72 nicholas purcell
and cultures of the elite which ran and benefitted from them, as from other aspects of
ultimately environmental control.
The Mediterranean framework for Greek and Roman history might seem uncon-
troversial. Those legends of the Trojan War, and, in reality, the maritime movements
of Greek speakers seeking to establish sometimes very distant new settlements, start
the narrative; which concludes with the creation of what is still too regularly called “a
Roman lake,” or a Mediterranean so dominated by Rome as to generate the posses-
sive terminology Mare Nostrum. In fact, the chronological termini apparently fixed
by either of those histories are called into question by new evidence which makes
resonantly Mediterranean the histories of both Dark Ages, those before the Greeks
and after the Romans, and the Mediterranean history of this essay in fact proves a
relatively poor fit with traditional chronology. This should be seen positively, as it
underlines the contingency of the relationships between the large structures of politi-
cal or cultural history which configure traditional periodization, and the changing
patterns of communication, movement and integration on which a history of the
persistent variables of a distinctively Mediterranean history must be based.
The archaeology of the second millennium has suggested an earlier exemplification
of patterns familiar from the age of the—mainly seaborne movements, “Greek,” or
sometimes “Greek and Phoenician,” “colonization”—with which twentieth-century
narratives have usually started. Aegean materials were widely dispersed in the western
Mediterranean. Prudent caution as to the nature of the underlying movements has
been occasionally overtaken: by finds which show that there was real cultural contact
between Crete and the eastern Egyptian delta in the fourteenth century bce; or by the
archaeology of the extraordinary site at Lefkandi in Euboea which presents the unmis-
takably wide horizons of the elite of a centralized coastal settlement 200 years before
it is reasonable to speak of the polis as a type of community. Integration within the
Mediterranean basin, then, is a story which cannot sensibly now be told starting in the
eighth century.
Nor is it logical to begin a history with Homer, when the poems as we have them
reflect, and are some of the best evidence for, social milieux and cultural participation
reaching across from west Asia and deep into the Mediterranean. The alphabet in
which they were first written also expresses the latter stages of a much longer history
of writing: and two of the earliest instances of the letters we call Greek have been
found on or inland from the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy. Written Greek epic is a tracer
of already old circuits.
Meanwhile, within the continuum of the ancient world, the play of intensification
of production, mobility, and exchange can increasingly, during the Hellenistic period,
be seen in a crescendo which produced in the early Roman Empire a paroxysm of
integration, whose nature is still the subject of debate, but whose quite exceptional
scale, by pre-modern standards, becomes steadily clearer. The period from 200 bce to
200 ce now stands out far more clearly from other parts of antiquity, and for reasons
to which the Mediterranean was central. The single case of the peak in metallurgy
reflected in the heavy metal pollution of the Greenland ice cap illustrates the type of
evidence which is increasingly distinguishing the second half of antiquity from the
first. Roman observers, it turns out, were right to think their age exceptional: and
knew too that the aggressive political unification of the Roman Empire was heavily