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Synesius from Alexandria to Cyrene: sea, storms, and ships in the eyes of a man of late antiquity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 July 2009
Abstract
In the first years of the fifth century AD a Greek gentleman in his early 30s embarked from the harbour of the great city of Alexandria on a sailing ship bound for his native Cyrene. It is a voyage of about 780 km, approximately the distance from Venice to the mouth of the Adriatic, or a little longer than from Hamburg to London. We are not sure about the season or the year; we only know that the voyage took place towards the end of a month; that is, a Greek lunar month, an ill-omened time for sailing, according to the belief of the Ancients. The traveller was Synesius, who belonged to a distinguished Cyrenian family, and was returning from a diplomatic mission in Constantinople, at the court of an Empire that would survive and bear the name ‘Roman’ for more than 1000 years. However, the empire of the ‘real’ Rome would find its real end in little more than 70 years.
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- Focus: The Imagination and the Sea
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- Copyright © Academia Europaea 2000
References
Notes and references
There is an excellent translation of Synesius' letters by A. Fitzgerald (1926) The Letters of Synesius of Cyrene. Translated into English with Introduction and Notes (Oxford). The most recent general work about him is the book of J. Bregman (1982) Synesius of Cyrene, Philosopher-bishop (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press). For his place in the spirituality of his time, between Neoplatonism, Paganism and Christianity, see H. I. Marrou (1963) ‘Synesius of Cyrene and the Alexandrian Neoplatonism’. In The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century. Essays edited by A. Momigliano (Oxford: Clarendon) pp. 126–50, later reprinted in (1976) Patristique et humanisme. Mélanges par H. I. Marrou (Paris: Seuil) pp. 295–319. The Swedish psychiatrist B.-A. Roos has tried a deep-psychology approach to Synesius, chiefly through the letters, in the book B.-A. Roos (1991) Synesius of Cyrene. A Study in his Personality (Lund: Lund University Press), happily with a cautious and balanced judgement. Finally the highly successful historical novel of the English writer Charles Kingsley, Hypatia or New Foes under an Old Face, published in 1851, in which Synesius appears as a character.
1. According to astronomical reckoning, there was a Tuesday at new moon on 28 January 404, and another on the day before new moon on 28 May 401. See Vogt, J. (1970) ‘Synesios auf Seefahrt’. In Kyriakon. Festschrift J. Quasten, (Münster/W) vol. I, pp. 407 ff.Google Scholar (reprinted in J. Vogt (1985) Begegnung mit Synesios, (Darmstadt) pp. 33–47).
2. A commentary on St Paul's voyage from a nautical point of view is that of Rougé, J. (1960) ‘Actes 27, 1–10’. In Vigiliae christianae 14, pp. 193CrossRefGoogle Scholar ff. On the literary stylization which doesn't spoil the reliability of the autobiographical narrative, see Xaver, P. (Hermann) Simeon (1933) Untersuchungen zu den Briefen des Bischofs Synesios von Kyrene (Paderborn) pp. 62–78Google Scholar. On the same problem, in the case of the narrative in the Acts, see (1956) Die Apostelgeschichte. Neu übersetzt und erklärt von D. E. Haenchen (Göttingen) pp. 643 f., and (1963) Die Apostelgeschichte erklärt von D. H. Conzelmann (Tübingen) pp. 146 f. See also Rougé, J. (1978) ‘Romans grecs et navigation: le voyage de Leucippé et Clitophon de Beyrouth en Egypte’. Archaeonautica 2, 279.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3. About organization and hierarchy on board ancient merchant ships, see Vélissaropoulos, J. (1980) Les nauclères grecs (Genève/Paris) pp. 79f.Google Scholar: La hiérarchie à bord du navire marchand; Rougé, J. (1966) Recherches sur l'organisation du commerce maritime en Méditerranée sous l'Empire romain, ‘Éicole pratique des hautes études, VIe section, Centre de recherches historiques, ports, routes, trafics 21’, (Paris), pp. 234–244Google Scholar; and the same, who quotes Synesius: ‘La justice à bord du navire’ in (1971) Studi in onore di Edoardo Volterra (Milano) vol. III, pp. 174–179.Google Scholar
4. J. Rougé has tried to calculate the size of these ships and the degree of crowding of the passengers: Rougé, J. (1984) ‘Le confort des passagers à bord des navires antiques’. Archaeonautica 4, 232CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the dimensions of ancient merchantmen (but also on those of war ships) the literary sources say very little. Reliable knowledge comes only from the finds of the underwater archaeology. See Casson, L. (1971) Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World (Princeton) pp. 170–173Google Scholar; and (1956) ‘The size of ancient merchant ships’. In Studi in onore di Aristide Calderini e Roberto Paribeni, Milano vol. I, pp. 231–238Google Scholar. See also Höckmann, O. (1985) Antike Seefahrt (München) p. 85 ff.Google Scholar The number of 50 passenger does not seem too high, even for a comparatively small boat. We know of much higher figures: Saint Paul's ship carried 276 people, the one that should have carried Josephus from Palestine to Rome, but was lost in the Ionian Sea, 600 (see his Autobiography 3).
5. There was a special word for a shipowner (náukleros) who was at the same time skipper (kubernétes): nauklerokubernétes.
6. ‘Le confort des passagers’ quoted above, pp. 227, on the accommodation of the passengers; according to him, p. 242, the description of Synesius lets us think that there was only one big cabin, a ‘véritable dortoir’, divided by the curtain in two departments, one for the men and one for the women.
7. Mollat, M. (1983) La vie quotidienne des gens de mer en Atlantique (IXe-XVIe siècle) (Paris) pp. 20 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar, comments upon the same taboo in the seamanship of the Middle Ages (‘et c'est le pêché qui attire les malheurs, le calme plat comme la tempête’), quoting the story of Huon of Bordeaux and Esclarmond, whose sin causes immediate tempest and shipwreck.
8. Defence of Amaranth: Casson, L. (1971) Ships and Seamanship, p. 268–269Google Scholar. This author had already stated his remarks on the subject in an older paper: Casson, L. (1952) ‘Bishop's Synesius Voyage to Cyrene’. The American Neptune 12, 294–296.Google Scholar
9. Seamanship never was a traditional Jewish trade, and the Bible has little to say about ships and sailing.
10. Ancient history reports several cases in which the precept of Sabbath kept the Jews from opposing armed aggressions, or even forced them to sacrifice their lives. The most famous instance was the conquest of Jerusalem by Pompei in 63 BC (Cassius, Dio, Roman History XXXVII 16)Google Scholar. Josephus, (Jewish Antiquities XII 6, 3/276 ff.Google Scholar) relates how a Jew argued that it could be allowed, in time of war, to violate the rule. Cf. Josephus, (Jewish Antiquities XII 6, 3/276 ff.Google Scholar XVIII 9, 2 (323). For another violation of the same kind, justified in the same way, see Josephus, , Jewish War, II 19, 2 (617).Google Scholar
11. On the theme of the dead at sea, who hope to be recovered and buried, there are numberless Greek epigrams. See Campetella, M. (1995) ‘Gli epigrammi per i morti in mare nell'Antologia Greca: il realismo, l'etica e la Moira’. Annali della Fac. di Lettere e Filos. Univ. di Macerata 28, 47.Google Scholar
12. The Nasamons, inhabitants of the Libyan coast, where notorious for their custom of seizing wrecks and robbing the survivors. See Silius Italicus, Punica III 321 sg.
13. In Petronius, Satyricon, 114, 13, the fishers who sight the wrecked ship rush to it only because they are attracted by the hope of plunder, and give up when they realize that the prey would not be an easy one. See Rougé, J. (1966) Recherches sur l'organisation du commerce maritime, quoted above, p. 338Google Scholar, and (1975) La marine dans l'Antiquité (Paris) pp. 148 ff.Google Scholar Much later, instances of unbelievable savagery (in modern times, and by Christian populations!) are quoted by Cabantous, A. (1992) ‘Les dons de la mer ou les enjeux du pillage côtier aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’. In L'uomo e il mare nella civiltà occidentale: da Ulisse a Cristoforo Colombo. Atti del Convegno, Genova, 1–4 giugno 1992 (Genova) pp. 345 ff.Google Scholar This kind of robbery was even somehow legalized. It is what the German calls Strandrecht and the French droit d'épave.
14. Leucippe and Clitophon, II 33. On the voyage narrated in this romance, see J. Rougé, ‘Romans grecs et navigation’, quoted above.
15. Here is what an historian of Medieval seamanship, Jean Merrien, has to say about some episodes in the 12th century: ‘Much more astonishing: the first to leave the ship is the master, sometimes, but not always, together with the most important persons, on the first life boat, manned by the best sailors; the efficient crew leaves also the passengers to their fate.’ … ‘In this, the centuries of chivalry are not chivalrous at all.’ Those who went against these customs (as King Louis IX in one occasion) excited great astonishment. See Merrien, J. (1969) La vie quotidienne des marins au Moyen Age (des Vikings aux galères) (Paris) pp. 156 f.Google Scholar
16. Dio Chrysostomus, Oration 74, 23 wrote: only the ignorant is afraid of the open sea in a tempest, because he doesn't know that the coast is more dangerous.
17. When writing, Synesius is not yet at his goal, he still has before him (or he pretends to have) the last leg of the voyage, probably about 80 sea miles, after the ship has covered about 380. (That is, if the current identification of ‘Port Azarius’ with the Wadi-el-Chalig, near Al-Bumbah is correct.)
18. In his Egyptian Tales (II 5/125 a-b) Synesius contrasts the accursed practice of navigation with the blessed Golden Age: the constellation of the Virgin (that is Justice) holds an ear of wheat in her hands, so showing that mankind had better remain on land, cultivating the fields and not defying the sea. The instances of severest blame for ships and sailing in the classical literatures are numberless. Much material about ‘blame and praise of sailing’ in the ancient and Romance literatures has been gathered together by Heydenreich, T. (1970) Tadel und Lob der Seefahrt. Das Nachleben eines antiken Themas in den romanischen Literaturen (Heidelberg).Google Scholar
20. ‘Saint Louis et la mer’, in L'uomo e il mare nella civiltà occidentale quoted above, pp. 11–24.
21. Frg. 47 Lobel-Page.
22. Anthologia Palatina XII 157 and 167.Google Scholar