Rome and the Mediterranean

On the eve of its transmarine and transalpine expansion in the third century bc, the Roman republic had succeeded in building what amounted to the only proximate model of a nation state to emerge from the ancient world. The cultural and linguistic diversity of Italy notwithstanding, the republic claimed sovereignty over most of the peninsula and a large citizen (c.150,000) and non-citizen population numbered in the millions and ruled by a government - the city-state institutions of Rome - which could legitimately be defined as unitary (the social war of 90-88 bc may be seen in this regard as but the final violent step in the institutionalization of Roman sovereignty). The combination of stable state and large citizen-allied armies placed the republic in a position to win most of the wars in which it was engaged. The Italian peninsula’s location at the center of the Mediterranean also afforded Rome a particular strategic advantage to its imperial designs by providing equal access to the both the eastern and western Mediterranean basins, an advantage which all previous and subsequent hegemons lacked in their visions of uniting the Mediterranean under their authority.

In a world, both within and beyond the Mediterranean, where wars of national liberation were unknown and where campaigns were frequently decided by a single decisive battle or the capture of an enemy’s capital, Rome’s repeated and often rapid victories created an aura of Roman invincibility and imperial destiny. Over the space of some two centuries this transformed an unparalleled military hegemony over the eastern and western Mediterranean into an empire whose power and influence extended over what the ancients believed to be both the inhabited and known world well beyond the narrow confines of the Mediterranean (K. Clarke 1999).

The central historic achievement of the Roman conquest was to cause numerous societies across the Mediterranean and Europe to be lifted out of their relative isolation and dependency on locality as the primary or sole driving force in defining their culture, institutions, and sense of identity. In effect, Rome destroyed the highly fragmented system of ancient states and replaced it with a new interdependent system of dependent territorial entities known as provinces. In so doing, it swept away the ancient Mediterranean system of states for ever, and with the latter, in one sense, the ancient political world as well. In stating this I am not suggesting that the affected societies were in any way genuinely isolated from the outside world prior to contact with the Romans; rather that the impact of the Roman conquest process introduced enhanced connectivity with the larger world in more places than at any previous time in antiquity. This transformation took place via the mechanism of increased exposure to various external “phenomena,” such as distant wars, economic fluctuations, and other historic events. Put in other words, the establishment of the empire fundamentally transformed the relationship between locality and local culture and thus established the only sustained globalization in antiquity (Hitchner 2008).

This reality is especially evident in way in which the Romans understood and interacted what they called “our sea” (mare nostrum). From a strategic and administrative standpoint they divided their empire into two broad categories: transmarine and transalpine provinces and possessions. Much like the Alps, the Mediterranean was perceived both as a physical barrier to be feared and therefore dealt with cautiously, not least because of its enormous destructive potential for commercial and military shipping, and as a natural frontier that stood between Rome and its overseas territories; this is perhaps most clearly evidenced, for example, in its decision to secure

Spain by moving legions overland rather than transporting them by sea. The Mediterranean therefore required securing, something which the Romans achieved by establishing naval bases which guarded the critical sea lanes of Gibraltar, the Gulf of Lyon, the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Adriatic, Egypt, the Levant, and Asia Minor. Similar naval arrangements were also deployed in the Atlantic, the great temperate European rivers, and the Black Sea.

On the other hand, the Romans also envisioned the Mediterranean much like the land, as a space dominated by lines of communication through which vital provincial revenues, commodities, resources, ideas, news, technologies, and labor reached and nourished the capital as well as other centers around its shores. Significant state and private resources were therefore invested in building and sustaining trade and supply systems well beyond the customary cabotage levels as early as the second century bc, not only in foodstuffs but mass-produced commodities, including quarried and worked stone, pottery, metals, wood, slaves, etc. (A. Wilson 2008). Shipwreck information, however quantitatively inadequate (and potentially misleading, particularly for the second century ad), demonstrates the fundamental role played by the Mediterranean in facilitating this unparalleled level of economic activity driven by empire.

The high volume of sea-based trade and communications in the Roman period also facilitated the movement of ideas, tastes, institutions, and beliefs in all directions. Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this is the seaborne migration of Christianity from the eastern Mediterranean westward, but it is also evident in the way in which highly localized cultural identities along the shores of the Roman Mediterranean were informed and redefined by the import of broadly standardized images, monuments, state ideologies, laws, forms of governance, goods emanating from Rome and other dominant or emerging cultural centers as the empire matured. The impact of the Mediterranean as a carrying force for trade was greatest along its coasts, and could be easily diminished just a few miles inland away from rivers and large coastal towns, as the trade in pottery reveals, or even more starkly in the more limited connectiveness between Atlantic Mauretania just beyond Gibraltar (B. Shaw 2006).

All that being said, dilating on the important role of the Mediterranean in the shaping of the ancient world especially in the Roman period must be balanced against the recognition that similar processes were occurring along the great land routes of Europe, Asia, and Africa, producing often significantly different patterns of exchange and identity formation which together constituted the rich global matrix of the Roman world. The impact of the Roman state on its European provinces is clear. In the late republic and throughout the first century ad, Mediterranean goods were imported into the European hinterland on a considerable scale. Over time, however, the imperial system stimulated economic and political developments in the region that were environmentally distinctive from the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean, therefore, was but one part of a larger global reality created by the empire, a reality clearly manifested in the Romans’ reference to the sea as mare nostrum.

Finally, the drop-off in both the extensity and intensity of Mediterranean connectiveness following the break-up of the Western half of the Roman empire in the fifth century is a clear demonstration of the centrality of the state in the shaping of Mediterranean history in antiquity (Wickham 2005, Ward-Perkins 2005, McCormick 2001). Indeed, any argument in favor of the Mediterranean as a fundamental framework for understanding the history of south-west Eurasia and North Africa must contend with the fact that its political and cultural unity as a region has only been achieved once in its history, and that under a land-based state in its center, not on either its eastern, northern and western shores.