The last fifteen years have seen a tremendous upsurge in the study of ancient fishing and a corresponding increase in our knowledge of what now appears to have been an important sector of the ancient economy. The few studies which appeared before the Millennium tended to be focused on a single category of sources, be it the mosaics of Africa or the Halieutica of Oppian. A rare exception to this rule was T. Gallant's A Fisherman's Tale (1985) which, inspired by the then-dominant ‘primitivist’ discourse, painted a dismal picture of ancient fishing as a marginal activity of little economic importance beyond the fisherman's own household, and consequently of limited interest for the study of ancient society.
The paradigm change that has taken place since then was driven by a number of factors, but two developments have been exceptionally significant. One is the trend towards interdisciplinary research involving not only the traditional source categories of ancient studies (texts, artefacts, iconography, epigraphy, numismatics) but also the contribution of other disciplines such as marine biology, ethnography and contemporary social anthropology. Another is the large body of new archaeological evidence for the production of salt-fish and fish sauce (garum) on a commercial scale, especially the work of D. Bernal Casasola and his team at the University of Cádiz.
Like the majority of present-day scholars, M. rejects the ‘primitivist’ model in favour of a ‘modernist’ interpretation whose roots can be traced back to the work of T. Frank and M.I. Rostovtzeff in the mid-twentieth century. Central to her study is the assumption, clearly laid out in the introduction, that ‘Fishing methods and techniques have remained substantially unchanged through the centuries from antiquity until very recent times. It was only after the Second World War that fishing in the Mediterranean changed dramatically’ (p. 3); this is restated in the conclusion: ‘both the fishing techniques and the implements used remained unchanged from antiquity throughout the centuries until recently’ (p. 302). It follows from this premise that descriptions of traditional fishing in ‘modern’ times (primarily the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), even modern fishing statistics, may ‘offer some indication of the extent of capital and labour investment needed to carry out certain activities successfully, which can in general terms be applied to the ancient world’ (p. 9). Drawing on the research results of the last decade combined with her own wide knowledge of traditional fishing practices in the Mediterranean, M. succeeds in creating a coherent picture that synthesises most of our present knowledge on the subject and fuses it with modern comparative data to create a lively and readable account of how the Romans exploited the resources of ‘their sea’.
The volume is clearly structured: following an introductory chapter, M. discusses large-scale fishing, fish salting, salt extraction, purple dye and other ‘fruits of the sea’, shellfish, concluding with chapters on the legal regime and the economic factors governing Roman fishing.
M.'s approach allows her to employ modern parallels to fill out the gaps in the patchy textual and archaeological record for ancient fishing, but it also, perhaps inevitably, leads her to emphasise the similarities between ancient and modern fishing at the expense of the no less interesting dissimilarities. Thus in her discussion of tuna fishing (pp. 66–79), M., like others before her, notes how the tuna fishing operation described by Aelian (N.A. 15.5) resembles modern accounts of coastal tuna fishing in Spain and Italy (p. 69). The division of tasks reflected in the membership list of a tuna fishing guild from Parion on the Hellespont (pp. 74–6) likewise resembles that attested for the early modern Spanish almadraba de vista y tiro. Yet while technology and organisation may have been similar, the socio-economic circumstances were not. Early modern tuna fishing on the Mediterranean coast of Spain was a near-monopoly of the dukes of Medina Sidonia, belonging to the highest echelons of Spanish society and socially on a level with the Florios of nineteenth-century Sicily, whose house-guests in their palazzo on Favignana (offering a view of the family canning factory) included the German Kaiser. Whatever the precise social status of the tuna fishers at Parion, aristocrats on this scale they were certainly not. It would seem that the wealthiest Romans preferred to invest their fortunes in coastal fishponds rather than fish traps, a difference possibly reflecting the different social prejudices and different perceptions of the sea prevailing in ancient Rome.
On the other hand, in the case of fish-salting M. underlines the ‘notable differences in the case of preservation. In the late nineteenth century … large quantities of mackerel, pilchard, and shad were lost for lack of the necessary quantity of salt to preserve them. These cases, one the product of the lack of economic means to preserve excess catches of fish, the other due to the monopoly on salt imposed by the Austro-Hungarian empire, highlight the contrast with the Roman period’ (p. 121), but the assumption that salt was more readily available in the Roman period rests on an argumentum e silentio: although no extant ancient text describes piles of unwanted fish rotting on the shore for lack of salt, it does not follow that this never took place.
Although ‘whaling was an organized hunt with purpose-made equipment’ (p. 8), M. devotes less than a page of text to the topic (pp. 37–8); here, M. Bode, ‘Wale und Walfang in der Antike’, Laverna 13 (2002), 1–13 (not in the bibliography) might have been helpful. The possibility that whales were primarily hunted for their fat (rather than their meat) also deserves investigation.
The problems of marine aquaculture and transport of live fish (Chapter 7, esp. pp. 216–19) and Roman gourmands' preferences for specific species of marine fish (Chapter 9, esp. pp. 271–2) are dealt with at some length and in this connection it might have been useful to include the evidence for a successful transplantation of parrotfish stocks from the Aegean to the Tyrrhenian Sea during the reign of Claudius, which is not introduced until p. 297; on this, see now the paper by A. Bullock in R. Gertwagen et al. (edd.), Il mare. Com'era: Le interazioni tra uomo ed ambiente nel Mediterraneo dall'Epoca Romana al XIX secolo: una visione storica ed ecologica delle attività di pesca (2009; not in the bibliography).
We are treated to a thorough and well-argued analysis of the technique of coastal salt production, but the section on ‘Ownership and management of salt-works' (pp. 138–41) leaves M.'s hypothesis that ‘the norm was rather for marine salt pans to be privately owned’ (p. 140) blowing in the wind, to be taken up again, but briefly, on p. 304. There are good arguments for private ownership of salt-pans during the Imperial era and the question might have deserved more detailed treatment.
Despite such minor criticisms, this book clearly deserves to take its place, as it no doubt will, as the standard introduction to the study of marine resources in the Roman economy. Given the wealth of material discussed, it is a pity that the publishers did not see fit to include an index of sources. The general index is of limited use, since the choice of headwords is somewhat arbitrary and most personal names (e.g. Cicero, Nero, Ulpian) as well as many geographical names have been omitted.
