the ancient mediterranean 65
mobile individuals, whose displaceability must be attributed to the conditions of
Mediterranean survival. Seneca could claim that outsiders formed the greater part of
the population in even the least well-connected communities (to Helvia, 6.5).
Hegemony and exchange extended the pursuit of risk avoidance from remedying and
insuring against bad seasons to maintaining large agglomerations which could never
be fed by the territory immediately adjacent. But such volumes of staple foods could
only be delivered by water. Producers, meanwhile, adjusted what they grew to the
needs of distant cities’ consumption, and to the forms of waterborne transport which
bridged the often very large gap between producer and consumer.
These effects were strongly implicated in the formation across the Mediterranean
of a world of interconnected and sometimes interdependent poleis, but that was only
the Greek version of a more widely extended phenomenon. Standard personifications
of cities carried a cornucopia, the productivity which kept them in being, and a rud-
der, for the sea which brought them its results. The very large agglomerations, in
particular—the primate cities which played so disproportional a role in the shaping of
Greek and Roman culture, were still more an essentially Mediterranean—that is, ulti-
mately, a maritime—phenomenon. The size of the largest and the overall number of
such centers in the Hellenistic or Roman periods makes this a trait of the ancient
Mediterranean which distinguishes it from successors until the eighteenth century.
Miletus, Corinth, Syracuse, Rhodes, Rome, and Constantinople, all grew and endured
through their hugely extended maritime hinterlands. The waterways of the larger
lowlands extended the effect inland.
The technology, economics, society and infrastructure of navigation, the develop-
ment and maintenance of maritime circuits, the gradual multiplication of improved
port facilities, the organizational and economic underpinnings of larger and more
efficient shipping, are all elements in the city history of antiquity. So are the choices,
perceptions and behaviors of those who moved and those with whom they were
socially intertwined. Accounts of ecological history can suggest processes without
human agency. The historical importance of the material of this section, though, lay
in the character which it gave to the personal and group power of those who con-
trolled the risky and mutable environment, and to their relations with those whose
labor they managed. Decisions about productive strategy, mobilizing its fruits, pre-
scribing their availability and distribution, generated a distinctive elite. In the ancient
Mediterranean, and especially in the agglomerations which depended on the sea for
their existence, elites developed and shared in a set of ways of representing themselves
in relation to the ecological realities. All this, therefore, ultimately derived from the
ecological imperatives of the Mediterranean; and what is at stake is the overcoming of
distance, the foreshortening of space, the multiplication of encounters, the achieve-
ment of complex cooperations. This is, in short, connective: a history of joining up.
“The powers that ruled the sea”^3The Iliad already saw the sea as the vehicle of political ambition, potentially subject to
a political control analogous to that through which the resource bases of production
on land were harnessed. The idea of a sea-based empire, or thalassocracy, is prominent
in the powerfully original historical thought of Herodotus and Thucydides in the late
fifth century. They sought other precursors for the contemporary seaborne hegemony