The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  Another change was that the provincial arts regained a degree of autonomy. Septimius Severus’ triumphal arch at Leptis Magna already foreshadows the art of Byzantium. At Palmyra and Doura, a marginal art was emerging, a kind of cross between the Greek and the Mesopotamian. In its preference for the abstract, it has a kind of primitivism about it. These are fleeting glimpses of what was to come, and we can make sense of them only because we know the inexorable outcome of this story. Although everywhere the overall ‘Roman Empire’ style, which had already become over-familiar, was tending to break down under pressure from local originality, this ubiquitous style was still strong enough to re-assert itself in certain circumstances. It can be seen under Gallianus (253-68), the friend of Plotinus, and under Diocletian (184-313), in the baths he had built in Rome or the palace he had built at Spalato. In short, there were many signs that that times were changing, but we are still a long way from Byzantium or from the Dark Ages.

  Law: a success story

  And Rome went on creating ever-larger cities, turning them into capitals: Treves/Trier, Milan, Salonika, Nicomedia. Literature too continued to flourish. Let us be bold enough to say that Ammianus Marcelinus (3 20-90) was the equal of Livy; that Ausonius of Bordeaux was a poet of true worth, that the literature of Christianity was extremely important, that the encouragement of education which was so evident in these difficult centuries certainly counted for something. Above all, there is the extraordinary success story of Roman law, which has remained in evidence to the present day.

  One would quickly get lost in abstruse explanations if one were to open one of the admirable textbooks on Roman law we have today, to look up the meaning of simple terms like consent, obligation, contracts, property; or if one were to try to understand how law followed the complex history of a society, adapting to it while adapting that society in turn. In his work on the institutions of antiquity (1967) Jean Gaudemet studied the evolution of Roman life in the light of this dialectic between society and law. He paints three successive pictures, first Rome under the Republic, then the Rome of the First Empire, followed by the Rome of the Late Empire – the last of these being the key period. The Roman law of the Theodosian Codex (438) and the Justinian Codex (527) to be followed by the Digest, the Institutes and the NovelleSy came at the end of a very long period of evolution, with various inherited factors superimposed on one another. Roman law was built up slowly, day by day, based on usage and custom, the senatus-consultes, the edicts of magistrates, the imperial ‘Constitutions’, jurisprudence, and doctrines developed by legal experts.

  The role of the legal experts, the jurists, who acted as legal advisers and barristers, was the most original feature of this complex construction. Without a doubt, Rome’s intelligence and genius came into its own in this area. The metropolis could not maintain contact with itsEmpire – the rest of Italy, the provinces, the cities – without the legal regulations essential to the maintenance of political, social and economic order. The body of law could only increase over the ages. The great legal thinkers able to handle this vast mass of rules did not appear until a fairly late stage. Sabinus and Proculus were contemporaries of Tiberius; Gaius, whose Institutiones were discovered in 1816 by Niebuhr in a Verona palimpsest, lived in the age of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius; while Pomponius, another famous jurist, was his contemporary. As for law schools, they appeared in the Late Empire, in Rome, Constantinople and Beirut, which played a leading role in the fifth century: the law school there would preserve Roman law, enabling the renaissance under Justinian to take place.

  So Roman law stood firm until the last days of Rome or even longer. ‘When one considers how Roman law and institutions survived Rome’s political dominion,’ writes Jean Gaudemet, ‘the idea of the decline and fall of the empire becomes quite meaningless.’ Rome certainly did not die in its entirety. The whole of the west was shaped by Roman survivals.

  The founding of Constantinople and the appearance of

  Christianity

  The old notions of the decline and fall of Rome are certainly open to debate. The Empire, although reported to be dying, survived its internal quarrels and the extravagance of its masters. There was no more gold or silver, the economy fell back into a pre-monetary state, yet life went on. There was no longer a disciplined army, as one after another the frontiers collapsed and the barbarians poured in, penetrating deep into Roman territory. Yet there were still soldiers prepared to die for Rome along the Rhine, outside Milan, on the banks of the Danube or in the valley of the Euphrates, fighting a new and formidable enemy, the Sassanid Persians, after 227. Even the building sites remained busy: Rome’s colossal ramparts were built under Aurelian in 272. From 324, Constantine started to build his new capital at Constantinople, inaugurating it in 330. If we are looking for a symbolic event, here is one indeed. This gigantic torch would send its light down the centuries to come.

  This was no hastily constructed city, built in a day: it was a second Rome, an act of incalculable consequences, the more so since it was linked to the emperor’s conversion to Christianity. By this act the destiny of both the Mediterranean and the Empire took the path which would lead to the eventual survival and longevity of Byzantium– something which Constantine in the course of his actions probably neither realized nor desired, for he had certainly not chosen the new capital to escape the structures of pagan Rome. Since the days of Diocletian and the tetrarchy, few emperors had had the time to stay long in Rome. In his new capital, Constantine was within reach of the Danube and the Euphrates, fragile gates on which the barbarians were constantly hammering.

  But it is Constantinople’s future that we in the west find so fascinating, since our own history is as it were prefigured there. Who could fail to be interested in the prodigious seismic change produced by the triumph of Christianity? In the event it triumphed only after centuries of deep trouble. But it was carried on the violent groundswell of a deep-seated revolution – not an exclusively spiritual one – which had developed slowly from the second century.

  It was between i6z and 168, in the early reign of Marcus Aurelius (161-80), that the foreign situation so comprehensively deteriorated. The intellectual, moral and religious crisis of the Empire followed almost immediately. Although the tolerant paganism of Rome with its thousands of gods might still be alive and in reasonable health throughout the Empire, and although the cult of the emperor was still strong, broadly corresponding to a form of patriotism, it seems certain that paganism could not truly satisfy either the masses or the elites. The latter looked to philosophy for their salvation, the former yearned for more accessible gods, for more tangible consolations. There could be no greater consolation than the belief in life after death. It is not without significance that ‘in the second century burial became more frequent than cremation, whereas in previous centuries the proportions were the other way round… The form of burial which left the dead person’s body as it had been in life is not unconnected to the spread of belief in an after-life, in eternal salvation and the possible resurrection of the body’ (E. Albertini).

  Here there was a connecting thread. Although sociological andgeographical differences can be seen, revealing a variety of responses according to class and region, the question being asked was everywhere the same. Rich and poor were troubled by the same anguish. The renewal of Greek philosophy in Rome is significant. The Cynics (Demetrius and Oenomaos), those strange philosophers who claimed to be messengers from Zeus, became travelling preachers. Neo-platonism took over from both Epicureanism and Stoicism. The most important of its interpreters was Plotinus (205-70), a Greek, born in Egypt. At the age of forty, he settled in Rome and opened a school which enjoyed huge success. His philosophy took Plato as its starting point but sought to reconcile all the various strands of contemporary thought in a single mystical urge.

  More disturbing signs pointed to the depth of the crisis. There was a proliferation of thaumaturgi and miracle-workers, such as Apollonius of Tyana, who died in Rome in 97, but who
se life with its marvels provided Philostratus (d. about 275) with enough material for a novel. His hero preached the cult of the sun, performed miracles, halted epidemics and healed the sick, The success of this book was a symptom of the times, and it would be outdone later. To influence mortals was one thing: to influence the life of the gods was another– and this was what theurgy claimed to do, providing a field day for charlatans and illuminati.

  Such a climate explains the growing prestige in the west of eastern cults: the cults of Isis, Cybele, Attis, Mithras, and before long the religion of Christianity, quickly gained ground. The soldiers who travelled throughout the Empire played a part in this spread of religions, as did the eastern merchants, the Syri, Jews and Syrians, who were present everywhere. But the emperor and his entourage carried enormous weight in this process. Neither Cybele nor Mithras and the bloody baptisms of his cult would have been so widespread had it not been that certain emperors looked on them with favour.

  This was equally true of Christianity, which was for a long time persecuted by Rome. Without Constantine’s conversion, what would have become of it? ‘Let us imagine that the king of France decided to convert to Protestantism, the religion of a small minority of his subjects’, writes Ferdinand Lot. ‘Fired with pious zeal against “idolatry”, he would have destroyed or allowed to fall into ruin all the most venerated sanctuaries of the kingdom, the abbey at Saint-Denis, Reims cathedral, the crown of thorns, the Sainte-Chapelle. That still only gives a faint idea of the frenzy that took hold of the Roman emperors of the fourth century.’

  But the Christian religion did not become the state religion without coming to some arrangement with the politics, society and even the civilization of Rome. The civilization of the Roman Mediterranean was taken over by the young forces of Christianity. As a result, it had to accept many compromises, fundamental and structural ones. And it is in this shape, and carrying this mixed message, that the civilization of antiquity has come down to us.

  Editor’s note: This work, which covers such a long chronological span, has no overall conclusion. This might seem rather surprising: the reason is that it was originally conceived as the first volume in a collection (see the prefaces above) and would have led directly into the next volume, by another historian, which was to be devoted to Byzantium. Fernand Braudel therefore planned his conclusion so that it would fit the introduction of the following volume. When the collection was cancelled, it was left as we have it here.

  Appendix I

  Appendix II

  1. The Mediterranean (geographical overview)

  2. The Fertile Crescent

  3. Mesopotamia

  4. Ancient Egypt

  5. ‘Phoenicia’

  6. The eastern basin of the Mediterranean (2500–1200), showing Hittite expansion and the rise of Crete

  7. Phoenician colonization

  8. Greek colonization

  9. Etruscan settlements

  10. The urn-field burial people

  11. Celtic migrations

  12. The Empire of Alexander the Great

  13. Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul

  14. The Roman Empire in the reign of Septimius Severus

  Notes

  Editors’ Foreword to the French Edition

  1. Francoise Gaultier, Chief Curator in the Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities at the Louvre, read the sections on the Etruscans, and Jean-Louis Huot, Professor at the University of Paris I, read the sections on the eastern Mediterranean.

  2. The Long March to Civilization

  1. Today one would put it at between one and two, or even three million years. The oldest carved tools (found in Africa) are about two and a half million years old. (JG)

  2. There is now reason to think that the paleolithic goes back over two million years. (JG)

  3. Today the middle paleolithic is regarded as starting in about 200,000 BC and ending in about 35,000. It was thought to last only about 40,000 years at the time Braudel was writing. (JG)

  4. We know now that this is not the case. Sardinia was settled in the thirteenth millennium BC and Corsica in the eleventh. But it also seems possible that a much older population could have inhabited these islands (witness the ‘paleolithic’ artefacts of Sardinia, and the hearth in a cave at Coscia in Corsica which has been attributed to Neanderthal man). (JG)

  5. The figure is now thought to be 200,000 years BC. (JG)

  6. Neanderthal man is nowadays considered to have been a sapiens. He is described as Homo sapiens neandertalis, to distinguish him from Homo sapiens sapiens, who would eliminate him during the transition between the middle and upper paleolithic ages. (JG)

  7. Their arguments have been confirmed in recent years: it is no longer suggested that the mesolithic was marked by hardship and backwardness: on the contrary, the development and exploitation of the forests made possible the establishment of ‘progressive’ cultures, as Braudel himself notes below. (JG)

  8. The figure of 1000 inhabitants is not known with certainty. (JG)

  9. (JG)

  10. The chronology of the appearance of domestic cattle in the Middle East is still a matter of debate. (JG)

  3. A Twofold Birth

  1. (JG)

  2. They have now been excavated at the Aetokremnos site on the Akrotiri peninsula. (JG)

  3. The cardial culture is now thought, according to ‘calibrated’ dating methods, to date from the sixth millennium BC. (JG)

  4. Today the date is put at about 2500 BC. (JG)

  5. If the boats drawn at Tarxien are contemporary with the temple, they must date from the third millennium BC. The suggestion of contacts with the Aegean in the second millennium is therefore anachronistic as far as these images are concerned. (JG)

  6. Fernand Braudel thought that the megalith/Earth-Mother/metal-working complex was all part of the same culture and diffused from the eastern Mediterranean. This combination is no longer regarded as valid (cf. Jean Guilaine, La Mer partagée. La Méditerranée avant Vecriture 7000-2000 avant J.-C, Paris, 1994). The sequence is now thought to have been as follows: (1) the first agricultural societies and their religions (eighth to seventh millennia BC in the Middle East, sixth millennium in the west); (2) the megaliths: the oldest ones are in the west and date from about 4500 BC; (3) metal-working: this developed earliest in Anatolia and south-east Europe (in about 5000 to 4500 BC) and later in the west (c. 3500-3000 BC). (JG)

  7. Carbon dating has now provided a much earlier date for the megaliths of the west, especially those on the Atlantic coast. Megalithic culture was a neolithic phenomenon and had no connection with metal-working in these western regions. (J G)

  8. Since 1969, it has become possible to date many megaliths. The ones in the west seem to be completely unconnected with those in the Mediterranean. It seems that the phenomenon could be the result of either contacts or convergence, varying from case to case. (JG)

  9. The desertion of the Hal Tarxien temple is now dated to about 2500 BC. It is not clear that the temple was destroyed. (JG)

  10. Here again, the dating has been completely modified since 1969. Traces of paleolithic settlement have been found in Sardinia dating from the thirteenth millennium (the Corbeddu cave) and dates even further back are possible. In the sixth millennium BC, neolithic settlers colonized Corsica, Sardinia and other regions of the western Mediterranean. (JG)

  11. These lines were written at a time when it was customary to telescope the chronology of these phenomena. The much longer chronology favoured today allows us to date the cult of Ozieri to the fourth millennium BC, the dolmen tombs to the third, the ‘tombs of the giants’ to the second, and the nuraghi villages to sometime after 1500 BC, with rebuilding going on down to Roman times. (JG)

  12. This view according to which the megaliths spread west from the Mediterranean is no longer tenable. The oldest dolmens on the Iberian peninsula are those on the Atlantic coast, not those on the Mediterranean side. The megalith phenomenon appears to have been partly created
in the west. (JG)

  13. There is no evidence of the links between these invaders and the megaliths, or of any eastern influence. More generally, the comparison with the Aegean is misleading. (JG)

  4. That is precisely what has been discovered, with the help of carbon dating. Some of these phenomena have even been found to be older still, going back to the fifth millennium BC. (JG)

  15. These migrations are disputed today. (JG)

  4. Centuries of Unity: the Seas of the Levant 2500-1200 BC

  1. The announcement was premature: the script of the Indus valley has still not been deciphered (PR, 1996)

  2. This explanation is no longer accepted. On the crisis of the twelfth century BC, see W. A. Ward and M. S. Joukovsky, The Crisis Years: the nth Century bc: from beyond the Danube to the Tigris, Dubuque, 1992. (PR)

  3. On Crete and the ‘disaster’ of Thera and its consequences, see the more nuanced views taken today in R. Treuil et al., Les Civilisations igiennes du Niolithique et de l’Age du Bronze, Paris, 1989. (PR)