ABSTRACT
The idea of a ‘boundless sea of unlikeness’ derives from Plato’s Politicus, where the Pilot saves the ship of the Universe from being confounded in the perils of chaotic failure to resemble, wrecked on the shoals of fatal overdifferentiation. The authors discusses the traditional definitions of the Mediterranean dealt with the learned thought of geographers and others in the ancient and Islamic worlds, with folk practice, especially in seafaring milieux, with the schematic notions of modern governmental practice, economic, diplomatic, and political, with the essentially Romantic classifications of travellers and, more recently, of tourists, and, not least, with the taxonomies found in the modern academic study of the Mediterranean, historical, geographical, oceanographical, or archaeological. ‘Mediterranean exceptionalism’ has, for essentially political reasons, come to evoke increasing caution from scholars concerned with comparisons across wide spaces rather than long periods of time. The Mediterranean historian has no use for linear boundaries.
