Long before the re-election of Donald Trump in November of 2024 and the subsequent forced deportation of migrants from the United States, borders have been at the forefront of numerous elections throughout the West.¹ As I write this conclusion, Canada (the country where I live) is holding a federal election; all six of the political parties within the election have “border security” as either the first or the second point of their election platforms. This volume, therefore, is more than simply timely, it is highly relevant to the present-day geopolitical climate. In demonstrating how ideas about borders and space can be analogous amongst disparate and diverse peoples, the volume furthermore illustrates how such ancient conceptualisations continue to influence and impact our contemporary world. Private individuals as well as governments, both ancient and modern, all attempt to establish firm boundaries for what they consider to be their territory, yet such “hard” borders rarely last and almost never deter people from migrating: “Border-first approaches may be increasingly popular and politically appealing, but they are certain to fail, and to hurt many innocent people in the process.”² Thus, taken together, the papers illustrate how the borders between peoples and cultures are constantly fluid, and how scholars must resist the temptation to see a people as frozen in time. Overall, the volume, like the Territoires multiples conference itself, demonstrates not only how, in both the ancient and the modern Mediterranean world, space matters, but also how borders are intrinsic to the very definition of space itself.

At the outset, borders needed to be physically demarcated, and this was often done through the presence of temples. These religious structures, as Matrone argues, could act as liminal spaces where diverse peoples came together and borders disappeared. At the same time, religion could be used to define space, as can be seen clearly in the lustratio, a Roman religious procession whose primary purpose appears to have to define space. Nonius Marcellus (335.21-27L) even says as much, as he associates the verb lustrare (“to ceremonially purify”) with circumire (‘to encircle”).³ The lustratio created a sacred boundary with the purpose of purifying whatever was inside; amongst numerous other instances, it was performed at Roman funerals, as relatives circled around the corpse to mark a border between the living and the dead.⁴ It might also be performed around the pomerium – the sacred boundary of Rome – in order to purify the city, particularly in times of trouble.⁵ The pomerium itself equally illustrated the importance of space in the Roman Republic since it served as the nexus for the binary concept of domi militiaeque (“at home and in the field”), whereby Rome was defined as domestic space while areas beyond the border of the pomerium formed the militia, the space where war happened and the legions operated.⁶ The lustratio also formed a border in the Roman conception of time as it marked the end of a census and the beginning of a new epoch.⁷ Thus, citizen rights, magisterial power, civic and religious rituals, and the very definitions of “Roman” versus “foreign” were all bound up with the relationship between space and borders. These are but a few examples of the important roles which boundaries and space played in the lives of ancient peoples. As the volume makes clear, borders – whether legal, interstate, symbolic, or theoretical – are ubiquitous in all periods of classical ancient history, and thus the study such boundaries and the spaces they delineated is crucial to the understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world itself.

The papers by Haake, Matrone, and Erdas focus on the role of space and borders in societal order and stability as part of the ancient understandings of the physical and philosophical worlds. Haake illustrates how land and space were connected to Greek philosophical ideas that the universe was orderly and that all living creatures had natural states of being. These natural states involved both private and public lands, and thus, ipso facto, borders. Not only could philosophers not picture a world without borders or internal divisions of land, but they also presume the existence of laws to govern boundaries between private properties. The connection between Greek philosophical ideas, borders, and space perhaps reached its apex with Euklides and his study of geometry, a branch of mathematics which specifically deals with space and spatial relationships. Under the patronage of Ptolemy I within the Museion at Alexandria, Euklides used geometry to argue that the universe was governed by complete order and nothing, even within nature, was random. The royal patronage may have been very intentional, serving a political purpose: as Ptolemy I was a recent usurper, Euklides and his establishment of geometric principles provided the king with an opportunity to claim that his monarchy was part of a natural order.⁸ Such geometrical traditions were inherited by Rome, as Matrone goes on to illustrate how the Romans associated the proper laying out of space with public order. Although viewing gender as a spectrum which is linked to particular time periods and cultures is concept often associated with the twenty-first century, the volume illustrates how ancient peoples equally negotiated ideas of “gendered space”: the city of Rome, as a domus, contained women as part of the natural order. However, within the militia, where the legions operated, females were characterised as a destabilising and unnatural force, particularly within the ordered space of the Roman military camp.⁹ This establishment of “gendered space” created boundaries and borders which governed the movement of women, in turn reasserting the belief amongst ancient males that gender hierarchies themselves formed part of the physical and philosophical natural order.

In the politics of the twenty-first century, candidates regularly equate strong borders with economic stability and good government. As Erdas demonstrates, such notions existed in the world of the Greek polis as well. Numerous Greeks – including Plato, Xenophon, Plutarch, and Pausanias – saw the classical Spartan homoioi as examples of the finest men, the most dutiful citizens, and the best warriors, all supposedly cultivated by a Spartan state which was relatively free from outsiders and produced eunomia within its borders.¹⁰ In the minds of these Greek writers, therefore, strong borders, stable government, and masculine virtue are intrinsically linked. Within the Athenian democracy, however, Erdas highlights a dichotomy in relation to borders and political stability: on the one hand, men like Demosthenes claimed that any attempts at land redistribution would destabilise Athens; but on the other, there were numerous accounts of how a lack of land redistribution could and did lead to tyranny.¹¹ Nonetheless, governmental transformations which originated from farmers or landless classes were exceedingly rare, as most movements which resulted in tyranny came through aristocratic competition. Much the same can be said about modern instances of so-called “regime change”. As Erdas goes on to show, there was little solidarity amongst ruling classes in Greece, and whether in an oligarchy or the Athenian democracy, the power of the ruling elites required constant renegotiation, and the greatest threat to the aristoi came from members of the same class.¹²

All the same, a state’s stability comes not just from control of its internal territory, but also from its frontiers and its relationships with external powers. The idea of the closed or “hard” border which defines the political and economic jurisdictions of a government is by and large a product of the nineteenth century. In the pre-modern world, even the Great Wall of China or Hadrian’s Wall were primarily defensive structures which did not inhibit, let alone regulate, the free flow of goods and people. Yet, in both the ancient and the modern worlds, the importance of borders was directly proportional to the perceived value of what lay inside. In the twenty-first century, borders only tend to be political issues within wealthy and emerging countries who possess both the will, the means, and the infrastructure to safeguard their territory. Although far less advanced in scale, borders in the ancient world likewise required the presence of a government which could both guard and enforce them. Thus, an organised and stable political infrastructure was a prerequisite for the existence of firm borders, and as defences for the latter became more elaborate, so too did governments within the poleis have to expand in complexity. In discussing the relationship between the urban centre of Kos and its chōra, the chapter by Vlamos illustrates how space and government action are deeply related. By the late classical and into the Hellenistic period, poleis needed to construct defensive fortifications which could withstand the artillery that had been introduced into mainland Greece by Macedonia, and likewise also needed to maintain its own artillery for defensive purposes. To these were often added networks of forts both on a state’s borders as well as within its territory.¹³ All of this was expensive beyond the means of individual ruling elites. Thus, beginning in the fifth century and reaching a peak in the Hellenistic world, local governments needed to copy the Athenian model of developing regularised taxation schemes in order to provide their poleis with both the means to make war and to defend themselves. Such costs took warfare beyond the means of the private, clan-based warbands which characterised the archaic age and thrust it into the hands of local oligarchies.¹⁴ Simply put, the more a polis fortified its territory, and the more this territory expanded, the more responsibility a local government had to assume. In order to tackle the mounting expenses of defence, poleis developed new taxation schemes and ephebic programmes designed to lessen the burden of having to hire mercenaries. The ephebic programmes not only furthered the professionalisation of warfare in this period, but as Vlamos highlights, they also meant that a polis gradually came to be defined both by its territory as well as by its citizens, its πολῖται (politai). However, in the end, many Greek states could not handle such expenses. Accordingly, as in the modern world where several regions look to a small number of global military superpowers to secure their borders, many Greek states were forced to forego some of their independence by turning to the major Macedonian monarchies for financial aid.¹⁵ The control of space by means of defensive fortifications, therefore, became a symbol either of a state’s independence, or of a Hellenistic monarch’s power and euergetism.

Although borders in the ancient world were far more fluid, as with their modern counterparts, they nonetheless increased in importance when land or space were deemed to have economic value. Thus, the papers by Franchi and d’Ercole focus on the role that land and borders played in social, economic, and political lives of ancient Greek elites. Borders in classical Greece were unique due to the topography, with arable land at a premium. The wider and more fertile spaces of Italy meant that the Romans were less immediately concerned with land than Greeks, but nonetheless, land for them existed in one clear, legal framework, and thus, like the Greeks, the marking out of territory by surveys was extremely important. Franchi in particular demonstrates how most Greeks preferred their lands to be contiguous; however, as argued by d’Ercole, this is not necessarily the case if the people in question controlled a port near non-contiguous land (e.g. the control of Tauromenion by the Hellenistic kingdom of Syracuse). On an individual level, that so much political privilege was tied to the ownership of land and the idea of a hoplite class illustrates how such private spaces were the preserve of Greek elites. As with modern ideas of land ownership, borders in ancient Greece were equally markers of status, as they could demonstrate that the land was owned by a citizen who possessed full political rights within his polis.¹⁶

The chapters discussed so far have by and large dealt with borders and frontiers as they relate to elites. For them, borders spoke to notions of human continuity, as ruling elites often looked to the past in order to justify present claims to land.¹⁷ That such notions existed amongst non-elites certainly cannot be dismissed out of hand, but as those who controlled the most land and who formed the governments of most states, including Rome, the aristoi had a particular interest in spatial organisation, as the importance of a border is usually commensurate with the value of what lies inside. The papers by Voisin and Negro, on the other hand, remind readers of the relationship between land and those who depended on it for survival. Non-elites, whether because of slavery, transhumance, mercenary or military service, migratory work, or hunting and gathering, often had little choice regarding their movements. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees puts the number of displaced people across the globe in June 2024 as nearly 123 million.¹⁸ This speaks to how, in both the ancient and the modern worlds, borders are oftentimes less meaningful to non-elites because they are more likely to engage in overland migration (forced or otherwise) and to lead peripatetic lives. For them, borders existed in a legal and interstate sense, and therefore in all likelihood held less symbolic value. For aristocracies, space could be defined through the use of money and power; but for non-elites, the organisation of territorial space was defined by both environmental factors and through relationships – whether peaceful, commercial, or violent – between the people who physically occupied the lands. This is seen most clearly in the paper by Voisin, which documents a split between the Pythagoreans at Crotone. For the reformers, who sought a more equitable distribution of the klēroi, the symbolic status of the land counted for little in comparison to the value of the actual plots necessary for farming. Moreover, as Negro emphasises, everyday people by and large associated themselves with the place where they lived, which was very likely the same lands on which their ancestors had dwelt. Negro’s important paper reminds us that the majority of people in the ancient world were not elites, and were born, lived, and died within a small radius. And although non-elites in modern, developed countries do possess the ability to travel, as with their ancient counterparts, grand borders between states matter little in comparison to their own lands on which their survival and financial security depends. Thus, for everyday people, borders tend to be deeply associated with localism. Here, the lives of a people and the territory on which they live become intertwined, and they have a relationship with their lands which goes far beyond the philosophical and the symbolic.¹⁹

As discussed above, the paper by Franchi illustrates how the topography of Greece is by and large unique for the ancient world. And the peoples of the Greek peninsula, the Aegean, and Ionia who occupied this unique topography were mostly homogeneous. The chapter by Henning emphasises that Italy was significantly different as the land was made up of numerous different linguistic and cultural units. But more than this, Henning has succeeded in showing how territories and identities not only shift over time, but often only take shape significantly later when memory starts to crystalise. Thus, the history of a people was often deeply coloured by how future generations viewed their ancestors. This means that peoples, cultures, and at times even borders of previous eras only existed through later imagination. In short, just as philosophies of natural order justified the gendered division of spaces and a Hellenistic king’s right to rule, history and memory were often used by a people for the purpose of justifying the control of contemporary lands and the existence of present hierarchies. Henning is therefore right to highlight how historians and archaeologists must be wary of drawing conclusions about a people based on ideas that only took shape generations later.

The papers within this volume have clearly illustrated the need to think long and hard about how ancient peoples self-identified and how they viewed their own borders. Here, scholars must not fall into the trap of allowing a people to be defined by others. Just as the Romans should not define all of Italy or elite Greeks should not be taken as representative of an entire polis, so too must modern scholarship resist the urge to define ancient people by our own concepts of territories, space, and borders. This is the greatest takeaway from this volume, as it has given rise to ideas not just about how peoples see space and borders, but how these peoples impose such concepts upon others. The chapters have furthermore demonstrated the ephemerality of borders and how spatial organisation is at its core a human construct. Even natural frontiers from the ancient Mediterranean world, such as the Rhine River or the Alps, did little to alter mass migration, whether violent or otherwise. Thus, the idea that states, ancient or modern, could exercise complete control over their borders is a myth. These points have significant ramifications not only for the study of the ancient Mediterranean, but perhaps even more so for the discourse on borders in the twenty-first century.

Notes