The Pathos of the Mediterranean Religion

Extract

On the basis of studies of the last fifty years, the term ‘Mediterranean’ has come to acquire an ethnographic, linguistic, and religious value, besides its purely physical and geographic meaning. If anthropology today speaks of a ‘Mediterranean race’—located between the extreme west of Europe and the peninsula of Malacca—archeology speaks of a ‘Mediterranean civilisation’. Of this civilisation, perhaps even the Indian revelations of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa do not mark the ultimate limit. It derived from a particularly evolved Neolithic, reached its apogee on the island of Crete in the Bronze Age, and spread from there all through the basin of the Mediterranean, continental Greece and Asia Minor (where alternate contacts and conflicts, not necessary to specify here, had characterised for millennia the relations between peoples of various races). This civilisation was succeeded by a more composite one, called the Mycean, with the Achaeans as its fulcrum, a people who had already proved their maritime and warlike skill in Anatolia, between the shores of the Black Sea and the Sporades. Linguistics, in turn, speaks of a ‘Mediterranean idiom’.