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204 The View from the Customs House
neither to forget that this ease of communications is relative,
and that the sea remains dangerous and, in pre-modern conditions,
extremely capricious; nor to limit this mobility to the sea
itself, since it is extended by the waterways of the coastlands
and the valleys which lead into the mountains and plains behind
them. But it is the sea itself which makes it possible for primary
producers to adjust their shortfalls and surpluses through redistribution
on a scale and over distances which are hard to
parallel elsewhere. As a Hellenistic treatise on political organization
puts it, there is a ‘transferring or trading’ element in the
lowest of the three strata of the community, which is concerned
with ‘the moving abroad of what is in surplus in the city, and
that which is in surplus abroad into the city’. 8 These reciprocal
movements are part of the productive economy, built into the
logic of choices about agrarian strategy, deployment of labour,
storage, and processing. And it is in relation to these that we
may observe a distinctive Mediterranean morphology of taxation,
from the earliest evidence available to us through to the
modern period. Michel Gras entitled an essay of 1993 ‘Pour une
Méditerranée des emporia’. 9 He was quite right to discern an
economic geography characteristic of this sea and its coastlands,
and to see it instantiated in the crucial phenomenon of the
ancient Greek emporion, unjustly neglected for so long. A similar
‘Méditerranée des ellimenia, une Méditerranée des douanes’
awaits our investigation. Similar, not only in the superficial
sense that a much-repeated institution patterns the space
around it; in both the emporion and the regime of taxes on
mobility, we are dealing with the structures with which the
powerful manage the consequences of the Mediterranean environment.
Control of gateways, on whatever scale, takes its
place, moreover, in the larger portfolio of environmental opportunities
open to communities: it is an aspect of the essentially
fissiparous microregional distribution of Mediterranean
resources. That ‘managing’ power has been wielded by prominent
individuals in small-scale communities, by regional elites,
and by far more complex structures which still ultimately reposed
on such foundations. Oppressive levying on interdepend-
8 ‘Hippodamos the Pythagorean’, Stobaeus 4. 43. 93 Hense (92 Meineke).
9 In A. Bresson and P. Rouillard (eds.), L’Emporion (Paris, 1993), 103–12.