ἢ μαψιδίως ἀλάλησθε,
οἷά τε ληϊστῆρες, ὑπεὶρ ἅλα, τοίτ’ ἀλόωνται
ψυχὰς παρθέμενοι, κακὸν ἀλλοδαποῖσι φέροντες;
Now I think that the last line seems to explain the favourable view which was taken by the Greeks of the practice of piracy. For it combined with the hazards of navigation, then so much more serious than at present, the chance of desperate encounters. It appealed, in the very highest degree, to the spirit of adventure; a spirit congenial especially to the earliest youth of a people full of unsatisfied and, so to speak, hungry energies. The mischief inflicted was inflicted on ἀλλόδαποι, on those with whom there was no close tie, either as compatriots or as ξεῖνοι. Now we must bear in mind that the law which, even in the time of Thucydides, governed the relations of the Greek tribes among themselves, during the period of their high civilization, was a permanent or ordinary state of hostility suspended from time to time by conventions for so many or so many years[843]. The same principle, applied to a period when political organization was less mature, and when men lived rather in knots and companies than in states, involves the Homeric view of piracy. And that view, entertained in such times, should occasion far less surprise, than our finding Thucydides inform us that the same system continued throughout whole divisions of Greece in his day; καὶ μέχρι τοῦδε πολλὰ τῆς Ἑλλάδος τῷ παλαιῷ τρόπῳ νέμεται, περί τε Λοκροὺς τοὺς Ὀζόλας, καὶ Αἰτώλους, καὶ Ἀκαρνᾶνας, καὶ τὴν ταύτῃ ἤπειρον[844]. The gains of the pirate’s life were in some sense fairly balanced by its dangers. The piracy of that age was not like piracy in ours, the strong and well-armed waiting for the feeble and defenceless; it was a game of more even chances, and the real resemblance for it is to be found, not among the Algerine corsairs, not even in the Highland clans sweeping down from the mountains upon the Lowland Scots, but most properly in the more even-handed forays of the border warfare between England and Scotland.
There is indeed yet a higher authority for this kind of piracy, than that to which Thucydides has referred. Ulysses, when he has destroyed the Suitors, considers, in conversation with his wife, not only how he is to preserve his remaining property in live stock, but how he is to replace what his enemies have destroyed. Part he thinks his subjects will make up to him by presents, but great part he will himself obtain by freebooting[845];
πολλὰ μὲν αὐτὸς ἐγὼ ληΐσσομαι.
We can hardly, I think, restrain the meaning of the word to the booty of legitimate and successful war. Sometimes, as in the case of the Cicones, piracy is scarcely distinguishable from war; but Ulysses fairly relates of himself a piratical attack upon Egypt, which can leave us no room for scruple in supposing, that he might without hesitation think of doing again what he thought it worth while to pretend that he had done before. Both these last-named instances may serve, however, to show that, in times when preparedness for war was habitual, the pirate took no great advantage in such attacks as these. For with the Cicones Ulysses had the worst of it at last[846]; and in the case of Egypt, according to his fable, the whole party were taken prisoners or slain. Kidnapping, however, such as that of Eumæus stolen in his childhood, is not, I presume, to be regarded as equal in honour to freebooting with the strong hand, thus apparently stamped with the sanction of Ulysses.
And yet this model-man had been stung to the very quick by Euryalus in Phæacia, who said to him, ‘You do not look like a man to compete in athletic games; but rather like one of the captains of merchant vessels, who looks after the cargo and makes rapacious profits[847]!’
Nor, after all, is this so strange as at first sight it might appear; for the Phœnicians, the merchants of those days, were also kidnappers and slave-dealers: and if their transactions were not, like those of the pirates, uniformly bad, they were, when exceptionable, double-dyed in guilt, because they involved fraud as well as robbery.
Mixed view of it in the poems.