The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  Virtually uninhabited coasts, easy to capture and sometimes even hospitable, included Cyrenaica (which was only settled in one small area); the northern Aegean; and the Black Sea beyond the Hellespont, which was controlled by Miletus from Abydos. On either side of the Bosphorus two Megarian watchposts, Byzantium and Chalcedon, faced one another, but after 650 Miletus was almost the only city to establish trading posts all around the Black Sea, whose stormy waters were ‘always enveloped in fogs and mists’. (To call the sea Pontus Euxinus or ‘the hospitable sea’ was a euphemism.) There the Milesians found precious goods, wood, salt fish, horses, slaves and grain. When Miletus went into decline, Athens took its place on this profitable sea.

  Italy and Sicily

  In the central part of the Mediterranean, matters were more serious. The failure of the Greeks to make the Inland Sea their own lake was the result of what happened in this area.

  At the outset, the sea favoured their ventures towards Italy and Sicily. There is a coastal current running northwards along the Balkan shoreline. Leaving this current behind in the region of Corfu, and if one was prepared to make a direct crossing, it was possible to sail in a day to the Italian coast, there to pick up another current flowing southward. A virtual salt-water river, driving along the coast, it carried ships to the Gulf of Taranto and past the shores of Calabria. From there it was no distance to the Sicilian coast across the Straits of Messina, which were not an insuperable obstacle.

  The Greeks were therefore able to settle almost everywhere along a coastal strip from the Gulf of Taranto to the shores of Sicily. It is worth remarking that they were less tempted by the more northerly parts of the Adriatic coast. Corinth occupied Corfu (Corcyra), it is true, conquering this strategic position from the Eretrians; it also seized Apollonia and Epidamnus (Durazzo), two ports sheltered from the severe winter weather by the mountainous coast of Epirus. But there was no attempt (except by the Phocaeans, to whom we shall return) to reach the northern part of the Adriatic, with its many coastal islands to the east and its flat plains and rivers to the west. The piecemeal and apparently haphazard efforts of the Greek cities were above all aimed at finding a route to the west. This did not, however, prevent the colonizers from stopping at times, when it was possible to come to an agreement, whether by peaceful means or by force, with the local populations, Iapyges, Oscans, Sicels or Sicans.

  The drive westward with little regard for the intervening places is clearly demonstrated by the chronology provided by both archaeology and tradition. The first Greek colonies were not in Tarentum or Metapontum, Sybaris or Syracuse, but beyond a line running from Tarentum to Syracuse and on the other side of the Straits of Messina, at Pithecusae (Ischia) in about 770. The Chalcidians and other peoples of Euboea had thus immediately embarked on a race to the most distant places. Subsequently this forward position was reinforced locally by the occupation of the islands of Capreae (Capri), Pandateria and Pontia, and by the founding in about 740 of the key city of Cumae (at a date much later than the traditional version, 1052). In the wake of these first settlements, hastily established as far west as possible, came other towns, Naxos (734), Zancle (730), which with Rhegium (c. 720) commanded the Straits of Messina, Syracuse (733), founded by Corinth, and Tarentum (706). The pattern is very like that of the Phoenicians, whose first objective was far-off Spain.

  At first things seem to have gone quite smoothly in areas that were either unoccupied or at least not defended by competitors of any consequence. Such rivals only arrived later on to challenge the Greeks for possession of key sites. In the sixth century, the Etruscans were consolidating their positions in Campania: the Greeks went no further than this, and for a long time had access to the wide Tyrrhenian Sea only when their rivals allowed it. There was a division of spoils with the Carthaginians, who kept firm control over western Sicily to the west of a line between Panormus and Motya (being so close, it was unthinkable for Carthage to give up this ‘bridgehead’). Broadly speaking, the Greeks and the Carthaginians shared occupation of the islandfrom 750 to 650, the former on the east, the latter on the west. But the Greeks’ great triumph was to have been the first to seize the hazardous Straits of Messina. It was not a total victory, however, since the Etruscans dominated the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Carthaginians, by clinging on to the narrow, rugged region of western Sicily, kept possession of an essential link in the route leading ‘by way of the islands’ to Spain. In a word, the Greeks had designs on the westward route giving access to metals, but were unable really to secure it.

  This did not prevent the colonial Greek cities from flourishing, no doubt because of their extensive and fertile hinterlands. Varro asserts that the grain yield here was a hundred to one. We may remain sceptical, but certainly the threefold triumph of wheat, oil, and wine, in which Diodorus saw the cause of the rapid growth of the Sybarite economy, explains the splendour of these colonial cities.

  Their wealth came also from trade and industry, but principally trade, since these cities of the central Mediterranean were above all places of exchange. If Himera and Selinus minted the first Greek coins in Sicily (Himera in about 570-560) this was because they were the first cities to come into contact with Spanish silver, either via Marseille (founded by the Phocaeans in 600) or perhaps even via trade with Carthage which was a major provider of silver.

  At this early stage in their history, most western Greek cities were still closely linked to their mother cities, which housed artisans, carriers and merchants. The products of the industry of the mother cities were a kind of currency which could be invested in the west. Thus it seems probable that the fine, multicoloured fabrics of Miletus reached Etruria by way of the land routes over the isthmus, from the Gulf of Taranto to the Tyrrhenian Sea. Sybaris owed part of its wealth to the fact that it directed this mule traffic towards its colony in Laos, on the Tyrrhenian Sea. The road, which was quite a difficult one though it went no higher than a thousand metres, could only be used for light-weight precious goods such as woven cloth.

  As for the heavy traffic in pottery, which was carried in the holds of ships, archaeologists can now give us more definite information and even suggest statistics. There was a continuous movement of trade, carrying pots over enormous distances for household or festive use: vases, amphorae, craters, drinking vessels, rhytons, hydriae, aryballoi and even ordinary kitchenware. And given that there are many different types of pottery, varying according to period and place of origin, and that we sometimes know the trademarks of the workshops and the painters who decorated them, the pieces and fragments unearthed in excavations are valuable evidence for dates. In addition, their immense variety can tell us something about the trade routes and indeed the way this trade altered over time.

  If we look at Georges Vallet’s 1958 study of Zancle and Rhegium, we can make some general points. Between about 625 and 570, there was an increasing flow of Corinthian pottery, but from 570 to 525 it was the black-varnished pottery of Ionia (particularly Phocaea and Miletus) which dominated the scene, to be ousted in its turn, from about 5 50, by products from Attica. So we have three ages: the Corinthian, the Ionian, the Attic. The first of these launched a new kind of commerce of a colonial type, like that of early modern Europe. The ‘crockery’ exported to the west by Corinth was the result of mass production and intended to be exchanged for grain which was then traded throughout central Greece by the manufacturing city. This typically colonial trade was designed simply to serve the interests of Corinth, which enjoyed the advantage of its geographical position at the crossroads of the routes through the isthmus. Once Ionia and Attica joined in (the latter before the disasters of 494 and the Persian conquest of Ionia), this colonial trade gave way definitively to an international form of commerce.

  If historians have described these exchanges in terms of ‘accumulation’, it is in order to suggest that this economic take-off in the ancient world may already have involved a type of merchant ‘capitalism’, with all the tensions that implies. In 1911, the biggest arch
aic treasure ever found in the west came to light in Tarentum: over 600 coins together with ‘six kilograms of unminted silver in the form of cast or hammered plates, and crude, worn coinage cut up beyond recognition, in rods and bars, and a few fragments of silver vases and utensils’. It all seems to have been buried around 480, the year of Himera and Salamis. It bears eloquent witness to ‘accumulation’, too eloquent perhaps – today it is suspected that the archaeologists of 1911 may have added a few coins from elsewhere to the collection.15

  Marseille and the Far West

  It was in the area beyond Sicily and southern Italy that Greek colonization launched its riskiest ventures, starting in the late seventh century and carrying on into the first half of the sixth century BC .

  There is no need here to pursue the discussion of ancient sources, since Michel Clerc has already done so in his classic study of Marseille from its origins until the fifth century ad. His conclusions were not invalidated by the 1967 excavations in the area round the Bourse, although these did yield a lot of information about the port of Lacydon (larger than the present-day Vieux-Port), about the stone jetties at which the vessels tied up, the reservoir from which they drew fresh water, and the fortifications of the ancient city.16

  The founding in about 600 of Massalia (Massilia was the Latin name), where the trade routes up and down the Rhone met the sea-passage to the west, is a sign of the Phocaeans’ great boldness. Their city, the largest in Ionia apart from Miletus, grew rapidly at the end of the seventh century and after, until it was taken by the Persians in 549. But all the crucial or easily accessible points on the great map of the western Mediterranean were already taken. As the last comers in the west, the Phocaeans had to travel further than the founders of the Chalcidian or Corinthian cities, beyond Corcyra and Epidamnus, Zancle and Rhegium, beyond Cumae even. They had one trump card: the speed of their ships. Being good sailors like all the Ionians, they had – according to Herodotus – invented a new way of carrying goods, not in roundships powered by sail, but in long pentecontors with fifty oarsmen, which the Greeks and other Mediterranean peoples normally used only for warfare. We might see an analogy here with the galera de mercato in fifteenth-century Venice, a ship equipped with both sails and oars. In any case, the slim, fast Phocaean cargo ships were unusually capable of defending themselves. We can picture them being used for piracy as well as trade.

  Thus the Phocaeans first reached the north of the Adriatic and the city of Adria. It would therefore have been possible for them to make use of the ‘German isthmus’, which lay close to hand. If they chose not to, it was not because they preferred the French isthmus and the Rhone route which the Greek merchants were quick to discover, but because they wanted to sail west towards the Atlantic. Everything suggests, indeed, that Massalia was not the real objective of the Phocaeans and the Greeks of Asia, the Samians and Rhodians. To quote Herodotus literally (1.163), the Phocaeans ‘opened up the Adriatic, Tyrrhenia [i.e., Etruria], Iberia and Tartessus’. Not a word about Marseille. Once again, therefore, it was the silver and copper of Spain which took priority, together with the tin which was already being shipped along the Atlantic coast to Andalusia. We might conclude therefore that Mainake and Hemeroscopion were founded before Massalia. Unfortunately, we know nothing about the former and the latter is regarded as relatively recent by the archaeologists.

  Marseille must have gradually put down roots and gained its autonomy. This can only have been consolidated by the fall of Phocaea, which was taken by the Persians in 549 and abandoned by most of its population. A difficult period followed, since the refugees from Phocaea were denied access to Alalia by the Carthaginian and Etruscan navies, while southern Spain was systematically and thoroughly controlled by Carthage.17 Even so, the Phocaeans had certainly attempted to fight their way to the silver of Spain.

  Unequal systems

  In about 700 BC, the general renewal of activity had favoured colonization and economic exchanges, to the advantage equally of the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Etruscans and the Greeks. A degree of prosperity opened up new possibilities.

  In about 600, events and exchanges seem to gather pace. In a Mediterranean world that was by now thoroughly explored and divided up, the Greek system had reached its zenith with the final ventures from Miletus into the Black Sea and from Phocaea to the western Mediterranean. It was in about 630 that the Egyptian pharaoh ceded the city of Naucratis to Greek merchants, and in about 600 that the Phocaeans founded Marseille at the most distant point of their expeditions to the west.

  Naucratis, as we have seen, was a sort of Shanghai, a concession enjoyed by the Asiatic Greeks. The Milesians were there alongside the Aeginetans and large numbers of Greeks from Chios, Rhodes, Tinos,Phocaea, Clazomenae, Halicarnassus and Mytilene. Perhaps the Greeks came to understand there that the Mediterranean belonged to whoever could embrace it from end to end, linking up the high point and the low point of commerce, Naucratis and Marseille in this case. Those who controlled the two extremities dominated the entire system, and Asiatic Greece thus became the heart of the Greek commercial system.

  Not the heart of the Mediterranean, however, since the sea was no one’s exclusive property. It had room for three systems which sometimes worked together, but more often competed, using force if necessary.

  The most fragile and least impressive network of the three was that of the Etruscans. Even at the time of their victory at Alalia, their commerce did not cover the whole of the Mediterranean. They were a meeting point of east and west, as their prosperity indicates, but they did not create trade links belonging exclusively to them. And in any case their first great disaster, the naval defeat at Cumae (474), dealt them an irreparable blow.

  The Phoenician system was altogether more extensive. Phoenicia and Carthage were able to resist everything that fortune threw at them. The crushing defeats suffered at the hands of Assyria and then Nebuchadnezzar did not destroy the Phoenician fleet, which rose from its ashes with the pharaohs of the Saite dynasty; then, in 525, it passed into the service of Persia. Carthage made a similar recovery after the disaster of Himera (480). And so it went on. Nothing seemed able to get the better of this adaptable creature.

  We should not therefore be misled by the omnipresence of Greek culture; the Mediterranean never became a ‘Greek lake’. In z Egypt escaped Greek control, Cambyses having put a stop to the trading activities of Naucratis. In 494, Ionia, the driving force of the system, was conquered by Persia. Then came the Persian wars, Marathon (490), Salamis (480) and the turbulent glory of Athens. But contrary to what the historians keep saying, the Persian wars were not won by the Greeks; their real conclusion came in 404 with the fall of Athens, which was the work of Persian gold rather than of the Peloponnesian armies. What is more, the gigantic and uninterrupted efforts of Greek industry can be seen as a proof of the difficulty of the situation and the need to overcome obstacles. The emigration of Greek craftsmen and artists, to Etruria for instance, is surely a movement similar to that of the mercenaries making for the Middle East. All this activity led to an inevitable spread of Greek cultural influence, even in Carthage and Carthaginian Spain. But the rival system, that of Carthage, remained undoubtedly the leader in terms of commerce. In addition to Spanish silver, it had African gold.

  The sea remained divided then – none of the three systems could gain complete control of it or profit from the advantages which this would have given them. We are a far cry from the triumphant unity of Rome.

  7

  The Miracle of Greece

  Let us start this chapter by imagining a dialogue between two people, one of whom believes in ‘the eternal glory of Greece’ while the other does not.

  The negative view would go something like this: ‘Why insist so much on the splendour of ancient Greece? It is dazzling only from close quarters. The historian has a duty to stand back and keep some distance from the object of study. A play by Sophocles or Euripides certainly stirs echoes in me, going back to my schooldays, but
their world is quite foreign to me. It is not our world. I believe, like Wilamowitz, that we should “stay inside the Greek world and think in a Greek way about what is Greek”; or as Heidegger said after trying in vain to translate a line by Parmenides, that “we should allow Greek words to tell us what they have to say in their own language”. Any confusion between present-day western civilization and that of ancient Greece is an anachronistic device, such as one finds in a Giraudoux play. The coherence of the Greek world depended on its being a closed universe. If we try to penetrate it, it will crumble away into dust.’

  The other speaker, who is perfectly at ease in admiring ancient Greece, and can inhabit it in his mind without feeling a stranger in his own time, would reply, quoting the splendid aphorism of Louis Gernet, ‘“There is no history that does not relate to the present”. In other words, ancient Greece is a living presence for us: the Greeks of antiquity can stand for a certain basic humanity which has changed little across the ages. And like the souls of the dead who were brought to life by Odysseus’ sacrifices, Greek thought is constantly being reincarnated, transmitted to us. It was to be found in Miletus in the great days of the Ionians; in Athens when Socrates was teaching there; in Alexandria in Egypt, before the brilliant age of Archimedes in Syracuse; it was still alive in Rome, since the pathetic reduction of Greece to a Roman province in 146 b c was in the end a spiritual triumph by the conquered over the conquerors; it was a precious bloom cherished in a hothouse by Byzantium, that second Rome; it flowered once more in the Florence of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Pico della Mirandola; and it is still alive today. As Louis Gernet put it, “It was in Greece that the first framework for philosophical reflection was devised, and it has become commonplace to observe that our approach to the essential problems has changed very little since then”. And perhaps one is saying both too little and too much if one agrees with a modern British historian who has argued that “the Ionian philosophers blazed the trail, and all science had to do after that was follow it”.’