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

218 The View from the Customs House
grazed there. The comparison between harbours and pastures
has appeared odd to scholars attempting to impose modern
taxonomies of taxation on the ancient world, but makes considerable
sense when the problems of survival in the Mediterranean
environment are considered as a whole. 50 This was a world
in which risk in essentially fragmented landscapes is countered
above all through the myriad forms of interdependence that
connectivity makes possible. Pastoralism, with its frequent requirement
of mobility, is an essential element in Mediterranean
agrosystems, and it is quite natural that levies on it should be
juxtaposed in the fiscal mentalité with those on the seaborne
redistribution which is taxed in harbours. The analogy also
reminds us that for all the crucial importance of normal redistribution
by sea, the interdependence of Mediterranean communities
involved their terrestrial neighbours too. The assets of
a microregion included not only harbours, but mountain passes
and land routeways. 51
The spotlight of the Greek evidence thus illuminates a remarkable
world of maritime interconnectedness, made up of
hundreds of local clusters of consumers and producers, each
netted with the others, near and far, by exchanges through
their outlets to the sea, occasionally built-harbours, more often
sheltered coves or convenient beaches. That spotlight shines
because of a group of cultural attitudes—the ethical concerns
with economic issues of the community and its leaders, the
sometimes diffident but always potent orientation of early
Greek culture toward the sea, that intensity of community selfdefinition
through the interplay of individuality and imitation
which we think of as characteristic of the early history of the polis.
The spotlight appears for what it is in a text such as the delineation
of the key subjects for deliberation in Book 1 of Aristotle’s
50 L. Nixon and S. R. F. Price, ‘The size and resources of Greek cities’, in
O. Murray and S. R. F. Price (eds.), The Greek City from Homer to Alexander
(Oxford, 1990), 166, called for more investigation of the economic relationship
between poleis, instead of a preoccupation with autarkeia, and used harbour
taxes to show that such relationships were important.
51 A striking individual case has recently been examined in a straggly
ancient village on the pass between Pisidia and Pamphylia, where a gate—a
literal gateway—for customs duties obstructed the Via Sebaste, beside a
Roman milestone, still preserved in situ, and a couple of hero shrines: Journal
of Hellenic Studies Archaeological Reports 45 (1999), 173.