Piracy, Pillage and Plunder in Antiquity: Appropriation and the Ancient World (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies) ed. by R.J. Evans, M. De Marre

Abstract

Reviewed by: Piracy, Pillage and Plunder in Antiquity: Appropriation and the Ancient World (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies) ed. by R.J. Evans, M. De Marre Richard Alston Evans, R.J. and De Marre, M. (edd.) 2020. Piracy, Pillage and Plunder in Antiquity: Appropriation and the Ancient World (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies). London and New York: Routledge. Pp. xiv + 245. ISBN 978-1-138-34100-5. £115.00. The focus of this collection is elusive. I began with Clifford Ando's introduction (pp. 1-8) and Seth Richardson's essay on Middle Bronze Age Mesopotamia (pp. 9-26) and thought that the book was about bandits and, potentially, pirates. Matthew Trundle (pp. 27-37) provides an essay on mercenary service and Athenian state structures before Richard Evans's treatment of [End Page 268] state finances and raiding with a focus on Syracuse (pp. 38-59). Alex McAuley (pp. 60-83) shifts attention to Seleucid colonisation and issues of identity. Roman Roth's argument follows (pp. 84-96), focusing on coastal colonies as manifestations of Roman naval power and policy. He suggests that pirates lurked in the colonial walls. Aaron Beek (pp. 97-114) considers Rome's habit of calling its enemies 'pirates', seeing them more as mercenaries. This is followed by Stephen Harrison's paper on Tibullus (pp. 115-28), which transitions the volume to a more literary focus, with John Hilton's paper on the rebellious boukoloi in Leucippe and Clitophon (pp. 129-44) and Martine de Marre's consideration of the female Circumcellions, who are in the tradition of morally bad, rural and poor heretics (pp. 145-69). The volume finishes with two papers on reception topics. The first from Eve MacDonald and Sandra Bingham (pp. 170-84) points to tropes of piracy which came to justify imperial expansion in modern North Africa and finally comes Liliana Carrick-Tappeiner's consideration of Classical motifs in the hyper-masculine King Solomon's Mines (pp. 185-202). This shifting focus reflects an essential slipperiness of the subject. The terms 'pirate' or 'bandit' are often applied in modernity and antiquity, but rarely after a carefully consideration of the sociological and political characteristics of the individual or group so labelled. Such terminology is descriptive and invective. One who called Domitian a latro (Plin. Ep. 1.12; Suet. Dom. 12), could not plausibly have been claiming that the Roman emperor conformed to the same sociological categories as the Cilician bandits or the Cretan pirates. But if invective is in play, are we looking principally at elite social discourses tarring the socially and politically marginal with a label reinforcing their externality? For historians of antiquity, the problem is worsened by linguistic issues. Inevitably, we are translating 'bandit' or 'pirate' across multiple languages, sociological settings and moralizing practices. Can the supposed roaming bands of heretics in North Africa be meaningfully compared with Hellenistic mercenaries or Bronze Age herders? Is there anything that connects other than a translated word? Within the comparative historical and anthropological literatures, the category of bandit is not particularly homogeneous. Ando's introductory survey goes back to Brent D. Shaw's work, mostly from the 1980s and 1990s.5 Shaw wrestled with this definitional problem, particularly in his long article on 'Bandits in the Roman Empire', which collated a multiplicity of reports of bandit activity. Lurking behind Shaw's engagement was a cross-disciplinary initiative, 'bandit studies' which drew inspiration from the pioneering work [End Page 269] of Eric Hobsbawm (not in the bibliography here). Hobsbawm invented the terminology of the 'social bandit' drawing on an experience of near contemporary banditry as a form of armed resistance.6 Bandit studies looked to recuperate the stories of low-level, low-class resistance as evidence for mostly agrarian social conflict. For Marxist-inspired historians, the bandit, or the primitive rebel, offered evidence of class struggle before modern political ideology. But as Hobsbawm well knew, the social bandit was not a straightforward figure. In places, the social bandit was mythologized and romanticized. Robin Goodfellow became a very bourgeois bandit in Romantic and modern receptions. In the Mediterranean, the klephts, armatoles, and pallikari of the nineteenth-century Balkans metamorphosed into nationalistic icons, defenders of anti...