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Why Are Pirates Romanticised?

asparagus said:
I thought the story with Julius Caesar and pirates was that his captors were going to ask for 20 talents of silver to release him, and he said ask for 50 talents as my family is very rich.It doesn't matter anyway as I'll get all the money back afterwards when I hunt you all down and crucify you. The pirates laughed at this big talk from a gangly teenager and released him when his family paid the ransom. Caesar then hired a ship and did indeed hunt them all down and kill them.
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“In chapter 2 of his Life of Julius Caesar, Greek author Plutarch of Chaeronea (46-c.120) describes what happened when Caesar encountered the pirates. The translation below was made by Robin Seager.

“[2.5] However, the ransom arrived from Miletus and, as soon as he had paid it and been set free, he immediately manned some ships and set sail from the harbor of Miletus against the pirates. He found them still there, lying at anchor off the island, and he captured nearly all of them.

[2.6] He took their property as spoils of war and put the men themselves into the prison at Pergamon. He then went in person to [Marcus] Junius, the governor of Asia, thinking it proper that he, as praetor in charge of the province, should see to the punishment of the prisoners.

[2.7] Junius, however, cast longing eyes at the money, which came to a considerable sum, and kept saying that he needed time to look into the case. Caesar paid no further attention to him. He went to Pergamon, took the pirates out of prison and crucified the lot of them, just as he had often told them he would do when he was on the island and they imagined that he was joking.”

https://www.livius.org/sources/content/plutarch/plutarchs-caesar/caesar-and-the-pirates/

maximus otter
 
bugmum said:
As someone who went to school in (allegedly) Hereward's home town, that did make me snigger.
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Bourne? I've been looking at property there recently.
 
cycleboy2 said:
Why are pirates romanticised?

Because they Arrrrrrrrr!

(To paraphrase a very old joke. Just looked back through the thread and if I've missed a referenct to this, I'm sorry, and will walk the gangplank in penance...)
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https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/why-are-pirates-romanticised.68887/post-2119991

wheel.jpg
 
cycleboy2 said:
Why are pirates romanticised?

Because they Arrrrrrrrr!

(To paraphrase a very old joke. Just looked back through the thread and if I've missed a referenct to this, I'm sorry, and will walk the gangplank in penance...)
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WARNING: Christmas cracker joke coming up.

What is a pirate's favourite letter of the alphabet?

"You might think it be the Arrrrrrrrrr, but everyone knows a pirate's first love be the C."

No apologies, you were warned.
 
Robin Hood, though, took from the rich and gave to the poor.
Whereas pirates take from whoever they choose to, and keep it for themselves.
 
Trevp666 said:
Robin Hood, though, took from the rich and gave to the poor.
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While that was part of the schtick he got via the legend, I personally think they must've kept something. Bribery, making people look the other way, even paying his followers to 'do the right thing'.
I've always believed that the legend was more about Saxon rebellion against the Norman occupation on a small scale. It wasn't inciting unrest throughout the country, but showing the Norman's didn't quell the Saxon spirit entirely. If Hood had been an ordinary bandit i.e. stole from the rich, then he wouldn't have been much of a hero. When the legends started to surface, they didn't want to glamourise bandits but the romance of a brave hero, righting wrongs etc. etc. Let's face it - if a real person, his 'merrie men' would've had to be pretty brutal against the Norman forces.
 
Stormkhan said:
While that was part of the schtick he got via the legend, I personally think they must've kept something. Bribery, making people look the other way, even paying his followers to 'do the right thing'.
I've always believed that the legend was more about Saxon rebellion against the Norman occupation on a small scale. It wasn't inciting unrest throughout the country, but showing the Norman's didn't quell the Saxon spirit entirely. If Hood had been an ordinary bandit i.e. stole from the rich, then he wouldn't have been much of a hero. When the legends started to surface, they didn't want to glamourise bandits but the romance of a brave hero, righting wrongs etc. etc. Let's face it - if a real person, his 'merrie men' would've had to be pretty brutal against the Norman forces.
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This is covered in Folklore and Nation in Britain and Ireland, here is a paragraph from a review I've written for FT magazine.

David Clarke’s “The Last Earl of Hallamshire” examines the influence of Anglo-Saxon identity on the folklorists of Hallamshire (Sheffield) and how that identity coalesced around two folk heroes: Robin Hood/Loxley and Earl Waltherof. In folklore and literature these were Saxon rebels who fought the Norman occupation. Their legends became part of an imagined heritage of Anglo-Saxon indigeneity to Britain. The outlaw yeoman Robin of legend was replaced by the disinherited nobleman in literature by Sir Walter Scott and on TV in Robin of Sherwood and Robin Hood. But both continue to function as symbols of the radical spirit of the region in the form of Saxon against Norman and, in more recent history, north against south.

https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...r-book-suggestions.13479/page-68#post-2156167
 
cycleboy2 said:
Why are pirates romanticised?

Because they Arrrrrrrrr!

(To paraphrase a very old joke. Just looked back through the thread and if I've missed a referenct to this, I'm sorry, and will walk the gangplank in penance...)
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Another one for the Coincidences thread - I saw the thread title today whilst browsing on 'new' and thought just about the entire content of your post cycleboy, almost word for word.

We may be psychically attuned. Be very afraid...
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Today's Guardian argues that pirates were enlightened beacons of diversity...

https://www.theguardian.com/artandd...ships-diversity-democracy-cornwall-exhibition
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Well, the headline suggests it, though the article itself is a little less forthright, but it finishes with a gibbet reference, which means it could be referenced in another thread.

Doesn't sound much of a life, though: possibly rich beyond your wildest dreams and then shortly thereafter dead!!
 
The ships' cats were tailless.

The Isle of Man was a "sort of pirate island" in the Irish Sea in the early medieval period, an author has said.

Tim Clarkson said the island's nodal position made it an ideal place to keep a fleet of ships for raiding in the surrounding areas. His new book, A Mighty Fleet and the King's Power, covers the period between AD400 to AD1265.

The 62-year-old visited the island in September 2021 for research and to see the sites for himself.

He said: "At times it was almost like reading a tale of Pirates of the Caribbean kind of thing. It was that sort of atmosphere, that sort of activity that seemed to be quite central to the history of the Isle of Man in the early medieval period."

Mr Clarkson has written several books about British medieval history but it is his first book about at the island.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-isle-of-man-65200963
 
So I've recently seen the ballet Corsiar (at the Kazakh National Opera and Ballet Theatre).

The ballet is from 1856 and involved a numer of composers whose names are not so well known these days. It is a Classical standard though.

As far as I can tell `Corair` is just an old word for pirate and far as I could follow the swashbuckling plot it concerned the corsiar's ladies being captured by dodgy Turkic Easterners and taken iinto some kind of harem where they had to dance for the Emperor and so on. This happened twice but the Corsairs - who were unequivocally good guys - saved their women through guile and courage.

The ballet is based on a narrative poen by Lord Byron dating back, forty or so years earlier, and which was a bestseller at the time.

So Byron is one of the people who romanticised pirates (even before Treasue Island). It may seem hard to believe now but even in those days (the Nineteenth Century) people hungered for a simpler time - or place - where individual heroism seemed more possible.
 
Just bought Hawkhurst by Joseph Dragovitch on my Kindle, which totally demolishes romanticism of the smugglers. Looking great and I'm not even past the introduction yet.
 
It's just occurred to me that the psychology behind the glamourisation of the outsider criminal could also be behind the movies involving mercenary groups (such as The Expendables franchise), when the reality is a group of hired killers with no real accountability.
 
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