the ancient mediterranean 73
implicated. The processes have unlimited parallels: the paroxysm which re-periodizes
ancient Mediterranean history was one of scale.
Thalassological thinking never ceased to present the Mediterranean as the meto-
nym for corruption and alienation, a much earlier and almost wholly negative, but no
less unified conception. That rejection of the sea is part of the same history as “becom-
ing maritime,” and the two can be mapped onto each other. Aliens, and culture
change, and destabilizing novelty, the fruits of integration, did come, with special
effectiveness, over the sea; and the sea offered influence, wealth, and knowledge. The
negative and positive evocations were versions of the same perception. And it was a
shrewd one, to the extent that the processes of comparison, and differentiation, which
came with high density maritime connectivity, and with the effects that they had in
destabilizing hierarchies and revising allegiances, were fundamental agents of cultural
change in the ancient world. Susceptibility to that kind of change can be seen in turn
as a basic element in the historical character of antiquity.
However much communities—or their elites—sought to deny mobility and pre-
serve identity through introversion, communications subverted apparently fixed char-
acters and became the center of new ones based on the medium of communicability
itself. Christianity in the first centuries, between misfit cities and gateway settle-
ments, inhabiting the seaways in the manner of Paul’s journey West in Acts, was a
Mediterranean social formation, Mediterranean also in its pride in subverting conven-
tional ethnicities. At the same time the sea was the medium which supported the evil
empire, in league with all the sea captains of the world in the vision of the Apocalypse.
The sea, for all that, had been the vehicle of Christianization, the medium by which a
scattered community could maintain some cohesion despite local differences, the
small size of many Christian groups, and the distances between them. This seaborne
communicability gave them an ability to identify themselves which resembled the
cohesiveness of the Roman state itself: it made it possible for them to reject traditional
social classifications, and helped make them suspect, like so many seaborne outsiders,
as a kind of organizational rival to the sea-linked ruling power.
The third century of this era saw a substantial falling off from the acme of connectiv-
ity represented by the second century, when all the indicators suggest that Roman
economic activity was most widespread as well as most intense, and when many of the
cultural by-products of frequent, cheap, and normal mobility were propagated most
effectively. At the same time, new peoples, seen by Romans as barbarians, became mar-
itime, and became Mediterranean, challenging the security of the seas in a way which
looks ahead to the ceaseless hostilities of a medieval Mediterranean split between Muslim
and Christian polities. The further developing importance of the Red Sea world, and
the multiplication of trans-Saharan routes, opened the Mediterranean in late antiquity
to south and south-east in new ways; while Sassanian hostility closed off the Levantine
corridors and for a time made the eastern Mediterranean more enclosed.
If the transitions, three and four centuries later, to a medieval order were to be
more gradual than was once thought, and the patterns of that order more familiar
from ancient precursors, continuities from the Antonine Mediterranean should
equally not be overstated. But for all that, it is not hard to see why the Mediterranean
should look so good—and still so much the Mediterranean of Seneca or Pliny—to
Basil of Caesarea in the 360s, member of an elite which was still thoroughly configured