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54 Practical Mediterraneanism
tried to show that this concern with the play of concealment and
intimacy may undergo transmutations, within the global hierarchy
of value, that are intially at their most recognizable
around the Middle Sea but that eventually compel us to cast a
much wider net. But another pair, noted early by Davis, is the
tension between town and country, between an ancient urban
tradition and its rural hinterland. 23 Here we immediately encounter
a model for hierarchies of value: if what is created in the
cities is considered to be politically superior (although perhaps
morally inferior) to the supposed simplicity of the rural, this is
less a matter of different dwelling systems or modes of subsistence
than of a hierarchy of taste—the urbane versus the rustic,
rather than the urban versus the rural. It was the imperial
powers that spread what they interpreted as the Roman ideal
of civilization throughout the known world, reimporting it into
the Mediterranean—not only into obviously colonial situations
such as those of Cyprus, Malta, and Gibraltar, but also into
countries like Greece, already subject to its imperious judgmentalism
through the proximity of Italian models of considerable
historical depth. In the British Ionian Islands, as Thomas
Gallant has shown, 24 the Italian and northern European models
fused, to the great discomfiture (but also long-term political
advantage) of the local Greeks. This value hierarchy was thus
less Mediterranean than an imposition on Mediterranean
peoples of values that their self-appointed protectors from further
north thought Mediterranean peoples should embrace.
Much as classical Greek culture was filtered back to Greece
through German philology and art history, so the civic morality
of civlization came full circle through imperial recensions of an
imagined ancient Rome.
Much of the anthropological literature about Mediterranean
cities emphasizes the fear of the city’s open spaces. Notions of
exposure and moral degeneracy, expressed through metaphors
23 In addition to the discussion in Davis, People of the Mediterranean, 7–8,
see especially Sydel Silverman, Three Bells of Civilization: The Life of an
Italian Hill Town (New York, 1975); Paul Stirling, Turkish Village (London,
1965), 283–8.
24 Thomas W. Gallant, Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity, and
Power in the British Mediterranean (Notre Dame, Ind., 2002), 5–6.