The classical world centred itself firmly on the Mediterranean Sea, the nexus of ‘Western’ civilization for millennia, surrounded the great empires of each era: Hittite, Egyptian, Persian, Hellenistic, Carthaginian and eventually Roman. It is for this reason that by tracking the history of the Mediterranean one can follow the course of Classical and pre-Classical civilization. Perhaps the most famous reference to the relationship between the Greeks and the sea comes from Plato’s Phaedo 109b likening of the Greeks to frogs around a pond. Plato’s simile also highlights that the sea was an integral part of ancient Greek life and a mediating and unifying agent.
For the Greeks the sea was and remained the most vital single resource. It is ubiquitous in the collective Greek consciousness, both because of its . For many Greeks, the sea also represented their livelihoods, as seafarers, fishermen and from the earliest times onward. In fact, the Greeks relied on the sea not only for sustenance and transportation, but also for news, warfare, commercial and political exchange, as well as scientific development. The sea was also very significant in the religious life of the typical Greek. Seawater was used for purification, various rituals were held on the seashore, and certain festivals involved throwing offerings to the gods of the sea. Seafaring was also the occasion for numerous rituals. In this way, the sea pervaded all aspects of ancient life.
The Classical canon and mythology is pervaded by the motif of the sea. It is no coincidence that the founding epics of the Greek and Roman civilizations revolve around the sea. The Odyssey, Aeneid, and to a lesser extent Iliad, all incorporate this theme. However, the Aeneid does not necessarily represent the collective Roman consciousness as it was composed at the behest of Rome's first emperor who needed a suitably heroic, Hellenic ancestry for his new empire.
The sea is sometimes viewed as a nurturing figure in Greek mythology. For instance, in the Iliad, when Achilles comes to the shores of Troy to lament the loss of his prise Briseis, his mother Thetis rises out of the sea to comfort and help her son. In this episode, the sea provides a setting for this scene of consolation and reassurance. Thetis, as a Nereid, can also be thought to represent the aforementioned nurturing, maternal aspects of the sea, being a kourotrophic goddess, one who rears the young. In the same line of thought, the sea has been put in parallel with the earth as a nurturing mother, particularly in view of the sea's role in the Greek creation myth. In Hesiod’s Theogony 131, Pontus, the god of the sea, is one of the children born out of Gaia's parthenogenesis. Thus, the sea acts as one of the elemental primeval forces that form the world. Similarly, the Titan Oceanus, the river that encircles the world beyond the sea, is described as a creative force in the same text: "Tethys bore to Okeanos (Oceanus) the swirling rivers… She brought forth also a race apart of daughters, who with lord Apollo and the rivers have the young in their keeping all over the earth.”
However, a paradox emerges between this bountiful, nurturing image of the sea and it’s barrenness. Homer calls the sea “ἀτρύγετος”, "fruitless". This epithet contrasts the sterility of salt water with the fields of the earth, fertilized by fresh water. Even the numerous fish that inhabit the sea, made evident by the Homeric epithet “πόντος ἰχθυόεις”, "the fish-filled sea", evoke death rather than sustenance, as sailors worry that the fish will mangle their bodies if they suffer a shipwreck. Indeed, for Homer’s heroes, the sea serves predominantly as a universal representation of the Other and a purgatory through which the protagonist must journey to reach home, not just a sterile desert. In this way the sea seems to be an extension of fate, a natural force completely indifferent to wills of mortals. In the Odyssey and Aeneid, the sea is an obstacle that must be crossed to either reach home or found it anew. The former presents a world of hostile monsters [cont.]
An explanation for this Homeric picture of the sea might lie in the culture that caused the Mycenaean collapse, which coincides with the activity of the Sea Peoples in the Eastern Mediterranean. They caused widespread destruction in Anatolia and the Levant and were finally defeated by Pharaoh Ramesses III in 1175 BC . Their close association with the sea might have provided terrible inspiration the fantastic and terrifying tales that Odysseus relates to the Phaeacians. However, One of the ethnic groups that comprised these people were the Eqwesh , a name that appears to be linked with the Ahhiyawa, mentioned in the Hittite Tawagalawa Letter. [cont.]
Outside the legend of Homer, the Achaeans’ victory at Troy (likely the Luwian city of Wiluša) heralded the start of Greek colonies on the land surrounding the Mediterranean. The maritime colonialism of the early Greeks was [will be finished]
The Athenians, Greeks who pledged the bulk of their military expenditure to the sea, emerged as the dominant military power, while the Spartans, who closely regulated their naval investment consciously decided not to try to dominate the sea. This was a policy that just preceded the naval rise of Athens. In the final half of the 6th century BC, Sparta operated all over the Aegean and beyond, projecting its power and making a name for itself as a protector of Greek communities against tyrants. To name an example, Herodotus describes their siege of Samos in 525 BC , which would have required a substantial fleet and expeditionary force. However, in the 5th century BC, Sparta turned inward. They willingly surrendered the leadership of the Delian League to Athens just one year after the defeat of Xerxes' army; after that, they are not seen operating anywhere outside the Greek mainland until the Peloponnesian War forced their hand.
Between 489 and 480 BC Athens expanded their fleet from 40 to 200 triremes with public funding. With this large navy the Athenians provided the lion's share of the Greek fleet that fought the Persians at Artemision and Salamis in 480 BC. After the Persian invading force had been defeated, the Greek alliance founded the Delian League with the intention of avenging the losses and sacrilege inflicted by the Persians. The operations of the League were mostly naval, assaulting Persian strongholds in the Aegean and Asia Minor; as the supplier of the largest naval force, the Athenians soon emerged as its leader. Within a few years, its policies as leader of the League took a darker turn. Athens began to regard the League as its personal network of unequal allies, who were compelled by force to remain part of it, and made to follow wherever Athens led.
One of the ways Athens made this shift palatable to the members of the League was by offering them a way out of its constant campaigning: instead of supplying ships and troops, members could opt to pay tribute, which would allow Athens to fund additional naval forces of its own. The result was that Athens constantly practiced its naval expertise and constantly expanded its navy, while the other members of the League increasingly gave up their fleets and lost their expertise, relying on Athens to protect them if the need arose. Any members who rebelled were forced back into the fold and generally made to surrender any ships they had left. By the time of the Peloponnesian War, only Lesbos and Chios still supplied ships of their own. All other subjects opted to pay. Athens boasted a fleet of over 300 triremes; its sailors had decades of naval campaigning under their belt.
In Greece and the wider Aegean, local, regional, and international trade exchange existed from Minoan and Mycenaean times in the Bronze Age. The presence, in particular, of pottery and precious goods such as gold, copper, and ivory, found far from their place of production, attests to the exchange network that existed between Egypt, Asia Minor, the Greek mainland, and islands such as Crete, Cyprus, and the Cyclades. Trade lessened and perhaps almost disappeared when these civilizations declined, and during the so-called Dark Ages from the 11th to 8th centuries BCE international trade in the Mediterranean was principally carried out by the Phoenicians.
The earliest written sources of Homer and Hesiod attest to the existence of trade (ἐμπορια) and merchants (ἐμποροι) from the 8th century BCE, although they often present the activity as unsuitable for the ruling and landed aristocracy. Nevertheless, international trade grew from circa 750 BCE, and contacts spread across the Mediterranean driven by social and political factors such as population movements, colonisation, inter-state alliances, the spread of coinage, the gradual standardisation of measurements, warfare, and safer seas following the determination to eradicate piracy.
The Romans, like the later Spartans, built their empire by land, where the pre-Hellenistic Greeks built theirs by sea. However, the Romans did by no means neglect their navy. Military supremacy of the seas could be a crucial factor in the success of any land campaign, and the Romans well knew that a powerful naval fleet could supply troops and equipment to where they were most needed in as short a time as possible. Roman naval tactics differed little from the methods employed by their Greek precursors, using the same main vessel (the Trireme) and two basic strategies: ramming (bronze rams were fitted to the prows of warships, and were used to rupture the hull of the enemy ship) and boarding.
While the typical Greek drew his strength and wealth from the sea as a fisherman or seafaring merchant, the typical Roman’s roots were firmly planted in the earth making his living as a farmer. A microcosm for this cultural division is found the distinction between their attitude of their respective lyric poets: for example Tibullus and Sappho. In Tibullus 1.1 the speaker praises the quiet life of the farmer setting his ideal rural life in rura in opposition to his past life in militia. The recurring motif of the sea represents the perils of such a life; the speaker says: “sit dives iure furorem / qui maris et tristes ferre potest pluvias”, “let riches go by right / to he who can bear the wrath of the sea and the dreary rain”, bathetically setting up the sea as an obstacle for a hero to overcome, a typical epic narrative, only to undermine it: the speaker rejects the redemption and rewards of the maritime quest in favour of the satisfaction working Italian land. This sentiment is typical in the Roman consciousness, as highlighted by Cicero’s quote from De Officiis: ‘Omnium autem rerum, ex quibus aliquid acquiritur, nihil est agri cultura melius, nihil uberius, nihil dulcius, nihil homine libero dignius’; ‘But of all the occupations by which gain is secured, none is better than agriculture, none more profitable, none more delightful, none more becoming to a freeman.’ Agriculture was it was idealized by the social elite as a way of life, rather than by the peasants who actually tilled the land. In this way, the sentimental Roman vision of the land seems rather hypocritical: the wealthy were happy to own farms but still used slave labour in their upkeep.
By contrast, in Sappho’s poetry, for example The Brother’s Poem the sea, though a force to be reckoned with, gives a transformative experience to one who overcomes it. The poem is in two parallel sections, each discussing one of the poet’s brothers Charaxos and Larichos, the former hoping that Charaxos will return safely from his trading voyage and the latter that Larichos will become a man. The juxtaposition of these two ideas suggests a connection; that a successful passage across the sea is a rite of passage of sorts. The idea of the sea as a positive transformative force is reiterated when the speaker says ‘εὐδίαι γὰρ ἐκ μεγάλαν ἀήταν αἶψα πέλονται’, ‘for calm seas often follow after the squalling of a storm’. In Sappho’s poetry the sea also often represents a medium through which physical messages and abstract desires are transmitted, for example in ‘Come to me here from Crete’. These complex visions of the sea, while not directly positive, stress its importance in Greek poetic thought.
In conclusion, the [will be finished]