A Companion to Mediterranean History

A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

chapter four

terminus omnis motus et urbes

muros terra posuere nova

(every boundary has been removed—

cities have built their walls on new soil)

(Seneca, Medea, 369–370)

“Mediterranean antiquity”—an abusive relationship?^1

Are the “long 15 centuries” from the dissolution of the Mycenaean order to the
transition from Roman to medieval, and their shorter phases, subdivisions, currents
and ruptures, legible in Mediterranean history, as they are in political, social, or cul-
tural history? How Mediterranean are those other ancient histories? This sketch of an
enormous subject presents in three stages an argument for an affirmative answer. The
sea provided a distinctive milieu of communications; those communications enabled
an ecology of connectivity; that ecology patterned the cooperations, interactions and
disjunctions of social and cultural history.
Such opening questions are necessary on three levels. Trivially, here is a
millennium-and-a-half which can hardly be omitted from Mediterranean history,
while it is obvious that maritime themes are central to the cultures of Greece and
Rome and their congeners. More creatively, a history organized, as Mediterranean
history must be, around large sweeps of space and time, and patterned by environ-
mental considerations, can engage traditional periodizations in constructive
dialogue—and few definitions of historical epoch are as well-established as those of
societies which pioneered historiography itself. But most seriously of all, the ancient
Mediterranean challenges Mediterranean history itself, as skeptics about the creden-
tials of such an enquiry are apt, with some justification, to suggest that the attractions
of taking the Mediterranean basin as an object of reflection at all are actually a conse-
quence of this long shadow of “classical” culture. Far from calling the traditional
constructions of ancient history into question, the study of the Mediterranean stands

The Ancient Mediterranean

nicHolaS Purcell