Francesco Prontera’s Al di qua delle Colonne d’Eracle offers a wide-ranging examination of the ways in which the Mediterranean came to be conceived and represented as a coherent geographical space. The volume continues and expands a line of research that Prontera has pursued for several decades on Greek geographical traditions and Mediterranean spatial representations. Extending from archaic Greek literature to modern geographical reflection, the book reconstructs the gradual emergence of the Mediterranean as an “internal sea”—a space whose unity was progressively articulated through literary traditions, geographical theory, and cartographic practice.
At the centre of the study lies a fundamental question: how did the Mediterranean come to be historically recognised as a unified spatial entity? This issue is approached by reconstructing a long intellectual process through which the sea moved from being a poetic horizon in early Greek literature to becoming a structured geographical category and, eventually, a conceptual framework for organising space. The volume is organised into three main chapters that follow both a chronological and thematic progression, beginning with Homeric poetry and Greek colonisation, moving through the development of ancient geographical thought, and concluding with the reception and transformation of the Mediterranean concept in medieval and early modern cartography.
The opening chapter, “Il mare di Omero e la sua espansione”, situates the earliest traces of Mediterranean awareness in the Homeric world. Homer’s geographical horizon, as Prontera notes, remains largely confined to the eastern Mediterranean, extending no further than the Ionian Sea and the shores of Ithaca. Yet the maritime environment already occupies a central place among Homeric realia: the sea is not merely the narrative background of heroes returning from Troy, but a fundamental element structuring the world in which the epic unfolds. In Odyssey IX (105-115; 125-129), for instance, the text preserves what may be among the earliest Greek reflections on shipbuilding and seafaring as markers of civilisation.
The chapter also addresses modern attempts to interpret the figure of Odysseus through the lens of Greek colonial expansion. The reading of Odysseus as a “proto-colonial hero,” proposed notably by Irad Malkin (2004), is treated with scepticism, on the grounds that it risks projecting later historical developments onto a poetic tradition that predates them. Although the Odyssey undoubtedly incorporates elements of the cultural experience of early Greek exploration—especially that of Euboean and Corinthian sailors active in the western Mediterranean—it would be methodologically misleading to reverse this relationship and search in Homer for reflections of the eighth-century colonial movement itself. For Homer and his audience, the large-scale migration that would eventually produce the cities of Magna Graecia had not yet emerged as a historical phenomenon requiring interpretation.
The discussion then turns to the processes of archaic colonisation. The movement of Greek and Phoenician settlers—from the Levant to southern Italy, Sicily, Cyrenaica, the Hellespont, and the Black Sea—gradually transformed the Mediterranean into an experienced network of routes and coastal settlements. Rather than the result of a theoretical geographical conception, the Mediterranean as a unified maritime space emerged from practice: it was discovered through navigation and movement before it was conceptualised. Archaeological evidence, such as Euboean pottery from al-Mina and the early settlements of Ischia and Cumae, illustrates the reactivation of Mediterranean connections after the so-called Greek Dark Age. Mythical geography was also reshaped in this context, as episodes of Odysseus’ voyage came to be associated with new western landscapes—Scylla and Charybdis, the Aeolian Islands, and Circeo—thus generating a kind of proto-cartographic imagination. The spread of heroic cults, including those of Heracles and Achilles, further reflects the growing extension of the Greek spatial horizon. By the end of the Archaic period, a crucial conceptual step had been reached: the Mediterranean was increasingly understood as an enclosed sea, bounded by three continents and connected to the Ocean only through the narrow strait of the Pillars of Heracles.
The second and longest chapter, Il Mediterraneo nella geografia antica (VI sec. a.C.—II sec. d.C.) (pp. 69-147), forms the core of the volume. Here the discussion shifts from exploratory experience to the development of geographical theory. The chapter opens with the Ionian tradition, particularly Anaximander and Hecataeus, whose attempts to map and describe the inhabited world laid the foundations of Greek cartographic thinking. Anaximander’s schematic world map and Hecataeus’ periodos gēs represent early efforts to organise spatial knowledge by combining empirical information derived from navigation with abstract conceptual frameworks.
Later geographical texts continued to develop these approaches. The Periplus attributed to Pseudo-Scylax, for instance, presents a technical description of Mediterranean coastlines, recording distances and political information in a format clearly intended for practical navigation. At the same time, the text reveals a strong ideological dimension, as numerous non-Greek settlements are presented as Greek cities, reflecting a broader panhellenic perspective on maritime expansion.
A turning point in geographical thought appears with Herodotus (pp. 82-93), whose critique of Ionian cartography challenges earlier schematic models of the world. Rejecting symmetrical circular diagrams, Herodotus attempts to organize geographical knowledge through more rational spatial relationships, translating navigational experience into a more systematic understanding of landforms and distances. Subsequent developments in Greek thought further elaborated this process. Traditions of descriptive geography produced increasingly sophisticated “mental maps,” in which the Mediterranean functioned as the central axis of orientation within the inhabited world.
The acceptance of the earth’s sphericity introduced an additional level of conceptual abstraction. The diagram of the solstices divided the earth into climatic zones according to solstitial points, while Aristotle incorporated such ideas into a broader meteorological framework that imagined the inhabited world as an elongated landmass structured by latitudinal divisions. Further advances were made by figures such as Eudoxus of Cnidus and Dicaearchus of Messene, whose attempts to impose geometrical order on the earth’s surface reflect the growing influence of mathematical thinking in geography. Dicaearchus’ famous line running from the Pillars of Heracles to Mount Imaus offered a new way of conceptualizing global spatial division, replacing the traditional tripartite continental model with a structure centred on the Mediterranean axis.
These developments ultimately find their synthesis in Strabo’s Geography. Particularly significant is Strabo’s observation that it is the sea that shapes the lands and provides the primary perspective from which their contours may be described (2.5.17C 120). In Prontera’s interpretation, this remark encapsulates the central argument of the book: the Mediterranean was not merely a passive setting but an active framework through which geographical thought itself developed.
The final chapter (pp. 149-190) follows the later history of the Mediterranean concept beyond antiquity. Medieval mappae mundi preserved the central position of the Mediterranean within a Christian cosmological framework, while Islamic geography—especially in the works of al-Idrīsī—reinterpreted classical geographical traditions within new intellectual contexts. A renewed empirical understanding of the Mediterranean emerged with the nautical culture of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The development of portolan charts, grounded in the practical knowledge of sailors, restored the Mediterranean as a precise and measurable cartographic space.
The concluding pages extend the analysis into the modern period, examining the nineteenth-century emergence of the notion of a “Mediterranean climate.” Scholars such as Theobald Fischer and the German geographical tradition transformed earlier spatial intuitions into systematic climatic classifications. In this way, Prontera traces a remarkably long intellectual trajectory, from the mythic sea of Homer to the scientifically defined Mediterranean of modern geography.
Throughout the volume, the Mediterranean appears not simply as an object of description but as a formative principle in the history of geographical thought. Rather than a self-evident natural entity, it emerges as a historical construct gradually shaped by literary imagination, navigational experience, and theoretical reflection. In this respect, Prontera’s work may be read alongside the influential reflections of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell in The Corrupting Sea. While that study approaches the Mediterranean primarily through the lens of environmental interaction and regional connectivity, Prontera focuses on the intellectual processes through which the Mediterranean itself became imaginable as a coherent geographical space. The two perspectives thus operate on complementary analytical levels.
Prontera’s work offers a careful reconstruction of this intellectual genealogy. Its strength lies in the clarity with which it traces the gradual formation of the Mediterranean as a geographical idea within ancient thought. The volume provides a rich and stimulating contribution to the study of ancient geography and to the broader history of Mediterranean spatial concepts, and it will be of considerable interest to scholars working on Greek geographical thought, Mediterranean historiography, and the intellectual history of space in antiquity.
References
Malkin, I. (1998), The Returns of Odysseus. Colonization and Ethnicity, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London.
Horden, P., Purcell N. (2000), The Corrupting Sea. A Study of Mediterranean History, Oxford.