Water, the sea, is the most prevalent feature of Mediterranean “topography,” supplying a source of food and luxury goods, connecting governments through trade, disrupting travel through piracy, and providing a venue for warfare, aspects that are much scrutinized in the scholarship. While any study of coastlines naturally touches on these trajectories, Paul J. Kosmin offers a fresh appreciation of the coast as a “type” of place (instead of simply a line between water and land): one where history begins and cedes to nature (p. 2). The shoreline, mutable with its statistically random fractal curves, is the single most important setting for economic, political, and social dynamics in the ancient world. The strand is where the global and planetary spheres meet, a venue of “intense historical generativity” (p. 4), the “terraqueous hinge” (p. 4) between nature and culture. But human initiatives to stabilize and fix the paradoxical coastline, with its “textured claim on the human imagination” (p. 16), both savage and spa-like, result in pacification, desavaging, and folklorizing, delimiting, rationalizing, and denaturing the shoreline.
The Ancient Shore falls neatly into three large chapters, each with three sections. The first chapter, “Unity,” focuses on the coasts of the southern Erythraean Sea ((modern) Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and western Indian Ocean). This large, arid coastal region, lacking cultural, linguistic, or political unity, with no major river systems, and unable to support a population of any size, contrasts starkly with the interconnected Mediterranean littoral. But, as Kosmin argues, with the late 2nd c. BCE discovery and then economic exploitation of the monsoon winds, a “globalizing” Southern Sea identity emerged. The first section, “On Fisheaters,” scrutinizes the evolution of the representation of this Southern Sea littoral. While earlier Ptolemaic ethnographic accounts of the Ichthyophagoi were instead regionally organized, Agatharchides of Cnidus’ fragmentary Erythraean Sea (2nd c. BCE) presents ethnography and the Erythraean littoral as fundamentally unified, and the coast as an intertidal area where the nearly amphibious Fisheaters hunt, bury their dead, and live their lives, governed by tidal rhythms, strictly along the strand. In the lands along the Southern Sea, “self-sustaining, self-contained, and isolated” (p. 34) humans exist only on the shore, a region unlike the “no man’s land” of Mediterranean coastlines which are inhabited only temporarily.
The second section, “Argonauts of the Southern Sea,” traces the globalization of the Erythraean Sea by means of monsoon winds, tidal patterns, and trans-oceanic trading routes opened up by Eudoxus of Cyzicus (fl. ca. 130 BCE), according to Agatharchides and by Hippalus (fl. 1st c BCE) who discovered a direct sea-route from the Red Sea to India, according to the anonymous mid-1st c. CE Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. The unification of facing shores resulted from regular, monsoon-based trade in luxury items. Kosmin here sees merchantmen elevated to heroic status, owing to the extreme distances of their voyages, the capital-intensive nature of the trade, extraordinary profits, and exotic locales. The emphasis on the risks inherent in long-distance trade and the paradoxa of those locales serve to mythologize the region on the model of the Odyssey.
The third section, “The Cosmopolitanism of the Coast,” examines evidence of “human drift” and the internationalism of Southern Sea trade. Material remains and documentary evidence speak to the movement of people and goods. For example, lighter, luxury cargo (requiring ballast), imported from far-side ports, would be offloaded—together with heavy ballast—at near-side ports and then replaced by heavy grain cargo destined for far-side ports, thus explaining Yemeni basalt at Myos Hormos and Berenice (p. 57). Particularly interesting is Hoq Cave on Socotra, an island off Yemen, where over 200 pieces of multilingual graffiti are largely clumped together by language (Greek, Brāhmī, Aramaic, etc.) attesting the sailors, helmsmen, captains, merchants, and ship-owners who put in at Socotra, and their offerings (pp. 65-76). Kosmin deduces that the cave’s activity, private or religious, is intended to be social—graffiti are meant to be read by future visitors—and the space reflects the homogenization and unification of its “mobile residents.”
Chapter 2 falls under the arc of “Claim-making,” where the coast is investigated as the locus of terrestrial exploitation, ownership, communal belonging, and physical instability. Here the shore, a site of danger and “political illegibility” (p. 81), privileges local populations. The first section, “Symbols of Possession,” analyzes attempts to conquer the littoral through the acts of construction and consumption. Symbolic conquest can occur through circumscription of littoral zones (e.g. Mithridates VI along the Black Sea: Appian, Mithridaticus 101) or with infrastructure that aims to make the physical presence of rulers permanent in otherwise unbuilt spaces (e.g. seaside steles and altars of Alexander at the mouth of the Indus River: p. 91). More monumentally, lighthouses—usually subsidized by monarchs or other elites as a guarantee of safe passage or warning of navigational hazards—mark the intersections of the coast with political authority and light versus dark (benign rulers are commonly associated with light and salvation). Lighthouses are thus physical manifestations of sovereign claims to coastal spaces, exhibiting a valid claim over a littoral that has been legitimately conquered and possessed, as with Gaius’ lighthouse at Gesoriacum (Boulogne-sur-Mer), erected “as evidence of victory” (p. 98). As such, the light-tower can be a statement of territorialism, as at Massalia where residents erected beacons to “take possession of the land” (Strabo 4.1.8; p. 98). Here Kosmin also considers tribute in the form of marine produce (fish) as symbolic of the monarch’s claim over the coast, focusing in particular on Oppian’s Halieutica (pp. 101-106).
The next section, “Codifying Sovereignty,” considers the shore as a site of interstate tension, governed by diplomatic and legal regulation or coastal exclusion. On the small scale, access to littoral resources were at stake—salt pans, tuna fisheries, port fees—as in the Argolid in the 2nd c. BCE. On the international level, Carthage (509/507 and 349 BCE) famously restricted Roman travel and trade from Punic shores (with exceptions for times of emergency) to promote its own interests in the western Mediterranean, and the Treaty of Philinus in 306 BCE imposed reciprocal restrictions from the Italian coastline on Carthage (pp. 109-112). Such treaties were not unique (pp. 113-117). Other regulations aimed to ensure the safety of ships and their crews who might land (or be wrecked) on a coast: Ziaëlas of Bithynia, whose authority extended over the coastline, at least theoretically, expressed the universal challenge of asserting that hegemony with particular regard to shipwreck victims: “[we shall try, as much as is in our power] to take thought for those who come ashore in the territory under our control, so that their safety be assured” (p. 124).
The third section, “Pushback and Suppression,” interrogates the hostility of local peoples toward those encroaching on their strands either as victims of shipwreck or, more nefariously, with the aim of suppressing and delittoralizing coastal populations. Victims who were washed ashore might be sacrificed, enslaved, or bludgeoned. Beacon lights might be deliberately snuffed out (p. 131). False beacons, often attested in the legal code, suggest that the practice was widespread (pp. 136-139). The effect, of course, was an erosion of trust in legitimate beacons. Small-scale opportunism and claim-making reassert the littoral entitlements of local populations.
As smaller communities unite in reaction to wider need, opportunity, and political circumstances, piracy naturally evolves, for economic gain or political resistance or both. “Pirate” groups constituted a distinctive coastal community, organized in ways that both mimic and diverge from land-based centers of power (e.g. the piratical preference for camouflage over visible coastal monuments). Organized piracy, however, posed a structural threat to state power at the shoreline. With Rome’s increasing interests in the eastern Mediterranean came concerted efforts to stamp out piracy and assert coastal dominance. The terminology is interesting, as Kosmin shows: M. Antonius is described as the “guardian of the whole coastline” (p. 153; 74 BCE), and in 67 BCE Pompey was given unlimited command of the entire Mediterranean, “and over the land from the sea for 400 stadia inland,” including the coastline (Appian, Mith. 94). In the end, the pirates were delittoralized, deprived of their warships, banned from the sea, and forcibly resettled inland.
The arc of the third chapter, “Cosmos,” is the coastal landscape as a place for and object of reflection, a site of deep emotion and philosophizing (p. 163). Kosmin here suggests the shore as a ritually orchestrated space that navigates between states of existence. In the first section, “The Shore as Explanandum,” the focus is on mythic and physical processes that shape the coastline, as in the separation of land from water in Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Jewish, and Greek cosmological accounts. Kosmin observes that the coastline is “quite possibly, the generative environment for this whole way of conceiving cosmic order through elemental contrast” (p. 169). This cosmic order is then advanced as terrestrial order vanquishes marine chaos: Marduk defeats Tiamat; Herakles and Perseus slay sea monsters. These clashes, occurring at the coastline, result in the containment of the primordial sea, thus semiotically minimizing the chaotic mutability of the shoreline and the active struggle between earth and water.
The second section, “The Coastal Scale,” surveys mechanistic and naturalistic (rational) explanations, beginning with sand (the shore) as a metaphor for the “impassable limits on human cognitive capacity” (p. 191), that is to say, from extremely large numbers (e.g. Archimedes, Sand Reckoner) to infinity (the number of kisses Martial demands from Diadumenus: curiously the intertext to Catullus 7.3-4 is buried in Kosmin’s footnote). This section’s arc is the “deep time” evidenced by changing coastal landforms, including the traces of ancient inland beaches, the process of siltation, and incursions of the sea. Kosmin’s arc of “deep time” is fleshed out by an aligning “big space” arc, where tidal rhythms are understood within a planetary frame: large, seemingly unmotivated, uplifts and recessions of the sea invite questions about the earth’s unity.
“Transition and Finitude,” the final section, considers ritual and purificatory aspects of the shoreline, especially with regard to transition from one state of being to another: e.g. in deification (most famously, the apotheosis of Dionysus’ aunt Ino) and death, “the ultimate transition” (p. 227). Like the shoreline, death borders the human world, and access to the underworld is often viewed as being via the coast in the Greek tradition (Taenarum, Heraclea Pontica, Avernus, Lerna). Kosmin notes mythic and historical examples of the wartime dead being honored on the shore. Further, the corpses of storm-wrecked, ordinary seafarers might be buried on the shore (underscoring a coastal obligation of hospitality and the “humankindness” of tending to the corpses and tombs of strangers: p. 250), or the unrecovered might be honored with shoreline cenotaphs. Thus, also of interest are nauagika, verses commemorating shipwreck victims that underscore “the desocialization of the shipwrecked dead” who are deprived of the usual funerary practices (p. 244).
It is occasionally unclear how some examples fit within Kosmin’s thematic arc. For example, the sea’s proskynesis before Alexander shows that the waters have succumbed to his authority (p. 87) but not to his active attempt to subjugate them (how does the coast, as such, figure here?). Further, the tsunami at Potidaea in 479 BCE is a natural disaster suggesting that the sea in fact is reclaiming coastal terrain and erasing the human stamp (perhaps erasing the coast? this is also unclear). Additionally, there are some overinterpretations and misinterpretations. Where tribute in the form of marine produce (fish) is taken as symbolic of the monarch’s claim over the coast (“Consumption:” pp. 101-106; a section that would be more clearly entitled “Tribute”), Kosmin makes intriguing observations about fish, tributes, and exile. Fish, however, do not strictly belong to the coast, but instead to the water, and, in his arguments, Kosmin occasionally conflates coast with sea (e.g. “beach death,” where the text clearly considers those who have died at sea but have been washed up on the shore: p. 245). Moreover, Odysseus’ sand-sketch is a map of Troy (Ovid, Art of Love 2.131-140), not a “sandcastle” as Kosmin calls it (pp. 2-3, 90), an interpretation that may derive from the author’s reliance on published translations. Finally, while I agree that “archpirate” is a cute transliteration of ἀρχιπειρατής, “chief pirate” or “pirate-leader” better captures the sense.
While slips are inevitable, they are few. I noted an inconsistency with the emperor Gaius (p. 113) also called Caligula (pp. 86-87), the former not being captured in the index. There are also a few errors in citation (in n. 42 on p. 281, the citation of Pliny should read ‘4.111’; in n. 317 on p. 294, Diodorus 19.73.6 is irrelevant). Vocabulary is occasionally obscure (e.g. “isocline,” a technical mathematical term: p. 227). And some terms should be defined (e.g. oikoumene: pp. 25, 76) or defined more fulsomely (periplus: p. 32). The narrative is well supported by six crisp maps and forty-eight illustrations (though the insufficient contrast in several images is regrettable: e.g. figs 1.5, 2.7, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3).
That said, this monograph, with its poetically serpentine style, is replete with intriguing insights, scrupulously supported arguments, and surprising, insightful comparanda: e.g. Ugaritic evidence for rites of salvage (p. 120), or the Southern Sea in alignment with the Arctic (p. 77-80). A sophisticated book, which is a delight to read, it should have a broad appeal to experts, students, and educated lay readers alike.