96 | CHAPTER 4
several Semitic languages.^16 Greek colonists, led by the Euboeans of Eretria
and Chalcis, and the Corinthians, followed the Phoenicians from about the
year 800. Soon, the coastal lands round the Black Sea were also being settled
by Greeks. But with the sole exception of this region directly accessible by
sea, the colonization movement stuck to the Mediterranean; and the Medi-
terranean world remained one of shore dwellers (often in cities) and seamen,
along with peasant populations in the fairly restricted plains that abutted on
or were directly accessible from the sea. The mountains were an almost con-
stant horizon, but a quite different world. Widely separate coastal regions
now had far more in common, in terms of way of life, than any coastal region
had with its own mountain hinterland.
This sense of “our” Mediterranean, “mare nostrum,” is conveyed in the fa-
mous remark Plato puts in the mouth of Socrates, to the effect that the earth
is vast in size, and we live around the sea in a small portion of it, from
Phasis [the river that flows into the south- eastern corner of the Black Sea]
as far as the Pillars of Hercules, like ants or frogs around a pond. And
there are many other peoples living elsewhere, in many similar regions.^17Note Plato’s awareness—anticipated by, among others, Hecataeus c. 500
BCE^18 —that there is much more to the world than just the Mediterranean.
Given the Greeks’ and Romans’ contribution to the concept of Europe, and
Rome’s creation of an empire which embraced—for the only time in history—
the whole Mediterranean, and remained thoroughly Italocentric until the
third century, it is hardly surprising that Europe the geographical region
should long have retained the Mediterranean alone as its southern base. West
of the Mediterranean there was anyway only the Atlantic, perceived as a desert
at the world’s end.^19 Eastward, though, it was harder to draw a line that was not
artificial. In fact it was to the East that most of Plato’s “other peoples” dwelt.
Discovering the East
The Jewish and Christian holy places, in the low hills behind the Palestinian
coastal plain, fit easily into the conventional map of the Mediterranean. In-
cluding the Hijāz and the holy places of Islam enlarges the frame; but while
16 “Great Sea”: J. Elayi, “Terminologie de la Mer Méditerranée dans les annales assyriennes,” Oriens
antiquus 23 (1984) 75–92; Harris, in id. (ed.), Rethinking the Mediterranean [3:109] 15; and see above,
p. 94.
17 Plato [ed. J. Burnet (Oxford 1900–1907); vol. 1^2 , ed. E. A. Duke and others, 1995; tr. J. M.
Cooper (ed.) (Indianapolis 1997)], Phaedo 109ab.
18 J. B. Harley and D. Woodward, “The foundations of theoretical cartography in archaic and clas-
sical Greece,” in J. B. Harley and D. Woodward (eds), The history of cartography (Chicago 1987–)
1.134–35.
19 Expositio totius mundi et gentium [ed. and tr. (French) J. Rougé (Paris 1966)] 59.