'Suffocare urbem et Italiam fame'? Il 'blocco marittimo' di Pompeo, la strategia navale del 49-48 a.C. e i limiti del Leviatano

In three letters of March 49 BCE, in the midst of the civil war, Cicero accuses Pompey of a plan that he describes as criminal: the ‘maritime blockade’ of terra Italia and especially of Rome, a project conceived some time before. However, these are the only three hints of a plan that was never realised, attested in letters written by Cicero at a time of great emotional instability and strong temptation to abandon Pompey. Yet scholarship, hand in hand with the development of interest in the naval aspects of Roman power, seems to attach increasing credence to the supposed plan for a ‘maritime blockade’, in the light too of the later exploits of Pompey’s son Sextus. In contrast, our reconstruction of Pompey’s and Caesar’s naval strategy shows the objective difficulties of such a plan. It would have required a tight coastal control of the Tyrrhenian areas, which was rendered impossible by the abandonment, by Pompey and his allies, of southern Italy, Sardinia and Sicily. The blockade by a naval power against a land power was in fact, in the ancient world, for technological reasons, a problematic strategy, requiring far more political cohesion than that of the composite anti-Caesarian coalition and requiring, above all, coastal control (which Sextus Pompeius, for some time, succeeded in maintaining). If Carl Schmitt has brilliantly sketched the history of the modern world as a conflict between maritime and land powers, we must recognise that during the 1st century BCE, Leviathan, to suffocate Behemoth, needed to have its feet firmly planted on the ground.