Pompey and Ancient Piracy
by Caleb Klingler
In the year 67 BCE, the Roman people were struggling to control a Cilician
pirate menace who threatened their daily lives. In a miracles turn of events
the Roman cause found their answer in Pompey, who eliminated the pirate threat
in a campaign that lasted three short months. However, what is a common
misconception were that the Cilicians were not a simple pirate group, but
realistically a fearsome enemy, an enemy that required a strong leader and a
swift campaign in order to pacify them. In a campaign that many historians over
look as Pompey's greatest victory in a decisive campaign that succeeded were
others failed before. This particular campaign lends itself to an even broader
interpretation in the study of military strategy. Both the Cilicians and the
Romans employed useful strategies to fight warfare that fit their unique
abilities as warriors.
In order to narrate a clearer understanding we must explore the term piracy. Piracy
in the Greco-Roman world is a term that is deep in meaning and difficult to
understand. The Cilicians, for example, were regarded as one of the fiercest
pirate groups in the ancient world, among their enemies. To their allies the
Cilicians were regarded as aggressive warriors whose tactics shocked even Rome.
The speed with which they fought was direct and swift; the rescue of
Mithridates in 72 BCE is an example to their speed. Their attacks were over
before people even realized what had just taken place. The skills of which the
Cilicians possessed made them master seamen, and had no shortage of groups
willing to pay for their services in times of war. The Mithridatic Wars, as an
example, saw the Cilicians in pay with King Mithridatic against the Romans. The
Mithridatic Wars proved to be an effort of the Asia Minor nations to thwart
Roman imperialistic advances into the region. Even once the principle forces of
Mithridatic were defeated, the Cilicians continued on the struggle to defend
their homeland. The Cilicians tactics continued to use swift naval raids
that paralyzed Roman commerce as the Roman had no clear naval strategy to
counter the Cilician threat.
Neither Greek nor Latin provides a single word that explains piracy.
Greco-Roman writers such as Plutarch and Strabo do provide insights into why
the Romans labeled groups pirates espically the Cilicians as one such group.
Both writers give justification for the need of militarily expeditions;
however, not all Roman claims of piracy were necessarily correct. As pointed
out above, the Cilicians were not simple pirates, but used piracy to further
warfare that benefited their skills as sailors, even if it meant warfare in the
nontraditional way. When faced with an understanding of Piracy, the reader is
ingrained with the idea of piracy based upon an Eighteenth Century idea of
pirates as robbers sailing around the oceans. Within the framework of the
English pirates of the Eighteen Century, historians place the Cilicians in the
same category and this claim is neither fair nor correct definition of the
Given the Roman charge that the Cilicians were pirates, the Romans struggled to
contain them for years, in peace or in war. The Romans sent numerous generals
to the region, one in particular Lucullus was sent to pacify the Cilicians
during the Mithridatic Wars; but found little success.
In Pompey, the Romans found their champion against the Cilician menace. His
victory ended the Cilicians' threat to Rome and Rome's allies in the
Mediterranean Sea. In a campaign that lasted three months, Pompey put an end to
Cilician piracy. Pompey's victory was made only possible after the senate
made him an admiral in control of the entire Roman navy with jurisdiction of
fifty miles inland along every coast in the Mediterranean Sea.
By using definitions of piracy in both Greek and Latin, Phillip De Souza shows
through etymology that there were more kinds of piracy than just a simple all
encompassing answer. In Greek the words leistes (armed robbery or
plunder) and peirates (attempt at robbery or plunder) have become
synonymous with piracy of today. The Greek term katapontisties (to
take from the sea) is the closest in meaning from Greek to English pirate
terminology. The Latin word preado (booty or plunder) derived from peirates
When we study the ancient definition of piracy, we learn what piracy was but
not who the pirates were. The notion of placing the Cilicans under the same
context of eighteenth century pirates does not fit the same definition. With
this ambiguity of the term pirate, we see that the Cilicians are not simply
pirates or armed brigands. The reality behind the Cilicans lies in complexity.
The historian Strabo describes that Cilicians came from present day Turkey near
the border with Syria. This region was referred to in Roman times as the
Cilician Trecheia. Strabo describes the Cilician Trecheia surrounded by the
Taurus Mountains; this range of mountains helped them to build well fortified
cities to defend against land attacks and Zenicetus was one such fortress. The
access from the sea to the land had few usable harbors; these harbors were only
large enough to land troops against the Cilicians and these were dominated by
the heights surrounding them. As well the Cilicians built a series of
watchtowers to provide an early warning system against incoming fleets. The
construction of such elaborate defenses suggests that the Cilicians were more
than a loose confederation of pirate bands. The Cilicians built these
formidable defense for protection. These defenses are evidence that even Strabo
considered the Cilician homeland as a permanent settlement, not just a simple
The wars between the Romans and the Cilicians ran from 102 BCE to 67 BCE. In
102, the war began when the Roman legislature sent Marcus Antonius on a special
mission to quell the start of the Cilician threat. At the time, Marcus
Antonius governed the province and by sending him to quell the region
illustrates how a simple local problem grew into a problem that threatened Rome
and Italy with Antonius' failure. The crisis began to spiral out of control
when the Romans became involved in the Mithradates wars, a series of three wars
against King Mithradates. Mithradates aligned himself with the neighboring
Cilicians to fight against Roman expansion into Asia Minor.
The notion of a unified front against Roman expansion exuded the charges of
piracy leveled against the Cilicians. The Cilicians do not demonstrate pirate
behavior by defending of their homeland, this would undermine one of the key
principals of piracy in the Eighteenth Century. The pirates of the Eighteenth
Century had no nation to claim unto their own, let alone would pirates defend
that homeland. The pirates of this era were rebelling from corrupt monarchies
not out to defend the status quo. The only commonality they shared was the
tactics that they implemented. The use of small raiding parties and taking of
loot and hostages were vary useful for small scale military operations, these
proved to have widespread ramification against their enemies. The Cilician use
of small scale raiding froze the people of Rome into a state of panic that
demanded prompt action. The use of quick strikes from the sea onto the Italian
peninsula proved an ingenious strategy. The Cilicians, being life-long
mariners, knew they could not fight by conventional land battles against Rome
and so turned to fighting the way that they knew best. The wars ended in 67,
when Pompey finally pacified the region and ended the warfare.
By the year 67, the conflict between the Cilicians and Rome had proven to be an
even greater threat than Rome had imagined. The Cilicians had threatened to cut
Rome off from their food supply and starve them by disrupting the Mediterranean
Sea trade. The growth of disparities in Rome, such as the civil wars, left
itself unguarded from the sea and it could not defeat the Cilicians in open
naval warfare. The Roman defense could not even prevent the Cilician from
kidnapping two Roman praetors, Sextilious and Bellinuns, from the Italian
peninsula. The very threat of starvation and kidnapping drove the populace
to demand retribution and protection against the Cilicians. The problems that
Rome faced were to be blamed upon themselves. The defensive strategy employed
by the Romans was a revolving form of defense, one based on active defense
against passive defense in order to secure the Italian peninsula. The
definition of active defense against passive defense will be described in
Both strategies can be effective forms of defense; however, employing both
strategies is extremely expensive. The use of active defense pits an active
military out waging war against an enemy. An example of active defense is
sending a navy or army to battle the enemy instead of waiting for the enemy to
attack you. The use of passive defense eliminates large standing armies and
navies. In passive defense, building fortifications are used to protect fixed
points of territory. These fortifications are placed in expected positions that
the enemy will attack. For the Romans, the use of both forms of defense was too
much to maintain. The means to fund large navies and armies was extremely hard
to fund let alone maintain fixed fortifications that require large numbers of
troops to garrison them became overwhelming. The cost of the army was larger
than the Roman budget could afford. The use of either form of defense is a
viable strategy of defending oneself. In face of the cost, active defense
during the Second Punic War proved to be the only effective way to win. In
times of peace, passive defense is a more viable option because military
budgets are considerably less during these times. This became the standard form
for Rome when no longer challenged in the Mediterranean.
By 67, the Romans passive defense had been in place so long that the Cilicians
were able to build up a strong naval force, thus proving the downside of
passive defense and threatened Rome directly. The need to change strategy back
into an active defense was apparent. In order for the Romans to switch from a
passive defense to an active defense, new laws were needed to bring the
military back from its long hibernation. The Roman military needed to be
revamped, the vessels needed to be repaired and the army needed to be retrained
to fight in open combat instead of defending forts. A tribune by the name of
Gabinius proposed that the Senate should take bold action against the
Cilicians, known as the Lex Gabinia. Under the law, the Senate would choose
Pompey to deal with the pirate threat. He was made an admiral and fifteen
legates were put under his command. The Senate gave Pompey the ability to
draw as much funds as he required to fight the war as well as the jurisdiction
of all the Mediterranean Sea up to and including fifty miles inland of every
coast. The nomination of Pompey was met with contention; tribunes
Trebellius and Roscius attempted to veto the law. Pompey made a speech to quell
these critics before the Roman people and then allowed to engage the war
Pompey's force comprised of 500 ships, 120,000 infantry, 5,000 cavalry, 24
legates, and two quaestors. The entire campaign lasted only three short
months to clear the entire Mediterranean of Cilicians. The law effectively
revived Rome back into active defense and allowed for an aggressive campaign.
In order for Pompey to move with such swiftness, he divided the Mediterranean
into thirteen quadrants, each one lead by a legate. By dividing the
Mediterranean into individual quadrants, Pompey was able to achieve flexibility
of command. Each legate was able to eliminate the Cilician pirates in piece
meal. For Pompey dividing the Cilicians into small bands helped him to focus on
the larger picture of the war without having to be caught up in minute details.
The strategy as well allowed the legates to retain a semblance of autonomy that
would normally be allowed for independent commanders and kept cohesion in
command ranks and thus avoided rebuking his lieutenants' concerns of their
personnel status to that of Pompey. The move by Pompey was shrewd politically;
the brilliance of the strategy caught the Cilicians off guard and prevented
them from reinforcing themselves.
The Cilician strategy varied differently against that of Rome. They called for
independent fleets to act as raiding parties. The Cilicians were no match
against the Romans in land warfare and prompted them to fight by other means.
By combing their best assets as seaman and their tenacious skill as warriors,
they were more than a match for the Roman navy. These small raiding parties
kept the Romans off balance for years and prevented them from gathering their
forces for a decisive blow. Pompey realized this, but if he could keep the
Cilicians from reinforcing the small raiding parties, he could change the
direction of the war. Through flexibility of command and concentration of Roman
forces, he was able to regain the Roman strengths that the Cilicans had
subdued. Once the small raiding bands were defeated, Pompey was then quickly
able to combine his forces against the Cilicians home bases in Asia Minor. The
disappearance of the Cilician fleet eliminated the troops needed to defend the
fortress and watchtowers, thus leaving Pompey's army virtually unopposed.
Another key importance of Pompey's strategy allowed him to capture the
Cilicians in droves. The speed of the campaign not only caught the raider off
guard, this prompted thousands to surrender without even a fight. The ability
for the Cilicians to surrender with their families allowed Pompey to move
quickly across vast areas of the Mediterranean. By not executing them in
mass, he was able to avoid further unrest from the Cilicians. The speed of
the campaign would be comparable to that of the German blitzkrieg of World War
After the campaign had been completed, Pompey dispersed the surrendered
Cilicians to other parts of Cilician Trecheia. By sending them away from
their cities along the coast and into the nearby city-states, this allowed the
Romans to keep an eye on the Cilicians. In Pompey's quick campaign, he finally
defeated the Cilician threat where other Roman generals failed. Upon Pompey's
arrival back to Rome he was heralded as a champion and the campaign led him to
the triumvirate of Rome. The victory that Pompey achieved was short-lived
however, and after the troops were sent home and the fleet disbanded the Romans
once again turned toward passive defense. The attention that was once on Asia
Minor soon faded and Rome again faced civil war and the so-called pirates were
back at it again.
This study has looked at the misunderstanding of piracy in the Roman world.
Through language barriers in Greek and Latin, we are left with no clear
definition of which pirates were. The perceived notion of piracy in the
Greco-Roman world is vastly different from the understanding of piracy in the
Eighteenth Century. The labeling of the Cilicians as pirates does not justly
fit their status in history. The similarities that pirates of the Eighteenth
Century and the Cilicians shared were in tactics not in motivation. The cause
of defending a homeland united the Cilician people around a single cause;
pirates only defend themselves and their brethren. The Cilicians might not have
been able to defeat the Romans in pitched land battles, but they were more than
a match for them at sea. Pompey became the first Roman to devise a plan to
decisively defeat the Cilicians. He beat them at their own strategy and adapted
his own through political skill and battlefield maneuver. His victory in three
months over the Cilicans has proved just as impressive as the German blitzkrieg
of the Twentieth Century. Another unbelievable feat lies in the fact there were
so few casualties. By taking a few ships, he convinced thousands that surrender
was the best option and did not foul it up by killing the surrendered
Show Footnotes and
. Phillip De Souza, Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999) 131.
. Stephen Mitchell, Anatolia: Land Men, and Gods in Asia Minor (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, Oxford Press, 1993) 31.
. Phillip De Souza, Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World, 3-13.
. Plutarch translated by John Dryden and Revised by Arthur Hugh Clough, The Lives
of The Noble Grecians And Romans (New York: First Modern Library
Edition, 1932) 618.
. Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives, 759.
. Robin Seager, Pompey The Great: A Political Biography (Malden,
Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 1979, 2002) 44.
. De Souza, Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World, 3.
. De Souza, Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World, 10.
. De Souza, Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World, 13.
. Strabo translated by Horace Leonard Jones, The Geography of Strabo
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1917, 1960) 337. (14.5.5)
. Strabo, (14.5.5)
. Strabo, (14.5.7)
. Strabo, (14.5.7)
. De Souza, Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World, 109.
. Stephen Mitchell, Anatolia, 31.
. Seager, Pompey the Great, 44.
. Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives, 756
. Charles G. Starr, Jr., Costal Defense in the Roman World (The American
Journal of Philology, v. 64 #1, 1943) 56-70
. Chester Star Jr., Coastal Defense in the Roman World, 59
. Star, Costal Defense, 60
. Seager, Pompey the Great, 44
. Seager, Pompey the Great, 44
. Seager, Pompey the Great, 44
. Seager, Pompey the Great, 45
. Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives, 759
. Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives, 759
. Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives, 759
De Souza, Phillip. Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Mitchell, Stephen. Anatolia: Land Men, and Gods in Asia Minor, volume 1 The
Celts in Anatolia and the impact of Roman rule, (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, Oxford Press, 1993)
Plutarch translated by John Dryden and Revised by Arthur Hugh Clough, The Lives
of The Noble Grecians And Romans, (New York: First Modern Library
Seager, Robin. Pompey The Great: A Political Biography, (Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing, 1979)
Starr, Chester G., Jr. "Costal Defense in the Roman World" The American Journal
of Philology 64, no.1 (1943) 56-70 (JSTOR December 2, 2006).
Strabo translated by Horace Leonard Jones, The Geography of Strabo, (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960)
Copyright © 2008 Caleb Klingler.
Written by Caleb Klingler. If you have questions or comments on this article,
please contact Caleb Klingler at:
About the author:
Caleb Klingler is working on his MA of History from Eastern Michigan University. He is an army veteran and served as an M1A1 Abrams tank crewmen.
Published online: 07/06/2008.
* Views expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent
those of MHO.