ABSTRACT

Piracy, Pillage, and Plunder in Antiquity explores appropriation in its broadest terns in the ancient world, from brigands, mercenaries and state-sponsored "piracy", to literary appropriation and the modern plundering of antiquities.

The chronological extent of the studies in this volume, written by an international group of experts, ranges from about 2000 BCE to the 20th century. The geographical spectrum in similarly diverse, encompassing Africa, the Mediterranean, and Mesopotamia, allowing readers to track this phenomenon in various different manifestations. Predatory behaviour is a phenomenon seen in all walks of life. While violence may often be concomitant it is worth observing that predation can be extremely nuanced in its application, and it is precisely this gradation and its focus that occupies the essential issue in this volume.

Piracy, Pillage, and Plunder in Antiquity will be of great interest to those studying a range of topics in antiquity, including literature and art, cities and their foundations, crime, warfare, and geography.

chapter |8 pages

Piracy, pillage and plunder in antiquity

An introduction

chapter 1|18 pages

By the hand of a robber

States, mercenaries and bandits in Middle Bronze Age Mesopotamia

chapter 2|11 pages

The limits of nationalism

Brigandage: piracy and mercenary service in fourth century bce Athens

chapter 3|22 pages

Piracy and pseudo-piracy in classical Syracuse

Financial replenishment through outsourcing, sacking temples and forced migrations

chapter 4|24 pages

Terra cognita sed vacua?

(Re-)appropriating territory through Hellenistic city foundations

chapter 6|18 pages

Campaigning against pirate mercenaries

A very Roman strategy?

chapter 7|14 pages

Pirating pastoral poverty

Poetics in Tibullus 1.1

chapter 9|25 pages

‘Bad girls’?

Collective violence by women and the case of the Circumcellions in Roman North Africa

chapter 11|18 pages

Spoils of Empire

Rider Haggard’s appropriation of the katabasis motif in King Solomon’s Mines

chapter |2 pages

Epilogue