Crete in the Hellenistic Aegean: Seeing Through the Cretan Mirage

From a geographic perspective, the island of Crete in the south of the Aegean was wellpositioned to engage in the rapidly expanding trade networks of the Mediterranean that flourished in the wake of the death of Alexander the Great. Ancient literary sources tell us that these maritime routes through which goods flowed were often plagued by ‘pirates’, roaming independently of any hegemonic rule. On the basis of Polybius, the most popular (modern and ancient) theory is that Hellenistic Crete was a center of this pirate activity. Powerful ruling cities like Rhodes, attacked Crete in the 3 c. BC with the professed intent to destroy any pirate threat housed there. The mirage is that Crete is an island full of pirates, liars, and greedy citizens has continued in modern scholarship. This “Cretan Mirage” has had the effects of perpetuating the stereotypes of ancient Crete and marginalizing it within studies of the Hellenistic period. Paula Perlman first proposed that the “Cretan Mirage” was at work in the depictions of the First Cretan war (Perlman, 1992, 151-153). Here I go further to suggest that the “Cretan Mirage” has blinded scholars to other valid arguments about Cretan history and economics during the Hellenistic period. First, I will place Hellenistic Crete within its broader Aegean context, and, using archaeological and literary data, then I will compare the political and economic position of Crete to another major economic power in the Aegean, Rhodes. Finally, through a close examination of Crete’s role in the Mediterranean-wide trade I will argue that the “Cretan Mirage” is in fact a mirage. Crete was not solely inhabited by pirates, its people were not purely liars and full of greed. Rather, Crete was very much like any other island in the Aegean. I will also argue that Crete’s economic success and impact on the Aegean was similar in many way to Rhodes’. This conclusion should encourage a re-evaluation of the political and economic struggles that characterize the Hellenistic Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean in the 3rd and 2nd c. BC.