'Ben-Hur' Got It Wrong

The Roman emperor Augustus formed the first professional, full-time Roman Navy, as an auxiliary branch of the Roman army around the year 30BCE. At first, it was made up of ships captured from Anthony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium and based at a place called Forum Iulii (modern Frejus, near Marseille, France).

Very quickly, the fledgling navy was split and based on either Italian coast, the main fleet on the Bay of Naples, at Misenum, the other, slightly smaller fleet at Ravenna, on the Adriatic. Other fleets soon followed. Egypt, Germany, Britain, Syria, Pontus (the Black Sea) and the two (Upper and Lower) Danube fleets.

The British, German and Danube Fleets existed to guard the Roman frontier, whilst the other fleets looked after sea travel in the Mediterranean and Black Sea. It is probably not by chance that instances of piracy dropped considerably during the height of the Roman Empire.


But, who were the men who worked aboard these fleets? We don't know much about them, because what few books were written by the Romans about maritime matters haven't survived, but there are two good sources of information, although they are both somewhat limited. The first is the military honourable discharge Diploma, made out of bronze and given to all auxiliary Roman soldiers (up until about the year 250CE), who completed their enlistment period. The other source of data are the small stone burial memorials put up by the families/friends/slaves of the auxiliaries themselves.

All together, there are no more than 1,000 records still extant, but one or two are still being discovered every year and sometimes they tell us the auxiliary's name, what fleet he belonged to, where he came from, what job he held aboard ship and what rank he held. Most records won't hold all of this information, because many were broken in antiquity.

What makes me say that Ben-Hur was wrong, though? Surely it doesn't say on somebody's gravestone that he wasn't a slave? In fact, this information came from two surviving Roman documents. The first were a collection of letters by the Roman writer, Pliny the Younger. During his career, he held the post of Governor of Bithynia and, whilst he was there, one of his assistants came to him with a problem. It seemed that amongst the Army recruits that year, there were two slaves. Pliny wrote to the emperor Trajan and asked him what to do. Trajan replied that if the slaves had joined up knowing they weren't supposed to do so, they were to be executed immediately!

The second document is far longer and was compiled by the Byzantine emperor Justinian to form the basis of his law code. In it, fossilised, as it were, are laws which dated right back to Imperial Roman times, one of which said, 'Slaves are prohibited from joining the military. If they do so, it is a capital crime'. Another entry in the Law Code, says explicitly, that 'Sailors and rowers of the fleets are also soldiers... '.

Couldn't be clearer, no galley slaves in the Roman navy, instead freeborn men from the Roman provinces were recruited to sail the ship and join the Marines.

These men came from all parts of the Roman empire, many from Thrace (in what is now Bulgaria), from Turkey and from Egypt (and native Egyptians were forbidden to join any military unit except for the Misenum fleet). So far, there is only one record which names a man from Britannia and he came from Isca Dumnorium, a city that is now called Exeter. He joined the German fleet and was buried near Cologne, which was the HQ, German Fleet.

Something which seems very odd about the auxiliaries' gravestones is that there are plenty to ship commanders and senior officers (centurions) but only one or two to rowers, or sail handlers. It could be that the men who actually worked the ships came from families which were illiterate, and so, didn't bother with gravestones, but it seems odd that a Roman warship, with maybe 120 rowers, only shows gravestones for one or two officers and no rowers. Maybe only officers' families could afford a gravestone?

And, what about the ships themselves? It seems that the workhorse of the two Italian fleets was the Trireme (otherwise known as a 'Three'). This ship was long, thin and fast, a definite warship. It carried 3 banks or rowers and probably had about 120 oars all together.

The provincial fleets were smaller and their ships were almost certainly a class called 'liburnians'. These ships were biremes, that is, they had 2 banks of oars and were slightly shorter than a Trireme. However, there were still long and fast and pictures on Trajan's column in Rome, show them with rams fixed to their bows, so that they, too, were fighting ships. The Danube and Rhine fleets also had fleets of smaller ships which acted as river patrol boats and guarded the far-flung frontiers. Some of these smaller ships (De Meern type) have actually been preserved in the mud of the river Rhine in Holland and were excavated a couple of years ago

As well as these ships, there were also a few far bigger vessels, the 'Fours' and 'Fives', whilst the Misenum Fleet had one big 'Six', named after the goddess 'Ops'.

Why would a provincial decide to sign up to join one of the fleets? Somebody who had been messing about in boats since they were a boy probably wouldn't have been very interested in joining the infantry and the Roman Army offered reasonable pay, a roof over your head, meals, and a qualified doctor around if you got sick. In all, the Roman army was probably a better service than most armies were, right up until WW1!

Auxiliary service also offered a major incentive to join up. Roman citizenship was jealously guarded. Until 212CE, when it was extended throughout the empire, most provincials wouldn't have had a hope of becoming citizens. However, if you joined the Auxiliaries and managed to survive to get your Honourable Discharge (25 years for infantrymen, 26 years for fleet personnel), then you automatically got not only Roman citizenship for yourself, but it was guaranteed for any children you had later on. (At some points, it was even given to sons auxiliaries had whilst still serving, which theoretically, was illegal, since soldiers weren't allowed to marry). Better still, the senior officers were given a discharge bonus which would have allowed them to buy into the equestrian order (minor aristocracy) and which opened the possibility of further plum jobs.

Would they have survived to get their Honourable Discharges, though? Seafaring is not the safest career, but it actually seems as if fleet auxiliaries beat the statistical odds for survival, slightly. The age at which Romans died is very skewed because so many died aged or under. If you could survive till you were 10, you had a good chance of making it to age 30, but many of the auxiliaries who had their ages on their gravestones seem to have lived on into their late 40s and early 50s. One grizzled old veteran actually made it to 90!

I have been researching the Roman navy for several years and I often catch mistakes like the 'Ben-Hur' story in historical novels, usually because so little has been written about the fleets.
I'm retired now, but I originally trained as an archaeologist, although a combination of bad health and bad luck forced me to give up my career before it had really gotten started.
As well as research into the Fleets, I also work on local history and write novels in my spare time (which are available as 'publish-on-demand' books).