地中海世界とローマ帝国

抄録

(This paper is based on the lecture which I gave at the annual general meeting of SHIGAKU-KAI, The Historical Society of Japan, held on the 5th November 1977 at the University of Tokyo.) In what sense can one speak of the "Mediterranean World" in antiquity? What does "world" mean, when one speaks of the "Mediterranean World"? There must be a common principle, by which one can regard the vast and various areas around the Mediterranean Sea as a "world." There is no question that the domination of the Roman Empire only realized the Mediterranean world as a "world". The question is on what her domination was based. Was it based on the mere "imperialistic policy" that was hardly related to this principle? These are the questions which I posed in the lecture ; and I answered as follows. It was because of the existence of a kind of law peculiar to the Mediterranean areas, under the influence of which communities there developed, that one can understand the Mediterranean regions in antiquity, in spite of wide varieties within them, as a united "world." I call the communities, which developed under the force of the law peculiar to the Mediterranean areas, "citizen-communities". And the domination of the Roman Empire also, I think, was brought about by the policy which Rome as a citizen-community adopted against the tendency of her community to dissolve itself, the tendency resulted from its development under the force of this law peculiar to those areas. From such an understanding of the Mediterranean world and the Roman Empire, I proceed to explain the structure of the social classes as follows. Rome,the most developed citizen-community, is to be regarded as the governing class of the Mediterranean world, but as governed classes one must see on the one hand a great many other communities (civitates peregrinae) which were dominated politically by Rome, and on the other, a great many peoples (slaves) who were robbed of their own communities by Rome. Accordingly, I suggest, the Mediterranean world may be said to have begun to break down when the citizen-communities were thought to have stopped developing, while there began to break out more and more violent slave uprisings and native revolts both of which are to be understood as the movements to recover their own communities or to reestablish them. From these theoretical standpoints, I sought to reinterpret the development of the Mediterranean world in antiquity.