Unlike many of the other regions covered in this volume, the western Mediterranean is neither an ancient political territory nor topographically distinct and self-contained. Nor does it constitute a region, like that of the Black Sea, which is defined by the complete shoreline of a bounded body of water and the interior behind that shore, or like the Aegean, a conventionally accepted sub-region of the Mediterranean and conceptualized as such in antiquity (Margomenou et al. 2005). Instead, “the western Mediterranean” is a term used in a way similar to “the west” in the modern world. Indeed, a shorthand reference that echoes a contemporary usage of “the west” has been extended into antiquity, where “the west” sometimes refers to the Greek colonial world, and also to the far reaches of the western Mediterranean basin frequented and settled by Greeks. This notion of the ancient west is paralleled by “the East,” “the Near (or Middle) East,” and further refined by “the far west” (like the modern “Far East”) to indicate an even greater degree of remove, unfamiliarity, and exoticism. Yet it can be argued that already in Greek antiquity there was a concept of “the west” or the western Mediterranean, and even notions of a near and far west.1 The far western Mediterranean - west of Sardinia and Corsica, including modern Spain and coastal France - was certainly not as thickly settled by Greeks as the middle west, i. e. Italy and Sicily.
The western Mediterranean is, from the point of view of Greek history, simply the sea and landscapes west of the conventional Greek homeland of the Balkan peninsula, and for the Greeks it was a prime space of travel, trade, and colonization - not the only such space, but the scene of some of the earliest voyages, exchanges, and permanent settlements. One could make a case that parts of the central Mediterranean, or “midwest” (including part of coastal north Africa), should not be considered anything other than part of what we conventionally call “Greece” in the archaic period.2 The Greek communities of Sicily and southern Italy, for example, were established
A Companion to Archaic Greece Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Hans van Wees © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-0-631-23045-8
At the same time as the polis coalesced in “Greece” - indeed, the colonies may have led the way toward the integration and urbanization of the metropolitan communities (e. g. Morris 2006b). It is an old habit to see the Mediterranean midwest as fundamentally different from, say, Crete or Rhodes, a reflex grounded in modern national boundaries and old notions of cultural territories, as well as the sense that the territory once home to the Mycenaeans in particular is the original homeland of the Greeks. The notion of the mobility of early Greeks, a theme of this chapter, is predicated on this idea of a homeland; the traditional founders of western colonies, who for the early colonies were all held to come from the old country, followed in the mythic footsteps of heroic predecessors. But neither the Balkan peninsula nor the Aegean alone comprise “Greece” in the first millennium.
Looked at from the Phoenician (or Carthaginian) point of view, the central Mediterranean, and the Tyrrhenian littoral in particular, including the north and west coasts of Sicily as well as the islands of Corsica and Sardinia, forms the eastern “shore” of the western Mediterranean. From this point of view even Gibraltar - the traditional boundary of the Mediterranean, and of the known world - formed no real obstacle to trade or settlement. The western Mediterranean may be a bounded inland sea, but the silver riches of Iberian Tartessos and the markets and resources of the Atlantic were an incentive to found Gades (Cadiz), Huelva, Lixus and Mogador, all on the Lusitanian and African coasts (see below). Even the Greeks knew of Tartessos. The regionality of this part of the Mediterranean is, therefore, not entirely fixed nor strictly bounded.3
This chapter will survey developments in a part of the Mediterranean that today comprises Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and France but focus on relatively few sites, given the space constraints here. While the subject is the region’s particular “Greek” history, informed by the distance of this space and its shores and islands from the Greek homelands, it will not simply recapitulate the story of Greek colonization. Indeed, to tell the story of colonization in the western Mediterranean would be to give an account not only of the Greek, but also of the Phoenician and Carthaginian settlements in the west, which were many and began earlier than the Greeks’. Rather, the theme will be the conceptualization of the western Mediterranean as a “region” in which interconnected diversity reigns. The variety found in the west is predicated not only on the different origins and fortunes of the Greeks who frequented these waters, but also the presence of Levantines in the same seas: Phoenicians and perhaps North Syrians early; later the Carthaginians - in north Africa to the west of the main area of Greek colonization in Libya (i. e. Cyrene and its territory)4 - and the Etruscans. The archaic period in this region, as will be seen, is complex and heterogeneous, the groups sometimes in cooperation, at other times in conflict, in cohabitation, and in permanent settlements under the political authority of one group or another.
World History
