the ancient mediterranean 71
can address the largest questions of ancient cultural history, which concern the most
complex façade of the Mediterranean world, its abutment with west Asia. The periods
when this transition zone was most, and when least, porous, with the causes, nature
and consequences of the permeability, are one of the best examples of how a more
spacious Mediterranean history can structure the understanding of the ancient world.
Maritime civilizations? Ancient history and cross-cultural exchange^5Strangely enough, when Greek or Roman superiority is held to impair the heuristic
usefulness of the Mediterranean, it is often maintained—in general, and in support of
the other critique, that the Mediterranean is only, or mainly, the creature of modern
imperialist geographers—that antiquity had no notion of such a sea. The most wide-
spread terms, “the sea beside us,” “Our Sea,” are certainly local and relative, and by
no means entail proprietorial swagger. But the absence of a name hardly indicates the
lack of a unified concept.
It is preferable to explore more complex ancient cognitions than to seek ancient
counterparts to modern names—to penetrate a more sophisticated “thalassological
thought.” Two great maritime ideas far transcended local nomenclature: the Outer
Sea, or Ocean, and the Inner Sea, which (more rarely) was associated with the mythi-
cal figure of Tethys. The learned imperial agent Demetrius of Tarsus, finding himself
pursuing imperial geography at York in the reign of Severus, dedicated twin altars, to
Oceanus and to Tethys (Collingwood et al., 1995: nos 662–663). A greater maritime
whole was evoked around the waters we call the Mediterranean, which in that age was
the vehicle of imperial unity, a sign of knowledge and complete control through com-
munications (thus Appian, Roman History, pr. 7). That vision, drawing on its integra-
tive effects to give the Mediterranean an imaginative unity, is prominent in Roman
writers of the early Empire (especially Pliny, Natural History, 14.1.2).
Thinking thalassologically did not have to be cloistered or involuted. Greek thought
inherited from older west Asian worldviews a sense of an Outer Sea. The Mesopotamian
ocean had surrounded a continental core territory. In the Greeks’ concentric sense of
global space, instead of that land-mass, it was the sea by which they lived that formed
the heart of the system, an Inner Sea paired with, answering to, the circumambient
Ocean. This concept therefore developed quite differently from the Mesopotamian
Ocean, with its continental core territory, and the Inner Sea came to be the heart of a
concentric sense of global space. The Homeric poems already proposed the sea as the
medium of the displacements which were the common subject matter of much early
epic, and relating heroes’ returns thus entailed generalizing about a maritime world.
The Odyssey also imagines a sea which is the domain of itinerant opportunistic exchange.
The Inner Sea never ceased to have a privileged position in a geography which derived
its maritime foci from the role of the Mediterranean as a medium of communication
since the Bronze Age. At the same time, there was always a dualistic sense in which
there was a sea, the Mediterranean, and its continent, Asia, with a structural and priv-
ileged relationship. The vision of the god of the east, Dionysus, in the early Greek
hymn (Homeric Hymns, 7, 1–15), is given as that of Etruscan pirates, seeing the beau-
tiful traveler from Asia from their ship, and thinking of how to seize him and take him
for sale—in any part of the wide world which the sea opens to them. The Mediterranean
was the sea of enslavement and forced relocation. It therefore shaped the behaviors