Introduction

The Mediterranean as a thematic historic framework was first posited by Fernand Braudel (Braudel 1949: 1972). He ambitiously extended the powerful French geographical concept of the paysage to the world’s largest inland sea (c.2.5 million square miles), its coasts and islands. Braudel envisioned a Mediterranean world that was broadly homogeneous both ecologically and culturally. Despite its breathtaking force and enormous appeal, Braudel’s vision did not achieve broad interdisciplinary acceptance. Nevertheless, the allure of the Mediterranean as a concept has not deterred those drawn to it from asserting its vitality or at least its relative competitive strength in the heated modern market of ideas on the relationship between human history, space, and time (Abulafia 2003). The appeal of a distinctively Mediterranean history has recently attracted anew the interest of students of antiquity, and particularly of Greco-Roman culture, not only because of the congruence between the latter and the sea, but also because of its perceived potential as a mega-model capable of absorbing and sorting the enormous richness and diversity of the human history of antiquity. Indeed that interest has crystallized around the emergence of a new vision of the unity of Mediterranean history that contends that it is a function of the region’s ecological diversity, i. e. a space comprised, contra Braudel, of multiple, diverse pay-sages or regions, which compelled repeated and ever more complex forms of human connectivity and interaction (Horden and Purcell 2000). Such a vision privileges space and environment over time and human institutions as primordial forces in the shaping of the history of the Mediterranean prior to the modern period. In its favor, this is perhaps the most all-embracing approach to that past. However, as this chapter will argue, time, the evolution of human institutions, and even the great land masses on which those institutions rested, must share the stage with the vast seascape of the Mediterranean if we are to understand the place of the latter in the shaping of the history of antiquity.