A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (10 page)

Socrates lived the life he propounded, having done military service as a citizen of the polis, and is the first great thinker known to have died for his principles – accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and
introducing new gods, he refused to accept guilt when brought before the Assembly in 399
BC
and drank poison as instructed rather than backing down. When Plato stated that the ideal society would never come about ‘till the philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers', in other words, when the navigator runs the ship, it was not just knowledge of the forms that he meant – a philosophical theory – but a procedure of philosophical enquiry or discourse, what we would call critical thinking, and it is this aspect of Greek philosophy that is arguably its most significant legacy today.

There were practical aspects of the conveyance of ideas that lead us to know so much about the Greek ‘life of the mind' at the time of the wreck. One was the Greek language itself, first evidenced in the Linear B script of the Mycenaeans, and its expressive potential. Another was the alphabet, invented by the people of the Near East and adopted by the Greeks in the early Iron Age, and its suitability for recording the totality of speech including nuances of emotion. A third was a medium for recording those words that was not cumbersome and limited like clay tablets and stone inscriptions, or ephemeral like wax tablets – paper, first developed as papyrus by the ancient Egyptians, allowing the spoken word to be recorded in scroll and eventually ‘codex' form – like modern books – to be copied easily and to survive to this day.

The Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta reached a low point for Athens in the Sicilian Expedition of 415–413
BC
, when almost the entire Athenian force of more than 10,000 soldiers and 200 ships was annihilated in an attempt to capture Syracuse, an ally of Sparta. The war rumbled on for nine years longer but in 404
BC
Athens finally acknowledged defeat, and Sparta became the dominant power in the Aegean. A further war, the Corinthian War, saw Athens regain its independence in 386
BC
, and the rivalry between Athens and Sparta continued until Philip of Macedon took over much of Greece in 338
BC
and Sparta was subjugated by his son Alexander the Great seven years later.

The decades immediately following the Peloponnesian War were not entirely bleak for Athens. In 387
BC
Plato founded the
Akademia
, on land once owned by an Attic hero named Academus. The Academy can be regarded as the world's first university, where young men learnt philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, physics and politics; one
of those who studied there was Aristotle, who went on to found his Lyceum in 334
BC
. Despite its flourishing intellectual life, Athens in the fourth century
BC
was a very different place from the city in the Age of Pericles. Years of war against Sparta had left Athens eroded in spirit and manpower and devastated economically. Warfare had become endemic in the Greek world and sapped the energy of those who might have attempted to revive a ‘Golden Age'. There was never again a sustained period of peace as there had been in the middle of the fifth century
BC
, a crucial factor in explaining the achievements of Athens at that time.

Alexander the Great's brief but brilliant career saw the entire east Mediterranean region fall under Macedonian rule, only for it to be carved up on his death in 323
BC
by his generals into what we term the ‘Hellenistic' kingdoms – dominated by the Antigonids in Macedonia and Greece, the Seleucids in Asia Minor and the Near East and the Ptolemies in Egypt. Maritime trade once again flourished, with cities such as Alexandria in Egypt and the island of Rhodes in the Aegean acting as hubs for commerce. The next great power to arrive on the scene was Rome, with Corinth being captured in 146
BC
, Athens sacked in 86
BC
and much of the remaining Hellenistic world absorbed in the following decades, culminating in the defeat of the last of the Ptolemies, Queen Cleopatra, at the naval battle of Actium in 31
BC
. Athens had lost political significance by that time, but continued to be a major intellectual centre and tourist destination during the Roman period – the continuing legacy of her fifth-century
BC
achievements was famously expressed by the Roman poet Horace when he wrote
Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit
, ‘Conquered Greece in turn defeated its savage conqueror', a reference to the Greek art, science and philosophy that came to underpin Roman cultural life. From the inception of the Roman Empire soon after the Battle of Actium it is to Rome itself and her own distinctive achievements that we now turn, looking at a shipwreck off eastern Sicily – close to the site of the Athenian defeat at Syracuse – that exemplifies maritime trade at the height of the Roman Empire.

My first-ever view of the promontory of Penisola della Maddalena in eastern Sicily filled me with excitement. We were driving our inflatable boat from Capo di Ognina some five miles to the south-west, skimming over the crystal-clear waters of the Mediterranean in the dazzling sunlight of summer. I was diving officer on an expedition from the University of Bristol, still an undergraduate and not yet twenty, and was responsible for planning a dive on a site that I had not visited before. We had been excavating a Roman wreck in shallow water off the south coast but had been blown off by a sirocco wind from the Sahara and had decided to visit another wreck where conditions might be better. For me there was a special thrill because the site had first been reported by divers from Cousteau's
Calypso
, right at the beginning of wreck archaeology in the Mediterranean, and the time that had so enthralled me when I read about those early projects as a boy. It seemed an impossible dream that I should be about to dive such a site myself, less than a year after arriving in England to begin my studies and with my mind still filled with images of the wooden and iron-hulled ships of the Great Lakes where I had done most of my diving up to that point.

Mid-way across the bay the peninsula came into sharper focus, a rocky plateau that extends some 4 kilometres from the main contour of the coast and forms the southern reach of the Great Harbour of Syracuse. We were heading towards the jagged cliffs of Plemmirio near the eastern extremity, just before Capo Murro di Porco. It is one of the most dramatic places in the Mediterranean, with a view over the Ionian Sea in the direction of Greece and dropping to depths of more than 3,000 metres only a few kilometres offshore – the equivalent of the height of a mountain in the Alps. It was here that the Athenian forces under Nicias had landed during the siege of Syracuse in 414
BC
, during the Peloponnesian War; the word ‘Plemmyrion' first appears in
the work of the Greek historian Thucydides describing the siege. Two and a half thousand years later these waters were the scene of another invasion that changed the course of history, the Allied landings on 10 July 1943 that were the first toehold in Europe in the war against the Nazis. I had spoken a few weeks earlier about the landings with my grandfather, an officer on an assault ship who had been here on that day. In the intervening centuries Sicily had been a crossroads of ancient trade, and we were heading to the very apex – a place that ships hugging the coast had to pass on their way to the cities of Magna Graecia and Rome and later to the medieval centres of power in the west Mediterranean.

I put these thoughts aside as we reached the cliffs and turned east towards the headland, driving slowly along and looking for the cross-shaped cleft that marked the site. The sea slapped at the undercut of the cliff, and we kept the boat far enough out not to be sucked in. After a short time we spotted the cleft and began to kit up. There would be four of us diving, with two remaining in the boat to stand offshore and motor in to collect us after we had surfaced. I knew that the wreck extended below forty metres depth, but I had planned the dive to a maximum of thirty metres with a bottom time of twenty minutes in order to avoid the need for decompression stops. We rolled backwards off the boat and immediately dropped down, following the cliff to the rocky talus at its base. At thirty metres depth I stopped above a ledge and looked down, seeing the silvery flash of a tunny far below. I was used to the forbidding depths of the Great Lakes, but the depth of the sea here was almost inconceivable. I turned back and followed the others up the slope, exploring the gullies and fissures below the cliff base. In a few minutes I had found a gully filled with fragments of Roman amphoras, a distinctive cylindrical type from the province of North Africa that I knew had been used to carry olive oil and fish sauce to Rome. Touching the amphoras I felt an immediacy not only with those seafarers and traders almost two thousand years before, but also with the pioneer divers who had first seen this site when scuba diving was still in its infancy and discoveries such as this were opening up an extraordinary new window on the past.

That dive was to be the only one we carried out on the wreck that year. With the weather off the south coast improving, we focused our attention again on the shallow wreck that had been our original objective. But two years later I returned to Plemmirio with an expedition
under my direction to carry out a full season of survey, and two years after that to excavate. On that first dive I could little have imagined that the wreck would come to occupy several intensive and very fulfilling years for me and be the basis for my doctoral dissertation. Dating to the time of Rome's first African-born emperor, Septimius Severus, it was a wreck like those at Uluburun and Tekta
ş
that represents a high point in history – the time when the Roman Empire had reached its greatest extent, covering some five million square kilometres from Mesopotamia and the Sahara to northern Britain and as far as Rome could ever go on the uneasy Rhine-Danube frontier. The city of Rome was at its largest, with a population of well over a million, and most of the monuments that are familiar today were already in place – the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the columns of Trajan and Antoninus Pius, the temples and lawcourts of the old Republican forum and the new forum of Trajan. Septimius Severus' own contribution to this splendour, the great arch bearing his name in the forum, is one of the most photographed monuments of ancient Rome, occupying a central position beside the Senate House and beneath the steps of the great Capitoline Temple, with coins of Severus depicting the arch as it originally looked with a magnificent bronze sculpture of a horse-drawn chariot on top.

All of this provides a dazzling backdrop to the wreck, but it is a story with another historical reality – a civil war at the time of Severus' accession that nearly brought Rome to its knees, and a battle with his rival Clodius Albinus that depleted the legions and left the frontiers vulnerable to barbarian attack. To strengthen the Empire, Severus patronised the cities of his birthplace and made Africa the breadbasket of Rome, providing grain and olive oil to feed the people. The ship that went down at Plemmirio sheds unique light on the nature of that trade, and on the economic underpinning of the greatest empire the world had yet seen.

The wreck was first recorded in August 1953 by Frédéric Dumas, diving from Captain Cousteau's ship
Calypso
, who wrote ‘I saw broken amphoras, concreted into a fold of the cliff, then an iron anchor, concreted to the bottom and apparently in a corroded state, with amphora sherds on top.' In the early 1950s Cousteau was involved with the first-ever wreck excavation using the aqualung off the south coast of France, and Dumas was to go on to dive with George Bass at the Cape
Gelidonya Bronze Age wreck off Turkey in 1960. His discovery of the Plemmirio wreck was unknown to the University of Bristol divers who first chanced on the wreck during an expedition to Sicily in 1974 under the direction of Dr Toby Parker, a pioneer maritime archaeologist in Britain. A number of artefacts were raised under the aegis of the local archaeological superintendency, including amphora fragments, several concretions containing the casts of iron bars and a unique sounding lead. The study of Roman amphoras of African origin had been put on a new footing by the publication of pottery from Ostia, the port of Rome, and with few other wrecks of this period known, the Plemmirio site was one for possible future excavation. The year after my first visit to the wreck and after a study tour in Greece I spent a month working on another Roman wreck off the south coast of Sicily and discussed my ambitions with Toby Parker. We agreed that my undergraduate dissertation would be on wreck evidence for Roman trade at this period, and that I would lead an expedition the following year to carry out a full survey of the Plemmirio wreck.

When I returned to England after that first dive I showed my grandfather where we had been and compared it to the records of Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily in July 1943. He had been Second Officer of the assault ship
Empire Elaine
, part of a convoy taking Canadian troops and equipment to ‘Bark West' sector near Cape Passero at the south-eastern tip of Sicily. Having survived a hazardous journey along the coast of North Africa in which three ships of the convoy had been sunk by a U-boat, they offloaded landing craft close inshore while the monitor HMS
Roberts
fired 15-inch shells overhead, the muzzle blast deafening men on the ship as the shells roared across the sky towards their targets. After completing the landing they went up the coast towards Syracuse where further landings of British troops were taking place. Off Penisola della Maddalena an attempted glider-borne landing had failed, with several hundred lives lost when the gliders were released too far out to sea, but a raiding party of the Special Air Service came ashore a few hundred metres from the wreck site and successfully assaulted an Italian gun battery on Capo Murro di Porco that could have wreaked havoc on the assault convoys with its 6-inch guns.

We found belts of Italian machine-gun rounds on the wreck where they had been discarded over the cliffs after the surrender; in 2017 the remains of a British Wellington bomber were discovered by Italian
divers a few hundred metres away where it had crashed into the sea that night, killing its crew, and exploration in deeper water using oxygen rebreathers and mixed gas – allowing exploration to depths of 100 metres and more – has revealed further aircraft and wreckage from the war, a reminder of the potential of archaeology to bring to light evidence of recent conflict and that the siege of Syracuse by the Athenians in 415–13
BC
was only one of many wars to focus on this crossroads of the Mediterranean region.

I directed the survey and excavation of the Plemmirio wreck over three seasons, beginning with the University of Bristol expedition and following with two further expeditions after my move to Cambridge as a research student in 1984. By the end of the final season in 1987 the project had involved more than forty divers and archaeologists over a total of five months in the field, with many hundreds of dives undertaken. We worked under the aegis of the local archaeological superintendency and had funding from many bodies, including the British Academy, the British School at Rome, the Society of Antiquaries of London, Cambridge University Classics Faculty and my college at Cambridge, Corpus Christi College. The project became integral to my doctoral research and led to many publications and specialist reports. As with most archaeological projects, the fieldwork was only one component of the investigations, and my thinking about the wreck and its place in history has continued to evolve as other excavations have produced comparable material and my own perspectives have broadened and changed.

From our camp at Capo di Ognina we drove our inflatable boat every day to the site, mooring to a buoy and diving twice to a depth of 22 to 47 metres. It soon became apparent that the spread of artefacts below the cliffs formed two distinct concentrations, one of which corresponded to the living area at the stern of the ship. Buried beneath a huge boulder that had fallen on the wreck we found tiles and bricks from the ship's galley as well as many items of ship's stores: a beautiful intact amphora probably for wine, parts of a glass bottle and bowl, four pottery oil lamps and twenty-two items of cooking and table pottery, including cooking pots – fire-blackened on their bases, showing that they were used on board and not cargo – and jugs, plates and bowls. One of the lamps was decorated with the moulded relief of a reclining antelope, evidence of the lamp's North African origin. The
pottery was of great importance because even quite basic cooking pots changed in shape over short spans of time, and their shape and pottery fabric allow them to be sourced to particular regions. A leading expert on late Roman pottery identified one of our first finds as a type closely datable to about
AD
200, and our later finds were consistent with that date – placing the wreck in the middle years of the reign of Septimius Severus, who ruled from
AD
193 to 211. Most of the pottery was from North Africa but some was from Rome or its port city of Ostia, reflecting the route being taken by the ship and one that it had plied on previous voyages.

As well as about a ton of iron bars, the cargo comprised about 200 pottery amphoras – a number estimated from the quantity of sherds, including 33 intact tops and 29 bases. They were of two cylindrical forms, named ‘Africana grande' and ‘Africana piccolo' by the scholars who first studied them in detail in the 1960s, and further subdivided when a large deposit of African amphora sherds in the ‘Baths of the Swimmers' at Ostia was published by Italian archaeologists in the 1970s. They were produced in the province of Africa Proconsularis, a region roughly corresponding to modern Tunisia and coastal Libya, with amphora manufacture concentrated around several port cities. At the time, the office in Rome responsible for foodstuffs import, the
Cura Annonae
– literally ‘Care of Annona', the goddess who personified the grain supply – was acquiring much of the grain and olive oil needed for food handouts in Rome from North Africa, which also saw an increase in the shipment of fish sauce and salted fish – another major output of African coastal sites and an important protein component in the Roman diet.

The Plemmirio amphoras were among the first from a Roman wreck to be subject to a full range of scientific analyses of the pottery fabric and contents. The larger of the cylindrical forms had interior linings of a black material identified as pine resin; the smaller form had no visible lining, and chromatographic analysis of sherds revealed residue of olive oil lipids that had impregnated the pottery. This was consistent with the hypothesis that olive oil and resin did not mix well and that oil amphoras were unlined, with lined amphoras being used for fish produce – either salted fish,
salsamentum
, or a sauce such as
garum
, made by letting fish rot in open-air vats. Both amphora types at Plemmirio had a beige outer ‘skin' resulting from the use of salt water in the potting process, and both were of identical brick-red
fabric characteristic of eastern Tunisia. The breakthrough in pinpointing their origin came with a programme of neutron activation analysis carried out at Manchester University; the eighty-six sherds analysed had a signature identical to that of sherds excavated from kiln sites at Salakta, the ancient port of Sullecthum mid-way along the east Tunisian coast. For the first time, amphoras of this type could be sourced to a specific port, one from which the ship had almost certainly sailed on its final voyage.