persons. Indeed, this fact is the subject of another essential, but less well known ancient analytic tradition about bandits and pirates, which sees them as not so much criminals, as simply hired purveyors of violence. A compressed statement along these lines is provided by Varro in his work On the Latin Language: In The Helmet-Horn: Who for ten years fought for wages (latrocinatus) for King Demetrius? They were called latrones (‘mercenaries’) from latus (‘side’), who were at the king’s side and had a sword at their own sides, whom later were called stipatores (‘bodyguards’) from stipatio (‘close attendance’), and who were hired for pay; for in Greek this pay is called λάτρον. From this the old

6

Clifford Ando poets sometimes call soldiers latrones. But now those who besiege the roads are called latrones (‘bandits’), because like soldiers they carry swords, or because they hide to make their ambushes.10

The same definition, employing nearly the same terminology, appears in the dictionary of Festus, first under the lemma ‘Latrones’ and in the poorly preserved entry for ‘Stipatores.’ Latrones antiqui eos dicebant, qui conducti militabant, ἀπὸ τῆς λατρείας. At nunc viarum obsessores dicuntur, quod a latere adoriuntur, vel quod latenter insidiantur. 11 The ancients called those latrones who performed military service for pay, from the Greek term λατρεία (‘service for hire’). But now the besiegers of roads are so named, because they spring up out of hiding (a latere), or because they practice treachery in hiding (latenter). Ancient authors, particularly those of the late Hellenistic period, thus understood the labor force of war not narrowly in terms of citizen-soldiers (if ever they did so), but as embracing also cadres of young men—often of particular ethnicity or arising from specific regions—who move easily between self-employment as pirates, and employment by others as soldiers. (Once again, the early modern world provides notable comparanda, including the surge in piracy that followed the decommissioning of fleets at the end of the war of the Spanish succession.) This landscape forms the basis of the Aaron Beek’s fascinating analysis of Roman foreign policy in the second and early first centuries BCE. In Beek’s view (Chapter 6), much of Roman action, both diplomatic and martial, can be understood as directed at shaping the market of mercenaries: action against pirates was not undertaken out of a disinterested regard for lowering the risks of maritime trade, but with an eye toward depriving particular strategic enemies of access to soldiers. This could be accomplished through alliance, or through violence against those territories whence the mercenaries tended to spring, which violence would call their soldiers home. Many of the chapters in this volume establish their agenda in relation to traditional scholarship on banditry through acts of imminent critique. This is possible in part because, like Brent Shaw in his landmark essay, they focus on the late Hellenistic and Roman worlds, when the language and ideologies of sovereignty had so developed as to make clear that states aspired to account for all persons and territory within some borders— which aspiration is precisely what made possible the retreat of bandits to, or emergence of bandits from, those geographic and topographic spaces that state power did not in fact reach. As we have seen, the chapters by Evans and Roth begin to trace the limits of this scholarship in their focus on contexts of international action in which neither were all spaces

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controlled by states subject to mutual acts of recognition, nor (in consequence) did there exist any network of states of sufficient robustness that might allow a discourse of a rule of (international) law to emerge. The most radical assault on classical bandit theory along these lines is advanced by Seth Richardson (Chapter 1). Richardson seeks to discern the underlying sociological realities that were described—which is to say, construed and classified—in the state languages of violence in Middle Bronze Age Mesopotamia. As in other contexts studied in this volume, the terminology employed to denote robbers, which is to say, petty criminals preying on individuals within territories ‘controlled’ by the state, was also used to describe bandits that operated in groups in territories beyond state control, and also mercenaries. But they were not an epiphenomenon of state power, nor should we be misled by the simplicity of state language into imagining a single class of human being, or singular form of social action, that comprised either bandits or banditry. Instead, the desperate effort to contain diverse worlds within the simplifying taxonomy of ḫabba-tu is revealed by Richardson to be an index of state weakness, and both conceptually and materially, the diversity that the states could not capture ultimately overwhelmed them. A final array of essays makes the concept of piracy into a metaphor for appropriation, above all of a colonialist type. It is in this spirit that Alex McAuley (Chapter 4) approaches the history of Seleucid Syria, and analyzes both the big moves made by imperial powers to control the landscape and how the resulting landscape might be read; he also pays careful attention to the constraints on those moves imposed by the need of imperial powers to surmount infrastructural weakness through ideological power. More metaphorical still are invocations of piracy in Stephen Harrison’s study of Tibullus 1.1 (Chapter 7); Eve MacDonald and Sandra Bingham’s essay (Chapter 10) on the early history of Mediterranean archaeology and the relationship between the rediscovery of Carthage, French colonialist knowledge and seventeenth-century piracy; and Liliana Carrick-Tappeiner’s reading (Chapter 11) of Rider Haggard’s appropriation of classical motifs and especially pillage and plunder in a piratical sense in King Solomon’s Mines. Piracy is still with us, and it’s good to think with. Thus: The possibility of huge riches seemed to have been the main driver of piracy off the Somali coast. But it was a lack of effective government … and … navy, that enable it to happen. But 10 years ago, the European Union, Nato and others began to deploy naval forces to the region … Pirate attacks have now all but stopped, after reaching a peak in 2011. But there continues to be a danger that the piracy cycle could be repeated. (A. Soy for BBC News 11.12.2018)

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Notes 1 Augustine, De civitate dei 4.4. The same passage of Cicero is exploited by Nonius Marcellus three times: s.v. infestum mare haberet (181.13L); s.v. habere (498.18L); s.v. myoparo (856.15L). The fragment is numbered 3.24a by Ziegler and numbered first among the fragmenta incertae sedis of book 3 by Powell. 2 Cicero, De re publica 1.39a: Est igitur, inquit Africanus, res publica res populi, populus autem non omnis hominum coetus quoquo modo congregatus, sed coetus multitudinis iuris consensu et utilitatis communione sociatus. 3 On civitas and its metonymic range see Ando (2015) 7–14. 4 Cicero, Paradoxa Stoicorum 27: Quae est enim civitas? omnisne conventus etiam ferorum et immanium? omnisne etiam fugitivorum ac latronum congregata unum in locum multitudo? Certe negabis. Non igitur erat illa tum civitas, cum leges in ea nihil valebant, cum iudicia iacebant, cum mos patrius occiderat, cum ferro pulsis magistratibus senatus nomen in re publica non erat; praedonum ille concursus et te duce latrocinium in foro constitutum et reliquiae coniurationis a Catilinae furiis ad tuum scelus furoremque conversae, non civitas erat. 5 On this theme in the speeches after Cicero’s return see Riggsby (2002). 6 Shaw (2004a [1984]); see also Shaw (2000). 7 Shaw (2004b). 8 Roman Statutes no. 12, Cnidos copy, column 3, lines 28–41, and column 4, lines 5–30. 9 See Shaw (1990) and Lenski (1999), together with Hopwood (1983). 10 Varro, Ling. 7.52 (trans. Kent, revised). 11 Festus s.v. latrones 105L; see also s.v. stipatores 412L, with the representation of that entry in Paul the Deacon s.v. stipatores 413L.

1

By the hand of a robber States, mercenaries and bandits in Middle Bronze Age Mesopotamia Seth Richardson

When a fire it kindled by the hand of a robber, it consumes the land. ina qati habbati isatum napbat matam ikkal AbB VIII 28, Old Babylonian letter, ea . 1750 BC

Introduction As it was for many Mesopotamian social groups, literary depictions of the class of people called 'robbers' (Sumerian Iusa-gaz, lit. 'head-bashers'/Akkadian babbatu) differed significantly from what we can see of them as actors in the everyday economic , political and social arena. Thus, 'robbers' were on the one hand archetypal villains who populated the Mesopotamian imaginary at the mantic and divine levels; on the other hand, we find that while robbery existed (up to and including collective, organized brigandage), it was only occasionally connected to people called 'robbers,' who instead appear to have been marginal people partly integrated into state orders, working as laborers and mercenaries. It is difficult to discern, then-between the florid descriptions of omens and rituals, the letters describing highway banditry, and the administrative texts documenting the utterly routine farming work of 'robbers'-whether we are looking at organized-crime groups with parasocial features , 'social bandits' a la Hobsbawm, or indeed whether any meaningful group identity existed at all for 'robbers' outside of literary imagination. I will describe the evidence for 'robbers,' both literary and socio-economic , and then establish their context within the age in which they are best attested, the Middle Bronze Age in Mesopotamia (ea. 2100-1600 BC). These five centuries are among cuneiform culture's best documented , with a rich fund of sources permitting close reconstructions of economy , society, and political life, sometimes fine-grained enough to let us see daily events. They were also the closing scenes in the region's great first historical act of city-states (beginning as far back as ea. 3300 BC), with a 'Dark Age' intermission (ea. 1600-1400) intervening before Act II , the Late Bronze and Iron Age sequence of ea. 1400-539 BC, more characterized by national states and empires. My analysis of the confusing and conflicting signals about the existence and practices of brigandage concludes that its substantial socio-political

10 Seth Richardson identity lay in 'warlordism' rather than a criminal, subaltern, or romantic/antiromantic character. I argue that the ultimate impact of that warlordism in this time was to profoundly alter the nature of state authority itself One could overstate the importance of brigandage to the geo-political scene of the Middle Bronze Ur III and Old Babylonian periods, but its footprint on the landscape is informative about the extent and shape of the power of early states altogether. The Middle Bronze would seem an ideal vantage point from which to consider states and their others. By 2100 BC, state organization would seem well rooted after a thousand years of development and practice. The institution of kingship was at least a thousand years o1d, some dynasties measured their lifespans in centuries, and a dynamic international system tied regional and distant polities together (if as much in conflict as in mutuality). The state as both form and idea would seem to have achieved transhistorical durability. But Middle Bronze states still often struggled to control even local hinterlands and the marginal populations who lived there. This was not only a product of interstate competition (as is often assumed), but also of cross-scale conflicts between states and non-state groups they sometimes identified as 'enemies,' 'robbers,' or any number of ethnonyms. States seemingly remained vulnerable to some of the same local security threats they claimed to have long since overcome and surpassed by this point. This paradox of significant numbers of 'social bandit' groups at a high-water moment for states is best seen first as 'a response to [the] monopolist incursions and restrictions' of the state system upon the political landscape (following Dawdy and Bonni 2012: 676). But in its latter phases, the result was not (as it was by the early 19th century AD in the West) that states more or less successfully excluded systems of piracy from substantial power-sharing. Rather, following a particularly intense century of warfare ea. 1830-1730 BC, bandit-groups in Mesopotamia were models for, and perhaps precipitators of, the stateless 'Dark Age' that arose when that system deteriorated.

The literary context: 'the cut-throat' and 'the robber' The shadowy figure of the brigand and the plunderer appears in proverbs 1 and magical spells; his origins perhaps go back to the late Early Dynastic period (ea. 2500 BC). Here he appears with a demonic aspect in prophylactic incantations: 'the evil Galla-demon , released in the steppe , the unsparing robber.' 2 Among literary works, robbers figure prominently in a chilling tale of the youthful god Dumuzi (traditionally called Dumuzi's Dream) , whose nocturnal vision of marsh reeds is interpreted as 'The rushes rising up for you, which kept growing for you, are bandits rising against you from their ambush!' The bandits indeed soon appear-'big men who bind the neck ,' a 'motley crew,' 3 and 'demons'-and murder the beautiful youth , destroying his idyllic sheepfold. 4 In a very different composition, the literary-historical Cursing of Agade text, an infestation of robbers in the land is emblematic of a breakdown of cosmic order , when 'brigands occupied the highways ,' cutting off communications between

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cities; robbers were likened to prisoners and to monkey-faced Gutian people from the mountains. 5 In omens , hemerologies , and magical texts from the third to the first millennium BC, 'the robber ' was a figure who cut off travel , whose attack was like that of a lion, 6 who caused crop losses in the countryside . 'Will the man be saved from the business of the brigand and robber who block the road? ' one tamitu-query reads ;7 'Will the herd and the robber-wolf ever come to an agreement? '; 8 'If robbers are numerous in a city,' intones one omen 's protasis from the series Summ a Alu , 'there will be enmity .' 9 The apodoses of many omens foresaw the robber as the dire outcome of some interpreted sign: [If [If [If [If [If

A] : B]: C]: D]: E]:

robbers will turn the country into ruins. a robber will cut off his head . he will chance upon a den of robbers , but will not be stripped. robbers will kidnap him. anarchy , robbers will rage . 10

The robber was a paradigmatic enemy whose power of theft extended to all spheres: as a sign of social alienation ('I will roam over the remote open country like a robber '); 11 of affliction and disease ('Or whether you may be the evil Ala-demon who , as "sleep-robber ," always stands about in order to deprive a man of sleep ');12 or as an expression of sexual potency , as in this ritual dialogue : (She:) Like a robber , I want to plunder your attractiveness! (He:) When may I expose your clitoris (lit. 'no se of desire ')?13 The robber was even set among the stars and planets in the night sky, as the 1111 'plunderer-star ' (111 usa-gaz , another name for Mars) , which also enjoyed the epithet abu ('strange , hostile , ill-portending '), and was listed with stars named for predators such as the Lion and the Eagle . 14 As a symbolic figure inhabiting the mantic world , the robber was accordingly to be warded away ritually : 'it is the wording for an incantation ,' begins one ritual text , 'for going through the steppe against the enemy, for overcoming lion and robber. ' 15 A namburbi-ritual reads: 'You recite the namburbi , and robbers and enemies will not attack the man and his house .' 16 Alternatively , the robber could be summoned apotropaically to punish witches and sorcerors : 'Let a robber lie in wait in their fields'; 'let a robber lie in ambush for their earnings. ' 17 The image of the robber conveyed a trope about theft and seizure that formed at an early point and endured for millennia. He was styled as a solitary figure inhabiting the wastelands and mountains at the fringes of the settled areas , blocking the highways and striking at night . He became symbolic of the many dangers that lay outside of cities and away from the temples of the gods, where people were also vulnerable to illness, ghosts , scorpions , wild dogs, and demons - numbered among the mortal enemies of civilized mankind . Perhaps

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significantly, however, so were the cops: demons also took on the aspect of police , signalling to us how ambivalently claims of legitimate versus illegitimate force were received in early states. 18

Robbers and robbery in the Middle Bronze Borrowing from these stock images and apparently corroborating their reality , the inscriptions of Middle Bronze kings, from the time of ea. 2100 BC , began to introduce royal claims to have brought something called 'banditry' under control. From a hymn to King U r-N amma of Ur, we find: 'I place my foot on the necks of thieves and criminals. I clamp down on evildoers, who will be caught like snakes. I fenced out fugitives, and their intentions will be set right.' 19 'I have brought about the extermination of the cut-throats who roam the desert ,' reads another hymn to King Isme-Dagan of Isin, 20 and Nur-Adad of Larsa boasted 'I destroyed the robber, the wicked , and the evil-doer among the people.' 21 Kings of the Ur III and Old Babylonian periods also alluded in vague terms to the dangerous conditions they alleviated beyond the city walls, claiming to 'secure safe roads' through the countryside ,22 'eradicate armed violence,' and put an end to 'intimidation. ' 23 In omens and royal inscriptions, 'robbers' were semantically assimilated to other excoriated and dangerous (but ill-defined) non-state peoples at the geographic fringes of the state, in need of organizing, variously called 'enemies' (nakru), 'evildoers' (babilu) , 'criminals' (sarraru), 'runaways' (munnabtu), and 'cattered people' (nisz sapbati). 24 By the Old Babylonian period , sa-gazlbabbatu more specifically denoted a class of persons recognized at an institutional level, rather than designating individual 'thieves' (whether fictional or real) .2 5 We do not lack for attestations of such people: already by 1982, by one account, there were more than two hundred and fifty known references to sa-gaz, 26 with new examples emerging all the time. Raymond Westbrook distinguished between the legal sense of (individual) theft/burglary and (collective) robbery in this way: Theft with violence was regarded as a separate offence (verb babatum), probably because it reflected a different social reality. Robbers were typically outsiders who waylaid travelers or raided settled areas. If caught, they could be killed [SR: i.e., as hostis humani generis], but they were not often caught. Consequently , it was the local authorities who were obliged to compensate the victims (LH 22-24). 27 Hossein Badamchi has collected a host of Ur III , OB, and Nuzi texts alluding to attacks on merchants and messengers by 'robbers,' and the responsibility of provincial authorities to protect against them, 28 including a few other Old Babylonian letters which associate babbatu with raiding , robbery , and 'enemies': 'concerning the well-being of the land: a raid by the enemy '; 'concerning the palace servant girl whom they carried off in the razzia'; and so on. 29 Another letter tells us that 'robbers' are to surrender after their plundering of

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a farmstead (AbB VII 116); while in another, an official is reprimanded for not bringing 'criminals and robbers' in to his superior (AbB VIII 28; but see below). Yet another reads: As you have heard, the land is in confusion, and the enemy has settled in the countryside. . .. Take one lamb from the sheep to the diviner and find out about my oxen and my sheep , whether they must come here where I am. If no enemy attack (tzbi nakrim) or raid by robbers (tzbi babbatim) will take place, they must come here where I am. Or else bring them into the city of Kis, so that the enemy cannot get them. 30 Loan documents for overland trade expeditions indemnified investors against losses incurred due to brigandage: 'If the creditor entrusts the silver for trade or lends it to a third party, he is not liable for outstanding debts or loss due to highway robbery.' 31 This concern was mirrored by the common use of a repayment clause in other commercial loans , in which repayment was stipulated only 'at the safe completion of the journey.' 32 Old Assyrian letters show that babbatu could also be a problem for caravans in the north , characterizing their looting as them having 'eaten the land clean'; 33 at least two intercity trade treaties of the period specify that the other party would not use bapiru to disrupt trade. 34 One Old Assyrian letter (to which we will return) reads in part: Speak to the gods and to the city, thus (said) the merchants of Tamkur: You know that the roads have become full of hardship. As for the revolt of the region , since babbatus rebelled (and as a result) are controlling the mountains , the caravans . . . repeatedly [in the middle of] the country in distress. . . . Our profit and every single sh ekel of silver which we left behind in the region have disappeared. 35 1

Evidence from documents like these lends credence to the idea that there were some patches of territory that were not under the full control of states; 36 one imagines a countryside infested by thieves. Where the documentation of piracy becomes more tricky is in the question of what to do with the many references to piratical behavior that was not clearly attributed to sa-gaz by name. One dimension of this question is functional, insofar as cattle raiding , kidnapping , and asymmetric warfare (e.g. ambushes, use of difficult terrain, spectacular violence) are all well-attested in several periods of Mesopotamian history without necessarily having been carried out by sa-gaz. 37 Another dimension is areal, in that the countryside for all sorts of purposes was often held to be an unsafe place, one to be avoided by individuals and occasionally patrolled by troops, though the dangers were various and never limited to sa-gaz. 38 And a third dimension is terminological: when brigandage was carried out by people only called 'the enemy,' without distinction to origin; where 'enemy,' of course, could just as easily refer to the troops of another state as to anyone else, and sometimes certainly did. 39 But

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some references also likened 'enemies' to 'robbers,' 40 and many 'enemies,' instead of engaging in regular warfare, rustled cattle, 41 seized hostages, 42 and 'blocked (passage out of) the city gate' 43 or otherwise made travel and commerce unsafe, 44 activities more paradigmatic of 'robbers.' (I find it odd that letter-writers would not identify the specific name or origin of enemies if and when they could , as for, e.g., 'enemies from Esnunna.') 45 Taken together, what we can say is that there is some modest corroboration for the literary image of the robber as a real and everyday problem for Mesopotamian states. A small but steady drumbeat of letters and economic texts suggests brigandage as a hazard to travelers, a perpetual transaction cost for overland trade , and a subsistence strategy for some marginal people-even if they were not always called 'robbers.' What are we to make of all this? Of piracy without pirates, and (as we shall now see) vice-versa?

The hahhatu and their alters lo,'

The fore going 'police blotter' must be tempered by the fact that when people called 'sa-gaz' appeared in administrative texts of the Babylonian south as far back as the mid-third millennium, they only did so in the blandest possible roles, as economic producers: reporting for work, 46 delivering finished products ,47 or given rations. 48 The lusa-gaz is even listed among the so-called 'professions' in Early Dynastic lexical lists, alongside anodyne jobs such as 'oil-presser,' 'courtyard sweeper,' and 'midwife.' 49 One Ur III literary letter depicts the 'sa-gaz' as an unruly and unregulated (but not dangerous or hostile) people who simply had the unmitigated gall to carry out their affairs without reference to state rules: These bandits (1ula-ga) and brigands (1usa-gaz) applied their hoes to level the desert completely. As for their men and their women: the man among them goes wherever he pleases, the woman among them, holding a spindle and hair clasp in her hand, goes the way of her choice. In the vastness of the desert they knock up animal pens, and after setting up their tents and camps, their workers and agricultural labourers spend the day together on the fields. A structured connection between a 'robber class' and the state persisted down through the Ur III and into the Old Babylonian period , when sa-gaz remained a distinct group of people who collected rations, tilled fields, performed military service, and were overseen by designated state officials (sukkal/ugula sa-gaz, 'secretary/captain of the sa-gaz'). 50 In the north , where babbatu were clearly organized along military lines as seasonal mercenaries , there are references to them in numbers up to 10,000 at a time under the control of generals (ugula), section-leaders (gal ku 5 sa lulJ.), tribal 'princes' (bukasum) ,51 and named individuals (i.e., strongmen who, without title, commanded their own contingents of armed men). 52 From letters and administrative texts-practical documentsbabbatu were overwhelmingly documented as mercenaries (especially in northern Mesopotamia), 53 workers (in the south) ,54 and semi-nomads outside

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of the settled areas-but not as brigands. Through their project and group identity (at the exonymous level , at least) , their identifiable leadership structure, and their control of territory, sa-gaz units exhibited some degree of parasocial organization. Yet though we find this second-millennium record mostly descriptive of settled and productive fringe groups , we must also acknowledge undeniable records of attacks on caravans , cattle raiding , ships gone missing in transit , highway robbery , slaving , smuggling, and local protection rackets, even if many of them have no clear connection to babbatu or bapiru. It is a mixed picture which might lead one to think that a search for real Mesopotamian pirates would be chimerical. But the amount of evidence wants an account that makes sense of all these features within one framework. Though it would be too much to say that Mesopotamians were at the mercy of brigands , brigandage did exist at the vulnerable margins of state societies-out in the countryside , in the night , when a poor northern girl was trafficked down the Euphrates for sale in Babylonia. We may begin by untangling some of the easy equations between 'robbers' and brigandage without turning them into full negations. Some of the conflicting signals about who 'robbers ' were, for one, may stem from either our modern uncertainty about and/or the actual ancient ambivalence of the etymological derivation of babbatu. Akkadian offers us not one, not two, not three , but four separate homonymous verbs babatu (A-D): in brief , 'to rob ,' 'to borrow ,' 'to prevail,' and 'to move across (territory),' respectively. It has been suggested that the dual(?) root of babbatu may accommodate both the first and last of these senses , 55 pointing to the essentially perspectival nature of the word. An equation of 'robbers' with 'emigrants' bespeaks a lack of clarity or concern on the part of settled , literate people about who many of these outside people were , an assumption of a fundamental identity between many different groups. The word babbatu is then a classic structural trap , inviting us to imagine a single coherent social class with a strong abstract sense of ethnocultural identity, where only multiple and disparate group consciousness existed among dozens if not hundreds of separate collectives. As if these several contexts , functions , and terminological problems were not confusing enough, the term babbatu was and is profoundly entangled, etmyologically and notionally, in a special historiographic problem. This has to do with the word's possible relation to the word bapiru , which was , problematically enough , also sometimes written as Sumerian lusa-gaz. 56 Jjapiru was another collective term for a class of (mostly) soldiers (much like the babbatu in north-Mesopotamian contexts), best known from Late Bronze contexts, especially in the Amarna letters. 57 Although the two words may be near-synonyms for the same kinds of people , the word bapiru alone generated a very large secondary literature for about a century (still ongoing in some quarters) that attempted to tease out the relationship of these wandering outsider bapiru-people to 'the Hebrews.' One should better imagine this intellectual thicket than enter it. 58 But the problem is an instructive model for

16 Seth Ri chardson how the historical roles of Babylonian 'robbers' and 'enemies ' have often been complicated by ultimately unhelpful questions of their ethnic identity . Enemies , robbers , and scattered people have all often been associated with various ethnonyms on very scanty evidence-as Amorites , Kassites , Suteans , Subareans , among dozens of others , people with whom central states came into both conflict and cooperation . Some of these names were purely exonyms anyway (i.e., with no clearly meaningful identity for the people those names purported to distinguish) .59 We may take up two instructive examples , though they clarify the nature of our confusion rather than resolving it. The first example relates to the rebellious babbatu in the Assyrian letter quoted above . Although their predation on caravans indeed seems the most likely reading of that letter (though it is uncertain that the letter actually accuses them of robbing) , it is clear that these babbatu were mercenaries who had secondarily turned to piracy as a consequence of their 'rebellion ,' rather than performing a primary function as a 'band of robbers .' 60 The letter illustrates how slippery a slope we are talking about when we mistake a name for an identity: these are titularly 'robbers ' who were engaged in 'robbery ,' yet we miss their identity as mercenaries if we think of them as brigands. Another case comes in two related Babylonian letters , AbB VIII 24 and 28. In AbB VIII 28, an official upbraids a man named Silli-Marduk for failing to bring in 'robbers and criminals ' (sarram it babbatam) , and says that he will be held responsible for any crime committed in the land. But in AbB VIII 24, we find that Silli-Marduk is himself called the 'Overseer of the "Robbers "' (ugula lusa.gazmes, an office attested several times in Babylonian sources) .61 He is informed that twenty men have been killed between a city and a fortress ; that the way of a caravan is cut off; and that he is to restrain the caravan from proceeding. It is hardly clear, between the two letters , whether the 'robbers ' under the authority of Silli-Marduk were the source of the attacks on the road ; or whether he was meant to regulate inter actions between 'robbers ' and the state authority ; or whether yet again the 'robbers ' who were summoned were not in fact mercenaries meant to prot ect the caravans and travelers. It is very likely that these two situations do not call for exclusive readings , but describe problems of liminality-descriptions for groups which were neither fully in nor out of state control , and whose capacit y for violence was ambivalently both used and feared by state societies . This would hardly be the first or last time in history that a sub-class which otherwise cooperated with states also occasionally clashed with it, and/or was simultaneously vilified by that culture 's literature. It is the kind of cultural ambivalence that ha s marked the stories of imperialism , colonialism , and Orientalism from earliest times , and it is one that deserves to be applied as well to groups I would classify as 'warlord ' societies.

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Badges? We don't need no stinking badges ... Warlordism should describe groups with a primary project identity as mercenaries (whether currently employed or not) , identifiable by sufficient attributes such as distinct denomination , toponymic/territorial location , independent subsistence, and parasocial organization (especially officers or strongmen). They had a name, they lived in a place, they got by on their own or on their own terms, and one could treat with them through identifiable leaders. What they lacked (or cared not a fig for) were the aspects of state society which validated these social, economic, and political dimensions by ideology or theology. In fact, it is this absence of validating maneuvers that is the warlord 's necessary attribute: as Dawdy and Bonni (2012: 677) write, 'pirate cultures' are those that 'share a basic set of characteristics defined by their ambiguous legitimacy (often imperially illegal but locally licit).' Warlordism is a form of social organization which we may think of as imitative or derivative of state behavior (if not openly parasitical of states) but which deserves an account independent of normative state narratives. The discourse of state societies can be expected to code non-state people living outside of legimated (i.e., by law) 62 systems-even ones whose services they regularly used-as 'robbers' or the like; while by all functional criteria such groups were non-aligned warlord societies. In this context, I am not concerned to establish wardlordism as an ineradicable feature of some long-term homeostatic balance between state and non-state mercenary-groups , of which there are almost innumerable examples (e.g., the Italian condottieri of 14th / 15th centuries AD, or the armatoloi of the Ottoman empire) , and which undoubtedly persists as a sociological type to this day. Rather, my interest lies in the specific dynamic and categorical changes wrought upon Middle Bronze state organization through long-term exposure to the sa-gaz as an episode of historical change; not in how these robbers came to resemble a state, but in how this state came to resemble its robbers, down to the point where it just didn't exist anymore. Space here does not permit a full survey of the whole political landscape of mercenaries in the Middle Bronze Age. A brief description will have to make do with a partial list of the groups employed as the mercenaries of these Mesopotamian states: Amorites, Gutians , Subareans , Suheans , Kassites, Elamites , Sam1J.areans, Haneans , Hanigalbateans , A1J.lamu, Amnanu , Ya1J.ruru, Rabbeans , Jamutbal , Yaminites , Sima 'lites, Suteans , Num1J.eans, Lullu , Hadneans ... the parade of ethnonyms is virtually endless. Yet as long as the list is, for the bulk of the epoch the list of kingdoms and state armies was longer: as a general rule for the period ea. 2100 - 1750 BC , mercenary groups , whether denominated ethnically or geographically , were actors squarely subordinate to the states that employed them. Notwithstanding , we may note that state warfare practices themselves set standards sometimes indistinguishable from brigandage. As early as the Ur III period , the regular tax structure for conquered territories (gun ma-da , 'the

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tribute of the lands') was based on the annual delivery of animals seized by soldiers from the local population , depending on their rank: ten oxen and 100 sheep from generals (sagina), two oxen and twenty sheep from lieutenants (nu-banda), and a notional amount of silver from foot soldiers (eren). 63 Methods of collection are not documented, but it seems na1ve to think it was effected as orderly 'taxation.' Old Babylonian state armies regularly engaged in cross-border cattle raiding, hostage-taking , guerilla tactics, night attacks , caravan attacks , destruction of canals, fields, and civilians, spectacular/terrorizing violence, fearmongering and anonymity , and of course looting and the seizure of booty (sallatu): 'How can 5,000 troops return empty-handed to camp?' asked a disappointed ljammurabi after one campaign gone awry.64 At this level, it seems almost pointless to distinguish the 'regular' warfare of state militaries from the 'irregular' predations of bandits; the only real distinctions seem to be whether or not mercenaries were employed, and whether or not they retained their independent nomenclature. If non-state groups were 'imitative' of state behaviors, we must allow that those behaviors included everything we might, absent legitimizing titles, call 'banditry' anyway. The balance of state/non-state military groups changed drastically around the middle of the 18th century. The pace of regional warfare first began to pick up around 1830 BC. By the pivotal decades of 1770-1750 , in the wake of the super-regional wars between Babylon, Mari, Esnunna, and Elam (among many others) , mercenary contingents attained larger and larger sizes while maintaining their ethnic diversity and gaining the collective nomenclature babbatu-while the list of sponsoring states grew smaller and smaller. After 1750, the number of states in contact with one another shrank from a massive network to a bare handful. Here there is no reason to try to improve on the language of Jesper Eidem, writing of the north-Mesopotamian babbatu (emphases mine): 65 What is particularly interesting about the babbatum is the fact that they seem to be a basically new phenomenon. From the slightly older texts found at Mari we have many examples of kings using foreign troops, but such troops were usually sent as auxiliaries by foreign kings. . . . The babbatum, on the other hand, are apparently independent groups of professional soldiers who seem basically detached from any fixed political control ... [with movements that were] seasonal and related to conventional periods for conducting war. . . . Why then do we in this particular period , i.e. around 1750 BC, have the occurrence of large groups of professional mercenaries, fundamentally outside of state control, and apparently able to influence political events in a fairly decisive manner? ... The end of this period is marked by a severe reduction in the number of such major city-states. . . . Viewed in this perspective, the appearance of large groups of redundant soldiers in the countryside is hardly surprising . . . [O]n a long term basis, their existence must clearly have constituted a destabilizing factor.

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What has not received so much attention is what happened with these destabilizing babbatu-groups in the south of Mesopotamia, especially following the collapse of the great states in 1750.66 Without states to name them collectively, I have proposed (2005) that the many mercenary groups stationed in ex-urban fortresses were in effect not only exactly the same politically ambivalent mercenary-forces , but ones which had developed substantial group identity over the 150-year period of a weak Babylonian state from 1750-1600. By the Late Old Babylonian period, the state's fortresses substantially outnumbered its cities six to one. At least twenty-eight fortress communities can be identified as active-and perhaps another fifteen more-against only four cities. 67 Who was in these fortresses? Within the past decade, we have been lucky enough to have the archives of not one, but two of these fortresses published. The first, from ijaradum on the Euphrates , paints a multi-ethnic portrait through the onomasticon of its inhabitants alone. 68 The second archive, with hundreds of texts, comes from the fortress Dur-AbiesulJ , and is even more revealing by documenting at least fifteen separate mercenary groups stationed or passing through the place-including bapiru (and perhaps babbatu ) 69-all marked by different ethnonyms or geographic origins. They came from as far apart as Aleppo and Elam (a distance of almost 1500 km), including groups as diverse as Arameans from Syria , Jamutbal from the trans-Tigris , and Suteans from the mid-Euphrates region. Altogether, there are fifteen non-Babylonian groups mentioned in seventy-two texts. 70 Next to these, only four or five specifically Babylonian contingents are named, in only twelve texts. 71 Are these not habbatu? Mirroring the heterogeneous makeup of fortress life, the Late OB countryside was also dotted with tribal encampments and military outposts not belonging to the state: Kassite troop encampments (e.lJa Kassu), 72 a 'camp of the Elamites' (karas lu.nim.ma), 73 and the still-mysterious term mabanu, 74 among other unspecified 'enemies.' 75 A military apparatus had grown up to facilitate interaction between the multi-ethnic fortresses and the non-state camps , in the use of the eren kzdim ('troops in the outskirts') ,76 scouts (1uamiru), 77 and the development of civic titles for countryside places, such as 'governors/elders/ 78 There was also a new citizens of the countryside/river-district/fortress.' emphasis for divination to determine questions of safe movement in the countryside. The textual tradition of liver divination, by then in its second editorial phase ,79 had been repurposed as a particular knowledge claim related to the movement of troops and goods in a militarized countryside, as well as for the use of kings and courts engaged in interstate competition , which better characterized its first phase. 80 Mercenaries thus had not only senses of community, identity and order, but also epistemic control. What we read in state records about the lives and towns of mercenary groups has of course been heavily filtered through the lens of state administrative practices: what they were paid, how much grain they ate, how many men they had. It may take an act of historical imagination to think that groups of non-state people settled in small garrison towns for decades and '-"'

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then centuries took on a form of group identity we might call warlordismbut not much. By the 17th century BC , these mercenaries had been settled for generations in these fortresses, undertaken primary production of fields they called their own (rather than being provisioned by the state),81 and developed semi-independent powers to levy travel tolls, control local territory, and detain persons for ransom or enslavement. The conditions we see reflected in the 17th century Babylonian record are consistent not only with the idea that warlordism was emergent in this era, but that the state itself began to take on features of warlordism. This included a receding level of the king's authority inside of cities, where they invested less and less in building city walls and temples, and an increasing authority over the countryside, as they increasingly voiced their power over the matim, 'the land.' Meanwhile , the king's messaging apparatus shrank to almost nothing: the royal inscription and hymnic tradition that had been vigorously pursued by Hammurabi and Samsuiluna in the 18th century was now all but abandoned. It is also from the late reign of Samsuiluna onward that we see more of an emphasis on specific contingents of troops that belonged to the king, 82 and designations of officials loyal to his person. 83 There was an overall devolution from a legal and territorial royal authority to one that better resembled the desmesne authority of a lord over a fief, one step closer to the warlords with whom the kings now treated , instead of other kings. What happened at the end of the First Dynasty of Babylon in 1595 BC may never be known. Despite the confident tone of many textbooks, which tell us that the Hittites destroyed Babylon , only four of thirteen later accounts of the event named the Hittites as the responsible party (and two of those four are Hittite texts anyway). In fact, no fewer than eleven other groups of attackers are named by later omens, epics, and just-so stories: Hurrians , Amorites , Haneans, Kassites, Suteans, Elamites , Idamara~, ijanigalbat, Samgaru, and the troops of the Sealand. 84 In some accounts, seemingly no single identity can be summoned forth from historical memory, where the ethnic make up or origin of the enemy hardly mattered. Here, they are just called 'the enemy,' or 'the foreign-speaking troops,' or-perhaps most eloquently-the so-called 'Edasustu troops,' which means literally 'the sixty-armed mob. ' 85 A tradition survived that a Hittite invasion finished Babylon off, but only in the broader context of struggles against many armed groups who were already inhabiting the local landscape. The list of remembered enemies is perilously similar to ethnicities we find for the troops quartered in Dur-Abiesug. We may also consider an 8th -century tamitu-oracle purporting to describe the final peril of Samsuditana, last king of the dynasty, besieged by these many enemies and defended only by 'the garrison of Marduk' at the gate of Babylon. 86 I think I of the do not overtax the evidence if I draw a likeness between the habbatu '"" 18th -century north; the multi-ethnic contingents of soldiers at Dl1r-Abiesu1J (and undoubtedly in many of the state's other fortresses); and the hordes who were dimly remembered in later ages as the ones who demolished the state.

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Conclusions This returns us to the babbatu , about whom I will make two propositions, first to conceive of a spectrum of legitimacy and parasocial organization along which political authority may be located: {illegitimacy} criminals~

'social bandits'~

mercenaries~

states {legitimacy}

The de-legitimizing terminologies for all groups to the left of the state's position were , of course , products of the ideologies and discourses of state society , while those groups themselves (especially in deep antiquity) rarely expressed their own views about the state in the record left to us. 87 But if one accepts that every culture includes some social groups at all points along the spectrum simultaneously , we are never talking about a single absolute status for any one state society, but rather a distribution of weight along a continuum, and it is that distribution which is historically-particular and informative about the whole. The second and more important point is that the most vital aspect of the simple diagram above is not the relative weight of legitimacy accorded to each point along the spectrum , but the relational symbol '~' itself. This is not so much because legitimacy is a relative or fluid discourse (as it is), but because the center of gravity exercises force upon and informs neigh boring points along the organizational spectrum. In this sense and case , it is not relevant in and of itself whether we call babbatu 'robbers' or mercenaries; not whether they were more closely assimilated to states or criminals ; but that the weakness of the Babylonian state in the 17th century, and indeed the weakness (if not full collapse) of the international system (only within which can states maintain their meaningful identity anyway) relative to the strength of these group s was the crucial motor for historical change. The larger proportion of social power located with babbatu groups changed the premises on which the state acted and organized , corroding , destabilizing , and finally dismantling the state itself. Just in the way that it would be fruitless to study Roman pirates absent the context of Rome's sovereign claims on the Mediterranean; or early modern pirates without reference to European colonialism; the bandits of Middle Bronze Mesopotamia make sense only by reference to the territorial expansion of and interstate warfare between states in that political landscape. These states first made their 'monopolist claims and incursions' upon that landscape ;88 then tried to limit the power of the peripheral groups over whom they could not establish full sovereignty; then organized them as proxies to fight in what was as close to a 'world war' as that culture ever knew ; and finally, the state system , collapsing everywhere, found that those groups remained more resilient and archetypal than states themselves. These pirates were not only responsive to the 'monopolist incursions and restrictions ' of the state , but made incursions and restrictions of their own on states. By the end , at a point when the distinction

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hostis humani generis had lost all meaning , the babbatu felt they no longer needed badges to exercise their power. But this was also, hardly coincidentally , the very moment at which our sources go silent for nearly two centuries , until very different states would emerge in the Late Bronze Age, along with their own bapiru. But that is a pirate story for another time. 89

Notes 1 ETCSL 6.1.13 (SP 13.3), as la-ga , 'thief ' rather than sa-gaz . 2 Geller (1985) 59 11.648 , 658 , with commentar y 124-125 (an Old Bab ylonian text); cf. Geller (2007) 135, 220, Tablet 7 I. 2 (first-millennium Be): 'the evil Sheriff-demon , released from the steppe , takes no pit y (even) on the robber .' See also Schwemer (2012) . Cf. the demonic aspect of the saggasu, 'murderer .' See also n . 15 below. 3 L. 110, lu 1Ji-1Ji-a-mes, lit . 'mixed(-up) men ;' cf. the Edasustu mentioned below , ad foe. n . 83. 4 ETCSL 1.4.3 I. 45. 5 Invective about 'robbers ' linked them repeatedly to mountain origins and Gutian ethnicit y, as in a Hymn to Nergal (ETCSL 4.15.2: 'You are the lord who has made the bandits come forth from the mountains ') and the Sulgi E H ymn (ETCSL 2.4.2 .05 : 'I repelled the tribal Gutians , the bandit s of the hills '). 6 For the likening of desert thie ves to lions , note the pro verb: 'A thief is a lion , but after he has been caught , he will be a slave' (ETCSL 5.6.1: 30f.); the omen apodosis 'either a lion or robbers will cause that man to abandon his expedition ' (CT 39 25 in CAD N /2 s.v. nesu s. 1b-2') ; and the tamztu-oracie query 'Will he escape from an attack of the enemy, an attack of lion s, an attack of robbers? ' (IM 67692 , ibid . 1b-3') . Other aspects of lion beha vior which are possibl y metaphorical for brigandage include: their blocking of the roads , attacking cara vans , and those who leave the city gate ; the close restriction of the term (CAD A S/2) sibtu A to refer to attacks by lions /snakes /dogs , demons , and raiding ; and the description of beha vior of both robbers and lions as 'rampaging ' see CAD N / 1 s.v. nadaru v. 2a , c. 7 CAD S sarru As. 3f; see a similar tamztu-query s.v. CAD S/ 1 s.v. salalu 2c: 'inquir y concerning a campaign to an enemy countr y for killing , robbing , and plundering .' 8 CAD S s.v. sugullu s. a . 9 Freedman (1998) : Summa Alu I: 129; see also Freedman (2006) : Summa Alu 2:24; cf. 1: 105 and 133: 'thie ves' and 'marauders ,' respecti vely. 10 Exs. from CAD 1Js.v. babbatu s. lb ; T s.v. tesu s. la ; N / 1 s.v. nadu v. 7e. 11 CAD B s.v. beru B adj. b. 12 Geller (199 7) 1. 13 LAOS 4, 11 obv. 2 (http: //oracc.museum.upenn.edu /seal/akklo ve/corpus) ; see also LAOS 4 27- 34, obv. 20 for 'the enem y.' 14 W 23766 obv. i' 23' (http: //oracc.museum .upenn.edu /dcclt /qpn-x-celest#X000182 . 21) ; see also Rutz (2016) 32, 45 . 15 Schwemer (2012) 11. 26-27 . One later OB incantation likewise protected against 'the enem y and the robber ,' Stol (2004) 799 n . 1085. See also babbatu in Maqlu 2: 120- 121: ' May [the god] cause a robber to carr y off [the afflicting witch 's] goods , cause a plunderer to lie in wait at their resting place. ' Though most incantations (even in Sumerian) date to substantiall y later than the Earl y D ynastic , some are thought to have much earlier forerunners , the most relevant of which would be the robber 's likeness to the Alu-demon of the series U dug-1Jul. See n. 2 abo ve; Geller (1985) 3- 5 & (2007) xi- xiii. 16 CAD N s.v. nakru s. 2h . 17 CAD M / 1 s.v. man abtu s. 4; E s.v. ekkemu s. a. V

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18 Not only were 'legitimate ' wielders of force such as policemen demonized just like robbers in early Sumerian literature (e.g., as when the same attackers of Dumuzi are called rabi~u or 'baliff-demons'), but the police-demon and the thief were even lexically equated; see Erim1Jus 5 1. 72, hi lul-la-ga = ra-bi-~u(http://oracc.museum.upenn. edu/qcat/corpus). See further Geller (1997) 2 on demons as 'police-like' figures. 19 Ur-Namma C 11.35-37 (ETCSL 2.4.1.3), with gur 5 (about the 'fugitives') understood as 'to cut off , more specific than 'to cut.' 20 Isme-Dagan A (ETCSL 2.5.4.01). 21 RIME 4 2.8.7 11. 53-54 (sa-gaz , lu-1Jul-gal, and lu-ni-erim , respectively); similarly RIME 4 2.13.1311. 20-31. See further Badamchi (2013) 59. 22 Roth (1995) 16 (Ur-Namma). See similar boasts of 'making the roads safe/passable. ' See also ETCSL 2.4.1.3 1. 19, 2.4.2.011. 28, 2.5.3.21. 24, 2.6.9.5 1. 75, 2.8.5. a 1. 20, etc. Cf. images of chaos characterized by robbers blocking the roads, e.g., in the Erra Epic: 'I will make robbers rise,' swears the god, 'and they will block the road ' (CAD A/1 s.v. alaktu s. 3b). 23 Roth (1995) 25 (Lipit-Istar) and 133 (IJammurabi) , respectively . At least one Old Babylonian law refers not to the burglary of urban houses by individual thieves, but protections for citizens captured while raiding (LE 129, sibit barrani); others may include LE 150 and LH 123 , both invoking the responsibilities of rural authorities to protect property against theft, and perhaps LH 1102 , concerning losses on a business trip. 24 Richardson (2012) 9, 25- 32. 25 Beside e.g. sarraqu typically an individual 'thief ,' and saggasu ,'murderer', perhaps Perhaps also written sa-gaz, see discussion s.v. S/1 p. 71, where that reading is noted , but not accepted . See further Badamchi (2016). Although babbatu could also be used to refer to an individual 'robber', the verb babatu itself ('to rob') is rare in the OB, while the noun was commonly pluralized , e.g. awile babbati used to form classifications like mar babbatu (lit. 'son of a robber' , recognizing a type), appeared as a collective term for administrative purposes , e.g., rations distributed to the Iusa-gaz(mes) (where the optional mes indicates a group) and was often paired with other collectives such as 'the enemy.' 26 Owen (1982) 73. 27 Westbrook (2003) 421 18 .4.5. 28 Badamchi (2013). It is not clear that every instance he discusses is a theft by 'robbers' as such, but the overall picture in which the delegation of responsibility for the safety of goods and persons in the countryside to local officials is convincing , well-accepted, and similar treaty terms existed in the Old Assyrian and Amarna corpora . See also for example this Nuzi text reading: '[The mayor] will watch over his town within its borders all around , and there shall occur no robbery within the borders of his town ; if within the borders of his town a robbery occurs , the mayor will be held responsible ' (CAD P s.v. pafu s. 3a). 29 E.g., AbB VIII 28. See also CAD S/2 s.v. sibtu A s. le with the meaning 'attack, raid, razzia' for more examples. 30 AbB XIV 81. 31 MDP 23 271 cited by CAD Q s.v. qapu A v. 3b; see other exs. CAD A/1 s.v. abazu 9f. The concern is echoed by a later hemerological omen , which concludes: 'He should not make a journey , or robbers will kidnap him ' (KAR 147 r. 12). 32 The clause ina salam girrisu and the like, Skaist (1994) 183- 188. Although Skaist translates only a functional 'at the completion of the journey. ' CAD S/1 s.v. salamu v. 2c provides the examples that demonstrate the context of risk, with the meaning 'to arrive safely' for caravans/boats, goods, and people . 33 Dercksen & Donbaz (2001) 108. From Mari letters , note examples of razzia cited CAD S/2 s.v. sihtu A s. le. V

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34 Gunbatti (2004) 254 (Kt . 00/k 6) including provisions against 'vagrants' and 259 (Kt . 00/k 10): 'You shall not instruct vagrants (bapirum) in lie and evil to sink a boat (belonging to an Assyrian) and to cause the loss of that freight.' 35 Dercksen & Donbaz (2001) 103, 107. The editors state that the earliest use of the word babbatu in the north comes from the time of Zimri-Lim of Mari (ea. 1770 Be) in ARM XXVIII 40 , where the term strictly meant 'mercenary.' See further Eidem (2011) 18f; Charpin (1984) 280: 'solides montagnards. ' 36 See Dawdy (2011) 380-382 on incomplete sovereignties. 37 See Richardson (2016a) 41-47 . Note also Eidem (2011) 21 on the case of a bapiruemigrant who , collecting a band of 'outlaws' (sarrarum) , began kidnapping people (babatum 'to steal ') and selling them as slaves. 38 See esp. the 'trouble in the countryside' letters of Richardson (2005) . My point there was that most of the efforts to discover the ethnic identity of 'enemies'-i.e. who they were-has failed to take account of the aspect that is most stressed by the letters: where they were . See also AbB VII 88 datable by prosopographic evidence to the Late OB , and to be added to the foregoing dossier: IX 118, IX 134?, XI 188?, XII 124, XIII 25 and 154, XIV 131; also CUSAS 36 19. Cf. the cryptic distinction made by the fragmentary AbB XII 166 that 'those who live in Larsa belong to the king ,' while 'those who live in open country do the work of[ .. .].' 39 See e.g ., AbB VI 186; IX 32, 160; XI 61, 127; XII 182; XIV 8, 53, 114, 204 . See also Richardson (2005). 40 XIV 81. See also CAD s.v. nakru s. 2h and i for pairings of enemies and robbers . 41 Cattle-rustling: AbB VI 165; XI 58; XII 172, 184; XIII 41; XIV 132. See also several of the letters in Richardson (2005) and CUSAS 36 22, in which a town, 'besieged ' by a tribe , must move its cattle elsewhere . 42 E.g. AbB IX 32, XIV 224. It is, however, a very tricky business to distinguish between the legal detention of a person as a pledge for debt, and the illegal detention of a person for money as a 'hostage .' Notwithstanding the probability that most period references to 'captives' (~abtu) were legally distrained pledges , it is easy to see how the system could be abused for extortion , ransom , and human trafficking , accusations much attested in the sources . 43 Enemies blocking the city gate: AbB IX 160; XI 61; XIV 8. Note the heavy presence of the image of the enemy blocking the city gate in ominous literature , e.g. Freedman (1998): Summa Alu 1:51, 9:17' and 21'. 44 Travel difficult: AbB XIV 53, 114. See above ad lac n. 32 concerning the phrase ina salam girrisu. 45 Specified enemies: AbB VII 137; XII 182. 46 E .g., BDTNS TMH 5 8 (ED IIIb Nippur), listing five workers from the city of Suruppak called sa-gaz ; OSP 1 43 , a man delivering five men called sa-gaz ; cf. Attinger 2005 on sa-gaz AK as 'faire le bandit. ' 47 BDTNS RA 86 97 r I 185. 48 BDTNS BM Messenger 180 1. 49 Lu D, Taylor (2003): §§6 and 7: 14 and E (per PSD: Lu E 153, lu-sa-gaz'[K u M]). See also OB lu-azlag B-C seg. 2 83-84 , lu sa-gaz as saggasum , 'murderer ,' beside other terms: lu su kar-re=massibu , 'robber ' ; lu gab-kar-re=ekkemum , 'robber '; lu zug-a=saraqum , 'thief ' ; lu e burudx-burud x pallisu , 'burglar '; and MB Ura 3:15 , lu-sag 4 -gaz=bambatum . See http://oracc.museum.upenn .edu /qcat . 50 For an overview, see the ea . 60 Ur III texts produced by a search of 'sa-gaz ' in BDTNS ; and the discussion under CAD Ij s.v. babbatu s. 2. 51 AbB VI 24. 52 Eidem (2011) 19; Durand (1992) 579; Durand (2005). 53 See esp. Eidem (2011) 18-22. 54 CAD H ..., s.v. habbatu s. 2 . V

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55 See Durand (1992) 106 n. 71 observing the likelihood that both bapiru and babbatu derive from verbs of motion (see also the discussion under CAD tI s.v. babaru B). Eidem (2011) 2, convincingly rejects the translation 'robber ' in favor of 'mercenary' for the northern contexts he studies. 56 Namely in Middle Bronze divinatory texts and in Late Bronze writings, including Syrian texts and the Amarna letters. Unlike babbatu, which survived into NeoBabylonian usage , bapiru was substantially restricted to second-millennium use. See n. 25 above on the possible reading of sa-gaz also as saggasu, 'murderer.' 57 For Babylonian references, see e.g. OECT XV 10 and 29; CUSAS 29 39 and 62 (unindexed references); CAD Ij s.v. bapiru s. (including also Assyrian and other citations). 58 For a historiographic overview, see Durand (2005) 565- 568. 59 It has been my position that the absence of ethnonyms in Babylonian sources indicates a lack of knowledge about a group's ethnic identity (because Mesopotamians were not shy of labeling people ethnically when they could) or its essentially non-ethnic makeup , a condition that has been very poorly theorized in Assyriological studies. See Richardson (2005) . 60 Note the several OB letters concerning caravans which contain no hint of even the worry of brigandage , e.g. AbB IX 130, 178, and 184; cf. AbB XI 193, on 'killing' caravans , the meaning of which is ambiguous . 61 Also AbB II 35 and VII 116; YOS XIII 205; UET 5 687; see literature cited by Stol (2004) 798-799 and notes 1078-1083. 62 However , see Richardson (2020 forthcoming) for a distinction between 'legitimacy' and 'validity' in the ancient context. 63 Steinkeller (1991 ); see also Lafont (2009) §7.2. 64 Richardson (2016a) 39-47 . 65 Eidem (2011) 19-21. As a corollary to the rapid emergence of this enormous population of stateless mercenaries , note also that Babylonia 's textual record post1750 also frequently documents women living as institutional dependents rather than as members of a household; on the connection of this phenomenon to warfare, see Richardson (2017) 90. 66 E.g . Neither Durand (2005) or Eidem (2011) confines their remarks to the north-Mesopotamian world of Mari and northern Syria. 67 See Richardson 2019a Against this, there were only four cities of the Babylonian state at this time: Babylon , Sippar, Dilbat , and Kis. 68 Joannes (2006). 69 Oddly, neither of these two attestations of bapiru is indexed by the editors. It is also possible that CUSAS 29 191:2 may be read as ½ gin as-sum eren ba-0 -ab-bi-tu (editors: u-ba-x-ab-bi-tu), since no /u/ sign is visible, and reading an erasure instead of a missing sign; babbitu is of course not babbatu, but it is hard to think what else it would be. 70 From the Dur-Abiesug texts edited in CUSAS 8 and 29: Aramean29: 40; ArraplJa29: 40; Bimati (a Kassite band) 29: 4, 6, 76, 85- 106; Burasimu 29: 33; 'citizens of the countryside'(dumu.mes matim) 29: 40, 120; Elam 29: 39-40 , 56, 153-154; Gutium29: 39-40, 142; ij:alab (Aleppo) 29: 5, 39-40 , 56, 142, 145, 186, 191; IJapiru29: 39, 62; Idamaras . 29: 32, 39-40; Jamutbal 29: 40; Kassite 29: 31, 37, 39-40 , 65, 77-80, 83-84 , 107-108 , 112, 152; Qatana 29: 30; SadlalJi8: 82; Suto 8: 81, 29: 28, 65, 206. 71 From CUSAS 29: Babylon 29: 38; Isin 29: 8, 40; Kis 29 : 39; Uruk 29: 8. I will assume for the moment that troops from Maskan-sapir (CUSAS 29: 33, 39-40 , 62, 110, 131, 142, 162) were regular state troops, but it is just as possible that they were in fact Jamutbal tribesmen. 72 See especially van Koppen (2017); also Richardson (2005) 277; and AbB XI 94. 73 CUSAS 29 56. 74 CUSAS 29 162; see also Richardson (2005) 274 n. 2. 75 See Pientka (1998) 257-272 (Kapitel 7, 'Feindliche Bedrohung ') on the various Fremdvolker in the textual record of the Late Old Babylonian state. ~

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76 CUSAS 29 25; see also CUSAS 29 134. 77 CUSAS 29 17 (on a campaign into the countryside , ana girrim libbu matim) , 28, 39, 40; cf. 65, 'information from/about the Kassites.' Note also the role played by an amiru in the second-to-last dated text we have from the Middle Bronze Age, moving grain into Babylon together with a diviner (VS 22 77, dated Sd 26/6/30); the next day (Sd 26/7/1), a related extispicy was performed by that same diviner (Richardson 2002: 234-35, 241-42 [Text 4]); I concluded this was 'consistent with the probably increased militarization of the countryside in northern Babylonia in the late Old Babylonian period. ' 78 Richardson (2007) 24-25. 79 Richardson (2010a) 255- 256. 80 See the extispical texts from the fortress Dur-AbiesulJ (CUSAS 29 45, 47-48 , 55, 57, 62, 124, and esp. 206, along with probably many of the other sheep deliverytexts), and the important role that diviners played throughout the corpus published in CU SAS 8 and 29. See further Richardson (2010a) 250-251: 'By a geography of knowledge , one would better contrast than compare temple religion (where truth was to be found with the god, in his cella, at the very heart of the city) to extispicy (where truth was to be found by a professional , inside a sheep, from the transhumant zones of the countryside).' 81 E.g., many of the ration texts of CUSAS 29 for the fortress Dur-AbiesulJ specify the origin of their grain as local fields; see further Richardson (2007) 19, 24-25; (2010b) 15- 18, 'fortress provisioning texts,' including rations for soldiers' dependents . 82 Including the 'royal guard ' (eren lugal.la: CUSAS 8 21, 51- 53, 58, 62, 74- 75, 82; MHET 6 893; etc.) and the 'troops of the palace gate' (eren ka e.gal: CUSAS 8 18-19; CUSAS 29 9, 40, 162-163; OLA 21 20; a.o.). Note from the later tamztuoracle that Samsuditana, the last king, is defended only by 'the garrison of Marduk ,' Richardson (2016b) 118. 83 Those persons bearing the epithet lu ka-NE lugal (see e.g. CUSAS 8 p. 258 for references), known from the reign of Samsuiluna onward , whom Katrien De Graef and Anne Goddeeris have proposed as a 'liaison officer of the king ' (in a paper given at the 2017 ASOR meeting in Boston). Note also su.i lugal (Di . 214, YOS 13 163 and 271, and PBS 7 97), di.ku 5 lugal , Joannes (2006) Text 23, dub.sar lugal (BM 80623 and 97643), and gal.ukken.na lugal (VS 7 141), all from the Late OB. 84 Richardson (2016b). 85 Richardson (2015). 86 Richardson (2016b) and (2019b). 87 As Dawdy and Bonni (2012) 675 put it: 'Of course , the naming of who is a pirate and who is not-or whether piracy is a reprehensible crime against all humankind or not- depends upon the vantage point of the namer .' 88 Richardson (2012). 89 In a paper on pirates , I will not resist a final note to point out that the cuneiform writing system permits at least five different ways to write the phoneme /ar/. See also Borger (1981) 227.

2

The limits of nationalism Brigandage: piracy and mercenary service in fourth century BCE Athens Matthew Trundle

What were the limits of a state 's and a citizen's mutual obligations to each other in the fourth century BCE? On the one hand , individuals strove to better their circumstances and that of their family, economically and socially through service with others outside of the polis . On the other hand , the state balanced its duty to its people with a finite resource-base with which to redistribute a community 's wealth , provide reciprocal benefits for service and of course oversee the market and the exchange of commodities. States struck an ethical balance between prosecuting violence (hy bris), while rewarding or denying rewards of honor. Honor and hy bris aside, this chapter seeks to address the significant place of economic redistribution as an important aspect of the state. If we can use terms like nationalism and national identity in an Athenian context (let alone more broadly in a generic Greek-po/is one), then these could not transcend the economic needs of the citizens of any Greek poli s. Thus , mercenary service, brigandage and piracy offered enviable opportunities for enrichment overseas. This discussion explores the relevance of concepts like nationalism , poli scommunity and citizen-loyalty in fourth century BCE Athens .1 Two specific moments in the middle of the fourth century BCE illustrate well the tension between the city's and its citizens' responsibilities to each other and their mutual responsibilities or lack thereof. The first is a remarkable story found in the corpus of legal speeches attributed to Isaeus (Hagnias 11.48-9) concerning Macartatus. This Macartatus sold his land and bought a trireme in which he sailed to Crete, presumably on a plundering expedition. He almost started a war between Athens and Sparta. Fortunately for interstate relations he and his ship sank before matters could get out of control. The second moment comes in the form of an inscription that sought to prohibit Athenians from crossing the border to take military service in Boeotia , specifically then against Eretria an Athenian ally (Tod 2.154. 10-15). While different in nature and in source material ,2 both incidents illustrate the loose nature of state control over Athenian citizens on the one hand and yet the state 's responsibilities for their actions on the other. Nothing resembling a modern nation-state emerged to unite those peoples who identified as Greeks in the classical era. Greek states themselves fiercely

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defended their independence (autonomia) and freedom (eleutheria). The Greeks of these po leis had found military service with eastern rulers from as early as the Archaic Age.3 By the fifth and fourth centuries Greeks in mercenary service increased exponentially. 4 At the same time the disunity of Greek poleis manifested itself most clearly in warfare in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Thus, more Greeks fought against the Greek states in the Persian wars than defended the mainland in 480 BCE. Spartans and Athenians had each sought Persian favor in the Peloponnesian War. Over 10,000 Greeks, whom Xenophon styled as xenoi, fought for Cyrus the Younger in his failed coup of 401 BCE. As the Theban Proxenus stated, Cyrus meant more to him than his native state (Xen. An. 3.1.4). On the other side a few Greeks even served for his brother the king (Xen. An. 2.1. 7), for example Phalinus. Greeks found themselves on both sides between Persian Kings and Egyptian Pharaohs in the three fourth century wars for control of Egypt. Hired soldiers, those we would today call mercenaries in the Greek world, probably should be differentiated from ad hoe raiders (leistai) and pirates (peiratai) whether these were organized or more randomly in and out of piracy. 5 That stated, G.T. Griffith notes and no doubt rightly that the profession of piracy - and with this he would likely also include those raiding on the land (leistai) - 'had much in common with the mercenary calling. ' 6 Raiding, piracy and 'mercenary' activity would have attracted people seeking profit from violence and theft. The distinction between mercenary and raider or pirate was never big, though of course mercenaries by definition were employed and received (in theory) 'regular' wages. In this environment, individual Athenian aristocrats transgressed the boundaries of their own state and the loyalties that they owed to their individual po/is. 7 Aristocratic Athenians, just like their poorer compatriots served overseas as the cohesion of the Athenian po/is unraveled. The career of Alcibiades presents a paradigm of the complex allegiances of Greeks to their city of birth. 8 This Athenian aristocrat sought Spartan and Persian support when it suited his needs, despite the damage he inflicted on his fellow Athenians, only to return to the Athenian cause and win major victories for his native state before once again returning to exile. Ritualized friendships and foreign relationships regularly transcended loyalty to one's own city. 9 Despite the realities of Greek military service, philosophers like Isocrates (most clearly at 5.120-121) called in vain for Greek unity against the Persians with idealized notions of common peace and united purpose. However, no such peace, and certainly no unity, ever emerged. As we discuss in a little more detail below, Athenian aristocrats and Athenians more generally continued to seek opportunities overseas. While the word nationalism with its modern connotations may not be the most accurate term to describe Athenian (or other Greek citizen) patriotic feeling, there was such a thing as the Athenian state and notions of citizenship and belonging that involved markers of identity and community, rights, duties and obligations. These rights, duties and obligations resemble those of modern nations in that they were of significance in social and political terms as well as

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religious, military and economic interconnections and associations. Edward Cohen in his important discussion of The Athenian Nation identifies several key points whereby we might isolate Athens as a nation for it had: a homogenous and mutually conceived identity , an 'imagined community' in its scale and organization that transcended an individual's ability to know everyone within that community, a mythical identity that connected to its origins, influences and cohesiveness, a territorial focus, mobility and internal economy. 10 In these facets, Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE could be said to have come close to 'nationhood,' even in modern terms. We might add to Cohen's definitional models, and important for this discussion , that citizens represented their states as individuals and their individual actions were closely tied to their states, which in turn assumed some responsibility for the actions of their citizens both good and of necessity bad. The story of Macartatus presents both a good illustration of the relative potential freedom of citizens to act independently of their states, while highlighting at the same time the responsibilities that states had for the actions of their citizens. It also presents an alternative vision of Greek social, political and even economic ideals with civic identity dislocated from pure land ownership. We are so often told that land and its possession was central to Greek identity and belonging. Selling land for any reason theoretically carried enormous stigma. Indeed, in most states of the Greek world land-holding or land-ownership were pre-requisites of citizenship. Athens remained anomalous in that it incorporated citizens who theoretically owned no land at all (or even no property of any kind) and holding land was not a sine qua non for citizenship or status within the citizen group. The members of each of Salon's tele achieved status, even those from the pentakosiomedimnoi through wealthproduction (even via trade) rather than solely through land-holding (though admittedly the vast majority of wealth remained in the hands of the landed elite). The new political class that emerged in the Peloponnesian War period did so in a world of new money and wealth accrued through trade , selling and investment as much as traditional land-holding. 11 Cleon , hated by Thucydides as just such a 'new' man, notoriously known as the 'seller of leather' in Aristophanes' Knights (125-143) on account of his family owning a tannery , represents neatly this new class of politician challenging the old elites. More significantly , as he was essentially the representative of the elite, Nicias the son of Nicaretus gained his wealth and associated place in the Athenian state through leasing slaves to the mines at Laureion (Plutarch , Nicias 4.2). He is thus a good example of how Athenian socio-political status transformed from one of purely land-based status to one of money even amongst those whose associations were entirely respectable in Athenian terms. 12 His wealth and the position it allowed him, therefore , represent a significant shift in Athenian political life. Nicias led the Athenian elite and traditional aristocrats in the assembly , despite his business in slaves and coins. The Athenian Arche and the Peloponnesian War had cemented the significant place of coined silver as a form of money , a principal means of

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exchange, in the eastern Mediterranean. 13 The importance of money to everything from state management , to trade and especially to warfare was a significant legacy of the fifth century to the four th. Indeed , coinage produced a more mobile , transient and professional (for want of a better term) world in which specialists and soldiers could transcend their traditional communities and thrive abroad . We have already noted that the number of wage-earners (misthophoroi) serving in the military forces of wealthy foreigners grew exponentially in the last years of the fifth century and laid the foundations for the great mercenary armies of Greeks hired by men like Cyrus the Younger (in 401 BCE) , and subsequently Egyptian Pharaohs , Persian Kings and their Satraps through the fourth century BCE. This monetized and mobile world provides the context for an obscure event that appears as an aside in one of Isaeus ' forensic speeches. The speech On the Estate of Hagnias concerns the legacy of the eponymous Athenian, Hagnias, who died in 396 BCE on official state business. The inheritance case in question is enormously complex , but almost as an aside and as part of the background information the speaker tells the jurors the story of a relative of the family named Macartatus . The story of this Macartatus has little (or even nothing) to do with the events that concern the trial. The speaker reminds the jurors that Macartatus sold his land and used the proceeds for the purchase of a warship with which he then set out on a plundering mission to Crete . He came close to igniting a war with Sparta as a result , but his ship sank with all on board before matters reached boiling point. The incident has received a good deal of discussion in the past, but not much in recent scholarship. 14 The speech itself is usually dated to around 359 BCE. 15 The date of the Macartatus incident is not known. Edward Forster the editor of the Loeb edition on the speeches of Isaeus thinks it can only have occurred while Sparta remained in control of both land and sea, thus before 378 BCE when Athenians recovered their naval power, and with more certainty while Athens and Sparta were at peace. Athens was at peace with Sparta from 386-379 BCE and from 369-362 BCE . The incident , therefore, must relate to one of these two periods. Alongside the Loeb translator 's view that the incident must have occurred before 378 BCE , most of the other commentators also prefer the earlier dates of 386-379 BCE. Thompson, however, perhaps sensibly argues that the speaker noted that everyone in his audience knew about Macartatus ' modest circumstances and that each was aware of how he died. These facts, Thompson argues, suggest the more recent period of time from 369-362 BCE rather than some twenty years earlier. The context of the Macartatus story, and the motives behind it, have also received a good deal of attention in the past. The event raises a host of questions beyond even the motive for selling up and sailing to Crete . How did one purchase a trireme and from where? How much would it cost? Who would crew such a private vessel in fourth century BCE Athens: relatives, friends , metics, hired specialists and oarsmen, slaves? Our sources present plent y of examples of mercenar y oarsmen in the Aegean in the Classical Period. In order to buy and fit out the vessel enormous resources were

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necessary. The speech (11.49) refers to thirty minae as the value of the estate of Chaereleos, Macartatus' brother. If this then was of a similar value to that sold by Macartatus (as seems the implication in the speech) such an amount would certainly have been well short of the funds required to buy and fit out, let alone crew a trireme in the fourth century BCE, which would have likely run to several talents of silver. The speaker explicitly notes that Macartatus and his brother were not among those who provided liturgies to the Athenian state, so we would assume his overall resources were limited. Potentially neither brother would have been officially listed for the Trierarchy. Indeed, the speech confirms they were not wealthy enough to perform liturgies for the state. Some have suggested that Macartatus received the backing of a consortium. Thus, he sold his land for his part of the stake, received additional funds from investors to buy and fit out a warship (assuming his farm did not sell for that much - noting his modest means mentioned in the speech - and triremes were never cheap) and then headed to Crete to garner what plunder he could as something of a business enterprise. 16 Rather than a private consortium, Meyer argued he had state backing. 17 Indeed, he suggested that Macartatus was a covert agent for the Athenian council acting in secret and without the knowledge or sanction of the assembly. He draws parallels with the story of one Demaenetus (Hell. Oxy. 6.1-3) who sailed to Conon and the Persian fleet in 396 BCE under orders from the council, but without the knowledge of the assembly. He was sent to help the Persian-Athenian coalition that had been formed to overthrow Spartan naval power in the Aegean during the War between Sparta and Persia that had begun in 399 BCE. The Boule subsequently disavowed any knowledge of this Demaenetus or the order to send him to Conon when the story broke and amidst fears that his presence with Conon might arouse Spartan hostility against the Athenians. This is an intriguing insight into ancient international relations and remarkably similar to modern national and international intrigues whereby secret operations take place under the radar and without the knowledge of politicians, let alone the public. The potential parallels with Macartatus are obvious. The Athenian state of course disavowed any complicity in Macartatus' actions. To them he acted alone. Most recently, Lionel Casson argued that the venture of Macartatus was definitely and only a private one for material gain. 18 Even so, he still wonders if Macartatus was capable of buying and fitting out a trireme on the proceeds of his land-sale alone. The argument for Macartatus as effectively a privateer , while possible, then opens up a host of issues. One of these must be that this is the sole story we have of its kind, that is of a private Athenian selling up and taking a ship on a plundering enterprise, in an age when mercenarism and privateering were common enough in and of themselves. This kind of privateering involving a rogue individual Athenian and a trireme appears unique in the fourth century BCE evidence. That stated, parallels for this kind of behavior hark back to the sixth century when wealthy aristocrats, admittedly in the period prior to

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the invention and the spread of the trireme, took to the seas in pentekonters (or fifties) in search of profit both by trade and theft. 19 The rise of the trireme appears to have brought that age to an end. Only communities like Corinth , Aegina and Athens could control the resources and coordinate the manpower needed to build, maintain and crew large numbers of triremes. 20 The trireme of course still required a combination of public (state) and private synergy if the Athenian state represents the norm. Thus , the creation of the Athenian fleet under Themistocles had the state's wealthiest citizens provide half the funding for the building of the ships involved. The richest men in Athens were made responsible for the construction of each ship both in terms of oversight and financial costs (Aristotle, AP 22.7; see also Hdt. 7.144.1-2; Plut. Them. 4.1-2). It is hard to imagine that they did not then benefit in some way from the economic rewards of the navy and the Empire at least at the start of the imperial period. The loss of the Empire and the restructuring of the fleet that this entailed led to a series of reforms in the fourth century BCE. Nevertheless, Athens still relied on private input to assist in the fleet's management. Despite the fact that the state navy had changed dramatically , the private impetus of wealthy Athenians remained an essential component of naval resourcing and management. 21 Trierarchs came from the elite and wealthy citizen group throughout classical antiquity. We know from Demosthenes (51.7-9) , as Casson suggests, that trierarchies might themselves be hired out for a fee for private enterprises. 22 Demosthenes (51.11) is not alone in decrying the commonplace nature of privateering, plundering and pillaging in the period of the mid-fourth century, but his examples are of ships under Athenian aegis and acting , albeit loosely, in the context of Athenian state policy. Casson further argues that it is possible that Macartatus received payment for bringing aid to certain cities in Crete as a kind of 'naval condottiere ,' even if not actually acting under orders from the Athenian state. Of course , this would still be the equivalent of a business venture. But as the development and management of the Athenian fleet illustrates , the boundary between public and private war-making (and pillaging more generally) was never very clear or indeed even recognized. There are good examples of the privatized nature of so-called public warmaking in fourth century Athens. At the top level the fourth century saw Athenian generals regularly flit between state Service and service for rulers beyond the Greek world. 23 Several of Athenian generals married into elite families abroad. Iphicrates presents a paradigm who became the son-in-law of the Thracian king Cotys (Demosthenes 23.130-132). Athenian generals often served as generals and advisors for Thracian chieftains , Egyptian Pharaohs , Persian Satraps and of course the Great King himself. Even while in Athenian service several stories highlight the privatized nature of war-making as trierarchs try to make war and make ends meet on scant and often their own private resources keeping crews paid and fed, and preventing desertion. Demosthenes (50.7-14) in his speech concerning Polycles highlights not only the blurred boundaries between public and private enterprise in manning and maintaining Athenian triremes in the fourth century , but also the proclivity of 1

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Athenian crew members to abandon their triremes and their trierarchs in search of better options for pay and for plunder while on campaign. 24 In another speech, (Ps-) Demosthenes (47) details a feud between two Athenian trierarchs concerning their personal responsibilities to fit-out a single trireme that one had taken over command of from the other. The origins of the feud lay with one of the two men not giving up some of the ship's essential materials (skeue) , which he had presumably 'stolen' at the end of his trierarchy for his own personal profit. The second trierarch invoked a law of the central council to seize by force the equipment and a violent on-going quarrel ensued. A central point to take from these incidents remains the privatized nature of public war-making and leadership roles within the Athenian state navy. The story of Macartatus' private enterprise appears more understandable and potentially more closely aligned with military circumstances in the context of the privatized nature of Athenian war-making in this period. The crews of triremes came from various sources as we have noted. Crews, even Athenian crews, deserted their Athenian ships regularly, as the example found in the Polycles speech above demonstrates. Many oarsmen were, as we have noted , not themselves Athenians , but metics and foreigners with potentially less loyalty to the Athenian navy. In addition, Wallinga also suggested that many triremes campaigned with less than a full complement of crew.25 Vincent Gabrielsen also highlighted the need to pay crews decent money to recruit and to prevent their desertion (see Dern. 50.11 ). 26 In several examples, commanders feared the men under their command might abandon them on their campaign, for example, Tissaphernes (Thuc. 8.57.1) and Nicias (Thuc. 7 .13.1- 2). Some evidence suggests that the better crewmen were themselves more likely to abscond (Dern. 50.15-16). In one speech alone Apollodorus listed three instances of crew desertions while on campaign (Dern. 50.11-12 , 14-16 and 23). To return then to the Macartatus episode, the conclusions to be drawn from it are complex. Above all the incident illustrates that land ownership in itself was not the be all and end all in the Athenian social, political and economic hierarchy of the fourth century BCE. Additionally, there were clearly tensions between state responsibility for its citizens and citizens' responsibilities to the state. The state struggled to control its citizens and their actions. The fact that Macartatus almost drove Athens and Sparta into a war shows that even rogue members of a community could embroil the whole community in an international incident. As we have noted other incidents blurred the private with the public interest. This all stated, however, it remains possible that the Athenian state was not entirely innocent regarding the specific nature of this saga either. Thus, we might once again wonder from where Macartatus bought his trireme. There were plenty of triremes in the eastern Mediterranean throughout the Classical Period. Some states, even small states with few ships, might rent out their triremes to those with money to pay. Thucydides (1.128.3) tells us that Pausanias, the son of Cleombrotus , after his first recall to Sparta after the Persian Wars, sailed to the Hellespont in a private capacity. To do so he hired a

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trireme from the city of Hermione. This at least suggests that triremes existed for purposes outside the purview of state business. It would only be a small step to go from renting triremes out for profit to selling them wholesale into the private domain. With this then firmly in mind, we might note that Lionel Casson concludes that the only viable option that existed for Macartatus for his trireme was from the Athenian state itself and that it was this fact that led to Athenian concerns about the actions of a private citizen pillaging and raiding in the Aegean. He was after all on and commanding an Athenian ship. The Athenians and the Athenian fleet ultimately enabled (at the very least) one of their citizens to attack cities in Crete and to contravene the terms of peace between Athens and Sparta. The fact that he was a rogue actor would do little to absolve the state of its responsibilities in this matter. Moving on from Macartatus and in a wider context, the fourth century was an age of mercenary adventurers and mercenary armies. The explosion in the numbers of Greek citizens seeking livelihoods from military service outside the Greek world in the generations fallowing the end of the Peloponnesian War has been well documented. This phenomenon itself illustrates the weakness of Greek states not only to control their own citizens and their actions , but also to remunerate and reward them sufficiently in an economic environment that was always harsh and poor. Plunder rather than regular pay was the goal of most soldiers in any service abroad , whether they were citizen soldiers or professional mercenaries. The actions of Macartatus become clearer in the context of fourth century socio-political and economic conditions of mercenary and other non-state sanctioned military actions. The fourth century BCE context provides other examples of citizens seeking advantage abroad independent of the state. Epigraphic evidence illustrates Athenian citizens seeking military service and with it associated economic gain from warfare , not in navies, but in land armies. A decree cited in Greek Historical Inscriptions (2.154), dated to 357/6 BCE and translated by Toogood states that: If anyone from henceforth attacks Eretria or any other of the allied po leis, whether he is from Athens or from one of the Athenians' allies, he is to be condemned to death and his property is to become the state's and a tithe is to be given to the goddess. 27 This inscription more than likely aimed at prohibiting Athenians planning mercenary adventures across the Athenian border. Indeed , and more likely, it was a reaction to what was a commonplace as Athenians took an opportunity to become involved in and benefit from a conflict close to the border of Attica and its coast. In this case action against Athenian neighbors. We have other examples of such prohibitions. Thus, the Thebans had prohibited their citizens from enlisting with the Spartan army as it marched through Boeotia in 383 BCE (Xen. Hell. 5.2.27). This Athenian decree and the story of

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Macartatus probably date to within a decade of each other in the 360s and 350s BCE. They share the same narrative in the sense that each incident illustrates the strange responsibility that states bore for the actions of their citizens, even though their citizens were acting independently of the state. This was after all a time of unparalleled Greek mercenary service, notably with Persian Satraps , the Great King himself and Egyptian Pharaohs. The Great Satraps Revolt reached its peak in 362 BCE attracting enormous numbers of Greeks into service for the Persian King and his adversaries across the eastern Mediterranean. The Macartatus incident and Eretrian prohibition fit neatly into this broader international context of what might be termed in modern parlance mercenary activity. Of some significance, though, is the fact that the Athenians felt they needed such a decree prohibiting Athenian citizens and allies from seeking military service. Similarly, they had felt they needed to disavow themselves from the actions of Macartatus (and Demaenetus before him). Prohibition is not prevention. In addition , decrees like this usually reflect existing situations that required some sort of regulation. Rather than pre-emptively preventing (or more accurately prohibiting) such military service , such decrees reacted to realities. Athenians clearly had been taking military service against Eretria and other Athenian allies. Such military action was indeed happening and on a scale worthy of a post-event attempt to stop them happening. Or, and this is more likely, the decree aimed to demonstrate clearly and publicly to the allies of the Athenians that the state cared about such activity and were trying (regardless of how successfully) to do something about it. Both these incidents , then, illustrate the uncomfortable relationship states had with their citizens and the role that the actions of their citizens , even ordinary and anonymous citizens , played - as individuals - in wider international relations. The men who sought service against Eretria were not famous and well known aristocrats and generals , like Iphicrates , Chabrias or Timotheus each of whom had served foreign rulers for great rewards at one time or another in this period , but ordinary men no doubt attempting to bolster their meagre incomes through local and not so local military adventure and for want of a better term 'privateering. ' They were testing the limits of something akin to nationalism in Athenian society at the same time. Crucially , both Macartatus and those crossing the border to fight against Eretria did so for economic gain. They were not seeking political advancement within their community , nor the attainment of abstract military honor (time) or glory (kleos) nor even perhaps social advancement. The argument to be made clearly here then is that the Athenian state's economic weakness and inability to redistribute enough resources satisfactorily to all members of the community was an absolute and inherent weakness in the Athenian state's political and social integrity. The state did not sanction the actions of rogue citizens, but neither could the state prevent such activity , the root cause of which was acquisition.

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Ultimately, this state and infrastructural economic weakness would lead to the collapse of the po/is and of po/is unity in the face of economically stronger and wealthier states like that of the kingdom of the Macedonians and the Successor Kingdoms of Alexander the Great's conquests. The reality that underpinned the story of Macartatus and the inscription prohibiting military service against Eretria was the ultimate conflict between individual interest and state unity within the Greek city. Individual material self-interest triumphed over po/is idealism and 'national' identity in the end.

Notes 1 For a crucial discussion of the notion of an Athenian nation see Cohen (2005); recent discussions of nationalism and identity see Cartledge (2002); Coleman (1997) 175- 220; Gruen (2011); E . Hall (1989); J.M. Hall (1997, 2002); Isaac (2004); Papadodima (2013); Vlassopoulos (2013) . 2 Toogood (1997) 295- 297. 3 On Greek mercenary service generally , see Parke (1933) ; Griffith (1935) ; Aymard (1967) 487-498 ; Seibt (1977); Miller (1984) 153-160 ; Marinovic (1988) ; Bettalli (1995) ; Trundle (2004, 2013) 407- 441; Gomez Castro (2012); and most recently and importantly Bettalli (2013). 4 In addition to the works listed in note 3, for discussion specifically of Greeks in the mercenary explosion of the later fifth and fourth centuries BCE see Roy (1967) 292-323; Weiskopf (1989); Fields (1994) 95-113 ; Fields (2001) 102-138. 5 Trundle (2004) 23- 24. On raiders and other plunderers more generally see Ormerod (1924) ; Jackson (1973) 241-253 ; McKechnie (1989) 101-141 . De Souza (1999) 2 makes the point that the terms correctly referred to both plunderers by land or sea without distinction . 6 Griffith (1935) 262. 7 The best discussion of elite Athenians abroad in fourth century service is Pritchett (1974) 56- 116 for a long chapter on 'The Condottieri of the Fourth Century BC.' See also Trundle (2004) 147-159; and Trundle (1999) 28-38. 8 On Alcibiades generally see Ellis (1989) . 9 On ritualized friendship see generally Herman (1987) ; Trundle (2004) especially 27-39 , 147-162 . 10 Cohen (2005) 79- 103. 11 This is best illustrated by Connor (1971). 12 See most recently Trundle (2017) 21-31 with further references. 13 For discussion see Trundle (2010) 227- 252. 14 For discussion of Macartatus see most recently Casson (1995) 241-224. Several scholars long ago have tackled the subject including Schomann (1831) 476 ; Wyse (1904) 712; Miinscher (1920) 311; Fiehn , K. RE s.v. 'Makartatos' (1928); Roussel (1960) ; Thompson (1976) 5. 15 Forster (1983) 386- 387 for the relevant part of the introductory discussion to this speech. 16 Schomann (1831) 476 ; Wyse (1904) 712; Fiehn (1928) 632; Thompson (1976) 5657. 17 Meyer (1909) 43. 18 Casson (1995) 244, n. 14. See also Forster in the Loeb edition (1927 & 1983) 387, who refers to Macartatus ' venture without qualification as 'a privateering enterprise .' 19 Tandy (1997); also Van Wees (2004) 203- 205; Haas (1985) 29- 46 .

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20 On the rise of the trireme see Van Wees (2004) especially 206-231; Morrison, Coates & Rankov (2000) 34-46; Wallinga (1993) 103-129 ; Casson (1991) 83-96 . For discussion of the role of coinage in naval developments in the later sixth century and possible associations towards trireme adoption see Van Wees (2010) 205-225. For an emphasis on early developments see Haas (1985) 29-46; De Souza (1998) 271-294. 21 For a brief introduction to the changes to Athenian naval management c. 358/7 BCE see Van Wees (2004) 217-218; Gabrielsen (1994) especially 193; see Christ (2007) 53-69 for discussion of changes to the taxation system in Athens after 378/7 BCE alongside the symmories. 22 Casson (1995) 241- 245; also Jordan (1975) 79- 80. 23 See Pritchett (1974) 56-116; also Trundle (2004) 147-159. 24 Well discussed by Gabrielsen (1994) 105-125. 25 Wallinga (1993) on crews see 169-186. 26 Gabrielsen (1994), especially 122. 27 Toogood (1997) 295-297.

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Piracy and pseudo-piracy in classical Syracuse Financial replenishment through outsourcing, sacking temples and forced migrations Richard Evans

Introduction There is a tendency to ignore the contribution of essentially piratical behaviour in ancient Greek history perhaps because of an assumption that the various Hellenic states were organised on a proto-modern basis. That since they were users of coin they did not require the contribution of plunder , from various ventures , to keep a healthy balance in their public treasuries . Two such methods of enhancing the public finances at Syracuse are highlighted in this discussion , namely the financial gains obtained from sacking temples and from the enforced movement of conquered populations . 1 However, in order to reach some idea of the contribution of plunder generally to the treasury of Syracuse in the period under discussion , it is first necessary to briefly illustrate the normal avenues by which the government of a Greek po/i s of that period secured a regular income . That some form of taxation , however rudimentary, was an integral , if insecure , component of the finances of the Hellenic city-state by the classical period is well attested ,2 but taxation as practised in these city-states does not bear much resemblance to modern systems, as is also well recognised. While some taxes, for example on basic foodstuffs such as salt , certainly affected a far wider demography ,3 the evidence from Thucydides illustrates that at Athens , and almost certainly in most cities, there was a tendency for a particularised direct taxation (eispho ra or a tax on property) to target the political and economic elite. Moreover , at Athens , it was the elite families who were responsible for maintaining the warships , although there was also some state subsidy, that policed the Aegean and protected the grain supply and the various members of the Delian League. The ships were in an optimum state the captains (trierarchs) and the state bearing the burden of the cost. Each of the crews received a state daily allowance of a drachma , the treasury of the Athenians also providing sixty additional warships and forty transports to be manned by the best

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available crews. The trierarchs also provided extra money to the thranitae - in addition to the state allowance - and to the rest of the crews. The trierarchs also spent extravagantly on decorative bows and equipment since each wished that his ship stood out from the rest in appearance and speed. (Thuc. 6.31; cf Lysias , 19.29, 21.2-6) Furthermore , the religious festivals that were a regular feature of the annual civic calendar, especially those including theatrical competitions , were financed by the choregoi, who were also , for the most part , members of elite families .4 Thus the wealthy citizens, even if they represented a fairly broad cross-section of the Athenian citizenship , contributed by far the most to the smooth running of the community , but all citizens were expected to play some role albeit in a more modest capacity . How then did the revenue system at Syracuse equate with , or differ from, that of Athens and other mainland Greek city-states ? In Syracuse the taxation of individual citizens appears to have been well established in the 350s if there is any accuracy in Plutarch 's statement (Dion, 30.1), but again it is far from clear if this evidence points to a universal system or rather was systemic only among a particular group - the wealthy elite.5 Syracuse and Athens each possessed territory that was not particularly fertile, but the former unlike the latter also functioned as a harbour of entry or departuve for a region well beyond its chore. 6 And that function certainly provided some basis for its wealth and power. That some system of payment must have been imposed on all goods entering or leaving Syracuse, either when these came from the interior moving down to the harbour or from the sea moving to the city and the inland parts of Sicily, seems a plausible conclusion to make both from contemporary evidence of harbour dues and the elaborate nature of the gates closest to the interior of the island .7 Syracuse's role as the main entrepot for at least this eastern sector of the island presumably became well established during the fifth century and this role and the income it generated compensated for too little productive land to feed a population of approximately the same size as Athens .8 Charging for the use of harbours also appears a common enough feature of the ancient Mediterranean world , applicable to cities such as Athens , Corinth , Miletus and Syracuse, the cost falling on both local and foreign merchants , and was a regular and lucrative source of revenue. Quite general similarities in state finances in various pole is do not however disguise more glaring discrepancies at the root of which was the sole rule which characterised the government of Syracuse for much of this period .9 Notwithstanding the existence of embellishment in the literary evidence regarding the magnitude of the power of the tyrants of Syracuse , these rulers (Gelon , Hieron I, Dionsyius I and Dionysius 11) still represented a formidable military presence in the western Mediterranean , if not in the entire Hellenic World . 10 But sole rule of a po/i s, even if this rule was really government by a ruler, close family and supporters , still brought with it profound implications for the nature and source of public revenues since how could these through a

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generalised taxation system have been the foundation of the Syracusan tyrants ' military power? Each tyrant possessed an army consisting solely of mercenaries , and this hoplite force, alone , numbered at least ten thousand and on many occasions far in excess of this number ; and , moreover , the soldiers were generously paid (Diod. 13.94.1). 11 On the other hand , the citizens of Syracuse seem rarely to have been called upon to undertake military service. The tyrants also excluded the Syracusan citizens from the strategically important sectors of the city. Gel on and Hieron favoured their own fellow Ge loans and other groups including mercenaries and at the same time appear to have confined the Syracusan element of the city's population to the quarter known as Tyche. 12 Dionysius I is said to have added additional fortifications around the Island and the smaller of the two harbours (Diod. 14.7.2-4 , 14.10.4) not only to secure the city from attack but to safeguard his family, supporters and his personal troops . Dionysius is also said to have forced his fellow citizens , much against their will, to disarm (Diod.14.7.6 , 14.10.4, 14.45.5), 13 and required them to serve in his armies or navy on a much more ad hoe process than is evident in, for example , Athens where all citizens had a military role. Even the elite Syracusans who formed the cavalry were seldom called upon since their loyalty was questionable . Thus in military circumstances the citizens were often debarred from gaining any personal wealth and hence there was no opportunity for this means to filter into the public treasury . Besides the absence of citizens on regular military duty, the tyrants could not allow either choregoi or a system of trierarchy to function since this would suggest a sharing of power and the possible opportunity for opposition to their rule. In 405 (Diod . 13.94 .1) when Dionysius returned to Syracuse from fighting the Carthaginians he arrived just when a dramatic festival was coming to an end in the theatre at Neapolis and was met by the crowds who were coming away from attending this event . But this is the sole reference to festivals in a 'democratic ' Syracuse whereas later the tyrant is invariably described as a patron of artistic competitions . Similarly , no reference is made to the manner in which Dionysius ' warships were commanded , if not personally then by no other individuals than his family members such as his brother Leptines (Diod. 14.53.5), or close supporters , such as Philistus (Diod. 14.8.5-6). 14 As a result , as indicated below a system of outsourcing (real piracy) , temple sacking (piratical action) and forced migrations (pseudo-piracy) all became necessary to ensure that Syracuse maintained its position as hegemon in the western Mediterranean.

Outsourcing Pirates were practically indistinguishable from mercenaries , a fact again made clear in the ancient references to such adventurers. For example , Postumius an Etruscan (Dio. 16.82.3) was arrested and executed on the order of Timoleon in 339/8 BCE. 15 This Postumius had a fleet of twelve 'pirate ships ' - 1vncr-rpicrt and seems to have considered Syracuse his base. 16 The Etruscans also have a long history as mercenary troops at Syracuse and so the difference between

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pirate and professional soldier is quite indistinct. 17 Postumius was probably a supporter of one of Timoleon's opponents such as Hicetas. These pirate ships were clearly not recognised as warships in the technical sense and so smaller (the rather elderly Loeb translation of Diodorus has 'cosairs' and the translator may have had yachts or dhows in mind) but they could easily have been pentekonters if they operated further out than coastal waters. Postumius' force of pirates may therefore have been in the order of five to six hundred. If he was using Syracuse as a friendly port he must surely have been operating further afield and with a crew perhaps of mixed origin, Etruscans , Italians , Iberians and Greeks - the usual mercenary mix - they may actually have been pirating over a quite a wide range around the seas of Sicily. There was also Thrasius (the name could be Etruscan again) who had served as mercenary under Timoleon. He and his band off ollowers were expelled from Syracuse for treachery, unspecified by Diodorus (16.82.1) but Plutarch (Tim. 30.3) stipulates desertion. Plutarch states that these were ordered to leave Syracuse at short notice and they may have marched away, but perhaps more likely that they went by ship since they are next reported as having attacked and captured a harbour in Bruttium. The Bruttians responded by sending an army against these pirates or mercenaries and they were massacred. 18 And there seems little to differentiate such freebooters working the seas with those Phocian mercenaries who served under Timoleon but who had been declared guilty of sacrilege by the Amphictionic Council. They had served under Philomelus and Onomarchus in the Third Sacred War. They were all killed in Sicily (Plut. Tim. 30.4) but they were also employed by Greeks who , if not members of the Amphictionic League , had treasuries in Delphi and attended the Pan-Hellenic Games. The Phocians had negotiated their freedom at the close of the war with Philip II and were perhaps meant to spend the remainder of their lives serving abroad in some non-Greek speaking region. That there were other Greeks even one with Timoleon's apparent sensitivities who were prepared to hire the Phocians suggests some opportunism and a degree of religious indifference. Moreover , there can be little difference between those described as pirates and those mercenaries from Zacynthus hired by Dion for his expedition from the Peloponnese to Syracuse in 356 and who were later, presumably the same group hired by Cali pp us, and responsible for their former employer's death (Plut. Dion, 22.8, 57.1-3). 19 Notably there were numerous mercenary commanders such as Nypsius , described as a Campanian from Neapolis (Naples) hence a Greek or Italian, and Pharax a Spartan (Plut. Dion , 49.1) who served Dionysius II as commander at Neapolis (Licata). 20 Nypsius played a crucial role in maintaining the presence of the tyranny in Syracuse after he was sent to reinforce Dionysius ' garrison on the Island in 356/5 (Diod. 16.18.10). 21 Nypsius was evidently a mercenary but he could equally have been a pirate who , unlike more prosaic commanders of military forces, used unorthodox tactics to gain advantage in a conflict which was confined to the city streets and alleyways, primarily in Achradina which was densely populated but easy prey for piratical forces. 22

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If real piracy was allowed to operate using Syracuse as a base then it is highly likely that the city authorities would also have gained financially from permitting such a situation. A system of taxing or taking a cut of the plunder could very easily have been implemented . This form of outsourcing was a common enough practice in the Caribbean during the seventeenth century and later where freebooters such as Henry Morgan were allowed to operate and indeed were supported by the British government which benefitted materially. 23

Temple sacking The plundering of religious sites was hardly a phenomenon found only in Sicily and Magna Graecia as the literary sources beginning with Homer's Iliad clearly show, and which also illustrate that as a source of revenue the treasures located in temples were always cons idered a worthy target. The origin of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles lay in the former being forced to return his captive woman concubine , Chryseis , to her father Chryses, priest of Apollo at the temple in Chryse that the Greeks had attacked on their way to Troy. Agamemnon finally compelled to return Chryseis in order to bring an end to the plague sent by Apollo for the Mycenaean king 's treatment of his priest meant in turn that the captive concubine of Achilles was demanded as fair compensation for the king's loss of dignity. 24 Since this episode begins the Iliad , one of the earliest extant Greek literary compositions , it would be fair to argue that temple sacking was a regular feature and byproduct of ancient warfare , and the most visible sign of institutionalised robbery. Syracuse was , therefore , not unique in the practice of using temple treasures for military or civic projects, although it is not a recorded feature among the other Greeks in their regular internecine struggles until the mid-fourth century when the Phocians in the Third Sacred War (356-346) sacked the treasuries at Delphi to finance their war against Philip II of Macedon and the Amphictionic League. By the second half of the third century , temple sacking had become a commonplace action in any military campaign. 25 But from a much earlier time at Syracuse a fragment exists relating an episode that involved Hippocrates, the tyrant of Gela. Hippocrates, who ruled for much of the 490s, pursued a vigorous policy of expanding his control over much of eastern Sicily. Only Syracuse remained independent and a threat to his position. 26 The Geloans are said to have defeated the Syracusans at the Elorus River and they advanced towards the city with the intention perhaps of starting a siege and forcing a peace on their enemy. The Geloans made camp outside the Olympieion at Polichne, which commands a good view over the harbour and the city. Diodorus relates that the priest of the cult of Zeus and other Syracusans who were attempting to remove certain valuables from the temple for safe-keeping in the city were arrested. 27 Hippocrates is supposed to have 'lectured these men accusing them of being temple robbers and ordered them to return to their city but he left the shrine 's treasures untouched because

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he wanted to gain a good reputation' (Diod. 10.28.1-2). The actions of the temple priest and the Syracusan citizens suggest that temple sacking was a normal practice, at least in the minds of perhaps both Diodorus and the excerptor, and that they were simply trying to prevent the loss of the cult's treasures. The account therefore also portrays the Geloan leader in a positive light behaving in a scrupulous manner and that Hippocrates had deviated from what was anticipated and as such this episode therefore became worth recording. 28 Yet there is some ambiguity in the text which invites some analysis. Diodorus' comments (10.28 .2) wander from the specific episode involving Hippocrates to the more general observation that the majority in the community would perceive some misconduct among the ruling elite because the temple treasures at Polichne had been left in situ. It may be that this preserved fragment acted as the prologue to his coverage - lost of the stasis at Syracuse which occurred soon afterwards and which was exploited by Hippocrates' successor Gelon to further his own ambitions and to take sole power in the city adding this to his rule over Gela. So the passage is rather puzzling. Moreover , it seems that either Diodorus or his source had some doubts about the apparent integrity of the Geloan tyrant since the account considers two motives for his action: either that having begun this latest war Hippocrates did not wish to be seen despoiling Zeus' shrine or that by leaving the treasures intact he would cause tensions in the city between the demos and the ruling oligarchy. Further afield, this was surely a time when plundering temples by Greeks was not normal practice and , the refore, the Syracusans should have been able to leave their temple unguarded in the knowledge that its contents would not violated. The Milesians had , after all, refused to plunder the temple of Apollo at Didyma to finance their revolt against Persia when it could very easily have been accomplished .29 The Persians similarly did not sack Delphi when they had the opportunity to do so in 480. Temples and shrines dotted the ancient landscape and most would have contained treasures but the Greeks avoided the sacrilege of stealing anything that had been dedicated to the gods. Even the Persian Datis attempted to return a statue of Apollo to its temple when it was discovered on board a ship in his fleet while on his return to Asia Minor after his defeat at Marathon (Hdt. 6.118). Had the looting of this temple at Delium , just north of Oropus , been regarded as the cause of the Persian defeat? Herodotus does not venture to connect this event with the Persian defeat , but the passage illustrates that it was possibly this act of plundering that worried Datis who elsewhere was scrupulous in not antagonising the deities to the extent that he personally deposited the stolen statue at Delos. 30 Hieron's victory over the Etruscans at Cumae in 474 (Diod. 11.51.2) must have been a profitable exercise since he sent warships at the request of the Cumaeans who certainly would have been expected to provide a financial incentive for such a major move: the Etruscans were not a threat to Syracuse or its sphere of influence. Diodorus gives only a brief notice of events , but the

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epigraphic evidence indicates that Hieron's naval forces scored a major victory over their enemy and the tyrant was able to send lavish dedicatory offerings to Olympia. 31 Dionysius is said to have stolen treasures from the temples of Syracuse (Diod. 14.65.2, 14.67.4) in a speech attributed to a certain Theodorus in 396 when the Carthaginians were besieging the city.32 Expropriation of temple funds may have been excused in times of adversity, but this evidence, such as it is, seem almost certainly ancient invective designed to denigrate Dionysius' character and makes his actions conform to that of the archetypal tyrant. 33 In his pursuit for financial gain Dionysius also went further afield to Etruria and perhaps Corsica, although he was not breaking new ground since warships of Hieron I had been active in this region which culminated in a great victory over the Etruscans in 474 at Cumae (Diod. 11.51.2). And Syracusan fleets operated openly during the period of the democracy along the Etrurian coast attacking Etruscan settlements on Elba and Corsica on two occasions, both dated by Diodorus (11.88.4-5) to 453. The account notes that the Syracusans had responded to the widespread occurrence at this time of Etruscan piracy. However no pirates among the Etrsucans are mentioned and no engagement with pirates is recorded. In the first episode some rather inept private enterprise is noted by the Syracusan commander Phayllus who was accused of taking bribes from the Etruscans to return to Syracuse. Once there he was prosecuted, found guilty and exiled. In the second episode , Apelles, replacement for Phayllus, commanded a fleet of sixty triremes and had more success in obtaining captives for sale as slaves and plunder although the extent of either is not stipulated. It is worth noting that these expeditions are said to have been inspired by a desire to curtail piracy but they seem very much to be simple pillaging exercises in themselves. Clearly plunder was not simply a characteristic of tyrannical rule. The most detailed account of this type of plundering expedition is dated to 384 by which time Dionysius had already been sole ruler of Syracuse for twenty years. The tyrant , as he often did , commanded in person a fleet, numbering sixty triremes, the objective of which was Pyrgi , one of the harbours for Agylla. 34 Was this expedition meant to contribute to the payment of the costs of dockyards which could accommodate two hundred triremes, a major extension of the city's fortifications, the construction of gymnasiums on the banks of the River Anapus, and temples and other unspecified projects which enhanced the splendour of the city (Diod. 15.13.5)? 35 Diodorus lists the costly building programme which Dionysius had been pursuing in the city, probably for at least decade. As a result, which seems implicit, in his coverage of the following year, 384, Diodorus describes a major military intervention in Etruria. Dionysius was in need of money and waged war against the Etruscans with sixty triremes. 36 His excuse for the expedition was the suppression of piracy but he actually intended to plunder a temple which contained

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expensive dedications. This was situated in Pyrgi , the harbour of Etruscan Agylla. He arrived after nightfall , his forces landed and they attacked at dawn. He accomplished his plan by overpowering the small number of guards , and looted the temple of one thousand talents. When a relief column came up from Agylla Dionysius 's troops routed the Etruscans in battle, took many prisoners and raided the surrounding countryside. Then the Syracusans returned to their city. The spoils of this successful adventure raised another five hundred talents. (Diod . 15.14.2-3) Diodorus goes on to record that this plunder was sufficient for Dionysius to hire mercenaries to initiate a new war against Carthage. Moreover , he relates as fact (15.13.1) the assertion that Dionysius I intended to attack Epirus and ultimately Delphi because of its wealth and that in preparation for this campaign he founded colonies on the Italian side of the southern Adriatic. This information is related for 385, the year before Dionysius ' successful expedition to Etruria . Dionysius gave aid to the Epirote exile Alcetas who hoped to regain his rule with support from neighbouring Illyrian tribes who attacked Epirus. Dionysius sent a force of 2000 allied troops and arms for a further 500, perhaps more a token display of support considering his resources. The Illyrians defeated the local Epirotes but were in turn defeated by an army sent by Sparta and the plans of Alcetas came to nothing . All mention of Delphi disappears from the account . Why would Dionysius have considered Delphi a viable target for plunder? The information is given without elaboration and related more to the foundation of the colonies . There was never an attack on mainland Greece from Syracuse , but in the years following the Peloponnesian War the growing power of the Sicilian city may have been viewed with some alarm and this anxiety may have found its way into Diodorus ' source. 37 However , its position in the text does allow for some interesting speculation. The Persians were also said to have attacked Delphi following their victory at Thermopylae and failed in their objective , states Herodotus in an account which is obviously invention . Diodorus ' source may have written about Dionysius ' accumulation of power and compared the tyrant to Xerxes and to Xerxes ' ambitions. However , the account for the events for 385/ 383 makes for some humorous reading since for all the ambitions and initial successes, defeat by Carthage in 383 left Dionysius ' finance s in a worse state that at the start of his campaigns , as a cursory glance at the text indicates (see Box). The Text: Dionysius' Ambitions in the 380s 15.13.1 - Attack on Epirus and Delphi planned. 15.13.5 - Building programme in Syracuse and note of the dockyards accommodating up to 200 triremes. 38 15.14.1 - Dicon of Syracuse won the stadion at Olympia. 15.14.3 - Dionysius short of money, expedition to Etruria.

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Richard Evan s 15.14.4 - Dionysius gained 1500 talents, hired mercenaries, planned war against Carthaginians. 15.15.3 - Victory of Syracusans at Cabala. 15.16.3 - Defeat of Dionysius at Cranium. 15.17 .5 - Dionysius ceded territory in western Sicily to Carthage and paid an indemnity of 1000 talents. Overall, there appears to be a theme linking the passages dealing with Syracuse in this section of Book 15, beginning with Dionysius' seemingly extravagant building programme followed immediately by the plundering of an important religious site in Etruria.39 The financial results of this attack are precisely recorded which is interesting and immediately suspicious. First of all Dionysius had completed an ambitious elaboration of the city's walls in 401 (Diod. 14.18.1-8), ship building, arms manufacture and extensions to the harbour facilities in 399 (Diod.14.41.2-43.4), yet here in the narrative there is a concatenation which appears to lead from cause to effect.

Hence why the prominent pos1t1on of a contemplated pillage of Delphi when it then fades in importance? Its treasures would certainly have financed many wars had its plunder become a reality, but was this information in fact a creation of a historian rather than any indication of Dionysius ' ambitions? Furthermore , can this accusation have been an attempt to mitigate the actions of the Phocians , if Diodorus ' source here was Timaeus? As a result the Greeks might argue that the Phocians took their cue from Dionysius - held up as the tyrant par excellence - rather than being innovators themselves in this particular type of pillage. The notion of sacking Delphi seems fanciful especially since Dionysius , father and son, sent dedications to Delphi. 40 And in fact the Syracusans at times appear to have fallen foul of the predations of their fellow Greeks . In 374/3 (Diod . 15.47.7) the Athenian general Ctesicles was dispatched to Corcya to intervene in a civil war which had broken out in this poli s where one side had received aid from a naval force sent by Sparta. The Spartans were defeated .41 In the immediate aftermath a second Athenian fleet arrived , but was too late to play any significant role in this war. However, a Syracusan relief force sent by Dionysius to aid the Spartans was, relates Diodorus , intercepted by an Athenian force commanded by Iphicrates and nine triremes were captured . The prisoners were all sold as slaves which raised sixty talents with which Iphicrates was able to pay his rowers and troops .4 2 When Dionysius II was at Locri in about 347/6 (Diod. 16.57 .2) he sent a naval force to deliver a number of gold and ivory statues to Delphi. These ships were intercepted by the Athenian Iphicrates who seized the valuable goods , and these were ordered to be brought to Athens by the dem os. Dionysius complained by letter about this theft of goods which were to be dedicated to Apollo (Diod . 16.57.3) and accused the plunderers of sacrilege since they evidently intended melting down the stolen statues for

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coin. 43 The Athenians ignored the complainant which Diodorus casts as indicative of the lack of observance of religion at that time. 44 Instead the passage casts Dionysius II in a favourable light even in the last years of his rule as tyrant and accuses the Athenians of profiting from plundering of the gods , if not the temple itself. 4 5 Athens in the fourth century was a much less prosperous city-state than Syracuse and this tendency to plunder from fellow Greeks indicates perhaps a breakdown in the cultural and political adhesion in the post-Peloponnesian war period, and that the Syracusans were better financially equipped to behave in a more civilised fashion .

The movement of people for financial gain Forced movement of populations of cities or whole regions in the ancient world was almost a commonplace whenever the defeated , if not killed , were expelled from their native lands to be resettled elsewhere .46 There are examples under Babylonian rule - the Israelites during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar - or under Persian rule - the Milesians in 493 and the defenders of Eretria three years later - but this procedure is not attested among the Greeks when the various citystates came into conflict with one another .47 In 404 a highly emotional occasion for such a process presented itself when Athens surrendered to Sparta. The Thebans and the Corinthians argued for the comprehensive destruction of the city, but they were opposed by the Spartans on the grounds that the defeated Athenians had in the past - the Persian Wars is implicit here - provided great service to the Hellenic cause (Xen. Hell. 2.219-20). Unlike in Mesopotamia where populations were often relocated to new places of habitation , for example the Eretrians to the Persian Gulf in 490 (Hdt. 6.119) , in Sicily in the period discussed here the displaced were moved , arguably uniquely , certainly among the Greeks , to within another community . This was of course Syracuse and the movement was initiated by the tyrant rulers of that city.4 8 This phenomenon is first witnessed during Gelon 's rule when an unprecedented surge in population displacement occurred , and only economic gain can fully explain the peculiar details that emerge from the literature . Herodotus (7.156) states that once Gelon had obtained control of Syracuse he invested all his energy in ensuring that the city became a great power . In order to make that possible he 'saw to it that all the inhabitants of Camarina were brought to Syracuse and made citizens , and he had the town demolished '. 49 Camarina was not a large poli s but must have contained about one thousand citizens plus their families and slaves. In a similar, less drastic yet more spectacular , move Gel on of the Geloan citizenship to relocate also ordered 'more than half ' (uncp17µtcru