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38 The Mediterranean and Ancient History
avowed purpose is to produce a more dynamic account, 130 but
the effect is to produce one so atomized that the great changes
involving man and the environment that did occur within their
3,000-year, or 2,000-year, period seem to lack all explanation.
Humans went on being tenacious and ingenious (or not, as the
case might be), which explains nothing. Yet the authors see
clearly that the ‘static minimalist’ account of the economic
world of Graeco-Roman antiquity is now most definitely untenable.
131
6. mediterraneanism and ancient history:
in favour of a wider ethnography
Mediterraneanism was defined earlier as the doctrine that there
are distinctive characteristics which the cultures of the Mediterranean
have, or have had, in common—from which it has
been thought to follow that one may extrapolate the importance
of social practices and their meanings from one Mediterranean
society to another. It might be accounted optimistic to expect
much from a theory so obviously related both to a quasi-Orientalist
desire to assert cultural superiority (they have amoral
familism) and to touristic nostalgia. But I will attempt to
weigh it in the balance.
First of all, we should take note of the fact that Mediterraneanism
is often nowadays little more than a reflex. The Mediterranean
seems somehow peculiarly vulnerable to misuse. ‘A
deep familiarity with the dream-images of his fellow Mediterraneans
assured Artemidorus of the iconistic verity of these
gods as dreams’ is simply rather sloppy prose. 132 Another
author picks phrases from Friedl’s description of the people of
you can do both, if you make room for necessary exceptions and there are not
too many of them (whether Braudel was right about mountain regions,
MMW, i. 25–53, we need not decide, but Horden and Purcell simplify his
analysis).
130
CS 464.
131
CS 146–7.
132
P. C. Miller, Dreams in Late Antiquity (Princeton, 1994), 29. Artemidorus
of Daldis claimed to have listened to immense numbers of dreams in
Greece, Asia, Italy ‘and in the largest and most populous of the islands’
(Oneir. i, proemium, p. 2 in Pack’s edn.).