the ancient mediterranean 69
the Thracian rulers who controlled it, and the Greek coastal cities which linked it to a
wider world, grew in confidence, self-consciousness, and influence.
Mediterranean coastlands, now controlled by the seaborne, now, in a reversal of
roles, dominating the sea on behalf of powers based in the interior, have displayed a
similar set of special patterns of changing integration. This recursivity is another struc-
ture of the Mediterranean which is amply illustrated in ancient history. Greek overseas
settlements, tacked on to the shores of the barbarians in Cicero’s phrase (On the
republic, 2.9), could be taken over by peoples of the neighboring interior, who might
subsequently take to the seaways by which the formerly-successful intruders had
arrived. Communities little engaged with the sea reorientated themselves towards it,
while, in the reverse process, former seafarers might come to present façades aveugles
toward the sea. These changes were well known in Greek and Roman thought, and
patterned both historical narrative and a priori reflection on early human experience.
One influential theory held that humanity originated in the uplands, and that it was
an aspect of the way in which decline had set in that “relocations downward into the
lower regions,” close to, and eventually across, the sea, had taken place (thus Strabo,
Geography, 13.1.25). Both Athenians and Romans, earlier properly indifferent to the
sea, emphatically “became maritime” in the formation of their respective dominions,
in a transformation central to their historical imaginations.
The Mediterranean has been shaped as much by its relationships with the ecologies
which surround it as by its internal configurations. Histories weave around the transal-
pine and Balkan façades, the Black Sea circle, the very different gateways which give
onto continental Asiatic spaces, the Atlantic and Red Sea maritime realms, and the
great sweep of desert interactions along the arid southern boundaries of the zone.
There are histories, moreover, of “by-passes,” the zones adjacent to Mediterranean
ecological space in which history has been patterned by avoiding the complex and
conflicted world of Mediterranean lands, and through which mobile groups move
along corridors—the Danube valley, the interior piedmont of the Lebanese chains, or
the coastwise links of the Atlantic façade—shaped by a distant Mediterranean world
but not—or not often—engaging directly with it.
Along these margins are found places which have repeatedly provided foci for
interchanges between the Mediterranean lands and other regions, and on which
recursive changes in the trajectories of integration have been centered. The greater
river valleys have a privileged role. The Orontes, the Vardar, and the Rhone have local
histories which resemble each other across the longue durée, but which have also
helped to shape Mediterranean history in their recurrence. But it should be observed
that the effect is differently articulated in different periods. If Marseilles has in certain
senses remained the center through which the connections of the Rhone corridor are
mediated to the Mediterranean, and vice versa, that function has been shared by a
large variety of other settlements—Etruscan St Blaise, Lattes, or Roman Arles. The
Orontes mouth made the site which we know as Al Mina a major intermediary of
Mediterranean and west-Asian social and cultural contact in the first half of the first
millennium bce; but adjacent Ugarit had exploited the same links much earlier, and
the Hellenistic cities of Seleuceia and Antioch succeeded it. The case of Antioch, 15
miles inland, and its congener Aleppo, much further from the sea but equally-blessed
by the lines of communication from the Euphrates bend to the Mediterranean, shows
again how access to and from Mediterranean space may be controlled from and