Isidore’s Etymologies, written in the early seventh century, offers one of the most extensive analyses of the city, yet they have been dismissed as an antiquarian compilation of out-of-date views. Isidore emerges as more than an antiquarian, someone at the heart of contemporary politics with close relations with the Visigothic kings. The concern of these kings for cities comes out in their foundation of new cities, especially Reccopolis. Isidore’s writing, far from being buried in a classical past, is more influenced by Christian writings, and shows memories of the past recycled and reinterpreted. For him the city is timeless, stretches throughout the history known to him, and covers an area wider than the classical, including Persia. His detailed analysis of the city may contain antiquarian details, but is engaged in a present and the foundation of new cities.

The History of the Franks of Gregory of Tours, along with his Saints’ lives, show a world of cities that maps with surprising accuracy onto the administrative world of late Roman Gaul. The squabbling Merovingian kings treat cities almost as stocks and shares, something of value worth fighting over, valued for their resources and taxes and manpower. From the perspective of Gregory as bishop, he and his fellow bishops play a central role in city administration. Yet they too are descendants of the local land-holding elite, with whom their interests align. The idea that city councils have disappeared is based on a misinterpretation of the senatores, who are simply Gregory’s way of describing the old landed elite who held office in cities. The bishop, as representative of the church and its land-holdings, proves to be the key figure in the adaptation of the old order.

“Ars” came to be laden with specific meaning in the intellectual culture of late-Republican Rome, with some artes being regarded as intellectually and socially worthier than others. These “higher artes” were distinguished by several features that would form the premises for the scientific culture of the artes in the early Roman Empire. These premises were established in Rome by the reception of Greek notions of technê (τέχνη) but were elaborated independently and joined for the first time into a unified conception of specialized knowledge by Roman thinkers, including Cicero and Varro. The higher artes are logically organized and systematically presented, hence systematic. They are related to one another in their principles and methods, hence interdisciplinary. They entail explanatory knowledge of their methods in terms of causes in nature, and are hence explanatory. And they balance experience and practical know-how with theoretical knowledge, and are hence balanced.

The emergence of a systematic literature around land-surveying in the late first century AD affords an ideal opportunity to study the development of an ars within the scientific culture of specialized knowledge in the early Roman Empire. The variegated methods that belonged to the historical inheritance of surveying practice challenged the construction of a discrete and coherent disciplinary identity. The surveying writings of Frontinus and Hyginus evince several strategies intended to produce a systematic and explanatory conception of the ars. These include rationalizing explanations of key surveying terminology and practice with a view to natural first principles and an accounting of surveying methods in interdisciplinary perspective with astronomy, natural philosophy, and mathematics. While these earliest surveying works pose several unique challenges, they ultimately provide a precious window onto the challenges and opportunities that greeted the emergence of an ars in the fervid scientific culture of the period.

This chapter introduces the principal Roman authors and texts studied in this book and examines the relationship between the artes and the society and politics of the early Roman Empire. The development of the artes can be understood in terms of the “Romanization” of specialized knowledge, whereby the scientific and technical contents of the artes were suffused with the peculiar interests and prerogatives of Roman Empire. The chapter surveys several ways in which this process of Romanization was instantiated in the artes: by the refiguring of specialized knowledge in the artes as Imperial self-knowledge; by an expansive conception of Roman imperium as fueling the growth of scientific knowledge; by the mastering and elaboration of Greek specialized knowledge; by the fashioning of an ideal, elite Roman readership for the artes; and by technocratic approaches to the artes relating disciplinary knowledge to Roman Imperial government.