Throughout history, people have always been drawn to the sea in a way or another. The colonisation of the coast by inland peoples drastically altered marine environments, but it also utterly transformed the nature of coastal communities. The Romans not only lived on coasts, but they thought with them, even if their way of manifesting these reflections was related less to the physical topography of the areas and more to how they engaged with them. They were part of their mythical as well as physical geography. Traditionally, the sea was deemed to be a space beyond human control and not subject to laws created by humans, while on the contrary land was governed by the civil law of the Romans. Nevertheless, because of the importance of the sea for ancient civilisations and states, numerous legal solutions were elaborated to facilitate the transport of goods and travel by sea, which interfered with the maritime realm. The declared aim of this book was to change our understanding of Roman conceptions about the sea by placing the focus on shipwrecks as events that act as bridges between the sea and land. The different chapters of this work explore the different Roman legal definitions of these spaces, and how individuals of divergent legal statuses interacted with them.
The enormity and wildness of the sea has always evoked an aura of mystery and uncertainty.1 This has done much to influence literature, art, and legal interpretation; as a result the sea’s actual effect on society can be overstated and a degree of artificiality introduced. Accumulated tradition, if not symbolism itself, exacerbates the problems of interpreting both the archaeological and legal records. If we look at archaeological evidence of wrecks and structures, we can see that some aspects of the maritime environment have little potential for change over the centuries, such as the need to combat tides, wind, and weather; these remain constant irrespective of technological advances. Faced with that immutable reality, human populations have taken different attitudes when faced with a difficult situation at sea, such as taking advantage of it, ignoring it, or trying to help. In the Roman world, where there was no such a thing as the moral imperative of saving lives from shipwrecks, the attitudes towards a sinking ship, its cargo, and the shipwrecked relied on social and political conceptions. Consequently, one of the sea’s functions becomes apparent; it acts as a symbolic space, where violence takes place and needs to be targeted by the law of the state, and onto which visions of power and unity are projected. The latter fits well with the Roman view which guided them through their Mediterranean expansion. This view about the sea established the limits of legality and considered who was and was not part of a given social group, what counted as necessity, and what constituted violence. In that sense, the perspectives on shipwrecks would not be based on principles of natural law, but rather on unilateral solutions for reacting in relation to specific situations, in the context of a politically organised community.2
This book has highlighted how the violent acts of wrecking ships and stealing from them changed from being accepted and even encouraged, to being prosecuted in both the public and private realm of the Roman world. The latter indicates a change, at least in the legal and political sphere of Rome, which had an impact on the interaction and management of space. After all that has been said in this book, what features of the Roman maritime cultural landscape can be identified? I have previously mentioned that the ethnic and legal diversity of the different areas of the Mediterranean would have had an impact on their landscapes, especially in areas with a long-lasting cultural background. However, when taking a bird’s eye view of the different rulings related to shipwrecking (whether carried out by private actors or organised in gangs), it is possible to recognise that something was changing in people’s minds, at least the minds of those in control of the Roman public image. First via treaties, and later by statutes, the Romans were imposing their attitude of avoiding violence at sea to create safe spaces to navigate, trade, and—especially—to govern. That mentality was not exclusive to the Romans but was also embraced by the Greeks and other maritime populations. However, it was the Romans who publicised this as their great achievement, claiming that they were the ones who brought peace to the Mediterranean.3
This book started by informing the reader on ancient perceptions about the sea; even if these views were a bit over-exaggerated by ancient poets and rhetors, they still had a strong influence on how Romans dealt with that space. The interaction of subjects with changes in the landscape has been considered in terms of reciprocal agency, to categorise and challenge maritime cultural landscapes as conceived in the legal literature. This in turn can help to redefine the sometimes-rigid distinction between the spheres of public and private, official and unofficial, legal and social. The sea was a savage realm beyond domination, a place of no return, but also a waterway that connected one land with the unknown people and cultures of another. In the Mediterranean before Roman hegemonic rule, foreigner and enemy were close categories in the mental conceptions of coastal inhabitants. It is in that context of confrontation among different social groups and powers that the primitive form of the right of shipwreck grew. This practice lived for a long time in the Mediterranean world, either directly through the acts of plundering committed by coastal communities, or indirectly through the right of reprisal (sylan). The latter gave birth to all the Greek legislation of asylia,4 and other remedies enabled to provide solutions to the acts of private violence existing before the Roman domination of the Mediterranean basin.
The chapter has also described the origin, background, and possible chronological dating of the edictum de naufragio, which punished robberies and other violent conduct that took advantage of catastrophic situations such as fires, wrecks, or attacks on ships. Even if it might appear as if this change of perception about shipwrecking was not terribly significant, it involved deep social change. The possibility of establishing contacts, trading with others, and being protected in case of catastrophe lies behind the idea of a unified Mediterranean (even if this assertion needs to be taken with a grain of salt). This was the start of a beautiful story of Empire, and conveys the idea of a maritime cultural landscape of peace and safe navigation. However, this is far from the truth, in the sense that the safe maritime landscape promoted by the Romans was politically produced—but what about its social side?
The practical daily needs of many stressed the need for creating instruments to handle events taking place at sea. In that way, we can see how private legal texts sometimes use legal analogies, abstractions, or fictions to overcome legal loopholes and handle legal hazards. In a way, these remedies were artificial because they were constructed on the basis of the legal boundaries established to conceptualise sea and land in the Roman world. The jurists’ responses to the needs and experiences of Rome’s subjects provide a small insight into the official reactions to hazards suffered by citizens at sea. The use of legal tools such as fictions or analogies highlights that there was a practical need to overcome that legal divide between land and sea.
The Roman world operated on multiple concepts of dominion and law, concepts that influenced not only how they understood the acquisition of goods lost from a wreck, but also how Roman maritime landscapes came to be interpreted and can be connected to the Roman state’s interests and ideology. Issues such as the acquisition and ownership of things considered as belonging to no one (nullius) or to everyone (communes omnium) created legal problems that indeed mirror the multilegality and diversity of customs from the ancient Mediterranean. On the one hand, there was the official discourse from the Roman state indicating that the shipwreck’s remains belonged to the original owner, while on the other hand, it is possible to find that in some areas and periods, the state had some right over the recovered goods. In any case, there is enough evidence to assume that plundering and piracy were practices that never disappeared in the Mediterranean, and that even during the high Empire, many populations found in these actions a sustainable way of living.
Perhaps it would not be unrealistic to say that probably many people who did not have much contact with the law of the Empire and needed to solve their issues at sea did not even conceive that there was a boundary, and found their own ways to cope with these threats. The study of these cases has underlined how Roman law was sometimes pragmatic, creating instruments to be used in very different settings and spaces, and sometimes narrative, focusing on the stories that jurists told, the verbal presentation of these cases, and the discourse through which the messages were conveyed to the reader. In sum, there is no such thing as a Roman ‘law of the sea’ created to govern the rights and duties of different populations in maritime environments. Instead, the stress was placed on growing a universal Empire, led by an all-powerful emperor, and keeping the peace when these acts were taking place mostly in the provinces.
Some of the elements that I would like to highlight in conclusion perhaps constitute the dark side of that propaganda, or perhaps only the social and cultural reality of the Mediterranean landscapes. It is true that political changes also cause developments in society, but it is necessary to remember that one does not simply fall asleep in the Middle Ages and wake up in the Renaissance. All cultural and historical processes take time, and the changes in the realm of maritime customs would not be an exception. In that sense, after imposing their hegemonic rule over the Mediterranean, did the Romans stop fearing the sea? Did they no longer consider it a savage wilderness that could not be dominated by the rule of law?5 Did people stop committing violence against ships? The answer is obviously ‘no’. By using the focus on violence reflected in legal sources targeting plundering, it is possible to appreciate how this guided the imperialistic efforts of Rome, first in constructing the Empire, and later in maintaining the imperialistic propaganda. However, did that idea permeate the minds of the people living on the coast? While it is true that we do not see legal statuses addressing piracy after the end of the Republic, and that the number of wrecks decreased considerably, these developments indicate that wrecking and piracy were taking different shapes. Unfortunately, these activities would never have disappeared, but rather would have evolved from being carried out by organised gangs on a global scale to being smaller-scale events at a local level. The latter allowed the Roman jurisprudence to cope with the legal boundaries established by the dichotomy of the sea and the land, as well as demonstrating the force of the imperium of the emperor, or the magistrates representing him. For the Romans who debated the matter, the main issue was not the sovereignty of the sea, but rather its political implications, and with it, the unusual powers that such an extraordinary command would have.
This has book has sought to provide a contribution to the history of the seas, which have acted as bridges between cultures and people and which create their own legal history. A bridge is not a one-way route: it also connects peoples, and through this connection, affects the identities of the societies on both sides. Thus, by bringing the sea (as well as other waterways) and their different roles to the fore, as I do in this book, new perspectives can be revealed on the shape—and shaping—of the Roman world and the peoples who inhabited it, their ways of thinking about the world which they inhabited, and their identities. I propose to look at Rome as both defined and confined by the sea, but ultimately spreading beyond the sea.
See Nicolet 1991, 5, on the importance of these sort of mythological conceptions for Roman society.
Shaw 2000, 361–403, 2004, 326–374; Benton 2011, 239–240; Ando 2020d, 1–3.
One of the best examples comes from the Augustan Res Gestae (CIL III.2.769–772), where the emperor claims to have defeated piracy in the Mediterranean.
Rigsby 1996.
Tuori 2018, 201–204.