Untitled - UTSC Humanities Research Projects server - University of ...

Ecology and Beyond 103
trade in the western Mediterranean they let the western Phoenicians
and above all the Greeks play the main role. 23 Nevertheless,
the Etruscans were fully up-to-date in agriculture and
metal-working technology, and they could benefit from all
the achievements of eastern and Greek civilizations. Thus the
Etruscans could develop their own alphabet derived from the
Greek, and fully participate in the artistic achievements of
the Orientalizing period. In different ways and at a different
time, the cultures of Iberia also benefited from the impulse that
gave them both the West-Phoenicians and the Greeks.
This role of go-between people was not sufficient to ensure
the Greeks an everlasting domination. Through conquest by
Alexander, they managed to gain control over the eastern basin
of the Mediterranean—that is another story. But it was just then
that a specific cycle of their culture, represented by the citystate,
began to come to an end. In fact, it soon appeared that in
this role of middlemen the Greeks were no longer needed; and
the heritage of their specific city-state organization even proved
to be a radical handicap when it came to competing with the
territorial state that Rome developed in Italy. Then the two
basins of the Mediterranean were at last united and this time a
general connectivity could come into being. At first this connectivity
mainly benefited Rome and Italy, as both texts and
archaeology testify. But under the Empire this one-sided situation
changed. We now know that the Roman world was more
‘multi-polarized’ than was previously thought, 24 though Rome
and Italy long remained the centre. In any case this general
connectivity in the Mediterranean world was not ‘the end of
History’: several very serious internal difficulties brought about
a first crisis in the third century ad, then the final collapse in the
fifth century of the western part of the empire.
23 On the maritime contacts of the Phoenicians see A. Millard, ‘The Phoenicians
at Sea’, in G. J. Oliver, R. Brock, T. J. Cornell, and S. Hodkinson
(eds.), The Sea in Antiquity (Oxford, 2000), 75–9; and, more generally, the
articles in S. Moscati (ed.), The Phoenicians (Milan, 1988). On the Greek
presence in the western basin of the Mediterranean see the many different
studies in the collective volume edited by Pugliese Carratelli.
24 K. Hopkins, ‘Rome, Taxes, Rents and Trade’, Kodai 6–7 (1995/6),
41–75; H. W. Pleket, ‘Models and Inscriptions: Export of Textiles in the
Roman Empire’, Epigraphica Anatolica 30 (1998), 117–28.