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Dawn of the Pirates

“STRANGERS, WHO ARE YOU? Where do you sail from? Are you traders, or do you sail the sea as pirates, with your hands against every man, and every man’s hand against you?”

These lines come from Homer’s Odyssey, one of the earliest existing texts. Piracy—one of the world’s oldest professions—has been around even longer than the blind poet and also shares a birthplace with him: the Mediterranean. Since the late Bronze Age, this area has been a hotbed for piratical activity. In fact, the word pirate comes from the ancient Greek word piero, which means “to make an attempt.” According to an Egyptian clay tablet from the period, the people of the eastern Mediterranean were attacking ships as early as the fourteenth century BCE, and it is not a big surprise given the geography of the area.

Greece is one of the most mountainous countries in Europe, with a rugged terrain unsuitable for farming. Hence, civilizations sprang up only in flat pockets near the shore, where the mountain ranges tapered off, but even in these flatter areas, the rocky soil was of too poor quality to be hospitable to crops. Villages by necessity had to be small and humble—they could not grow large and prosperous because there was not enough arable land to grow food to feed a large village.

Since the ancients could not grow enough food to be profitable, they were forced to take up fishing as a way to make a living. In the water beyond their shores, food such as fish, squid, octopus, and shellfish flourished. An average able-bodied man would have had access to a boat for fishing. For him to be successful, he also needed navigation and sailing skills. Sailing in the ancient world bore little relation to the sailboats and speedboats enjoyed by sailors today. Without the modern inventions of GPS, sonar, power engines, and the National Weather Service, sailors had to be conscious every moment of the water depth, the weather conditions, and their position in the sea in order to avoid running aground, capsizing, or becoming lost. These skills, learned by necessity for fishing purposes, came in handy for the men and women who eventually turned to piracy.

The scarcity of good soil and natural resources naturally led to trade. Since it was virtually impossible to cross over any of the Greek mountains in those days (and moving stuff by sea is always easier anyway), the sea turned into the Greek “highway” system as the best and most efficient way to get around and conduct trade. One city-state would specialize in a particular good or crop and ship it to other city-states, selling their product and purchasing the products of other city-states. Over time, the best routes to navigate from city-state to city-state became well known and well used—and irresistible to pirates.

In fact, the very geography of the sea itself helped to foster piracy. The Mediterranean basin is essentially an obstacle course of small islands. Large trade ships were forced to sail in very narrow lanes between the islands and the shore in order to avoid shipwrecks. Before the advent of the steam engine, sailors were at the mercy of the currents and tides and unable to deviate from the courses nature charted. Ships could not sail in the winter or during rough weather. All these factors combined meant that large trade ships were likely to pass through only certain small areas and only under certain weather conditions. They were sitting ducks for the pirates, who had only to lie in wait among the many islands along the coast for a big ship to pass by.

Beyond the physical geography, political reasons helped piracy take off. The small, isolated villages that grew out of the landscape created independent settlements that were not easily governed by a single body. Greece was not one unified country as it is today but rather a collection of loosely connected groups who had their own governments, identities, and ways of life. These city-states were allied in name but were often rivals in practice; hostilities between city-states were not uncommon. Piracy easily sprang up between the city-states because it did not seem like stealing from one’s own country. Capturing a merchant ship from another city-state was fair game in an area of scarce resources.

With all these factors in its favor, piracy was considered part of the rhythm of life during the late Bronze Age. Despite its happening all the time, everywhere, people did their best to thwart it whenever they could. The opening quote of this chapter demonstrates how Odysseus the sailor was greeted by the Cyclops after landing in his port. Outside of the Odyssey, newly arrived sailors to any port in the eastern Mediterranean could expect a similar greeting that tried to suss out whether the sailors had come for lawful or unlawful purposes. The fact that sailors were routinely asked whether or not they were pirates is a testament to just how ubiquitous piracy was in the region.

The Taurians, a group of early settlers of the Crimean Peninsula, used an even more extreme method to combat piracy. They had a custom of sacrificing all shipwrecked sailors who landed on their shores to their Virgin Goddess (similar to the Greek goddess Artemis). They would beat the unlucky shipwreck survivors in the head with a club and either throw the bodies off a cliff or bury them. Some scholars use this example to demonstrate how much the Taurians feared pirates and their wicked ways, but given Herodotus’s account of the Taurians as “living by plundering and war,” it seems possible that the Taurians were just eliminating the piratical competition.

A pirate ship needed the ability to sail into the maze of islands and shallow water where the larger ships could not follow. Merchant ships sailed on very specific routes and could not deviate from those paths, even when under attack, without risking shipwreck. The pirates knew this and used it to their advantage. They lay in wait for the larger ships among the natural coves and harbors along the coastline or in the hidden waters between the smaller islands—wherever they had a good view of the merchant ships’ paths. When a large, slow ship sailed by, the pirates would spring into action and sail right up to it, attacking it and stripping it of its valuable cargo. The merchant ship was helpless as the pirates laid claim to whatever they liked. After the raid, the pirates reboarded their small ships and sailed quickly away, back to their hiding spots, where merchant ships could not reach them due to the shallow waters. For a long time, it was the perfect crime.

Historians agree that many pirates took advantage of this system and routinely attacked merchants. But while there is much evidence of piracy, there is very little historical documentation concerning specific pirates. The names of the ordinary men and women who took to the seas to raid and plunder are, for the most part, lost to history. There may have been scores of pirate women of low birth, but history has neglected to remember them. The pirates from this era who are known are generally either military commanders or rulers. This makes sense, given how history is usually recorded. Literate historians write most often about people in their own class—other wealthy people of high station. The legends from this era feature the larger-than-life characters of gods, demigods, monsters, and kings. Everyday citizens did not get starring roles in the epic poems of this era, unless they were victims of kidnapping by Zeus. The women pirates known from this era are no exception to the rule. All of them were queens as well as pirates.

The earliest known female pirate from the Mediterranean, and perhaps of all time, was Queen Artemisia I of Halicarnassus. Most of what is known about her comes from Herodotus’s Histories and Polyaenus’s Stratagems of War. Sometime in the fifth century BCE, she was born to a Carian father and a Cretan mother. Her childhood was spent in her father’s gubernatorial land: Halicarnassus, a large coastal city-state in the region of Caria (modern-day Turkey). As the daughter of a government official, she was destined to marry well, and in 500 BCE, she married the king of Halicarnassus. (In a strange twist of fate, it is his name that is lost to history.) Before the king died, he and Artemisia had one son. The newly widowed Artemisia ascended to the throne of Caria and ruled in her dead husband’s place. Herodotus notes that she had a grown son, and thus had no reason to go into battle herself, but she did so anyway. Whether he said this with pride or disgust is not certain.

At this point, it is vital to note that ancient Mediterranean piracy was not identical to the modern conception of piracy. These ancient pirates were not bands of outlaws who swore allegiance to no one; they were more like enemy powers who raided other city-states on both land and sea. Their methods, however, would be copied by more modern pirates—methods such as lying in wait for their prey, plundering large merchant ships, and using the geography of the area to their advantage. More important, these ancient pirates set the tone for more modern pirates, who would likewise follow their desire for riches to the sea and take them by any means necessary.

Piracy was more accepted in ancient times than it is today because it was more like intertribal warfare than nationless piracy. Acts of warfare, unlike acts of piracy, are generally accepted as legitimate in most times and countries. St. Augustine offers a provocative story in City of God that speaks to the delicate line between legitimate warfare and illegitimate piracy. As the story goes, Alexander the Great once captured a pirate and questioned him, asking, “How dare you molest the seas?” The pirate answered, “How dare you molest the whole world? Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor.”

Part of Artemisia’s queenly duties involved waging war against rival city-states. She took to this task with relish, not just commanding her fleet but actually taking the helm of her own ship. Caria had fallen under Persian control, so technically Artemisia sailed with the Persians. Some sources state that she secretly was in sympathy with the Greeks and hated Persia. Whatever her feelings were, Artemisia is known to have plundered both Greek and Persian ships, so it appears that she felt no particular loyalty to anyone save herself.

Her status as queen afforded Artemisia many freedoms not available to the lower-class women of Greece. In ancient Greece, women’s rights varied from city-state to city-state, but in general women were considered less valuable than men. Most of the existing historical accounts come from Athens, but it is important to remember that Athens does not stand for all of Greece. Athens was one of the more severe city-states, where women were not allowed to vote or own property beyond minor gifts—which her guardian could dispose of without her consent. Legally, a woman did not have an existence independent from men. She was guarded by her father, then by her husband, and if her husband died before she did, she was either absorbed back into her father’s guardianship or put under the care of her adult sons. All but the poorest Athenian women had slaves to take care of the domestic tasks such as cooking and cleaning, so their only tasks were to bear children and be attractive. Pericles said, “The best reputation a woman can have is not to be spoken of among men for good or evil.”

Only one type of woman besides royalty was afforded similar freedom, and that was the hetaera—the courtesan. These women were oddities in almost every way. They were educated, renowned for their achievements in dance and music, and they paid taxes. They were allowed to participate in the symposia, the drinking parties where philosophy was discussed and debated. They were single women who occasionally had sex with the men they spent time with, but they were not prostitutes. Their lives were a far cry from those of ordinary married female citizens in the stricter city-states. As Apollodorus explains in the case against Neaera, a legal case brought against a hetaera who tried to pass her children off as Athenian citizens, “We have courtesans for pleasure, concubines to take care of our day to day bodily needs, and wives to bear us legitimate children and to be the loyal guardians of our households.”

Some city-states, such as Sparta, were more relaxed in their attitudes about average women citizens. (However, not everything written about Sparta was written by Spartans, so that should be taken into account.) Like Athenian ladies, Spartan women had slaves to take care of their domestic tasks such as housework, but the similarities end there. Spartans were concerned chiefly with physical fitness above all else, so young girls as well as boys were athletically trained. Women were even able to race chariots during festivals. According to Pausanias, a woman named Cynisca won at four-horse chariot racing at the Panathenaic games, and a statue at the Temple of Zeus at Olympia commemorated her achievement.

Spartan women were not confined to the home as much as their Athenian sisters. Chastity was not held as sacred to a Spartan woman as it was to an Athenian, and so women were not forced to stay indoors in the women’s quarters of the house. Their short tunics led other city-states to derisively call them “thigh-showers.” Spartan women had to be the head of the household when the men were in training and away at war. Military duties kept men away full-time until their late thirties and part-time after that. In return for their management skills, Spartan women were allowed to inherit wealth from their families and were permitted to seek a divorce as well. Plutarch said in his Life of Agis that “the men of Sparta always obeyed their wives, and allowed them to intervene in public affairs more than they themselves were allowed to intervene in private ones.”

Most ancient city-states fell somewhere between these two extremes. Even in Sparta, however, women were relegated to duties that were second best. The tasks left to them were considerably more interesting than what Athenian women were called on to perform, but they were still tasks that the men deemed unimportant. No city-state placed women first or elevated their status as equal to men.

Little information exists on exactly what day-to-day life would have looked like for the women of Artemisia’s home city-state, Halicarnassus. After Artemisia’s time, Queen Artemisia II of Halicarnassus (often confused with her piratical predecessor) ruled side by side with her husband, and the pair issued joint decrees, which indicates a relatively elevated status of women—or at least of queens. A Halicarnassian marble relief sculpture from the first to second century CE, currently on display at the British Museum, offers a compelling peek into Artemisia’s society. This sculpture portrays two female gladiators locked in combat, demonstrating a notion of feminine power outside the domestic sphere. Rather than depicting women washing dishes or lying around in perfumed robes, the Halicarnassian artist presented women as warriors. We can extrapolate, based on this tableau, that Halicarnassian women were not confined solely to the home and that they enjoyed rights more similar to Spartan women than Athenian ones.

Artemisia’s pirating career before the Battle of Salamis is not well documented. Her first pirating adventure is unknown, as is exactly when she started pirating. Polyaenus’s Stratagems describes an early exploit of hers, when she sacked the city of Latmus using a cunning trick. She and her men camped right outside the city walls and staged a full-blown festival, complete with dancers and music. When the curious people of Latmus came outside to see what all the fuss was about, Artemisia and her crew stormed through the open gates and took the city.

Whatever else her early career consisted of, it is clear that Artemisia had been sailing for Xerxes for some time before the Battle of Salamis. Xerxes I, also known as Xerxes the Great, was a Persian king whose goal was to conquer all of Greece. He may be most familiar to the general public due to the graphic novel and film 300, which very loosely depicts the Battle of Thermopylae between the Greeks and Persians. A sequel to this film features a character based on Artemisia, portrayed by actress Eva Green.

In reality, Xerxes invaded in 480 BCE, taking many large cities, including Thermopylae, Artemisium, and even Athens. While Xerxes held all of Attica and Boeotia—a large chunk of present-day central Greece—the allied Greek forces held the key location the Isthmus of Corinth, which kept the Persians out of the Peloponnese Peninsula. If Corinth fell, Xerxes could march right into western Greece and keep expanding his holdings.

Xerxes believed the powerful Athenian navy had to be defeated for him to continue his Grecian domination. A decisive naval victory for either side could swing momentum the victor’s way. Both the allied Greeks and the Persians knew this, so each side began looking for the ideal opportunity for a naval battle. Xerxes was very concerned about his chances in a naval battle. His Persians were not particularly skilled sailors. Their capital city, Sula, was nearly a thousand miles from the sea, and they had not even had a navy of their own before the war. The Persian navy in the autumn of 480 BCE was cobbled together from privately owned ships and crews, a mismatched band of barely trained sailors.

Just as the pirating in antiquity was very different from the popular idea of pirating, the pirate ships of ancient times bore little resemblance to the tall-masted ships with billowing sails depicted in movies and television. The most common ships of the period were biremes and triremes, both a type of galley ship. Probably invented by the Phoenicians, these wooden ships were about 80 to 130 feet long and had either two (bi) or three (tri) banks of oars. The ships were built for speed and were comparatively easy to maneuver. They might have had a single sail for use when the conditions were favorable, but their main power came from rowers. A ship required anywhere from one hundred to two hundred rowers, often slaves. Biremes and triremes had sharp, pointed bows, sometimes covered in metal, for ramming other ships. Frequently the bows had large eyes painted on them so that they could “see” their prey. Many depictions of ships from this era still survive today on pottery held at the British Museum, among other places.

Ships chosen for use by the pirates were for the most part smaller, faster versions of the biremes and triremes. They were small, so as to be easy to hide and maneuver, and light enough to travel in shallow waters. A pirate ship could not win a head-to-head battle with a ramming bireme, so it had to be able to outrun the larger ships. Illyrian pirates were said to have invented their own special brand of pirate ships called lembi, which were small and very fast, with a single bank of oars and no sails. This allowed them to sneak up on larger ships, sack them, then zip away to shallower and safer waters. Less sophisticated pirates sailed in dugout canoes and raft-like craft. The Persian ships were the larger and less maneuverable kind, while the allied Greek ships were much swifter and lighter, similar to pirate ships, which would be a major factor in the coming battle.

Because Xerxes was not convinced that his ragtag navy could beat the allied Greeks in a fair fight, his plan was to continue waging war on land until the perfect opportunity to take Greece by surprise at sea came his way. Xerxes believed that opportunity finally came in September of 480 BCE, in what is now known as the Battle of Salamis.

According to Herodotus, the Greek general Themistocles laid a trap for the Persians. He sent a messenger, disguised as an escaped slave, into the Persian camp to tell the Persians that the Greek navy was anchored in the straits of Salamis. Salamis was a small island one nautical mile off the mainland coast, and the straits of Salamis were the narrow waters between the island and the coast. Themistocles hoped that the Persians would accept the bait and come to battle, where the Greeks—who would not be caught unawares after all—would surprise them with their organized and ready forces.

The narrow body of water seemed to Xerxes an ideal place to finish the Greeks off once and for all. He thought if he could block their exit from the straits on both sides he would effectively trap the Greeks inside the bay, where he could slaughter them. As he prepared for this battle, he asked his council of advisors, including Artemisia, what he should do.

The entire council voted unanimously to go into battle, except Artemisia. She advised him not to go, telling him to save his ships and avoid the battle. She reminded him that they had already taken Athens, which had been his goal, and there was no need to risk a naval battle against superior seamen. Besides that, their land force was still doing a fine job, and if they kept up the assault they would soon take all of Greece anyway without having to fight at sea at all.

Needless to say, her prudent advice did not go over well among the battle-hungry Persian men. They were power drunk after their recent victory against Athens, and they wanted to win the whole war sooner rather than later. Herodotus says that after Artemisia gave her advice those “who disliked and envied her, favored as she was by the king above all the rest of the allies, rejoiced at her declaration, expecting that her life would be the forfeit.” Unfortunately for them, Xerxes praised her advice, saying he valued her now more than ever. But nevertheless, he readied the fleet for battle.

Themistocles’s trap worked just as he had planned. The smaller, more maneuverable Greek fleet clustered along the shore near the Straits of Salamis, mimicking a cowering position. The larger Persian fleet, around twelve hundred ships, sailed into the narrow bay as they had planned, with lines of ships three deep.

When the Persian lines packed into the bay, the Greeks made their move. They surged forward, closing the gap between the two navies and effectively pinning the Persians against the mainland Greece shoreline. The front line of Persians was able to turn around to retreat, but they ran into their own second and third lines, unable to escape the press of their own forces. The confused and immobile Persians were fish in a barrel to the superior sailors of the Greek navy, who sailed their lighter ships around the edges of the Persian lines and rammed the Persian ships. Greek reinforcements sailed in from the north, blocking the exit into the Bay of Eleusis. The Persian ships were too bulky and too numerous to be able to make a hasty retreat.

What had started out as an easy win for the Persians was shaping up to be a devastating loss. The Carian ships, including Artemisia’s—identified as the Lykos by Klausmann, Meinzerin, and Kuhn, authors of Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger—were most likely in the second Persian line toward the southern side of the battle, near the Gulf of Aegina. Right in the middle of the fray, Artemisia realized her prediction had come true: the Greeks were going to defeat the Persians at sea. Persian ships were floating in pieces all around her, and her comrades were dead and dying in the water both in front of her and behind her, fallen from sinking ships or shot down by the Greek archers. The cracks of splintering wood echoed like gunshots while the screams of dying men filled the air.

Artemisia was not interested in joining the ranks of the Persian dead. It was time to make her escape. There was only one problem—she was in the middle of the battle, with allied Calyndian ships blocking her escape route toward Piraeus and the sea. The Greeks were gaining on her with every minute. What could she do?

The Lykos slammed into an ally ship at full speed. Some sources claim that before Artemisia rammed the ship, she lowered her Persian flag and raised a Greek one to confuse the Greek fleet. In fact, Polyaenus reports that Artemisia routinely sailed with two flags, one Greek and one “barbarian,” and she chose which one she flew based on where she was.

Xerxes had been watching the battle from a hill high above the bay with some of his advisors, one of whom saw Artemisia’s well-known ship sink another ship. The man wrongly assumed that she had taken down an enemy ship, not an ally, which would have raised Xerxes’s ire, so he informed the king of her victory. In response to her attack, Xerxes is reported to have said, “My men have become women and my women have become men.”

According to Herodotus, Xerxes never discovered that Artemisia had actually sunk a Persian ship because nobody from the Calyndian vessel lived to tell the tale of her treachery. But the Greeks knew—the Greek captain who witnessed it figured she was either herself a Greek or she had deserted the Persians.

The Greeks, thanks to Themistocles’s cunning trap and Xerxes’s refusal to take Artemisia’s advice, won the Battle of Salamis. Afterward, Artemisia almost completely disappears from historical records. Some accounts suggest that Xerxes sent her to the Greek city of Ephesus to raise his illegitimate sons and that she lived out her days as a surrogate mother and teacher to the boys. This idea fits in with the “bad girl goes good” archetypal plot, in which a wild woman is tamed and surrenders to her destined gender role. This type of story is perennially popular with male historians as a way of diminishing the power of a warrior woman’s legend. It is meant to teach the reader that although a woman can have her fun and possibly even do something great, in the end, she will go home and raise babies like she is supposed to. It is possible that Artemisia did retire after the battle or chose to lay low, surmising that her treachery against Xerxes might be discovered if she remained in the public eye and that she would pay for it with her life. The claim that she gave up seafaring life to care for Xerxes’s sons seems like a stretch.

Even more doubtfully, a scandalous story recounted by Photios, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople in the first century CE, claims that once Artemisia arrived in Ephesus, she fell in love with a man who rejected her and she killed herself. This story has not been readily accepted, and not just because Photios was writing about a thousand years after Artemisia’s death. Photios, a religious man, had an explicit motive for writing this story: to warn clergymen against forming romantic attachments. His agenda to spin a compelling cautionary tale may have led him to fabricate a ridiculously undignified end to a legendary pirate’s story.

This example of a historian changing, faking, or editing a woman pirate’s story to make his own point crops up again and again. For example, some scholarship suggests that Queen Dido of Aeneid fame was a warrior and perhaps even a pirate herself. Klausmann, Meinzerin, and Kuhn explain that Elissa of Tyre, a warrior and leader, is the person on whom Virgil based his portrayal of Dido in the Aeneid. However, Virgil played fast and loose with dates and locations, twisting Elissa’s life story for his own purposes and making “Dido” into an ideal Roman woman, then using her to justify the Punic-Roman vendetta.

According to Klausmann, Meinzerin, and Kuhn, the real Elissa/Dido was not only a founder of Carthage but also a pirate. She was the firstborn child of the king of Tyre, a city in Phoenicia, which was a group of several allied ports in the eastern Mediterranean and home to a vibrant community of sailors and traders. She was heir to the throne, but her brother Pygmalion ousted her and claimed it for himself. She fled the city in search of a place to found a new Phoenician homeland. Over her eleven-year odyssey, she endured many hardships and visited many strange places before finally landing in present-day Tunisia, where she would found the city of Carthage. Other scholars disagree with this assessment, stating that numerous historical and biblical accounts establish Elissa’s identity and place her much too late in time to have been alive—never mind romantically involved—with Aeneas during his flight from Troy. However, it is an intriguing theory that Virgil co-opted heroic Elissa and made her into the lovelorn Dido, and it is certainly not impossible that a heroine could be slandered by historians in such a way.

No matter what really happened at the end of Artemisia’s life, the stories that exist about her paint a fascinating picture of an early pirate queen who was not afraid to stand up to a king or to turn her back on her allies to save her own skin. This act of self-preservation will serve as a prototype for later female pirates’ nationless ways. Two hundred fifty years later, another female pirate would follow in Artemisia’s footsteps—Queen Teuta of Illyria.

Much of what is known about Queen Teuta comes from hostage-turned-tutor-turned-author Polybius, who wrote The Histories, a forty-volume work of ancient history of which only five volumes survive today. As a Greek, he would have grown up exposed to Hellenic attitudes about women. This antiwomen bias that claimed women were hyperemotional and not valued in the social sphere outside domestic tasks, along with some of the sources he drew on to write his books, might have colored his treatment of Teuta. Nevertheless, he is the largest source there is on Queen Teuta and therefore cannot be avoided in recounting her life. The reader must, however, remember his bias and weigh his statements accordingly.

Queen Teuta’s rise to power began when her husband, King Agron, died as a result of a drinking binge. Illyria was a city-state along the coast of the Adriatic Sea, located in the present-day Balkan Peninsula. In 231 BCE Agron’s military forces defeated the Greek city-state of Aetolia, and the king threw a banquet in celebration. He partied a little too hard and died a week later. His death gave Teuta a chance to rule through her stepson Pinnes, for whom she served as regent during his infancy.

Upon taking the throne, Teuta decided to expand Illyria’s riches. She granted every ship in her navy a license that gave them permission to attack ships from other city-states—even city-states with which Illyria was currently at peace. Essentially, Queen Teuta turned her whole fleet into pirates and encouraged them to plunder as much as they liked, on land or sea—provided they brought the riches home to Illyria, of course.

Teuta’s pirates were wildly successful. They preferred land pillaging to sea pillaging and plundered villages up and down the Illyrian and Italian coast. Twin cities, meant to curb piracy, instead worked very much to the Illyrians’ advantage as they looted without fear of reprisals.

The development of twin cities—one close to shore for commercial purposes and one farther inland to house the military forces and other resources—was a solution that kept the riches and resources of the city safe from attackers, including pirates. Piracy had weighed heavily on the minds of city planners as they developed their communities. People were so afraid of attacks that they didn’t dare build their cities along the coastline, even though that was the most logical thing to do for trade purposes.

A famous example of this twin cities construction was Athens and Piraeus. Athens, located twelve miles inland, was the center of the arts, culture, and philosophy for all of Greece. The city was built around the Acropolis, a high peak in the middle of the city crowned with temples and monuments to the gods. Athens featured the senate building, the agora (outdoor marketplace), the Panathenaic stadium where the precursor to the Olympic Games was held, and numerous theaters and temples.

Piraeus was the port of Athens and its twin. Everything that Athens needed from elsewhere came in through Piraeus. It consisted of three separate ports—one for commercial work and two for the navy. Piraeus was a thriving city in its own right. It hosted shipyards where navy ships were constructed, offices, warehouses, and brothels. It was not the hub of culture and sophistication that Athens was, but without it, Athens could not exist.

Two long walls connected Athens to Piraeus. These walls were four and a half miles long, with a space between them where people and animals could travel. Athens was also surrounded by high walls, which protected the city from invaders and ensured that supplies could be transported from the port of Piraeus during a siege or warfare. As long as Athens was not cut off from Piraeus, it would be able to survive.

This twin cities idea, intended in part to help curb piracy, instead served to further its influence. When the pirates such as Teuta and her band discovered that the coastal cities had to wait for the local military force to make the journey from the inland city in order to mount a defense, they knew they could sack a town and be long gone before the guard made its way to them.

Teuta herself occasionally accompanied her pirates on the raids and enthusiastically participated in the mayhem. Polybius tells a story of Teuta and her crew landing outside a city and approaching the wall with water jugs. The crew cried out that they were dying of thirst and begged for water. When the citizens opened the gate, Teuta and her crew ditched the jugs, grabbed the swords that were hidden inside them, and proceeded to attack the town.

Teuta became known as the Terror of the Adriatic. Once she tired of winning every battle she started close to home, she turned her eyes to the Romans and the riches they had to offer. Her ships attacked a number of Roman merchant vessels, meting out various horrors that ranged from plundering the ship’s goods to enslaving the crew. Polybius claims these actions got the attention of the Roman government, which decided to send two emissaries to Queen Teuta to put this woman in her place and make sure she understood that Rome was not to be treated rudely.

When Roman brothers Gaius and Lucius Coruncanius arrived in Illyria, they attempted to engage in civil discourse with the queen. The brothers requested that she issue a ban on attacking Rome, an idea she listened to with an “insolent and disdainful air,” according to Polybius. She then replied that Illyria’s policy was not to interfere with private citizens’ right to attack whom they chose, even if that happened to be Rome. Lucius, the younger brother, would not take this insult to Rome lying down and told her either she would issue the ban or they would make her issue it. Teuta received this threat with “womanish passion” and “unreasoning anger.”

The Roman negotiators, doubtless shocked to their very core that anyone, let alone a woman, had the audacity to disobey them, started off toward home. Unluckily for Lucius, Teuta’s men were obedient to her, and a group of them carried out her orders to “kill the one who had used his plainness” in speaking so rudely to the queen. (Another historian, Appian, tells the story a little differently, attributing the murder of Lucius to Teuta’s husband, King Agron, who does not die as early on in his version of the story.)

According to Polybius, Rome was very upset by Teuta’s assassination of Lucius. Lucius’s death alone, however, was not enough to goad Rome into war with Illyria. Teuta might have escaped Rome’s notice altogether if she had refrained from picking up her late husband’s land campaign. The queen, along with her royal governor Demetrius, had begun capturing cities along the western coast of present-day Greece. That move expanded Illyria’s territory southward and brought them dangerously close to interfering with Roman land interests. Now Teuta was no longer just the leader of an annoying pirate band; she was a legitimate threat. When she came knocking on Rome’s back door, they had to act.

In 229 BCE Rome declared war against Illyria and readied sea and land campaigns of its own against her. Unfortunately for Teuta, her reign of terror over the entire region had left many Greek provinces petrified, and they were willing to turn to any major power who promised to oppose her—including their enemies the Romans. Under the guise of protection from the big bad Illyrians, the Romans gobbled up territories all around Illyria, assuring the people that Rome would aid them in their fight against Queen Teuta—all for the small price of complete surrender to the Romans.

Rome’s naval campaign was as successful as its land campaign, particularly because Teuta’s own governor Demetrius sold her out to the Romans; he remained in power and with a large part of her land after her surrender. With the Illyrian forces on the run, Teuta was forced to flee from her capital city to her fortress at Rhizon, where she and the subjects who remained loyal to her endured a yearlong siege.

Finally, in 228 BCE, Teuta’s supplies and fortifications against the siege gave out, and she was forced to surrender. She sent messengers to Rome to negotiate a treaty. According to Polybius, she agreed “to pay a fixed tribute, and to abandon all Illyricum, with the exception of some few districts: and what affected Greece more than anything, she agreed not to sail beyond Lissus with more than two galleys, and those unarmed.” In contrast, Appian claims she begged forgiveness from the Romans for the dirty deeds done not by her but by her husband.

Regardless of the specifics, Rome graciously forgave her and accepted her surrender. After that, Teuta virtually disappears from historical records. When Teuta’s stepson Pinnes came of age, he took the throne.

Polybius had many motives for portraying Queen Teuta as a power-hungry villain. First, many of his primary sources were Roman authors, who would naturally paint Teuta as the instigator of war and color themselves blameless. Also, he probably held with the antiwoman bias of his time and wanted to ensure that future generations of Hellenes knew the consequences of putting a woman on the throne. This type of historical revisionism runs rampant on the journey through pirate history.

Fast forward about a thousand years, and historical revisionism has not been left behind. In fact, the Viking chroniclers take it to a whole new level, weaving bare historical records with outlandish fictions to spin their stories of dangerous feminine power. The wild Viking women pirates were—according to sources from the time—in the end conquered by men and returned safely to the home, where they became housewives and mothers. Did the Viking women pirates even exist, or were they just the product of men’s imaginations used to warn women to stay in line?