Like Frogs around a Pond

This past week was the start of the new academic year. It’s always an exciting time. The whole dynamic of the campus changes. Much like a small Mediterranean seaside town in high tourist season, campus is now abuzz with energy: move-in coordinators showing freshmen to their dorms could easily be mistaken for tour guides bringing guests to their lodgings; lines at the bookstore easily resemble eager shoppers queuing up at a fish market just as the day’s catch—the fruits of the labors of the fishermen who were at sea since long before dawn—begins to roll into port.

Perhaps you can forgive me for the terrible Mediterraneanization of my Appalachian university campus: after all, as you could expect, my students the past week have spent a lot of time thinking about things related to the Sea Between Lands. While neither of my classes this semester is a course on the Mediterranean itself, what we are studying sort of necessarily forces us to grapple with the Middle Sea and how it impacted global history on one hand and the history of early Modern Europe on the other.

In my intro course, a freshman seminar on global history, we looked at the way two ancient Mediterranean civilizations—Babylon and Greece—understood the world and the sea according to their respective cosmologies. We discussed in particular their maps of the world, ranging from Homeric visions of a cosmology that hinged on the gods’ intervention in human affairs, Babylonian beliefs that the Ocean Sea was the boundary between this world and the next, and the Romanization of Greek views of the world that wed together Greek cosmogony with Roman needs to govern their sprawling Mediterranean empire.

In my upper level Early Modern Europe class, which explores the relationship between early modernity and the Classical Tradition, we began by reading Plato’s Republic, a text that you really have to read if you want to understand anything about early modern political theory. In fact, the first three weeks of my early Modern Europe class will all be dedicated to classical Mediterranean sources—Plato, Lucretius, Vergil, Livy, Ovid, Cicero, Augustine, among others—that I think students should have a baseline relationship with. Of course, one of the hallmarks of early modernity that I want them to understand is connections across the Mediterranean that began in antiquity and were reaffirmed and strengthened (not broken—sorry, Atlanticists) in the early modern period.

On the whole, my goal in both classes is that students come to realize that whether you study big history or something as focused as classical reception in early modern Europe, everything is connected and human societies have more in common with one another than the rhetoric of difference would have you believe. My freshmen will read geographical and ethnographical texts that describe the many peoples whom their author met and the many lands they visited; my history majors will read epic poetry, histories, and private letters that tell us what early modern Europeans thought of others.

In both cases, students will explore how societies viewed others, themselves, and the connections between them. My hope is that they come to agree with Plato when he said in Phaedo that Mediterranean societies were all ‘frogs around the pond’: despite perceived differences and the belief that seas separate people, my students will explore the myriad ways that seas are but ponds that connect us, not aquatic chasms that divide us. If this helps them see difference not as a matter of hierarchy but as something that enriches us all and makes societies better forms of themselves, then I might have done an okay job this semester.