Alas, the answer must be no. When the world was young it was limitless; now it has shrunk pitiably, and the Mediterranean has shrunk with it. Today it is easier to fight a war in Iraq or even Korea than it was a century ago to transport an army from England to Italy or Spain. The flight from Gibraltar to Istanbul takes little more than three hours. Trade routes no longer exist. Transport ships and tankers continue to ply to and from the pipeline terminals of the Middle East, but the sea itself is rapidly being taken over by a new and terrible phenomenon: the monster cruise ship, prowling ceaselessly from port to port, from island to island, vomiting out on to each more people than many of them would in former days have seen in a lifetime.
At the start of the third millennium, therefore, it is becoming increasingly clear that its old raison d’être is lost for ever, and that the prime purpose of today’s Mediterranean is pleasure. This is not, perhaps, in every respect a bad thing; it could be argued that waters which were in the past all too often stained with blood are a good deal better off under a thin film of ambre solaire. One tends to forget, too, the miseries of former days at sea–days when the backs of galley slaves bled under the lash, when ships were stricken by plague and obliged to remain offshore until no man on board was left alive, when a sudden summer storm could be tantamount to a death-warrant for an entire crew. What is sad is the loss of dignity: that the world’s most historic body of water should be so taken for granted, so polluted; that many of its shores should be so littered with old plastic as to be practically unvisitable; and that many others are maintained only through the efforts of thousands of sweepers, working all day to keep them clean.
Here, perhaps, is yet another reason for this book to end where it does. It has chronicled many disasters, and not a few tragedies. It has considered the Middle Sea by turns as a cradle and a grave, a bond and a barrier, a blessing and a battlefield. How sad to watch it decline into a playground, as the old harbours are converted into yacht marinas and the triremes are replaced by jet-skis. How much better to draw the curtain while it was still essentially the Mediterranean it had always been, of which every wave told a story, and every drop was noble.
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Normans in the South
The Kingdom in the Sun
Mount Athos (with Reresby Sitwell)
Sahara
A History of Venice
Byzantium: The Early Centuries
Byzantium: The Apogee
Byzantium: The Decline and Fall
The Architecture of Southern England
Fifty Years of Glyndebourne
Shakespeare’s Kings
Paradise of Cities
The Twelve Days of Christmas
Christmas Crackers, 1970–79
More Christmas Crackers, 1980–89
Still More Christmas Crackers, 1990–99
FOOTNOTES
1 See Chapter VI.
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2 Unless of course one was Odysseus; ten years between Troy and Ithaca must, even in his day, have been something of a record.
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3 Though I wish someone would do something about her left eye.
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4 In Roman times the Emperor Nero was to pass an edict restricting the wearing of this purple to himself alone. It remained an imperial colour–certain emperors were said to have been ‘born in the purple’–until the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, and even today retains something of its old prestige. The principal drawback of the murex industry was the appalling smell that it created; the piles of broken shells were always sited downwind of the town.
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