Storm and Shipwreck in Roman Literature

Roman literature of the classical period abounds in references to the difficulties and dangers of a voyage by sea. Indeed both in Greece and Rome the indignant complaint against seafaring was a recognized rhetorical theme, of which we possess a most interesting specimen in the Trogymnasmata' or ‘Preparatory Exercises’ of Nicolaus the Sophist (viii. 6), to be found in the first volume of Walz's Rhetores Graeci. The two Senecas also have treated this topic in a formal way. In verse the theme is extremely common, though the thought is often compressed to a few lines. It occurs in Epic poetry (for every epic must have its storm), in comedy and tragedy, in lyric, elegiac, and didactic verse. History, epistolography, and philosophical prose furnish further examples. From this wealth of material I have selected what seem to me to be the salient features.In the numerous accounts of the Golden Age, when primitive man lived a life uncomplicated by civic developments and international relations, when he confined himself to his proper element the earth, and had neither inclination nor facilities for trespassing on the unknown expanse of Neptune's ‘second realm’, the invention of the ship is regarded as the source of many evils. Man sails the seas to reach lands which God in His wisdom has set apart as beyond His province. The course of a ship over the waves involves not merely insult to the outraged sea-god, whose supremacy is thereby challenged and whose permission has not been sought, but physical discomfort to the Ocean from the weight of the vessel, the furrow driven by the keel, and the strokes of the oar-blades.