Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World
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An historical study of piracy in the ancient Greek and Roman world.Times Literary SupplementIt is a truism of academic work on outlawry that cultures get the criminals they deserve, that Prohibition produced the Chicago gangsters, that the war on drugs sustains the drug-barons of Colombia and Burma, that witches are the product of witch-hunts, that the strange criminal hybrid of the philosopher-pornographer is a construct of Bourbon censorship in the eighteenth century and that a distinctive kind of British hypocrisy threw up the distinctive Cynthia Payne. On another level, highwaymen need highways and cat-burglars need security systems and buildings of several floors, and it is, of course, thanks to the discovery of America and the grant of a papal monopoly for the exploitation of its riches that pirates bury their treasure on Caribbean islands, tie handkerchiefs around their heads to protect their fair skins from sunburn and talk in English accents but Spanish coinage of "doubloons" and "pieces of eight".
List of platesAcknowledgementsMaps1Introduction12The origins of piracy from the Bronze Age to Alexander153Hellenistic piracy434Cilician piracy975Pompey and the pirates1496Pax Romana1797Piracy in Late Antiquity2258Conclusions241Bibliography243General index254Index of sources266
