The Imperial Port of Baia
Not
long ago, a piece of an oar was dredged up from
the mud of Lake Lucrino, the small body of water
near Baia in the bay of Naples. Well, you say, the
Mediterranean is brimming with such bits of
antiquity. What's so special about this one? This
one, it seems, was from a Roman ship, a fighting
vessel that was part of a fleet built nearby and
that trained here for its subsequent role in one
of the most important naval engagements in
history. There are three such bodies of water in
the area that were crucial in Roman naval history
and subsequently in the rise of the Roman Empire:
namely, Lake Lucrino, Lake Averno and the harbor of
Miseno.
Roman history in the first century before Christ was marked by civil war and unrest. The tumult came to a head with the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, an event that set the stage for the struggle to determine who would rule Rome. That struggle was between Octavian, a great-nephew of Julius Caesar, and Marc Antony. The latter was in league with Egypt (and very in league with Cleopatra!), so the struggle could be said to be between the forces of Rome and those of Egypt. The struggle was decided in 31 BC at the Battle of Actium, a small dot on the Balkan coast in northern Greece opposite the heel of the boot of Italy.
To fight effectively at sea, the Romans had to
change their traditional thinking. For centuries,
during the Punic Wars, the Macedonian Wars and
endless adventures against piracy in the
Mediterranean, Rome had been content not even to
have her own real navy. Instead, she relied on using
—renting— small squadrons of vessels from her
maritime allies, such as the Greek city-states on
the Italian mainland and on Sicily. It was a policy
that had worked but one that had more than once
almost proved disastrous, such as when Sextus
attempted to cut off all supply routes in 40 BC,
almost succeeding in blockading Rome into
submission.
Octavian,
thus, chose to build a fleet from scratch, and he
chose his very able deputy, Agrippa, to build and
command it. Four-hundred ships were built from the
wooded areas near Naples and they trained on Lake Lucrino, a few miles
north of Naples. (The lake at the time of the Romans
was much larger than the pond you see today [photo,
left]. The violent seismic activity in the 16th
century that formed the hill of Montenuovo right
next to it also emptied most of the water.) Agrippa
joined Lake Lucrino to the adjacent Lake Averno and
to the gulf of Cuma by
canals in order to form a single large naval base, portus
Iulius. (A chariot tunnel from Averno to Cuma
was built at the same time and has partially
survived the ravages of time.)
The Roman vessels were somewhat smaller than those of Marc Antony. The Roman fleet that trained at Lucrino and Averno was made up of small, fast triremes (sailing ships with three banks of oarsmen) as well as "fives" and "sevens" (here, the number refers to the number of rowers on each oar). The Romans specialized in speeding into close quarters and boarding by grapnel to let their superb infantry swarm onto enemy vessels. Antony's fleet, on the other hand, was the last great one in history built along lines pioneered by the Greeks. Some of the ships were monsters, virtual sea-going cities with boarding towers, artillery and large infantry forces on board. They were propelled through the water by sail and as many as ten rowers on a single oar.
The two fleets, each of 400-500 vessels, met off of Actium. The Roman fleet had been in battle a few years earlier. Marc Antony's fleet was green. The battle, itself, was somewhat of an anticlimax. The Romans succeeded in bottling up the Egyptians along the coast and picking them off little by little until Queen Cleopatra decided to make a run for it. She got away —and her fleet commander and lover, Marc Antony, sailed right after her, deserting his men and ships! The disheartened Egyptian fleet surrendered to the forces of Octavian, effectively ending the dispute about who was going to rule Rome. Antony and Cleopatra did the Liebestod thing, Octavian changed his name to Caesar Augustus, and all was right with the world.
The third important small body of water in the area (after Lucrino and Averno) was Miseno, the natural harbor sheltered by Cape Miseno near Cuma. Misenum actually referred to the pair of harbors behind the cape: inner and outer, to the west and east, respectively. They had been used for centuries by the Greek city-state of Cuma just beyond the gulf. Caesar Augustus formed his first imperial fleet shortly after the Battle of Actium. He had two main bases built in Italy: one at Ravenna at the mouth of the Po river, and the other at Miseno. To make Misenum suitable for its new role as an Imperial home port, the Romans built new breakwaters and a freshwater reservoir of unparalleled size. The outer harbor served the active vessels of the Roman navy and provided room for training exercises, while its inner counterpart (to which it was connected by a canal crossed by a wooden bridge) was designed for the reserve fleet and for repairs, and as a refuge from storms. The complex remained connected by canal and tunnel with Averno and Lucrino.
Because of its location, Misenum controlled the
entire Italian west coast, the islands and the
Straits of Messina. The Misenum fleet had a number
of secondary ports along the Tyrrhenian coast,
probably at Ostia, Centumcellai (modern
Civitavecchia) and Calaris (Cagliari) in Sardinia.
Eventually, the Roman Empire would extend its
Imperial fleets, with 'home ports' at Alexandria, in
Syria and Britain, as well as a river fleet in
Germany. The Misenum fleet, however, being one of
the two Imperial fleets of the Italian homeland, is
referred to—as is the Ravenna fleet—in
Roman records as classes praetoriae, a
prestigious term, indeed, putting them on a par with
the Imperial Guard, the Praetorians. The importance
of the Misenum fleet waned with the integrity of the
Roman Empire, itself. The fleet survived the periods
of unrest in the third century and was reorganized,
but later proved ineffective in keeping
Constantine's ships from seizing Italian ports in
the struggles that led to the ultimate division of
the Roman Empire into two parts, east and
west.