A comprehensive examination of the effects of the shifting seasons on maritime trade, warfare and piracy durig antiquity, this book overturns many long-held assumptions concerning the capabilities of Graeco-Roman ships and sailors.
It is the long-standing belief among classical scholars that seafaring on
the ancient Mediterranean was highly seasonal in nature. This assumption
underlies and permeates our present understanding of Graeco-Roman maritime
activities and has gone all-but unchallenged by historians and archaeologists.
There has, after all, seemed little reason to question the handful
of ancient texts relating to the seasonal limits of the maritime calendar, for
while such literature is sparse, on cursory examination there appears to be
broad agreement that the sailing season of antiquity was con
ned within a
six- to eight-month period centred on the summer. By contrast, the wintertime
was regarded as ‘out-of-season’ for Greek and Roman seafarers—the
period of mare clausum, the ‘closed sea’. A relatively recent study therefore
noted: ‘The duration and dates of the sailing season in the ancient Mediterranean
arewell knownand have been fairly thoroughly discussed’.1 Throughout
the following pages it will, however, be argued that, rather than presenting
a single, uni
ed picture of the Graeco-Roman sailing season, critical
examination of the ancient texts instead reveals that the maritime calendars
surviving from antiquity are far from compatible. Indeed, the literature
deals with a wide variety of diferent types of vessels, sailing on very diferent
regions of the Mediterranean Sea. Many of the surviving ancient texts
are also separated by broad spans of time that encompassed considerable
technological, political and economic change, all of which had profound
implications for the length of the sailing season.
