Cilician pirates

• 1. Introduction

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  Cilician pirates once held the entire Mediterranean Sea hostage. At their peak, according to Plutarch, they commanded more than 1,000 ships and had captured some 400 towns. Trade routes collapsed. Grain shipments to Rome dried up. Starving citizens took to the streets of the Forum demanding action from their leaders.

  The story of how this happened is not simply a tale of lawless brigands. It is a story about what fills a vacuum. When great empires fall apart, when wars exhaust whole populations, and when the most powerful state in the world decides a problem is someone else's burden, piracy does not merely persist. It grows into something that can threaten civilization itself.

  Who were these so-called Cilician pirates? Why did Rome tolerate them for so long? And how did one general, granted extraordinary powers and a fleet, manage to sweep them from the sea in a single summer?

• 2. The Vacuum That Made Them

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  Carthage fell. The Seleucid Empire collapsed. Ptolemaic Egypt weakened year by year. By the 2nd century BC, the Mediterranean had no dominant naval power capable of policing its own waters.

  Rome was the obvious candidate, but Rome was fundamentally a land empire. Its navy was reduced, and it relied on hiring ships as needed. The seas it cared about, the Tyrrhenian and the Adriatic, were patrolled with expeditions aimed at coastal pirate bases. Everywhere else was left largely undefended.

  Crete, still independent and scarred by civil wars, saw much of its population turn to piracy. Its central position in the Mediterranean and its freedom from any imperial authority made it ideal. Around 140 BC, Rome sent Scipio Aemilianus on a fact-finding mission to the region. His report was bleak: local governments were either too weak or too indifferent to act. Rome itself was unwilling to spend the effort, partly because the pirates delivered a concrete benefit. They were the most consistent suppliers of cheap slaves to Roman landowners who ran vast plantations across Sicily and the Italian countryside.

  So a pragmatic calculation was made. The chaos was profitable. Cilicia, on the southern coast of what is now Turkey, offered the other great pirate refuge. Its rugged natural harbours were easy to defend, and the Seleucid rulers who nominally controlled the region were too enfeebled to suppress the pirates. Diodotus Tryphon, who ruled the Seleucid Empire from 142 to 138 BC, went further and actively supported the pirates to bolster his own hold on power.

• 3. The Slave Trade's Shadow

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  Ten thousand slaves passed through the markets of Delos in a single day at the height of the trade. That number, recorded from the island's busiest period, captures how thoroughly the pirate economy was woven into the Roman one.

  Delos had become the centre of Mediterranean slave commerce. Markets in Rhodes and Alexandria also participated. The demand driving all of it came from Rome's agricultural economy, where large estates worked by enslaved people had replaced smallholders. Sicily was especially dependent on this system, with sprawling Roman plantations stocked with people captured from across the Mediterranean.

  When Rome was at war, the legions supplied captives. In peacetime, the pirates filled the gap. Western Asia was the main hunting ground for captives, and the combined effect of pirate raids and Roman tax collectors stripped those regions of both population and economic vitality. The business class in Rome lobbied against any serious crackdown, since their estates and commercial interests depended on the steady, affordable supply that the pirates provided. This was not passive tolerance. It was structural dependency.

• 4. Plutarch, Appian, and the Scale

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  Plutarch named the praetors Sextilius and Bellinus and the daughter of Antonius as prominent Romans seized by pirates and held for ransom. Their capture was not a random misfortune. It illustrated how completely the pirates had neutralized Roman prestige at sea.

  The pirates had their own customs of mockery. When a captive claimed to be Roman, the pirates would perform a theatrical show of terror, begging for mercy. Then, once they were satisfied with the performance, they would lower a ladder to the sea and invite the prisoner to step off. If he refused, they pushed him overboard. Plutarch records this ritual not as cruelty for its own sake but as a statement: Roman citizenship no longer carried protection on the water.

  Appian traced the escalation to the First Mithridatic War, which ran from 89 to 85 BC. When Mithridates plundered the Roman province of Asia in 88 BC, the people he ruined had no recourse. They turned to the sea with a few small boats. As the war dragged on, they acquired larger ships. When the war ended, piracy continued. Appian singled out Lucius Licinius Murena and Publius Servilius Vatia Isauricus, who held command from 78 to 74 BC, and concluded that neither accomplished anything lasting against them. The Crags of Cilicia, the promontory of Coracesium, became the main base, drawing men from Pamphylia, Pontus, Cyprus, Syria, and beyond.

• 5. Caesar at Twenty-Five

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  In 75 BC, Julius Caesar was sailing to Rhodes to study oratory when pirates seized his vessel. He was twenty-five years old. The pirates demanded twenty talents, or 480,000 sesterces, for his release. Caesar was offended. He insisted they raise the demand to fifty talents, which he considered more appropriate to his standing. His companions raised the money and paid.

  While in captivity Caesar told his captors plainly that he would have them crucified when he was free. The pirates found this amusing. After his release he assembled a small fleet, tracked them down, and crucified them as promised. As a concession to what he described as leniency, he had their throats cut first.

  The episode sits oddly in the historical record. A young man who is not yet a general, not yet a senator of note, treats a pirate stronghold as a personal grievance to be settled with his own resources. That he succeeded tells us something about the informal nature of Roman authority in the eastern Mediterranean at that moment.

• 6. Spartacus and Sertorius

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  Around 71 BC, the slave rebellion led by Spartacus reached a critical moment. Spartacus had brokered a deal with the Cilician pirates, planning to ferry a rebel force to Sicily. The pirates took the arrangement and then abandoned it. Spartacus had to give up the crossing.

  The episode shows how the pirates operated as free agents: willing to negotiate with a Roman general's enemies, a rebel slave army, or anyone else, but bound by no alliance when a better calculation presented itself.

  Quintus Sertorius, the renegade Roman general who had been driven out of Hispania, made his own arrangement with Cilician pirates. Together they seized Pityussa, the southernmost of the Balearic Islands, and used it as a base. A war fleet and nearly a full legion eventually drove them from the Balearics. The pirates then broke with Sertorius entirely and sailed to Africa to support a rival claimant to the throne of Tingis. Sertorius pursued them to Africa, rallied local forces, and defeated both the pirates and their candidate Ascalis in battle. The Cilicians were never simply a pirate navy for hire. They were a third party, pursuing their own interests.

• 7. Pompey's Eighty-Nine Days

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  In 68 BC, pirates sailed directly into the harbour at Ostia, barely fifteen miles from Rome, and burned the consular war fleet. The port went up in flames. The grain shortage gripping Rome became acute and citizens demanded answers in the Forum.

  Under the lex Gabinia, Pompey was granted extraordinary powers. He divided the Mediterranean into thirteen districts and assigned each one a fleet and a commander. His own fleet swept the western Mediterranean, driving pirates east or into the waiting arms of his other commanders. That phase took 40 days. Pompey then turned east, offering mild terms to pirates who surrendered to him personally. From those who yielded, he learned where others were hiding.

  At Coracesium, the stronghold the pirates had used for generations, Pompey won a decisive battle and blockaded the town. The pirates surrendered their harbours and their fortified islands. The entire campaign lasted 89 days, completed in the summer of 66 BC.

  Strabo records that Pompey destroyed 1,300 pirate vessels of all sizes. Rather than execute the tens of thousands who surrendered, Pompey reasoned that many had been driven to piracy by desperation. He settled them in underpopulated areas along the southern coast of Asia Minor. Many went to Soli, which was renamed Pompeiopolis in his honour. Others were placed at Mallus, Adana, and Epiphaneia.

• 8. Mithras in the West

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  Plutarch makes a striking claim about the Cilician pirates that has nothing to do with ransom or naval tactics. He writes that they were the first to celebrate the mysteries of Mithras.

  When Pompey resettled some of the captured pirates in Apulia, in southern Italy, they may have carried the religion with them. In the latter part of the 1st century AD, Roman Mithraism became a significant religious movement, spreading through the Roman military in particular. Its origins have been debated for centuries, but Plutarch's account places the Cilician pirates at the beginning of that chain.

  The resettled pirates at Soli, Mallus, Adana, and Epiphaneia did not vanish into obscurity. They became farmers, townspeople, residents of a renamed city. Pompeiopolis, the city that grew from the settlement at Soli, carried the name of the general who had swept their fleets from the sea and then chosen not to execute them.