I wish they found a solution against jetlag. A pill that resets your internal clock to the correct time zone sounds just about right to me. Hate's a strong word, but it's pretty close to how I feel about how a long east-west plane ride does a number on your brain. Long flights have one advantage though: it gives ample opportunity for reading.

On the ride back to the Netherlands I finished reading The End of Barbary Terror by Frederick C. Leiner. It deals with the campaigns by the US navy and a combined Anglo-Dutch fleet in 1815-186 against the pirate kingdoms of North Africa and is a good read. For me it also provided an interesting perspective to the way ancient piracy was combated.

On the day before the battle of Waterloo Commodore Stephen Decatur, at the head of a US squadron, caught sight of a Barbary frigate, cornered and captured it some 20 miles south off the Cape de Gata (Spain, ca. 175 mi E of Gibraltar). He was able to do so because intelligence had told him that contemporary pirates used fixed routes, sailing fairly close to shore. Cape de Gata was, in fact, a known pirate rendez-vous. The rig of his frigates allowed him to take as much advantage as possible of the wind. They could chase their enemy quickly and as long as was necessary. Decatur's squadron surrounded the pirate frigate and battered it into submission with gunfire. Sailing on to Algiers, he posted his squadron at the harbor entrance and started his negotiations with first Algiers and later, Tripoli. Under threat of blockade the Barbary pirates gave in. Gunboat diplomacy at work.

Whether it is in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean, this is how piracy is fought in popular imagination, thanks to Patryk O'Brien, Hornblower and Hollywood. And since Ben Hur (ie: since 1870) the popular image holds sway for the Ancient world as well.

The problem is of course that, when transposed, almost every element of Decatur's history becomes anachronistic for Greece and Rome.

The first element, that of coastal navigation and more or less fixed routes, is valid. Lacking a compass, daytimeAncient navigation depended very much on landmarks as witnessed by several surviving so-called Periploi, 'round trips'. They provide those landmarks in the order they would be seen from see while sailing along the coastline. Combined with a pervasive northern wind, a strong counter clockwise current throughout the Mediterranean and a very limited square rig, it made routes quite predictable. Score one for the pirates, especially in such narrows as the Straits of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland.

Life was a lot more difficult for those chasing pirates. Their galleys, such as the bireme depicted above, were short range vessels. To be sure, they would have been able to give chase to a sailing vessel, but only for a short moment at high speed. Even at the higher estimates of cruising speed (5-6 knots), overtaking another fleeing galley or even a sailing freighter running before the wind was difficult as is confirmed by several ancient sources such as this one:

(Appian, BC , IV.86)

This shows that even when freighters were sailing a known route (i.e. across the Adriatic from Brundisium to Macedonia), it might be possible, but not easy to intercept them. The lack of ranged weapons with the stopping power to halt a ship must have been vexing indeed!

Fighting piracy at sea must have been a difficult proposition and seems to have been rare, unless the pirates banded together into a larger fleet that fought the Romans in a regular battle as Sextus Pompeius did or the final battle of Pompey's - Sextus' father - against the Cilician pirates at Coracesium. It was much more effective to attack the towns and villages that housed the pirates and their families. Much like Decatur did, in fact...

The blockading of harbors and ancient 'gunboat diplomacy' (siege ship diplomacy' doesn't really have the same  ring to it, does it?) however, I'll save for another time.