Civilisation is a tired word, but if it means anything it means a sense of communal social identity with the rule of law, systematic government, and public order rising above the uncontrolled forces of the natural world, and with a place for visual and verbal artists to respond creatively to those issues. In antiquity, those things were expressed above all in the life of the city: a centre of population and power surrounded by walls and typically asserting itself as the head of a state or polity, led by a king and protected by its own gods.1 Our concern here is not with the historical realities but the artistic responses.