possess everywhere along the coast signal-places and stations, but further inland—­in the most remote recesses of the impassable and mountainous interior of Lycia, Pamphylia, and Cilicia—­they had built their rock-castles, in which they concealed their wives, children, and treasures during their own absence at sea, and, doubtless, in times of danger found an asylum themselves.  Great numbers of such corsair-castles existed especially in the Rough Cilicia, the forests of which at the same time furnished the pirates with the most excellent timber for shipbuilding; and there, accordingly, their principal dockyards and arsenals were situated.  It was not to be wondered at that this organized military state gained a firm body of clients among the Greek maritime cities, which were more or less left to themselves and managed their own affairs:  these cities entered into traffic with the pirates as with a friendly power on the basis of definite treaties, and did not comply with the summons of the Roman governors to furnish vessels against them.  The not inconsiderable town of Side in Pamphylia, for instance, allowed the pirates to build ships on its quays, and to sell the free men whom they had captured in its market.

Such a society of pirates was a political power; and as a political power it gave itself out and was accepted from the time when the Syrian king Tryphon first employed it as such and rested his throne on its support.(4) We find the pirates as allies of king Mithradates of Pontus as well as of the Roman democratic emigrants; we find them giving battle to the fleets of Sulla in the eastern and in the western waters; we find individual pirate princes ruling over a series of considerable coast towns.  We cannot tell how far the internal political development of this floating state had already advanced; but its arrangements undeniably contained the germ of a sea-kingdom, which was already beginning to establish itself, and out of which, under favourable circumstances, a permanent state might have been developed.

Nullity of the Roman Marine Police

This state of matters clearly shows, as we have partly indicated already,(5) how the Romans kept—­or rather did not keep—­order on “their sea.”  The protectorate of Rome over the provinces consisted essentially in military guardianship; the provincials paid tax or tribute to the Romans for their defence by sea and land, which was concentrated in Roman hands.  But never, perhaps, did a guardian more shamelessly defraud his ward than the Roman oligarchy defrauded the subject communities.  Instead of Rome equipping a general fleet for the empire and centralizing her marine police, the senate permitted the unity of her maritime superintendence—­ without which in this matter nothing could at all be done—­to fall into abeyance, and left it to each governor and each client state to defend themselves against the pirates as each chose and was able.  Instead of Rome providing for the fleet, as she had