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Four Years of Corruption 369
Perhaps our working ecological metaphor has been misleading
in this respect. It has created the impression that Mediterranean
people have lived in harmony with their environment
(CS 473). If there has been homeostasis it has been on only the
very longest of timescales; but that is in no respect to diminish
the devastation of environmental catastrophes, political impositions,
or regional abatements in the medium term. Our analysis
does not allow much space to particulars of violence, racism, or
war in the Mediterranean (D’Hautcourt 2001: 222), for reasons
already given. But we do not ‘optimistically’ (ibid.) deny that
violent competition has been the ‘dark face’ of connectivity.
The title of CS, with its genealogy in the epigraphs, points to
the ‘grim view’ that we take of the world we describe and the
acquisitive greed of its entrepreneurs—which greed we are, pace
Squatriti, happy to see as a transhistorical category (Squatriti
2002: 265, 270). 38
6. doing without towns
The tendency attributed to us to smooth our subject out finds
obvious but, we hope, superficial justification in the few chapters
in CS that, unlike the rest, each focus on one particular
subject of a textbook kind, rather than sweep up a myriad topics
into a microecological bricolage. The first of these is chapter
IV, on towns and cities.
This argued that, since there are no clear criteria for separating
out one particular kind of larger, more diverse settlement,
towns presented no special obstacles for microecological history.
If we are considering population density then we should
be comparing items all the way along the spectrum of possibilities
from the hermitage to the metropolis. If we are looking into
population diversity then we should proceed analogously. For
each degree of settlement complexity there is, in principle, even
if the evidence does not enable us to calculate it, an exchange of
biomass between settlement and territory—the latter often
38 Perhaps naively, we had not expected any present-day inhabitant of
circum-Mediterranean lands to find the title offensive. But see the review
by P. Hurtado at http://www.mmsh.univ-aix.fr/SeminaireCommun/seance_
inaugurale.asp.