the ancient mediterranean 63
to his boat and exchanging the product of his labors (618–694). In both cases, as we
shall see, the visible linkages are signs of large social and cultural changes.
Movement across, and in and out of local landscapes, is therefore a structure of
Mediterranean primary production. Many different kinds of mobility are therefore
integral to Mediterranean history. Uplands inaccessible in winter, dry scrublands,
badly-drained plains, all generate pastoral strategies which can involve long seasonal
or more frequent displacements. Shortfalls and gluts prompt the relocation of
consumers.
Changing the productive base also changes the carrying capacity of the land-
scape, itself not a physiological given, as is sometimes thought, but an artefact.
Relocation is a further adaptive response to environmental pressure: in-bound, to
engage in increasingly labor-intensive production, or outbound, to relieve alimen-
tary shortfalls. The ritual departure of part of communities’ populations in the
Sacred Spring of pre-Roman Italy was explicitly attributed to demographic pres-
sure. Such emigration could be supported by violence, especially in the related
case of mercenary service. Such solutions require organization, of the kind pro-
vided by the leaders of early Greek overseas settlement expeditions, to whom sim-
ilar motives were attributed.
The transformation of the coastlands from 750 to 550 by dozens of more-or-
less self-conscious new opportunistic communities was a markedly Mediterranean
phenomenon. It amounted to a very substantial and often very violent mobiliza-
tion of resources, and to the establishment of new kinds of communicability across
the maritime spaces between the new settlements. There too, the population
relieved from indigence at the point of origin became a vital resource in the hands
of those who led its relocation, making possible new forms of exploitation and
management and ultimate redistribution of the product of labor. Population, then,
could be both liability and opportunity, but both situations led to the intervention
of those whose control of violence gave them a determining power. When all labor
was vulnerable to such interventions, it is not surprising that so much of the his-
tory of the ancient Mediterranean is the history of un-free labor, and especially in
those developed complex institutions which deserve the label “slavery.” The apolo-
getic discourses of foundation-sagas and pioneer-communities were a not alto-
gether effective smokescreen for the elaboration of structures through which
seafarers could subject the existing inhabitants of coast and hinterland to their will.
The slave systems of Greeks and Romans and their neighbors all deserve the label
Mediterranean, and ancient Mediterranean slavery may be seen as a precursor of
the medieval Mediterranean in which a bipartite cultural and political divide gave
new life to the mutual predation of symmetrical slaving. The maritime milieu came
to be a space of slave trading in a manner which looks ahead to the characteristic
commerce of the early modern Atlantic world.
The demand for mobile labor, voluntary or coerced, varied with local production
strategies. Among these we should set the specialization of labor involved in redistri-
bution, above all by sea, through which port-communities grow symbiotically with
the regions whose needs they serve. The ancient Mediterranean developed many dif-
ferent kinds of port, and the one type, the emporion or trading base, developed as
a distinct variety of community in the age when Greeks and Phoenicians were at
their most mobile and new interdependences were developing very rapidly. Alongside