Simply looking at the Mediterranean cannot of course explain everything about a complicated past created by human agents, with varying doses of purposeful design but also of caprice and misadventure.   But this is a sea that patiently recreates for us scenes from the past, breathing new life into them, locating them under a sky and in a landscape that we can see with our own eyes, a landscape and sky like those of long ago.   A moment's concentration or daydreaming, and that past comes back to life. (Braudel, 2001, from "Memory and the Mediterranean").