The Ancients - Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Strait of Messina

Episode Date: July 6, 2021

Dividing Sicily from Italy, the Strait of Messina is a small stretch of water with an incredible history that stretches back to ancient times. It was likely here that the mythical sea monsters of Scylla and Charybdis were supposed to have wreaked havoc on Odysseus’ crew. It was an area of the ancient Mediterranean renowned for its whirlpools and vicious currents. And it was also on either side of this strait, that two ancient cities enjoyed a long and connected history: Rhegium and Messana. To shine a light on this waterway’s importance in antiquity, Tristan was delighted to be joined by Dustin Mackenzie from Macquarie University.

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Oxus in Afghanistan, the Pamirs, the Hindu Kush, the Alps and Hannibal's Crossing and many many others. In today's podcast we're going to be focusing on one such feature, the importance of a narrow stretch of water that divides Sicily and southern Italy, the Strait of Messina. Now join me to talk about the importance of this narrow stretch of water, particularly for two cities in antiquity, the cities of Messana and Regium. I was delighted to be joined by Dustin McKenzie, a PhD student from Macquarie University in Sydney. Now, a few years back when I was studying at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Dustin taught me for a short period of time, so it was great to see him again and to talk all things the Strait of Messina. Here's Dustin.

Dustin it is great to see you again how have you been? Good man good lovely to see you again it's been a few years last time we spoke I was halfway through the MPhil at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. And now I'm halfway through the PhD at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. And Macquarie University, not Macquarie University, a mistake I have made in the past and I'm now learning from. But we are talking about another M today. We are talking about this amazing, this remarkable strait, the Strait of Messina in antiquity that's between Italy and Sicily. And this is an amazing stretch of water. It feels like the Hellespont of the West, this significant, small stretch of water that boasts

a very important history in antiquity. Yeah, it gets identified pretty early on, I'd say by the Greeks and then later the the Romans as not only a very strategic space, but a space that has a lot of power to it, both physically, mechanically, but socially and religiously. So it soaks up a lot of imagery and meaning over the years. Now, start with the background. And I kind of mentioned it there, but Dustin, let's really set the scene. Where is the Stit of messina yeah so the strait of messina as you said is that little bit of water that separates italy and sicily at its narrowest it's only three kilometers thereabouts

wide and at its shallowest it's only 70 meters deep so that's right at the northeast tip of sicily there that narrowest bit that's very at the northeast tip of Sicily there, that narrowest bit. That's very shallow, very narrow. Otherwise, on average, kind of five to six kilometers across. And if you're on either bank, Sicily's bank looking east or Italy's bank looking west, you do have this wonderful optical illusion where it almost looks like you're not looking in the Mediterranean at all. You're looking at a lake, almost, because of the way the boundaries of the island and the peninsula kind of wrap around one another. So it's quite a breathtaking view for the first time you see it. Is it like one of those places, I've never been, but is it like one of those places like Pompeii

when you visit there, you hear all about it, but when you actually visit it, you really appreciate the outstanding geography of the place. Yeah, I think so. As with Pompeii, you can take an appreciation of the space and the beauty of the space on its own as a landmark, as this archaeological site. But if you have a bit of understanding of the history of the space, it adds that much more gravitas to what you're feeling, what you're experiencing for example my first time seeing the strait in person i was driving along the highway along the north of the island from palermo and the west over to masana and you kind of come out of a tunnel and then all of a sudden you're looking down at the strait coming down from the mountains

and it takes you a moment where you're like what what is this lake doing here? Oh, I see. I see a sea. It's actually connecting two different seas. And also, just hang on that for a moment. So we've got this coastal region, this flat coastal region right next to the strait. But as you mentioned just there, towering right behind it are these impressive mountains too. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you've got Messana in Sicily, which is basically sandwiched between the Nobrodi's mountains and the strait, and then modern Reggio Calabria on the east,

on the Italian bank, with the tail end of the Apennines right behind it as well. So both of these cities, both of these ancient poleis aren't dealing with that much kind of farmable land, really. They're making clever use of terraces and trade, basically. Well, we'll go on to that, but let's stick on the two cities then for a moment. And let's start with Regio, ancient Regium. This is a city with Greek origins. Yeah, yeah. It's actually founded by Masana. Some Euboean settlers show up in the 8th century, thereabouts, as Greek settlers are colonizing what will become Magna Graecia. And it seems that they very quickly realized the strategic potential of the strait. It is the most direct

route through to the western shore of Italy. So they set up Messana on the Sicilian coast in its naturally curved harbour. So it gets its original name Zuncle from the Greek for sickle shape. And then that same century, a few years later, the same group founds Reggio on the other side. I imagine to capitalise on the space. So that's impressive that all from basically the origins, that there are very close connections between these two cities. And does this really emphasise how in their long history, even before the Romans come, that these two settlements, they are linked to the tracts of land opposite them? So Regium's early history is linked to that of Sicily, but also Messana's early history is linked to that of southern Italy. Yeah, very much's early history is linked to that of southern Italy.

Yeah, very much so. There is a continuity back and forth between the two that you can recognise in the archaeological evidence and the sources themselves tell us how similar these people are, how much back and forth there is between the two. The fact that you can hear dogs bark and cocks crow from one shore to the other, and at all times, weather permitting, you can hear dogs bark and cocks crow from one shore to the other. And at all times, weather permitting, you can see your sister city across the strait, which I can only imagine builds a certain level of community or rivalry. Or rivalry. Well, we'll get onto that in a second. Well, let's focus then on Masana for a little bit, because this has got a really extraordinary history, sometimes with the Italian peninsula. And Dustin, just tell us through the story of the Mamatimes quickly,

because I think this is a really amazing, infamous story, but an interesting one nonetheless. Yeah. So for those of you who are not familiar, the Mamatimes are this almost mythical or legendary group of people at this point. They're this group of Campanian mercenaries, allegedly Campanian mercenaries, we're told they're Campanian, who were in the employ of Syracuse. And then eventually they move on from that job. They start marching north and they wind up in Masana, at which point they say, you know what, this isn't all that bad. And they just kind of take it for themselves.

And depending which source you are referring to here, some sources are quite cutthroat and the Mamatines came in and they killed all the men of age and married all their wives and took the cities for themselves. Some later, more apologetic sources are like, oh no, the Mamatines were invited in because of X, Y, and Z. So they very quickly established themselves in Messana as a very prominent force to be reckoned with. And of course, they play a key role in the First Punic War. And what is the role then they therefore play in the First Punic War, which really starts linking them with Rome? Yeah, so you have this whole tug of war going on behind the scenes

between Rome and Carthage that I'm sure much of your audience are familiar with. And alongside that, you have this kind of trend in antiquity of smaller cities requesting garrisons from larger cities as security and as a way to build alliances. Messana, which is now led by the Mamertines, begins by inviting a Carthaginian garrison into its city and then very quickly swaps sides and decides, no, thank you, we'd rather have the Romans here. This is kind of, it's seen by many as kind of a match that lights the tensions between Rome and Carthage,

where Rome is now saying, ah, no, we have a right to be here. Carthage is saying, no, we were here first. Thank you very much. And this gives Rome their foothold in Sicily, which is, I would argue, one of the major turning points of Rome as a city and as an ancient Mediterranean power. I love the fact that you mentioned that it was a foothold for the Romans in the first Punic War. And is this really evidence for how the Strait of Messina in antiquity, even before the Romans really come on the scene, that this Strait of Water, this small stretch of water, was never a solid, hard boundary line between ancient Italy

and ancient Sicily? Yeah, very much so. It's seen as a mutable space long before the Romans show up. So in the fourth century, you have Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, taking over the entirety of the eastern coast of Sicily and parts of South Italy, and to the point where Sicily, for him, South Italy and he tries, or we are told that he wished to dig a trench across Calabria and kind of sever the toe of Italy and building a second straight almost to kind of draw that whole of Calabria over towards Sicily.

Wow. So where you draw the line really depends who you're asking and when and what their political motivations are. Well, talking about political motivations, why is the year 36 BC so significant in the history of the Strait? 36 BC is a year I love

and it makes me sad. So 36 BC notably is the Battle of Nellocus. And this is the kind of deciding naval battle between Octavian, between the younger Caesar, and between Sextus Pompeius, who I believe is the last surviving son of Pompey at this point. At the very least, the last surviving prominent son. So with Caesar's death in 44 and the prescriptions through to 43, Sextus is labeled one of the enemies of the state, flees to Messana and uses the political capital that the Pompeius name has in Sicily to establish his base of operations there as one of the kind of last bastions of the Republic. Fast forward

several years of back and forth, and yeah, 36 BC is where Octavian and his forces managed to weasel out Sextus from Messana and take Sicily. And what happens as a consequence to Sicily and the Strait of Messana? From this point on, the border, the boundary, the strait itself is kind of established politically as the hard boundary between what is and is not Italy and what is and is not the province of Sicily for several hundred years. And by the time that Sicily as a province is kind of rolled into Italia proper, that distinction doesn't, it does not carry the same weight as it would because there's already been so many expansions of citizenship and such. 36 BC does kind of cement the strait as the official divide

between Sicily and Italy, which looking at it in the 21st century on a map seems like a very normal thing to do. Yeah, there's a straight of water there. Let's put the boundary there. But as we've discussed, that's not that straightforward. Exactly. So you kind of precipitated what the next question would be. So this political boundary is now a political boundary, but socially and culturally, it is less straightforward. There is, shall we say say continuation of what's been happening before yeah very much so it seems that from the kind of third century bc through to the first century bc you have a bit of cultural stagnation economic stagnation in the area where the strait is kind of just being used as kind of Rome's foothold in the area

with some potential military hiccups, I guess, here and there. But from the arisal of the the establishment of the empire, the relation between Regio and Messana only continues from strength to strength as it becomes this quite prominent trade hub, as it becomes a major port of the region, as it becomes the main space through which goods from the east are transported through to Rome. And the people of Messana and the people of Reggio do not seem to mind all that much that there is this, quote, political boundary between them. So although there's this boundary, they are still very much united, these two cities, by the trade routes that are flowing right through, well, the centre, right through the

Strait of Messina. Yeah. You can imagine the Roman political state at the top level has a vested interest in what is Italy and what isn't Italy. That makes an amount of sense. But at the base level, at the everyday level of merchants, traders, artisans, everyday folk living in Masana and Reggio, that distinction, what is that to them? What does that matter when you're running a ceramics factory in Reggio that exports brick tiles and housing bricks to Messana. And so what is the surviving archaeology at Messana and at Regium telling us about where these traders are coming from in the empire? In a word, fragmentary. So we've mentioned Pompeii before. Pompeii, of course has the the luxury of being buried by

vesuvius masana and reggio have the luxury of being in an incredibly seismically active area where each city has been leveled several times over the last 2 000 years to the point where any kind of excavation in the area is fraught and very tricky. So what evidence we do have is, for the most part, I would say inscriptions and epitaphs. They are a large body of evidence that can tell us a lot about the kinds of people who are living in this region and passing through this region. We don't have much in the way of temples. We don't have much in the way of temples, we don't have much in the way of even solid concrete knowledge of where the Forum and the Agora were, but we do have a lot of small personal pieces of archaeological evidence. That's interesting. So it's the amount of the inscriptions that survive that are telling us so much about the culture and the identity

of these two prime cities of Messana and Regium, particularly in the Roman imperial period? Yeah, very much so. Yeah. So we've got, as a small example, in the third century AD, you have one epitaph from a man from Turkey who was a merchant of Tyche amulets. So good luck amulets. And what's his name here? Ulpius Nicophoros from Syrian Antioch. And there's just this quite fascinating body of inscriptions of these everyday people going about their lives. It's impossible for the most part for us to say whether they lived there or whether they were passing through. But if nothing else, their epitaphs definitely highlight them as a foreigner, as not from this region. So what are these inscriptions? You

mentioned these people coming from further east. What are these inscriptions telling us about the makeup of the people who lived in these cities? For instance, what languages do we think they really spoke? Certainly, it's a very metropolitan, cosmopolitan area by virtue of being such a prominent port and kind of crossroads of trade routes. Strictly speaking about the epigraphic record, you have about two to one split of Greek to Latin. Wow. across regio and masana and that kind of supports what we see in the literature in the ancient literature as well with strabo saying that regium is one of the last three places in italy that speaks greek by his time uh so it's regio tarentum and naples i believe were the three he cites as the last three bastions of greek language on the peninsula that's really really interesting and that's why i said wow just there's because messana and regium in the roman imperial period this really feels like the

heart of the roman empire and yet you have these bustling trading cities at the bottom of italy still in the majority speaking greek rather than latin yeah and it takes a long time for Latin to kick in as the language of official texts. When you consider that you have this strong Roman imperial, lowercase i imperial presence in the area from the third century, you have official honorifics and dedications being put up in the first century AD that are in Greek. And presenting the full trianomena of the Roman officials in Greek. So going on a bit further than that, what does this tell us about, for let's say, the local elites of places like Regium or Messana? Does it really seem to emphasise that these elites had been there since, well, pre-Roman times?

Yeah, and it tells us, I think more so, it gives us this interesting insight into the way Roman elites operate. You kind of govern a level Roman elites from these old aristocratic families. And to me, it gives us an insight into the flexibility involved in that position. You are one of these elite Romans going down to Reggio for whatever station you've been set there. And from the evidence, there's no indication

that they're kind of kicking up a stink and demanding things or posted in Latin or whatever. It's like, no, this is the way the city has operated for now hundreds of years so for all of our discussion about kind of the boot of roman imperialism and it was a boot often there seems to be quite a lot of care and respect for the continuation of the culture and the cultural processes in the strait do you think these cities are therefore, shall we say, a microcosm for the cosmopolitan nature, the interconnected, the global nature of the Roman Empire? Yeah, very much so. This idea of the global impact and the global reality of the Roman Empire is one that very much rests at the centre of my research, looking at the way trade routes connect people, the way that

people connect people, the ways that we should be looking at these regions beyond the lines in the sand that were drawn 2,000 years ago, and that we need to consider the fact that these spaces were mutable, were liminal, and were not so black and white as we might kind of default to thinking today. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers and over on the Warfare podcast, we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict. We've got the classics. Understandably, when we see it from hindsight,

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Subscribe to Warfare from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Join us on the front line of military history and dustin what are some of the most extraordinary inscriptions in your opinion from this this area that really emphasizes that this link was much more permeable than we might think this boundary i'm going to pull up one in particular because it is my favorite by a long while. So it was discovered in the 90s and it's only been published officially in 2016. And it's about Orion in his role as a foundation deity of the straights. I believe it's in Diodorus Siculus who talks about how Orion helped build Cape Polaris, which is the Northeastern Cape of Sicily. I'll skip straight

to the English translation of this inscription. It's over five lines. It's, Hail, blessed one, August Scion of our land. The August Scion being Orion, the August star. Guardian of Zankul with its safe haven and of Cape Polaris, watching over the narrow firth and the flood tide of the And there's just a lot here. Not only is the English there, all English translation is a bit stilted, mine especially, but it doesn't do justice to the fact that this inscription is five lines of dactylic hexameter written in greek in the second century a.d in the kind of heart of rome's trade network so in the heart of rome's trade network at the height of the roman empire at the strait in the cities in the strait one of the religious cults that seems to be of prime of

place is this one stretching back hundreds of years to the greek period to a greek mythological myth yeah and the language itself is kind of harnessing the the archaicness of the space right they they refer to the city as zankal it hasn't been Zankul since like the 5th century BC. So it's 700 years removed at this point, but there's still that memory and that understanding of the space and the mythical importance of it. So why is this inscription, Dustin, so important and so significant, so interesting when looking at the connectivity of this part of the ancient world? at the connectivity of this part of the ancient world. It tells us a lot not only about things we might typically hope to find in inscriptions, like names of people, ranks of people, what their jobs were, how long they lived, but it gives us an idea of how people conceive the world as well. The fourth

and fifth lines, so the final two lines of the inscription, in the unceasing ebb and flow of the pursuing waves, the Tyrrhenian waters take up arms against the Adriatic. That gives us just such a stunning insight into the level of understanding the ancient people had about the world around them and how it functioned. That's a pretty bang-on description of how the strait operates as a hydrographic feature. Because this is where one sea ends and then another sea ends and they link up, as it were, in quite a maritime danger zone. Yeah, exactly, yeah. It's where the Tyrrhenian and the Adriatic meet.

Let's see if I can get this right. The warmer Tyrrhenian is flowing over the colder Adriatic and the currents switch every six hours. And at this point, you have the legendary mythical kind of whirlpools and choppy wages and mirages appearing in that very narrow section we talked about right at the beginning of kind of three kilometers by 70 meters deep. You have up to a million cubic meters of water being pushed through every second. It's an absurdly large, powerful force happening here multiple times a day, every day. And it's stunning to see that those mechanics understood in such a

clear and poetic way. Well, keeping on the Straits themselves for a bit then, what do the literary sources of antiquity, what do they tell us about the Straits? Do they give a similar vein, as it were, to what you've just said? Do they always seem to portray the Straits as this quite maritime danger zone, or do they portray it in various different ways? It kind of depends who you're talking to, really. Similarly to whether or not you consider the Straits a boundary, whether or not you consider it a danger zone also depends who you're talking to. Famously, of course, it is the home of Scylla and Charybdis. So today you have the modern town of Scylla, which rests on a quite prominent cliff on the kind of the north

western tip of the toe of Italy. And then you have the whirlpools forming from these actions taking place in the water from the currents being Charybdis and then you have some sources such as book three book three of the aeneid where aeneas is on his way to he's received his marching orders he's on his way to carthage and he's told on his journey do not go into the strait that's not a good time and as they're sailing past you get these wonderful images of the waves licking at the stars and then falling to the depths of the underworld as the sky shakes and the seas boil. Compare that to something like Cicero, who in multiple texts mentions the strait as the gateway to Rome's empire. It is the method through which Rome achieves all it does. through which Rome achieves all it does.

And let's keep on Cicero then for a bit, because Cicero's writings and his history, well, what he gets involved in, he actually has quite an active connection with the Strait and with the city of Messana. Yeah, so famously, Messana and Sicily quite heavily involved in Cicero's Varine Orations. So this is Cicero's kind of landmark oration that puts him on the map as a force to be reckoned with in the rhetorical spheres of Rome,

where he so thoroughly dismantles the accused governor Veres of misconduct that he only has to present the opening act and Veres flees. Cicero then kind of takes his victory lap after the fact and publishes the Varan orations in their entirety. kind of takes his victory lap after the fact and publishes the Varan orations in their entirety. The fifth oration, I believe, features quite a lengthy passage about Verres' unlawful execution of a Roman citizen on the strait, where he's crucified in Messana and forced to look out across the strait at Italy, where he's so close to his homeland, he's so close to the land of justice and law, but it's still out of reach. It's quite interesting. I mean, if I was listening to that, from what you said there, and they were saying that Italy is the land of justice and law and Sicily is this very different

place. Just from there, it sounded like this strait was a boundary in certain senses, perhaps in political senses. But once again, teaming back to this idea that you've really emphasised during this podcast, that socially and culturally, it was very similar at Messana to what it would have been like across the strait at Regium. Yeah. And there was very much that idea of, while it is a boundary, sometimes that boundary can be easily broken and easily thwarted. So just popping back to Cicero there, his point is not that just this individual who was crucified is forced to look at his homeland, but it's that it's right there. And if we don't pull up Verres and make an example of him, well, that could be here next. And you see that in the rhetoric around Spartacus as well, and Spartacus's rebellion. They make it

right down to the strait. And the fear is that should they cross the strait, they're going to rile up all those pesky slaves that were causing all those rebellions in the second century. We can't have that happening again. And as a brief side, I'm in no way a modern historian, but you have many accounts of the fascist Italian soldiers in World War II throwing down their arms as soon as the allies forded the strait and entered italy from sicily i've been meaning to watch von ryan's express i've been told to watch von ryan's express it all happens in that film so there even today there is that very powerful idea of if you ford the strait you take whichever part of land you're going on to keeping on the political side i I guess, a bit longer.

But also this idea that actually there is so many similarities, so much strength between Regium and Messana that continues in antiquity. We see with so many cities in antiquity, and particularly, I think, in Hellenic city-states and Greek city-states, those city-states that are very close to each other, whether it's Athens and Thebes or Athens and Corinth or Elis and nearby city-states that are very close to each other whether it's Athens and Thebes or Athens and Corinth or Elis and nearby city-states this intense rivalry this intense rivalry this hatred brimming between them do we see anything similar between Regium and Messana which geographically are very close but of course separated by the significant stretch of water? Only in very specific instances. And I struggled, I'm sure one will be pointed out to me after the

fact, but I struggled to think of one that is the result of the people of Messana and Regio. If they're ever at odds, it's usually other powers, whether they be tyrants or governors or armies, using them for their own means. And I think a lot of that comes down to the fact, as we discussed, they do feel very isolated with the mountains to their back, the shores creating this almost a mirage that they're in a lake and the cities looking out across one another. There's an understanding that I believe that they share the same space, but they kind of need each other almost. And they both have such good access to trade routes and the products of Sicily and Italy, respectively, that there doesn't seem to be a large

amount of contest between the two over those resources. So why do you think that they really do need each other? What's the cause for this necessity, this need? That is something I'm unpacking, to put it lightly. I might have more for you in a year and a half when I finish the PhD, but I think it's just this long history they have of back and forth. It's this long history of connection. I think it helps that neither city was ever powerful enough in its own right to kind of trigger a kind of Athen-Thebes situation. Throughout the Greek and Hellenistic period, they're largely kept in check by Syracuse, by Carthage, by the other powerful cities of Magna Graecia. And then by the time Rome shows up,

Rome more or less, save a few decades, has control of both cities save some like rebellious garrisons and whatnot is this perhaps a reason then the key commercial reason of these two cities is a key point as to why they seem to be so socially and culturally similar even into the roman imperial period because the strength of their cities the economic strength of their cities relies on the amount of trade passing through and the fact that they're very similar socially and culturally only benefits that yeah absolutely the sources in the archaeology both speak to an understanding of how the cities benefit one another rather than they would hinder one another and you see that again back in 36 where you have Sextus Plumpeius' control of Messana and de facto control of Regio until the younger Caesar Octavian kind of really puts his boot in Regium.

But he has a total stranglehold over Rome. He's able to starve Rome out on multiple occasions because he has control of the strait. So strategic importance, but also commercial commercial importance significant in both cases absolutely yeah and you only see that increase through to the imperial period for the most part sicily and south italy and the straight disappear from the kind of historical narrative after 36 the sources are no longer interested what's happening in Messana and Regium, and poor old Ulpius, the Tyche amulet salesman. The narratives move on to the goings-on of emperors in the empire. But the cities carry on, strength to strength, trading in wine, in ceramics, in the wood of the Sela forest, which is in the mountain in the hinterlands of Regium. The fish and the wine both are recorded

in multiple sources as being particularly delectable. The swordfish of the Strait is quite famous. They only go strength to strength economically. So it's interesting that the trade is not just Messana and Regium are midway stations, shall we say, between trade being brought in from the east or from Africa on its way to Rome, it is also producing local goods as well to be shipped across the empire from there. Yeah, and it kind of comes and goes. So in the Republic, as I mentioned, you have that kind of stagnation of styles and the trades between Messana, between Reggio, between the Aeolian Islands. It's ongoing, but it just seems to be kind of puttering along at its own pace. By the second century AD, you have this big boom with North African trade coming into Italy,

and you see quite an impact of that trade in Reggio and Masana. And their own exports are there, but they're overshadowed by the North African imports. But then you get to the fourth century AD with the shift of the capital to Constantinople, shifting a lot of that North African trade away from Italy. And now Regium in particular becomes quite prominent in its production of ceramics and timber and pitch and becomes quite a player in the region off the back of those resources you mentioned there quite a lot of trade coming either from from africa from the south southwest and from the east do we ever hear of any traders coming to messana or regium from the west from places like modern day spain or southern france if there is a Spanish or Gallic name in the Straits epigraphic record,

I have not seen it. They don't seem to appear. They seem to get stuck in Palermo or Rome, and they don't make it to the Straits. And that, I think, reflects fairly the trade routes we see and the way the trade routes operated in the kind of the height of the empire. If you're coming from Spain or Gaul, you're commonly going to kind of hug the coast around the kind of northern edge of the Mediterranean and then come down Italy's western side to Rome, and then you might go back again. So of the 360 odd inscriptions that make up the corpus of Reggio Mass Messana I haven't seen a single name I could identify as solidly kind of Gallic or Spanish it's predominantly eastern that's

interesting and it's also interesting how 360 odd inscriptions that survive that seems like a hell of a loss that must be telling us so much about the social makeup the culture of messana and regium and its links to the east and this economic and strategic importance of the strait of messana it seems really interesting that we seem to see it with another key strait in antiquity further east we were chatting about this just before starting the helespont where you have also i think they're two prime cities ancient greek cities of abbydos and Cestus, opposing each other at one of the narrowest points. And once again, perhaps maybe it's a similar story there where they are helping each other to maintain good strength over trade, going between the Black Sea and the Aegean, but also strategic importance, being able to block

it off if need be. Absolutely, right. And we see that time and again through the kind of classical Greek period of how powerful control of the Hellespont is. And when you, you being the local people who live there, when you have such powerful control over a quite relatively small space, I think it makes decent sense to work together on that. You could fight with your neighbour, and there are times certainly where they do and where Reggio and Messana do. But the story, long form, is one of cooperation and mutual interest. So what do you think, Dustin, just to really wrap it up, what do you think are some of the big lessons to learn from the inscriptions from your work at Messana and from Regium in the Roman imperial period? There are fascinating insights, I think, into these kinds of port cities, these transitional spaces in the Roman world, and particularly the empire. There are many studies, many books, many recordings out there of studies of the major Italian ports, Portus, Ostia. And the Strait is definitely one that is understudied

in that regard by virtue of being fragmentary and by virtue of it being a lot of the publications over the last few decades do not get translated into English very often. So you're dealing with a predominantly Italian scholarship, which does scare people off. It certainly scared me off during my master's. But yeah, just the inscriptions give you this fascinating insight into what are otherwise very mundane everyday lives, which the more you look at them, the more you realise they're as interesting and sometimes even more so than the grand narratives of history. So these inscriptions are actually giving a very amazing, remarkable insight

into the traders, the everyday traders and the people of Masana and Regium, rather than always, as I said, the emperors or the governors or those people that we hear about a lot in other literary sources. Exactly, yeah. And they can tell us all kinds of fascinating little tidbits about how a society chooses to represent itself. One epitaph from Masana is for several young sailors from Turkey who die in a shipwreck in the strait. Another one is for a comedic actor from Cyprus. There's another one, which is just fantastically odd. And I only mentioned because there's only six lines long and it changes script three times which is just kind of peak peak straight of masana energy i think lines one to three are in latin lines four to

five are greek in latin script and then line six is in greek so what is this inscription what do we know about it it's an epitaph to a fabiairata and a Solustus Agathocles, who says his nickname is the Rodian. So that's it. It's just two Fabius Spirata and two Solustus Agathocles, the Rodian. And then over those six lines, you have just a phenomenally efficient use of, whether it's code switching, whether it's a stock epitaph having names added to it, whether it's a mason who's not super confident in his letters but recognises the names. It's a very interesting one and gives

us a very interesting idea into the mutability of the space. So I guess this is very much evidence for the unique bilingualism, shall we say, of the Strait of Misano in antiquity. Yeah, something bilinguality in the ancient world is so fraught, but there's certainly a case to be made for an amount of flexibility in the Strait. There is a family, gosh, what are their names? A Theseus? Yeah, the family of Tiberius Claudius Claudianus, who there are four epitaphs attached to. His wife and his elder son are in quite nice Latin script. They would have cost a fair bit. But then there's two more, which are to his younger children, and they survive very poorly. What has survived does not look like it was in super great condition initially anyway, and they're in Greek. So whether that means that

scholars have got this wrong and these are two different families, whether that means this man didn't think his youngest children were super crash hot and didn't deserve the big shiny Latin epitaphs, whether that means they were at two different points of his life and his kind of need to establish epitaphs and the quality they should be and the language they should be in has changed throughout his life is something we have yet to unpack well there we go regium and messana important ports and antiquity very different to the likes of ostia and portis but remarkable in their own way as you have brilliantly explained in the last 40 minutes or so dustin thank you so much for coming on the show it's been a a pleasure, man. Thank you very much. Lovely to see you again.