The Adriatic Sea both connected and divided the shores of the Italian and Balkan peninsulas in the Hellenistic period (fourth to first centuries BC). The Adriatic world was connected by traders and pirates in maritime networks. But it remained balkanized politically and resisted attempts at conquest. Conceptually, the division of the Mediterranean world down the middle at the Adriatic has lingered in boundaries of states and even fields of history. This dissertation explores the tension between these dividing and connecting aspects of the Adriatic Sea. In the early fourth century BC, as Athenian power waned in the Adriatic, traders participated in loose networks of exchange that had existed for centuries. Over the course of the next four centuries, increasing numbers of people exploited these networks, creating denser connections or “thickening” the linkages of the Adriatic world. By the end of the Hellenistic period, the connections in the Adriatic had grown to the point of “continentalization”, when the whole sea could be viewed as a densely-intertwined whole. The dissertation explores in five chapters ways in which the Adriatic functions as a maritime region that divided and joined peoples. This study builds on, and out of, the ecological approach to the Mediterranean developed by Horden and Purcell. Chapter one examines the geographic, ecological, and intellectual space of the Adriatic and includes a narrative history of the sea. Chapter two explores movement and traders through a series of maps, examining in turn general trade routes, specific commodities, and traders within the Adriatic. Chapter three tackles pirates and piracy in the Adriatic through the lens of Thomas Gallant’s “military entrepreneurs” with an emphasis on the interactions between non-state actors and state-formation. Chapter four engages with settlement and colonization in the Adriatic. Chapter five discusses military aggressions in the sea under the rubric of imperialisms.
Fairbank, Keith Robert,
"A Dividing Sea: The Adriatic World from the Fourth to the First Centuries BC"
(2018).
Classics Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/7686-qt19
