A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (11 page)

This identification opens up a rich historical canvas for the wreck, allowing a glimpse at how the ship might have looked – and even a possible name for it – and the men involved. At Ostia, one of the most remarkable structures to be seen today is the Piazzale delle Corporazioni, the ‘Square of the Merchants', a colonnaded courtyard surrounded by the offices of traders whose business was advertised by black-and-white mosaics outside. One of the most striking is that of the
navicularii
– the shippers – of Sullecthum, showing a lighthouse above two ships and below that two dolphins or tunny tugging at an octopus, an indication perhaps that their speciality was fish produce. One of the men likely to have worked in this office at the time is recorded in an inscription from the necropolis at Ostia, dedicated by his wife:

D
(is)
M
(anibus)
S
(acrum)

P
(ublius)
CAESELLIUS FELIX

CIVIS SVLLECTHINVS

VIXIT ANN
(is)
N
(umero)
XLVII M
(ensibus)

N
(umero)
VI POMPONIA LICI

NIA MARITO DIGNI

SSIMO

To the gods of the underworld. Publius Caesellius Felix, citizen of Sullecthum. He lived 47 years and 6 months. Pomponia Licinia, for her husband, most worthy.

With many of the people in Ostia being involved in shipping and trade, and Sullecthum being one of the main overseas ports at the time of Septimius Severus, it is possible that Publius Caesellius Felix not only worked in the Sullecthum office in the Square of the Merchants but also had a direct concern with the Plemmirio ship and its cargo.

The ships in the mosaic give an impression of the likely appearance of the Plemmirio vessel, with a single square sail, a double steering-oar and the characteristic high sternpost of Roman merchantmen. Another fascinating image comes from Sullecthum itself. As well as kiln sites and a fish-salting installation, the ruins included a baths complex with a mosaic showing two ships, one named
LEONTIAS
and the other
CANEIVS
, meaning ‘Lion' and ‘Dog'. The name lion is particularly significant because another room contained arguably the most magnificent mosaic ever discovered from antiquity, a huge lion that is today a centrepiece of the Archaeological Museum in Salakta – a ‘Barbary' lion, a species now extinct that roamed North Africa and was used in gladiatorial displays in the Colosseum. This discovery is a reminder that ships in antiquity were named and would have been seen as having distinct personalities, just as sailing ships did in more recent times – some with the strength and agility of a lion, or with that at least being the hope of sailors such as those on the Plemmirio vessel who entrusted their lives to them.

Thereupon a needle is to be taken pointed enough to penetrate, yet not too fine; and this is to be inserted straight through the two outer tunics at a spot intermediate between the pupil of the eye and the angle adjacent to the temple, away from the middle of the cataract, in the way that no vein is wounded. The needle should not be, however, entered timidly, for it passes into the empty space; and when this is reached even a man of moderate experience cannot be mistaken, for there is then no resistance to pressure. When the spot is reached, the needle is to be sloped against the suffusion itself and should gently rotate there and little by little guide it below the region of the pupil; when the cataract has passed below the pupil it is pressed upon most firmly in order that it may settle below. If it sticks there the cure is accomplished …

Shipwrecks often throw up unexpected discoveries that add another layer of fascination to the story that can be told – something that happened at Plemmirio with a find that revealed the presence of a specialist surgeon. Carefully wafting away the sediment at the bottom of a gully, I uncovered a slender bronze instrument 7 centimetres long with a point shaped like a willow leaf. It was a scalpel handle, the first recorded example found in an ancient wreck. The long slender point
was a blunt dissector, but the iron scalpel blade that would have been attached to the other end had corroded away. Subsequent excavation uncovered two more scalpel handles of identical manufacture to the first, but one without the blunt dissector, and a long wooden shaft which may have been a bandaging stick for winding tourniquets. The scalpel without the blunt dissector had been combined with a second instrument made of iron, the remains of which were preserved in a hole at the end of the handle. This may have been a cataract needle – a rare combination with a scalpel. All three handles contained metallic residue from the iron blades as well as the remains of wire used to bind them securely in place. The quality of the bronze work was of the highest order, equal to any precision instrument made until early modern times.

One of my team was Dr Chris Edge, a medical advisor to the British Sub-Aqua Club, and together we set about researching the scalpels. Professor Anthony Snodgrass at Cambridge put me in touch with Dr Ernst Künzl of the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz, a leading expert on Roman surgical instruments; we were also aided by Ralph Jackson, curator in the Department of Prehistoric and Romano-British antiquities at the British Museum and author of
Doctors and Diseases in the Roman Empire
. We learnt that most finds of Roman surgical equipment had come from the graves of doctors, sometimes with thirty or more items, as well as from the House of the Surgeon at Pompeii – an incredible collection of specula, catheters, probes, scalpels and other tools that would not have looked out of place in a surgeon's kit of the early twentieth century. Among scalpels a clear distinction could be seen between a spoon-shaped blunt dissector, used for pressing and parting tissue without cutting it, and the long, slender shape of the Plemmirio instruments, a less common form. The idea that this shape of dissector was used for eye surgery was borne out by evidence for ancient proficiency in cataract operations, as revealed by the first-century
AD
Roman medical writer Celsus' description in
De Medicina
quoted previously. The possibility that the Plemmirio instruments were those of a specialist eye surgeon made the find even more exciting, as no such discovery had ever been made before.

The wreck occurred within the lifetime of one of the most influential doctors in antiquity, Galen, and it is tempting to imagine the Plemmirio surgeon travelling to Rome to learn new techniques from
the master – Galen too wrote in detail about eye surgery. Born in Pergamum in Asia Minor in
AD
129, he had served his apprenticeship as an attendant at the local healing temple, been surgeon to the gladiators in Pergamum and eventually found his way to Rome, where he became physician to the emperors Marcus Aurelius, Commodus and Septimius Severus. In common with most other doctors in the Roman period his approach was based on the work of Hippocrates in the fifth to early fourth century
BC
and the school of Hippocratic medicine that had been established at Alexandria in Egypt. Like Hippocrates, Galen propounded a close association between philosophy and medicine, with ideas such as the four ‘humours' being based more on philosophical thinking than practical observation. Nevertheless, the parts of his work and Celsus'
De Medicina
that focused on surgery and the healing of wounds were rigorous and scientific in many ways, and this extended to other areas of medical practice where different approaches could be taken. Celsus' treatment for what he termed
melancholia
has a very modern ring to it:

Causes of fright (should be) excluded, good hope rather put forward; entertainment sought by story-telling, and by games … work of his, if there is any, should be praised, and set out before his eyes; his depression should be gently reproved as being without cause; he should have it pointed out to him now and again how in the very things which trouble him there may be a cause of rejoicing rather than of solicitude.

Archaeology may seem the preserve of artefacts more than writing, but excavated finds have been crucial for reconstructing the extent of literacy in antiquity. We are used to the idea of ancient Rome being a highly literate society because of the survival of texts that so richly reveal it – the sole basis for understanding the ancient world until the development of archaeology as a discipline, and still the main focus of classical studies. But it is archaeological discoveries that have shown how widespread literacy was and how it was deployed: graffiti on the walls of Pompeii, including the famous brothel inscriptions –
Felicia(m) ego hic futui
, ‘I had sex with Felicia here', near a depiction of a ship; soldiers' letters found in the waterlogged site of Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall in northern England; thousands of scraps of papyrus preserved in the necropoleis of the Faiyum and elsewhere in Egypt.
Another source is stamps and painted inscriptions on pottery, showing that the ability to read existed several steps down the social ladder from the elite who wrote books, among people whose lives were concerned with the production and transport of goods – including the amphoras filled with foodstuffs on which the Roman economy depended.

Three examples of writing from the Plemmirio wreck perfectly illustrate this point. One is an African amphora with the painted inscription
EGTTERE
, a Latin infinitive meaning ‘to go'. Unlike the detailed inscriptions found on some Roman amphoras, to be deciphered only by administrative officials, this was a big, bold inscription on the shoulder of an amphora, meant to be seen from a distance and instantly understood by those hurrying around a harbour-front – in this case perhaps identifying a batch of amphoras ready for export. Another amphora was stamped on the neck before firing with letters ending
PP
, the abbreviated name of a man who owned the estate on the African coast where the amphoras were manufactured and filled with olive oil and fish produce. A third example is the maker's stamp
IVNDRA
on one of the pottery oil lamps from the wreck. Donald Bailey of the British Museum identified him as Iunius Draco, a little-known Italian maker of the late second century
AD
, probably in Rome; only two other examples of his stamp are recorded. By making his name known, ‘branding' his product in a thoroughly modern way, Draco was not only providing evidence for literacy but also revealing himself as a named individual who can be associated with the ship, adding to the immediacy with the past that wreck evidence can provide.

The amphora stamp ending with the letters
PP
was a fascinating discovery because the only other known stamp ending with these letters on an African amphora,
CFPPP
, refers to Gaius Fulvius Plautianus, a cousin and close friend of Septimius Severus who was appointed
Praefectus Praetorio
– head of the Praetorian Guard, the emperor's elite bodyguard – in
AD
197, and one of the most powerful men in the Empire up to his death in 205. Like Severus, Plautianus came from Leptis Magna in present-day Libya, and these stamps show that he owned estates in North Africa as well as the ones that he is known to have acquired near Rome, where his name appears on brick stamps at the time. The date range in which the letters PP would have been used after his name,
AD
197–205, fits closely with the other dating evidence from the wreck, making this identification as close to certain as it can
be – amazingly, a man at the very pinnacle of Roman power whose name appears on a humble pottery amphora in a wreck off Sicily.

The emperor Septimius Severus' path to power had not been an easy one. The greatest battles and the greatest exhaustion of manpower and resources in his reign were not against ‘barbarians' but internal conflicts, an ominous throwback to the civil wars of the late Republic and a portent of things to come. Following the ‘year of the five emperors', a power struggle in
AD
193 from which he had emerged victorious, he fought a campaign against Clodius Albinus, governor of Britannia and claimant to the Empire, which resulted in one of the most devastating battles in history – one that may have taken place in the year of the wreck or only a few years on either side of it. Using legions withdrawn from the Danube frontier, one of them commanded by Gaius Fulvius Plautianus, Severus met Albinus in
AD
197 near present-day Lyons in southern Gaul. The historian Cassius Dio, a senator in Rome at the time, claimed there were 150,000 men on either side, and described the deleterious effect on Rome as a whole, despite the victory going to Severus:

… the Roman power suffered a severe blow, inasmuch as countless numbers had fallen on both sides … for the entire plain was seen to be covered with the bodies of men and horses; some of them lay there mutilated by many wounds, as if hacked in pieces, and others, though unwounded, were piled up in heaps, weapons were scattered about, and blood flowed in streams, even pouring into the rivers.

At the time of the dedication of his arch in Rome in
AD
203 Severus was ruling with his son Caracalla as co-emperor, and the victory that it celebrated against the Parthians in the east had been complemented by campaigns in North Africa that secured the desert frontier and made the rich agricultural lands of the coast even more prosperous. Africa was his home – born in Leptis Magna in
AD
145, he had lived there until he left as a young man to pursue a political career in Rome. His father had Punic ancestry, a descendant of the Phoenicians who had settled the North African coast a thousand years earlier and were themselves descended from the Syro-Palestinian traders of the Bronze Age. Once in power, Severus lavishly endowed his home city with monuments, including a new forum and a triumphal arch, making Leptis Magna one of the most impressive Roman sites today outside
Italy. He may also have created a new office in the Imperial foodstuffs procurement agency, the
annona
, called the
praefectus annonae africae
, responsible for providing the people of Rome with handouts of grain and other foods and resulting in an upsurge in African export at the time of the Plemmirio wreck.