The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

Man does not by nature take to the sea. He needs to be tempted on to that alien element. And of all the seas the Mediterranean has been the arch-temptress. While the boisterous, tide-swept oceans scared away all but the superman of primitive races, the inland sea sang her siren song with kindly intent and promised him mastery over another world.
We will pass over the remote age when that sea was separated from the Ocean and was divided, near Sicily, into two great lakes; and we will seek to understand its characteristics when it occupied the present basin. It is so shut off from the Ocean that little or no tidal impulse enters. The Mediterranean tide rarely rises more than a foot,Civalf, with which we are at first more specially concerned; for it has the characteristics of a landlocked sea, while those of the Atlantic often intrude into the weather of the West Mediterranean.