A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (13 page)

Handouts to the people of Rome became essential for the political security of the Republican leadership and then the emperors, and were too important to be left to the vagaries of commerce. The largest bulk import was grain, but another staple of great significance was olive oil. It has been said that olive oil was to Rome what crude oil has been to the modern world, both of them essential and their supply a register of economic stability. An analysis published in 2021 of human bones from Herculaneum, one of the cities destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in
AD
79, shows that olive oil was a major source of fat in the Roman diet and constituted at least 12 per cent of protein intake, confirming historians' estimates that the average Roman consumed at least twenty litres of oil per year.

The study of pottery occupies a central role in this picture, because olive oil was transported in amphoras that can be identified as containers for oil rather than for wine or other products. Even the quantity of wine transport from Italy to Gaul in the late Republic was dwarfed by the shipment of olive oil to Rome in the first and second centuries
AD
, with hundreds of cargoes reaching Ostia annually and being taken up the river Tiber by barge to the warehouses on the edge of the city. The main source of export oil at this period was the province of Baetica in southern Spain, along the banks of the river Guadalquivir between modern Seville and Córdoba, where the hills near the coast were covered with olive estates and many stone olive presses as well as amphora kilns have been found. To ship the oil a distinctive form of amphora was made, the Dressel 20, a large, globular type able to carry 40–80 litres of oil, the handles often stamped with the name of the estate owners and with painted inscriptions recording weights and names of shippers that show a high degree of quality control and regulation.

The scale of this transport is seen in one of the unsung wonders of ancient Rome, located well off the tourist track some 2 kilometres from the forum just inside the southern city wall. Known as Monte Testaccio, literally ‘Mountain of Potsherds', it is nearly the size of the Colosseum – almost a kilometre in circumference and 35 metres high – and is composed entirely of intact and smashed amphoras, many of them Dressel 20. Olive oil amphoras were single-use containers; resinous linings that would have made them more long-lasting by
preventing the oil from penetrating and weakening the pottery walls could not be used, as the resin would contaminate the oil. Sherds from other amphoras were used as a temper in concrete and are spread around Rome in structures such as the Pantheon, the basilicas and the aqueducts, but oil-impregnated sherds did not mix well with mortar, so oil amphoras were not reused in that way. Instead, after their contents had been offloaded, they were carried to Monte Testaccio and discarded, in an organised procedure in which some intact containers were used to create terraces, but the majority were smashed up and spread over the top of the hill as it rose.

In the medieval period Monte Testaccio served as a substitute for the Hill of Golgotha in reconstructions of the Crucifixion, with the Pope leading processions there and carrying out ceremonies on the top; the layers of potsherds beneath were also found to be a cool place for the storage of wine, and vaults were dug. It was here that Heinrich Dressel first developed his typology of Roman amphoras, visiting at a time when it was a forgotten area of waste ground and not understood – it was wrongly thought to have been made up of rubble from the Great Fire of Rome under Nero in
AD
64. In recent years it has been subject to annual excavations by Italian and Spanish archaeologists, digging shafts into the mound in order to establish its chronology and to record the thousands of stamps and painted inscriptions that are revealed every year.

Every time I visit Monte Testaccio I am struck by the huge scale of shipping that it represents, and by the economic underpinning this gives to the picture of Roman endeavour seen in the monuments of the city just visible above the rooftops to the east. The number of amphoras has been estimated at over 50 million – an astonishing figure. If we average that over 150 years of use, it comes out at about 300,000 per year; if each amphora contained 50 litres of oil, then the annual figure amounts to some 15 million litres, which for a population of a million is not far off the 20 litres per person per year suggested by the Herculaneum study. If the cargoes were made up of 500 to 1,000 amphoras each, 300,000 amphoras represents some 300 to 600 voyages annually. Some sixty wrecks have been discovered with Dressel 20 amphoras, almost all of them found on the routes between southern Spain and Rome. The historian Fernand Braudel, who I quoted at the beginning of this book, in his study of port records in the sixteenth century suggested that ships in the Mediterranean typically
had a one-in-twenty to one-in-thirty chance of wrecking on any given voyage. If that estimate is applied to antiquity, then those sixty wrecks would represent 1,200 to 1,800 successful voyages, or eight to twelve annually over 150 years – only a small fraction, therefore, of the 300 to 600 voyages that took place according to the estimated total number of amphoras in Monte Testaccio. These figures can only give an idea, but they do show that even the impressive number of wrecks known must constitute only a small fraction of the transport represented in this amazing monument, and the many wrecks that remain to be discovered.

In 1993, while I was excavating in the harbour of ancient Carthage with the British UNESCO ‘Save Carthage' mission, I was able to travel down the coast and dive in the harbour of ancient Sullecthum and then go to Ostia to the Piazzale della Corporazioni and stand in front of the office of the Sullecthum shippers – linking the origin and destination of the Plemmirio ship on its thousand-kilometre passage towards Rome. By then I had developed a clearer picture of what happened to the African amphora trade in the early third century
AD
, in the years following the wreck. In 211, Septimius Severus fell ill and died in Eboracum – modern York – during his campaign against the Caledonians of Scotland. Julia Domna lived for another six years, attempting first to mediate between her two sons and then after Geta was murdered accompanying Caracalla to the east, until he too was murdered by his own soldiers and she took her own life.

Caracalla had campaigned successfully against the Alemanni on the German frontier and against the Parthians, but his lasting achievement was the
Constitutio Antoniniana
, granting Roman citizenship to all free male inhabitants of the Empire. The next emperor, Macrinus, African by birth but of Berber rather than Punic origin, ruled for a little over a year until he was defeated at the Battle of Antioch by Elagabalus, a Syrian relative of Julia Domna who went on to became one of the most decadent of the Roman emperors. His murder by the Praetorian Guard in 222 ushered in a period of relative stability during the reign of Severus Alexander, but after his death in 235 – also by the hands of his own soldiers – the Empire entered a prolonged period of political crisis, with more than 26 claimants to be emperor in 50 years. It was only the accession of Diocletian in 284 that saw order restored, but not before the Empire had nearly self-destructed at a time when
barbarian pressure at the frontiers had also become a grave danger to the provinces.

The crisis is reflected is the debasement of the silver coinage that had begun under Septimius Severus and continued under his successors as a means of increasing coin supply to pay the army. By mid-century the denarius was little more than a silver-washed bronze coin, no longer with bullion value. Without the silver standard, confidence was lost in the base-metal currency – lower denomination bronze and copper coins – and they became worthless. Another reflection of the crisis was a pattern in the shipwreck evidence that I identified during my doctoral research. Of about a hundred wrecks known with African amphoras from the third century, most cluster at either end of the century. The earlier group is exemplified by the Plemmirio cargo, and the later by the wrecks that we had excavated off south Sicily – with new shapes of African amphora representing revived production at the time of Diocletian.

In North Africa, the Third Augustan Legion, based there since the time of Augustus to protect the grain supply, was disbanded by the emperor Gordian III in 238 after the legion had supported a rival, leaving Leptis Magna and the other cities vulnerable to Berber attack and resulting in a fall-off in the production of olive oil for export. In Rome itself, with foodstuffs procurement being highly centralised, run by a prefect appointed by the emperor, it seemed reasonable to expect that political anarchy might affect the smooth running of the administration and the quantity of import – an instance of the narrative events in Braudel's model of history noted in the Prologue to this book having an effect on economic activity that can be recognised archaeologically.

Diocletian instituted radical reforms to address the deficiencies that he saw in the previous half-century, including restructuring the army, increasing the number of provinces and creating a ‘tetrarchy' in which the Empire was divided into east and west with co-regent emperors,
augusti
, and subordinate heirs,
caesares
. His successor Constantine the Great went even further, moving the capital from Rome to Constantinople and giving legal status to Christianity. By the time of Constantine's death in 337, the Roman world which had been fundamentally similar from Augustus to Diocletian had altered in many profound ways, with the new eastern focus and new structures of control and administration – and above all with Christianity, no longer
persecuted and reviled, on the way to becoming the state religion and central to the Imperial projection of power. This new world order is seen in a remarkable wreck of the sixth century
AD
located south of Plemmirio off the fishing port of Marzamemi near the south-eastern tip of Sicily.

These words are from
De Aedificiis
, ‘On Buildings', by Procopius of Caesarea, who wrote in Greek at the time of the emperor Justinian in the sixth century
AD
. Procopius is best known for his ‘Secret History', a salacious account of Justinian and his wife Theodora and their court, but he was also a serious historian who wrote a multi-volume account of the wars of conquest undertaken by Justinian's general Belisarius in the east and west, having accompanied him in 526–32 against the Persians, in 533–4 against the Vandals in North Africa and in 535–40 against the Goths in Sicily and Italy. These campaigns unified the Roman Empire once again, after years when it had been divided and the west was ruled by the descendants of Germanic warlords who had swept down from their homelands in the north. But it was a very different empire from the time of the Plemmirio wreck three centuries earlier; in the early fourth century, Constantine the Great had moved the capital of the Empire from Rome to the old Greek colony of Byzantium
on the Bosporus, renaming it Constantinople, and a century later the capital in the west moved from Rome to Ravenna on the Adriatic. In the north-west, much of the old Empire was irretrievably lost, with Britain having been abandoned in 410 and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex having just been founded. Above all it was the adoption and consolidation of Christianity as the state religion that changed the character of the Empire, and that is nowhere better seen than in the great buildings of the period such as the Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople – in some ways showing continuity, with the same building materials and architectural orders as those of earlier Rome, but in other ways radically different, and representing an association between Christianity and political power that was to set the stage for European history through the medieval period and beyond.

In
AD
535 Procopius was present when Belisarius captured Syracuse, the ancient Greek city on the east coast of Sicily that was geographically at the centre of the Mediterranean world. ‘After he had won the whole of Sicily, on the last day of his consulship, he marched into Syracuse, loudly applauded by the army and by the Sicilians and throwing golden coins to all.' Only 40 kilometres to the south, and perhaps only a short time later, one of those buildings that Procopius could not include in his book
De Aedificiis
lay waiting to be discovered – not on land but underwater, in the prefabricated marble elements of a church that sheds fascinating light on the spread of Christianity during the final period of the unified Roman Empire.

Ancient stone columns on the seabed near the fishing village of Marzamemi in south-east Sicily were first brought to the attention of archaeologist Gerhard Kapitän in the late 1950s, at a site about a kilometre offshore and less than 8 metres deep. Kapitän was one of the pioneers of Mediterranean wreck archaeology, and he realised the significance of the wreck when he discovered to his amazement that the stone included elements of a Byzantine Church. Over several seasons from 1960 he mapped and excavated a large part of the site, raised many of the marble fragments and put them in the care of the local archaeological superintendency. With much scholarly collaboration – including that of John Ward-Perkins, Director of the British School at Rome – he was able to associate the wreck with the Emperor Justinian's programme of church-building in the sixth century, and his publications made the ‘Church Wreck' one of the best-known
shipwrecks anywhere, as well as a focal point for understanding the final period of classical antiquity in the Mediterranean.

I was fortunate during my expeditions to Sicily to dive with Gerhard Kapitän, who told us where he had first seen marble on the seabed twenty-five years before. We took a boat out from the fishing village and found the site using the shore transits that he had taken back then, and later examined the raised fragments in the archaeological park in Syracuse. From 2013 renewed archaeological investigations took place in a collaboration between the Soprintendenza del Mare, Dr Justin Leidwanger of Stanford University and Dr Elizabeth Greene of Brock University in Canada, resulting in much of the remaining material being excavated and new finds being made. This work and a re-evaluation of earlier finds has led to the ship's cargo – dubbed the ‘flat-pack' church in the media – once again receiving widespread attention, with fragments of the marble being taken to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford for a special exhibit on the shipwrecks of Sicily in 2016.

The main cargo comprised twenty-eight marble columns, each some 3.4 metres high and weighing 1.8 tons, along with separate capitals and bases that would have given a total height of 4.25 metres. The numbers of bases and capitals were greater than the number of columns discovered – at least thirty-two and thirty-five respectively – perhaps to provide spares in the event of breakage. They were made from the distinctive white marble streaked with grey from the island of Proconnesus near Constantinople, the source of much of the white marble used in late antiquity; the columns had been cut from the quarry to show the veins running vertically. The capitals were in the ‘Corinthian' style, beautifully carved with volutes and acanthus leaves, and several had mason's marks – of two or three Greek letters – carved at the workshops where the roughed-out stones were taken to be finished, possibly in a masons' quarter in the city of Constantinople itself.

Of great interest were the marble liturgical furnishings, decorated structures for the chancel of a church that had become standardised in the early Byzantine period as the Christian liturgy – the ritual of worship – was established. These included the panels and pillars of a screen, also of Proconnesian marble, with one of the panels decorated with a carved cross in a circle on the exterior and on the interior a wreathed Christogram flanked by two crosses. The most remarkable discovery was at least twenty pieces from an ambo, an early type of
pulpit more than 5 metres across and almost 3 metres high forming a platform behind a convex parapet reached by two opposing staircases. Similar to the screen, it was decorated with crosses inside concentric rectangles on the exterior and a Christogram in a circular recess beneath the platform. The ambo was made of verde antico, a mottled green brecchia from Thessaly in north-west Greece that was used for columns, sarcophagi and decorative fittings; the use of this stone together with Proconnesian marble is characteristic of sixth-century church decoration, with the green and the white giving a distinctive appearance that was part of the standardisation of church interiors at this period.

The cargo has been estimated at 100 tons, indicating a large ship perhaps 30 metres in length and 8 metres across. Other finds include fragments of lapis lacedaemonius, the green porphyry quarried near Sparta in Greece since the Bronze Age, and lumps of red-orange realgar and gold orpiment – mentioned by the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder in his
Natural History
as colourants and perhaps used in architectural decoration, with much ancient sculpture having been painted. As well as wine amphoras from the east Mediterranean, the pottery included a sherd of red slip ware showing a robed figure with one hand raised in salutation or benediction and the other carrying a staff with a cross – fascinating evidence of the ubiquity of Christian imagery by this period, something that would not have been possible during the first centuries of Christianity when worship was secret and symbolism was rarely so explicit. This style of figure has been dated from other archaeological contexts to the second quarter of the sixth century, consistent with a date for the wreck suggested by other pottery and the decorative style of the marble, and within Justinian's reign – including the period immediately following Belisarius' conquests of North Africa, Sicily and Italy, when the ship is most likely to have sailed.

Everything about the cargo – which also included possible fragments of an altar slab and a ciborium, an altar canopy – suggests that it was pre-ordered for a large church. Despite the different sources of the marble for the screen and the ambo, the similarity in decorative style indicates that they were finished in the same workshops and that the entire marble cargo was assembled and laden in one place – very probably Constantinople – rather than being picked up at the quarries en route. As we shall see, the location of the wreck off south-east Sicily, at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, leaves open a number
of possibilities for the ship's destination, but the size and value of the cargo – the Thessalian marble of the ambo was particularly expensive, and an ambo of that quality was unusual in the newly reconquered west – suggests that it would have been for a church as substantial as any that have survived at Ravenna and elsewhere in Italy of this period or among the ruined Byzantine churches of North Africa.

The role of Justinian in church building, and his intertwining of Christianity with the Imperial message, of the image of Christ with that of the Emperor himself, is nowhere better seen than at the heart of Byzantine Christendom – in the ‘Great Church' of Hagia Sophia, under construction in Constantinople at the time of the conquest of the Vandals in 535 and completed before Ravenna was captured in 540. Procopius in
De Aedificiis
makes it clear that this programme of church building extended across the Empire:

The Emperor Justinian built many churches to the Mother of God in all parts of the Roman Empire, churches so magnificent and so huge and erected with such a lavish outlay of money, that if one should see one of them by itself, he would suppose that the Emperor had built this work only and had spent the whole time of his reign occupied with this alone.

In newly conquered North Africa, at Leptis Magna in present-day Libya, Justinian ‘dedicated to the Mother of God a very notable shrine, and built four other churches'; at Sabratha to the west of Leptis he built ‘a very noteworthy church'; and at Septum, present-day Ceuta on the Strait of Gibraltar, he ‘consecrated to the Mother of God a noteworthy church … thus dedicating to her the threshold of the Empire'. Similar building took place at the other extremity of Justinian's rule, some 4,000 kilometres away on the eastern shore of the Black Sea where Belisarius had fought the Sasanian Empire and extended Byzantine rule into the Caucasus. Among the best parallels for the Marzamemi ambo, with the same style of cross and decoration, are three slabs of Proconnesian marble built into the wall of a medieval chapel in Khobi in western Georgia. An inscription records that they were brought there by a local warlord in the fourteenth century as spoils from present-day Abkhazia, the mountainous region at the western end of the Caucasus that was occupied by the Romans but only loosely
controlled, and where Christianity may have become established as early as the first century
AD
.

The uniformity of the liturgical furnishings – which, as we shall see, spread even beyond the borders of the Empire into sub-Saharan Africa, to one of the most extraordinary early Christian kingdoms – reflects not only the strength of Christianity as a religion but more specifically the orthodox version adopted by the Byzantine Church and promulgated by Justinian as part of his Imperial message. In the west, Justinian was not converting pagans but was stamping his ortho- doxy on the heretical version of Christianity practised by the Vandals and the Goths, further reinforcing the link between the Byzantine Church and himself. These churches became part of the architectural leitmotif of this final version of the Roman Empire in the way that amphitheatres, law-courts and temples – including temples to the Imperial Cult – had been in the early empire, with many of those earlier structures in the western provinces having been endowed by the local elite, just as bishops and other powerbrokers did for churches under Justinian in the sixth century.

At the time that I visited Marzamemi I was carrying out my doctoral research at Cambridge University and had a particular interest in shipwrecks of late Roman date off south-east Sicily and in ancient cargoes of stone. A year earlier I had spent several months travelling in Turkey on a scholarship from the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara and had come across a reconstructed ambo in the garden museum of the church of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. It had been built from fragments discovered in the 1940s in the ruins of a sixth-century church nearby and was very similar to the Marzamemi ambo – a platform reached by symmetrical steps behind a railing decorated with crosses, though not of Thessalian or Proconnesian stone, but red-streaked Pavonazzetto from Docimium in western Turkey.

The word ambo comes from the Greek for step or ascend, and climbing the stairs to the platform I was able to appreciate the authority that a priest might have felt over his audience as he read from the Gospels. The ambo had its origins in the rostra of ancient Rome – a platform for giving speeches – and represents the evolved nature of the Church by the sixth century
AD
, with the informal gatherings of Christian worship several centuries earlier having given way to a structured service in which the clergy occupied a reserved space set off
from the congregation. The ambo served to reinforce that divide, and the role of the priests as intermediaries between the congregation and God, standing between the nave and the sacred space beyond. By the time of Justinian the ambo was part of a set of liturgical ‘furniture' that could include a chancel screen, a ‘solea' or railed walkway, the altar itself and an altar canopy, all of it of marble and finished to a high standard in specialised workshops in Constantinople.