62 nicholas purcell
even allowing for the special variety of the landscapes of the Mediterranean and the
effect of the sea. Transhumance, long- or short-range, the qanat, the canal and the
aqueduct, may helpfully be compared across the whole of this space.
Landscape fragmentation single-handedly promoted productive diversification.
The other characteristic responses to risk were storage and redistribution, and the sea
patterned both in important ways, by hugely increasing the range over which redistri-
bution of fresh or stored goods could be carried on. Orientation to the sea therefore
often meant engagement with large institutions of exchange, commercial or state-run,
and the sea was essential to the development of such systems in antiquity. It was, for
all its frequency, a choice which was noticed, and which was the object of reflection.
On the whole, the possibility of engaging in seaborne communications was generally
seen as familiar and unsurprising, and the hostility frequently expressed to it reflected
this relative ordinariness.
“Responding to risk” sounds both rational and straightforward. Actual, predicted,
or alleged shortfalls in resources were usually accompanied by violence and compul-
sion. All the standard responses had problems. Intervention in the conditions of pro-
duction, changing agrarian strategies, often means changes in labor regimes, including
coercion. The imperative to store creates a standing invitation to hoard, to seizure and
theft, to legal and illegal exaction. Those who controlled stores, from Mycenaean
palaces to Roman imperial granaries, wielded considerable power. Redistribution, far
from being always consensual and constructive, is subject to similar abuses, and pro-
moted compulsory changes in productive enterprise. Those who could determine
strategy, perceiving opportunities in marketing, orientated production towards
the more lucrative enterprises, at the expense of production for local consumption.
The expanding oleiculture of archaic and classical Attica, or the takeover of potentially
arable land by large-scale commercial pastoralism in Italy after the second Punic War,
and the expansion of the Mediterranean vineyard in the early Roman imperial period,
are three well-known examples of this modality.
For any Mediterranean history, then, primary producers’ constant struggle to out-
maneuver very local regimes of environmental risk is fundamental, and alongside it, so
is the extent and character of the net of relations with other regions, near and far,
prevalent in a given period for the people of any locality, which will usually be among
the most important of those remedies. In these “relations” once again, competi-
tion, mutual predation, parasitic violence, and subjugation must take their place
alongside cooperation or peaceful economic relationships. Antiquity offers rich illus-
tration of these tropes of Mediterranean integration, differing in their spatial configu-
ration, scale, and in the genesis, nature and mutation of the processes which identify
them. Changing connectivities indeed are at the heart of a Mediterranean ancient
history and the basis of its periodization.
At the very beginning of conventional ancient history, those factors are witnessed
by the archaeological evidence for seaborne communications by which speakers of
Phoenician and Greek moved the length and breadth of the basin. The distribution of
artifacts which they moved, above all ceramics, and the new writing with which they
marked some of them, tell the story eloquently, and it is echoed by the consciousness
of hugely extended and fabulously enriching but deeply perilous seafaring in the
Odyssey, and by the artfully simple advice of Hesiod in his wisdom poem Works and
Days that the producer “lacking in good livelihood” must use the summer in taking