The Unification of the Mediterranean: Cold War in the Ancient World, Part I
At the close of the third century B.C., Rome and the Seleucid Empire confronted one another in the neutral ground of disputatious Greece. By E. Badian.
Until 230 B.C.1 the Mediterranean world was not in any important sense one world. Greeks had settled as far west as the coasts of Spain, and Phoenicians had, in addition to many other colonies, founded Carthage in Tunisia; and the coastline of Sicily and Southern Italy had been made into a Greater Greece.
Yet politically the Western and the Eastern Mediterranean, divided roughly by a line through the Ionian Gulf, on the whole went their separate ways. There were startling exceptions, as when Athens tried to found a Sicilian empire late in the fifth century; and later still various Greek condottieri attempted, from time to time, to gain a foothold in Italy or Sicily and link it to their Greek possessions. But these attempts to throw a political bridge across the Ionian Gulf, few and disastrous as they were, merely serve to throw the dividing line into stronger relief.
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