Another feature of the Mediterranean scene that written
sources
illuminate is the political organization of its peoples. Here we find a
striking gradient as we move from east to west. The Hittite state in
central Anatolia was a sizable one by the standards of the second
millennium, and a serious contender in the political and military
affairs of the Near East; in the next millennium the Lydian state came
to rule most of western Anatolia, until in the middle of the sixth
century it was conquered by the Persians and became part of an even
larger state.
But nowhere west of Anatolia was anything to be found
on this scale.
The Mycenaeans had their states, if we can judge by their palaces and
the later epic tradition, but they were small; and when Greece comes
back into focus a few centuries later, the scale of political
organization is, if anything, smaller.
The same lack of unity marks Italy for most of the
first millennium.
Meanwhile in Spain, as in northern Africa west of Egypt,
we know of
nothing that deserves the name of a state.
We could hazard the generalization that civilized people
tend to
produce a reasonable number of states of a certain size: Egypt,
Magadha, Ch'u, and the like. So in this respect at least, the central
and western Mediterranean was a region of unusual backwardness. Its
extreme political fragmentation clearly had much to do with its
refractory terrain and the limitations of its agricultural resources,
these did not preclude the formation of larger states in later times.
Just as significant as the degree of geographical fragmentation
is the
nature of the fragments. In the eastern Mediterranean there were
powerful kingdoms, as in the cases of Lydia and Egypt; the Mycenaean
states were perhaps similar structures on a smaller scale. At the other
end of the Mediterranean, in Spain as in most of northern Africa, we
dimly perceive tribes and chiefdoms. But the single most characteristic
feature of the political organization of the Mediterranean in this
period is the salience of the city-state.
City-states were not unknown in the ancient Near East;
indeed, they
were present in Mesopotamia at the dawn of history. But an important
event was the emergence of the Phoenician city-states in the second
half of the second millennium. In at least one instance the Phoenicians
replicated the city- state in the western Mediterranean, namely at
Carthage. But the institution was more extensively adopted, perhaps
under Phoenician influence, by the native peoples of Greece and Italy.
The Greeks in turn spread it by establishing numerous colonies
overseas, on the coasts of Anatolia, Cyrenaica, southern Italy,
southern France, and even northeastern Spain. The Mediterranean world
thus came to be dotted with independent city- states. These were
relatively easy to establish and maintain in regions where the
hinterland lacked effective political organization. This was the
dominant situation in the western Mediterranean. In the eastern
Mediterranean, by contrast, the political environment was less
favorable. Along the Egyptian coast city-states simply failed to
appear, and the Egyptian rulers funneled Greek trade through a single
emporium. In other regions they lost their independence with the rise
of effective states in the hinterland. Such was the fate of the Greek
settlements of western Anatolia with the rise of Lydia, and its
subsequent conquest by the Persians. Meanwhile, the cities of Phoenicia
itself had to come to terms with a whole series of overlords.
City-states were often monarchies, or at least started
that way. The
Phoenician cities, for example, had their kings, as did the Etruscan
cities, though these monarchs might not be very imposing. But in
general, monarchic city-states were not simply petty kingdoms. In the
Phoenician cities, despite the real power wielded by the kings, we also
hear of councils of elders, in one case with a membership of a
hundred. Thus there were formal institutions that gave some standing
in the political process to the leading citizens, if not to the
citizens at large. One city, Tyre, was for a while a republic ruled by
a pair of judges. Unfortunately we do not know enough about Phoenician
politics to say much more than this. But institutions of the same kind
turn up in city- states elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and in some
cases we have considerable knowledge of the rules under which they
functioned.
The information is richest for the city-states at the
center of the
only two literary heritages that survive from the ancient Mediterranean
world outside the Near East, that is to say for Athens and Rome. But we
also have quite detailed accounts of the constitutions of such cities
as Sparta and Carthage. As we will see in the next section. It was in
the context of the constitutional arrangements of city-states that
democracy first made its appearance.
An obvious weakness of city- states, was that they
could not easily
stand up to the power of large territorial states. A single city-state
was usually too small to resist effectively, and rivalries between
cities tended to prevent or disrupt alliances. Since the Mediterranean
had considerably more potential to support large states than had yet
been realized, this meant that the world of city-states was in the long
run unsustainable. Either large states would move in and take over, or
one city-state would expand and subject its peers.
What happened in Greece was on balance an illustration
of the first
process. In the early fifth century B.C. the country was invaded by the
Persian Empire, but the Greek resistance proved successful, thanks to
an alliance led by the two most powerful city- states, Athens and
Sparta. The Athenian role in this alliance in turn laid the foundations
for an Athenian maritime hegemony in Greece. This was only broken by a
war between Athens and Sparta in the last decades of the fifth century.
The Greek city-states had thus survived both an external and an
internal threat to their traditional political way of life. But the
fourth century saw the rise of a new external threat in the form of the
Macedonian kingdom to the north, and by 338 B.C. a Macedonian hegemony
had been established over Greece that sharply curtailed the political
activity of the city-states. The end came with the incorporation of
Greece into the expanding empire of the Romans in the second century
B.C. It was thus the formation of large states on the edges of the
Greek world that spelled doom for the city-states of Greece.
In Italy, by contrast, it was the rise of one city-state
that ended the
independence of the others. Rome began its life on the edges of the
Etruscan world, ruled by a dynasty of Etruscan kings. At a date
traditionally given as 510 B.C., the Romans expelled the royal family
and instituted a republic. In the centuries that followed they
displayed an unusual combination of militaristic aggressiveness and
willingness to incorporate defeated enemies into the enterprise of
further expansion. They established their hegemony over Italy and went
on to defeat Carthage, their chief rival in the western Mediterranean,
thereby bringing the whole of this region under their direct or
indirect rule. They then extended their sway to the eastern
Mediterranean, completing the entire process in the first century B.C.
A world of independent city-states had become a Pan-Mediterranean
empire.
The contrast in scale between these two forms of political
organization, city-state and empire, is remarkable. In the long run
neither proved viable. The city-states had disappeared as military and
political actors by the end of the first millennium B.C., and though
the institution reappeared in the Middle Ages, in the Mediterranean
world the revival was limited to Italy. The Roman Empire, in which the
traditional republican form of government soon gave way to imperial
autocracy, remained united until near the end of the fourth century
A.D., but was then divided. The western part fell to invaders from the
north in the fifth century, whereas the eastern part survived in some
fashion until 1453, though losing increasing amounts of territory to
Muslim invasion.
Since the fourth century the Mediterranean has never
again been united
under a single state.
