CLASSICAL ASSOCIATION OF IRELAND
November 2017
CAI annual Summer School CORK: 18-20 August 2017
‘Maritime Matters’
This year was a busy one for the Cork Branch. Not only had we Branch matters to contend with, but also we were hosting the annual Summer School, which comes around like a Leap Year, every four years! The conference took place in the Cork Education Support Centre on the Western Road, which is ideal as there are many B&Bs close by. This year the theme was Maritime Matters, as Cork is a port city. Professor William O’Brien, Head of the School of the Human Environment, UCC, of which Classics is a part, performed the official opening. This was a fortuitous choice as the keynote speaker was Prof. Martin Millett, Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology in the University of Cambridge. Both gentlemen had shared a number of digs in recent years. Prof. Millett’s talk on Friday night centred around ‘Ostia and Portus: new light on the harbour cities of Imperial Rome’. We discovered that Rome, an enormous city, had difficulty feeding its population. The food itself was not the only issue, but the transportation of it caused difficulties. In 4BC, the harbour was full of silt. Grain ships had to sail into Naples and then the grain had to be transported overland to Rome. Surely a logistical nightmare, even to the practically minded Romans! In 2BC, under Claudius and Trajan, a new port was developed, Portus, designed to be linked to Ostia. It was simply enormous. The capacity of the warehouses at Portus was probably in the region of 145,000m2 while that at Ostia was known to be about 31,883m2. Rome was fed daily by barges coming up the river from the Portus warehouses. The conclusion drawn was that the harbour and warehouses at Portus were supplying the state and were set up for bulk shipments, while Ostia catered more for private enterprise and much smaller quantities. Saturday morning, August 19, dawned bright and sunny, which cannot be said for the following day, of which more anon! Prof. Millett was to the fore again, this time talking about 4
Prof. Martin Millett and Prof. William O’Brien (Photo: Selga Medenieks)
‘Remote Sensing and the Roman City.’ This was a fascinating talk on the relationship between science and archaeology. Ground penetrating radar allows the archaeologist to walk over a site, albeit with a machine either attached or pushed, and be able to discern what lies under the ground. This discovery does not make detection a simple process, but it does allow for greater accuracy when it’s known there is something down there rather than just digging on spec. One gets the feeling that Sir Arthur Evans would have found Knossos a lot faster had he access to the gizmos that Prof. Millett had! The second speaker on Saturday morning was Dr Philip De Souza (UCD) whose talk ‘Piracy in Classical Antiquity’ centred around armed robbers on ships! The earliest notion of a pirate or raider comes from Homer. His were heroes who plundered and pillaged but they were the Odysseus of the stories; as they were raiding to devastate enemy territory, which was a common tactic in war, the term pirate does not sit well. As the ages passed, the attitude to these raiders changed. Polybius in the Histories called pirates the “common enemy of all mankind.” Augustus in Res Gestae 25 remarked that “I made the sea peaceful and freed it of pirates”. St Augustine took a more philosophical attitude in his City of God when he said: “If you molest the sea with a little ship, you are a pirate. You do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor.” To bring us back to earth after all these swashbuckling events, Dr De Souza was at pains to remind us that only the victors write the histories!