Introduction: space and society

On 28 October 1943, Winston Churchill commented, apropos of how to rebuild the House of Commons following its destruction in a wartime air raid, ‘We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.’ Over the last thirty years, in the fields of anthropology, sociology, geography and archaeology, in what has often been labelled the ‘spatial turn’, Churchill’s observations have been endorsed, investigated and expanded at an ever-increasing rate. Today, we think about spaces – from the individual room to the widest landscape – in an exciting variety of ways. Spaces can no longer stand solely or primarily as static geographical entities, but instead as fluid social constructs. They reflect and articulate practices of social behaviour. They exist in physical and perceptual forms, constructed through material, literary and epigraphical sources. Their meanings are dynamic and multiple thanks to the vibrant, subtle, complex and often unpredictable ways in which they interact with their (many and varied) users over time.

This book asks what use such a reconfigured understanding of space can be to the study of ancient history. That different resolutions of space are firmly fixed on the historian’s radar is undeniable: recent commissions for this Key Themes in Ancient History series, for example, include L. Nevett Domestic Space in Classical Antiquity; A. Zuiderhoek The Ancient City and D. Dueck and K. Brodersen Geography in Classical Antiquity. In addition, recent large-scale research projects across Europe, such as HESTIA, PELAGIOS and TOPOI, have sought to examine spatial issues within both literary and physical contexts. What this book sets out to achieve, in contrast, is not so much to understand one particular level or type of space, but rather to set out an argument for (and the potential of) a much broader engagement between history and space across the study of the Greek and Roman worlds.