The worrying fate of Paul and Rachel Chandler, who have apparently been captured on their yacht by Somalian pirates, is a reminder that lawlessless on the seas has been a threat for millennia.

Not everyone, though, should take the Julius Caesar approach to kidnapping. As a young man, reports Plutarch in his biography of the great man, he was kidnapped off the Dodecanese islands en route to learn rhetoric under the famous teacher, Molon of Rhodes. The Cicilian pirates (from the area of modern Anatolia north and north-east of Cyprus) he treated high-handedly. They asked for a ransom of 20 talents – he laughed at them for undervaluing him and offered them 50. While he was kept captive he treated them like bodyguards rather than prison guards, and frequently told them he would crucify them after his ransom was paid. (Better than that, "He also wrote poems and sundry speeches which he read aloud to them, and those who did not admire these he would call to their faces illiterate Barbarians.") In due course the ransom was paid, Caesar was set free – and, as promised, he crucified them to a man.

There's a vivid passage in Tom Holland's brilliant book Rubicon about the problem of pirates in the Mediterranean in the late Republic. Clodius, he reminds us (a thuggish, politically aspirant high-born, who got himself rebranded a plebeian to be a thorn in Cicero's side) was reputedly freed from pirates for the price of his anal virginity. Holland quotes Cicero on the problem of piracy: "The pirate is not bound by the rules of war, but is the common enemy of everyone ... there can be no trusting him, no attempt to bind him with mutually agreed treaties." It took Pompey the Great, with a vast fleet of 500 ships, to eradicate the problem of Mediterranean piracy in 67BC. Uncharacteristically for a Roman general, instead of meting out the death sentence to the criminals, he bought them plots of land and helped set them up as farmers. As Holland notes, "Brigandage, he had clearly recognised, was bred of rootlessness and social upheaval."