Metamorfosi del mare nostrum. Flotte, itinerari e traffici marittimi antichi e tardo antichi = Mare nostrum and its Metamorphoses. Fleets, Routes, and Maritime Traffic in Antiquity and Late Antiquity

This contribution scrutinizes the Roman naval hegemony in the Mediterranean from the Punic Wars in the 3rd century BC to the ‘Justinian thalassocracy’ in the 6th century AD and its consequences over time. A semantic recontextualisation of the syntagm mare nostrum introduces military, commercial, and infrastructural analyses, with a particular focus on the late antique age through sources such as Rutilius Namazianus and Procopius of Caesarea. The importance of Constantinople, the ‘Second Rome’, for the history not only of the eastern Mediterranean but also for its western part, following the conquest of Regnum Vandalorum in 533 (a century after its formation in 439), is characterized as the keystone of long-lasting historical and cultural persistences.