URSABLOG: Trading Roots

One of my favourite things ever is to be on the aft deck of a ferry, preferably a Blue Star Ferry, leaving the port of Piraeus for an island. I will have all I need around me: a cold coffee, a packet of cigarettes, a book and my mobile phone. The first four are self-explanatory, the phone is for checking where we are, what islands I can see, and with the help of the Marine Traffic app, what ships I can see. It doesn’t matter too much about the weather, but there, surrounded with the happy chatter of my fellow passengers embarking on a voyage, I can see all of life and relax.

And a journey through the Aegean does indeed encompass all of life; not just the lives and experiences of those around me, which would take a couple of libraries to document, but the lives of all those who came before us, mythical or otherwise. We like to think of history, especially ancient history, as being a different place where things were done differently, where people had different values, wandering around in sheets and eating grapes plucked fresh from the vine, so far removed from our daily experiences that we consider the ruins and the museums full of archaeological remains as something alien and distant. But their lives were very similar to ours in many ways, particularly as far as business and shipping.

Ancient Greeks were bound by a common identity and language, and a mythology which was the basis of an incredibly fluid religious sensibility which could be picked up and dropped, and changed, or ignored, depending on the flow of sentiment at the time, which is no surprise considering the revolutionary and rapid development of literature at the time. For me the Iliad and Odyssey are two of the greatest pieces of literature not written (for centuries they were exchanged by word of mouth before someone got around to getting them down on papyrus) but they were the founding myths and texts for a civilisation. And what literature! Reading Homer I don’t feel that morals are being forced down my throat, but stories are told showing the ambiguous and uncertain values of people who are neither wholly good or bad, right or wrong, brave or cowardly. The gods are fickle and fight amongst themselves, picking favourites and then dropping them. People deceive each other through disguise or sweet words, getting them drunk, or starving them. And these were not only acted out in temples or palaces, but also on islands, in caves, at sea, on mountains, in cities and on the battlefield. It feels very real.

When we think of Ancient Greece think of Athens, the rich, unruly, and political city, naturally, and the counterweight of Sparta: aristocratic, agricultural, and, well, Spartan. But what of all the other places that we pass by on the ferries and on the roads, or fly over? All these were interconnected, by language, by identity, by religion, but not by political systems, and not by any fixed stable structure. They were linked by business and trade, and the money and ideas that flowed up and down those trade routes. Any cursory look at the history of thought – whether it be science, theatre, art, sculpture, literature, mathematics or philosophy – means taking a look at a map that goes all the way from Sicily in the west, to Ephesus (and beyond) in the east. And what connects these dots? The ships that were trading between one place and another.

Like in our world today, there were many different ships doing many different things. There were large bulk carriers carrying grain from what is today Ukraine (Odessa is a Greek word) and Sicily into Athens and elsewhere. There were smaller ships carrying goods of higher value, sometimes on deep sea long voyages from one destination to another, others tramping around, hugging the coasts, seeing what they could pick up from one place to sell in another. I am indebted to a brilliant paper by Pascal Arnaud who has brought this to life for me. There were merchants, trading the cargoes (and the financiers behind them, giving loans that would effectively insure the ships, as they wouldn’t have to pay the loans back if the ships were lost), some captains traded cargoes on their own account, ships were chartered for a single voyage or for long periods of time. Sometimes the captains owned the ships, sometimes they did not. Summer trading was not very lucrative (over supply of tonnage willing to trade in the calmer waters of the sailing season), but winter trading brought higher returns with the higher risk, demand and lack of tonnage.

Trade was only allowed between certain ports, some protected by city states, others forbidden for the same reason depending on where you coming from and going to. Buying and selling of cargoes could not take place unless the duty and taxes were paid, and signed off by the right officials. Some of these officials no doubt were encouraged by the ancient version of a small envelope. Charter agreements were made; I cannot say charterparty as this was a Roman innovation, from carta partita where the paper (or clay tile) was split with the owners keeping one part and the charterers the other. Bills of lading, captain’s receipts and cargo markings were passed around, and I am sure that arrangements were made to indemnify the carriers if the goods were not received on board as described.

This basic framework and mechanism of trade, of commerce, was taken over and modified by first the Hellenistic kingdoms, and then the western, and eastern Roman empires, surviving in one form or the other until the present day, where some of the basic tools are still with us. Trade is a very European concept, and its roots lie in the peaceful – or otherwise – expansion of business by sea in the Western Mediterranean.

I sometimes think of work, and business, and the challenges of modern shipping, and the braying of the techies who say we – I mean Greek shipping in the main – are too conservative, and do not want to change, and do not understand the world of the future. That may be so, but those same techies embracing the future do not understand the nature of the business itself, and have little sense of the recent history of shipping, let alone the deep roots that tap the wellspring of the development of trade, the ships that service them, and therefore of western civilisation itself.

But looking down on people who actually do go down to sea to do business with ships is nothing new either. Plutarch (Cato Maior 21.6) notes:

He used to loan money also in the most disreputable of ways, namely on ships, and his method was as follows: he required his borrowers to form a large company, and when there were fifty partners and as many ships for his security, he took one share in the company himself….

Sound familiar? And how about this from Philostratus (Life of Apollonius of Tyana IV4.32):

Well, and can you mention any rabble of people more wretched and ill-starred than merchants and skippers? In the first place they roam from sea to sea, looking for some market that is badly stocked; and then they sell and are sold, associating with factors and brokers, and they subject their own heads to the most unholy rate of interest in their hurry to get back to the principal; and if they do well, their ship has a lucky voyage, and they tell you a long story of how they never wrecked it either willingly or unwillingly; but if their gains do not balance their debts, they jump into their long boats and dash their ships on to the rocks, and make no bones as sailors of robbing others of their substance, pretending in the most blasphemous manner that it is an act of God. And even if the seafaring crowd who go on voyages be not so bad as I make them out to be; yet is there any shame worse than this, for a man who is a citizen of Sparta and the child of forbears who of old lived in the heart of Sparta, to secrete himself in the hold of a ship, oblivious of Lycurgus and Iphitus, thinking of nought but of cargoes and petty bills of lading?

There is nothing new under the sun at the end of the day, and this gives me some comfort. And reflecting further on the journey of Odysseus back to Penelope, through many diversions and distractions (welcome or otherwise) Homer’s own words come to mind:

Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.

Simon Ward

www.ursashipbrokers.com