ABSTRACT
The war in which he brought peace to the sea was that with Sextus Pompey, who is regularly characterized under Augustus as a pirate leader. The war with Sextus is called a war (bellum), but it is a war with slaves, dignified only by its scale: Sextus himself goes unnamed. Later, in AD 69, Vespasian’s men defeated the piratical forces of Anicetus in what Tacitus calls, probably with half an eye to Anicetus’ past as a royal freedman, a ‘slave war’ (bellum servile; Tac. Hist. 3. 47-8, with Shaw 1984, 6). These cases, and others, raise large questions. What was the relationship between war and piracy? What role, if any, did piracy have in the Mediterranean after Augustus?
