Humanities West: Is Piracy the Second Oldest Profession? September 16, 2012

Piracy on the high seas is age-old. Homer and Thucydides told of pirates roaming the Mediterranean. Julius Caesar himself was ransomed. Augustus Caesar's fleets vanquished them and the Byzantines kept them at bay, but the Ottoman Turks unleashed the Barbary Coast pirates, while European rivals in trade and at war preyed on one another through state-sponsored privateering. The long history of piracy has been immortalized, sometimes romanticized, in the world's artistic heritage.