. The pirates
called themselves Cilicians; in fact their vessels were the rendezvous
of desperadoes and adventurers from all countries--discharged
mercenaries from the recruiting-grounds of Crete, burgesses
from the destroyed townships of Italy, Spain, and Asia, soldiers
and officers from the armies of Fimbria and Sertorius, in a word
the ruined men of all nations, the hunted refugees of all vanquished
parties, every one that was wretched and daring--and where was there not
misery and outrage in this unhappy age? It was no longer
a gang of robbers who had flocked together, but a compact soldier-
state, in which the freemasonry of exile and crime took the place
of nationality, and within which crime redeemed itself, as it so often
does in its own eyes, by displaying the most generous public spirit.
In an abandoned age, when cowardice and insubordination
had relaxed all the bonds of social order, the legitimate commonwealths
might have taken a pattern from this state--the mongrel offspring
of distress and violence--within which alone the inviolable
determination to stand side by side, the sense of comradeship,
respect for the pledged word and the self-chosen chiefs, valour
and adroitness seemed to have taken refuge. If the banner of this state
was inscribed with vengeance against the civil society which,
rightly or wrongly, had ejected its members, it might be a question
whether this device was much worse than those of the Italian oligarchy
and the Oriental sultanship which seemed in the fair way of dividing
the world between them. The corsairs at least felt themselves
on a level with any legitimate state; their robber-pride,
their robber-pomp, and their robber-humour are attested by many
a genuine pirate's tale of mad merriment and chivalrous bandittism:
they professed, and made it their boast, to live at righteous war
with all the world: what they gained in that warfare was designated
not as plunder, but as military spoil; and, while the captured corsair
was sure of the cross in every Roman seaport, they too claimed
the right of executing any of their captives.

Its Military-Political Power

Their military-political organization, especially since
the Mithradatic war, was compact. Their ships, for the most part
-myopiarones-, that is, small open swift-sailing barks,
with a smaller proportion of biremes and triremes, now regularly sailed
associated in squadrons and under admirals, whose barges were wont
to glitter