Urbanism has many faces, as the following two descriptions – of indigenous New World and West African Islamic cities respectively − make clear:
Indigenous urban centers in central Mexico were arranged according to astronomical bearings dictated by cosmological criteria … They were focused on great squares that served ceremonial, as well as commercial, needs or functions, close to prominent temples and palaces to project a particular social order and proclaim dynastic power. As the visible markers of wealth and status dissipated with increasing distance from the city center, crowded residential quarters for commoners were organized around more modest, sacred places. At the urban perimeter, the landscape dissolved into less structured villages and hamlets surrounded by market gardens.Footnote 1
Traditional Hausa cities have a clearly identifiable focal center, a bounding wall, and building of fairly uniform character occupying most of the land between. There is usually a triple focus, for in addition to the Emir’s palace and the main city market there is the Grand Mosque, often an imposing building rising above the generally even skyline … The city is divided into wards or quarters, and further sub-divided into compounds, in each of which rights of occupation are passed down within a family. All compounds once included some cultivated land, though most families also had fields within and outside the city wall: but as the population has grown, ever more dwellings have been built within each compound. Narrow winding paths run between the compound walls, which often remain intact, broken only by a single doorway … Minor markets and small mosques are spread through the various wards, and craft industries are also widely scattered, so that for many people residence and workplace are the same.Footnote 2
This book is about one particular, historical type of urbanism: the ancient Greek and Roman city. It is not a comprehensive treatment of its topic, that is, it neither deals with all of the different aspects and features of ancient Greek and Roman cities, nor with all of the modern scholarly discussions and debates concerning Greco-Roman urbanism. Rather, my aim has been to outline what I consider to be the most distinctive features of Greek and Roman cities – features which single them out as one particular manifestation of the global, world-historical phenomenon of urbanism – and to deal with some of the modern discussion regarding these features.
The book is bracketed by two broadly ‘historical’ chapters (Chapter 2 ‘Origins, development and the spread of cities in the ancient world’ and Chapter 10 ‘The end of the ancient city?’), in which I explicitly discuss some aspects of the development of ancient urbanism over time. The chapters in between have broad thematic titles, e.g. ‘City and country’, ‘Urban landscape and environment’, ‘Politics and political institutions’, ‘Civic ritual and civic identity’, and so on. Here, the stress is on continuities and similarities rather than on change and diversity (although these two aspects are not entirely ignored) so as to delineate most clearly the specific characteristics of ancient urbanism. In each of these chapters, I focus on those aspects of, say, Greco-Roman urban landscapes or civic politics that I consider most typical. I am well aware that the choices that I have made, both of inclusion and of omission, can be questioned. Also, it might be argued that I generalise too much and am not sensitive enough to the particularities of time and place. However, besides providing students and other interested readers with a brief introduction into some of the major aspects of the topic, my main purpose in writing this book has been to provide scholars interested in the comparative study of urbanism (whether they are historians and archaeologists working on other periods or social scientists and others active in urban studies) with a useful ‘working definition’ or ‘model’ of ancient Greco-Roman urbanism, based on a fairly wide range of existing research. Models are always provocative since for the sake of analytical clarity they highlight some aspects of the phenomenon under study while ignoring or diminishing others. That, however, is partly the point: if this book succeeds in provoking people to pursue their own research and to come to their own conclusions regarding the various aspects of ancient civic life, or to include the ancient city in comparative analyses of (pre-modern) urbanism, then it has well served a main part of its purpose.
Although I deal with aspects of the ancient city broadly from Homeric times (eighth/seventh centuries BCE) until late antiquity and draw on material and discussions relating to cities throughout the regions that eventually came to constitute the Roman Empire (though with an unavoidable emphasis on Greece/Athens and Italy/Rome, given the bias of both ancient sources and much modern debate), there is one important thematic demarcation: this book is about the ancient city and civic life, that is, about aspects of ancient urbanism, but not about urbanisation. Even though there is some brief discussion of urban networks in Chapter 3 on ‘City and country’, the data and literature on pre-modern urbanisation are sufficiently complex and wide-ranging for a comparative study of ancient urbanisation processes to require a volume of its own. To some extent, it is a different topic, and though I touch upon it from time to time, it is not systematically dealt with here.Footnote 3
Reading through the vignettes of New World and West African urbanism cited above, it is possible to discern both differences and similarities between these two descriptions, on the one hand, and differences and similarities between these descriptions and Greco-Roman urbanism, on the other. Central squares with temples around them, for instance, sound familiar to classical scholars, as do workshops doubling as residences, but city plans dictated by astronomy and narrow winding paths (instead of straight paved roads) have a less familiar ring to them. The similarities we perceive between manifestations of urbanism widely scattered in time and space would suggest that it is indeed justifiable to speak of ‘the city’ as a phenomenon shared by different cultures and societies. Yet at the same time, the idiosyncrasies displayed by the urban traditions of different societies would seem to lend credence to particular culture-bound categories such as ‘the Maya city’, ‘the medieval European city’ and ‘the (pre-modern) Chinese city’. Even within particular societies or cultures, moreover, the diversity of urban experience can be breathtaking: one need only compare a small Archaic Greek polis or a modest Roman provincial town with the sprawling urban mass of the imperial capital of Rome or other imperial urban giants, such as Alexandria in Egypt or Syrian Antioch.
In the remainder of this chapter, I shall discuss some of the answers that scholars have given to the question ‘What is a city?’ and also to the question of whether it is justifiable to speak of ‘the ancient city’ as a specific analytical category. Since some of the answers that have been given to this latter question were influenced by several long-lasting debates in western scholarship on the nature of Greek, Roman and later European urbanism, we shall pay attention to these debates as well, and also explain why, in spite of some recent scholarly trends, the study of ancient cities still remains highly relevant.
What is an (Ancient) City?
‘It will not have escaped notice that I have so far avoided defining what I mean by a city’, Moses Finley wrote, a few pages into his famous essay on the ancient city. ‘Neither geographers nor sociologists nor historians have succeeded in agreeing on a definition’, he continued, ‘[y]et we all know sufficiently what we mean by the label, in general terms’.Footnote 4 This, as the archaeologist George Cowgill has noted in a different context, is a bit like saying that cities are like pornography – we cannot define it but we know it when we see it.Footnote 5 Yet as usual Finley was onto something: as a (historical) topic of study, the city has proved particularly intractable. Scholars have variously tried to come up with some sort of trans-cultural and trans-historical definition of the city, but none of these attempts has been entirely successful, at least not ‘without excluding whole periods of history in which we all know cities existed’, in Finley’s words.Footnote 6
Most familiar is probably the demographic approach, which comes in two varieties: a focus on population size and density (population magnitude) and a focus on the characteristic (demographic) features of an urban population (population makeup).Footnote 7 How large does a settlement have to be to count as a city? Historians of early modern Europe have often used 10,000 inhabitants as a yardstick.Footnote 8 Clearly this would disqualify the majority of Greek poleis and Roman civitates which, on the basis of other criteria, are generally thought of as cities, as well as many cities in later periods.Footnote 9 Throughout Greco-Roman antiquity, the majority of urban residents would have lived in towns of 5,000 inhabitants or fewer. Moreover, the socio-political fusion of urban core and rural territory typical of Greco-Roman cities complicates the use of population numbers attested in ancient sources for purposes of cross-cultural comparison (e.g. with medieval Europe, where a strict administrative separation between town and country was often observed).Footnote 10
An alternative is not to look at overall population size as such but at population density, or nucleation. As Spiro Kostof has observed: ‘Cities are places where a certain energized crowding of people takes place. This has nothing to do with absolute size or with absolute numbers: it has to do with settlement density. The vast majority of towns in the pre-industrial world were small: a population of 2,000 or less was not uncommon, and one of 10,000 would be noteworthy’.Footnote 11 Recently, Robin Osborne has advocated a similar population density approach to urbanisation in Archaic Greece.Footnote 12 From a cross-cultural perspective, however, the density approach gets us into trouble too, for it cannot really accommodate the so-called dispersed cities one finds in parts of pre-colonial Africa, Asia and the New World, which somewhat counter-intuitively combine relatively low population densities spread out over vast areas with other, clearly urban features.Footnote 13
Instead of focussing on population magnitude (size and density), one might also inquire into the specific makeup of an urban population, that is, in terms of its particular demographic features (fertility, mortality, morbidity, age structure and sex ratio). Here we can point, for instance, to the much-debated ‘urban graveyard’ theory, according to which in larger preindustrial cities, the number of deaths always outstripped the number of births, necessitating a continuous inflow of migrants to stop the urban population from dwindling over time.Footnote 14 Or, one might concentrate on the specific socioeconomic makeup of an urban population. The populations of places we tend to call cities are generally characterised by differentiation according to occupation, status and wealth, resulting in social heterogeneity and hierarchy.Footnote 15 Occupational specialisation and occupational diversity are often singled out as particularly distinctive criteria: the city population and the surrounding countryside constitute a market of sufficient size to make specialised production of goods and services economically possible.Footnote 16 These criteria create some problems for small Archaic and Classical Greek poleis, where a majority of citizens would have been farmers; but even in such settlements, artisanal specialisation was probably greater than in a village. Moreover, these poleis are often considered to be cities on the basis of yet other criteria, such as density of settlement or having a clearly defined urban centre, which was true of almost every polis.Footnote 17
This brings us to yet another way one might define cities, that is, by means of layout and the structure of the built environment (urban landscape): the presence of central squares or plazas, paved streets, defensive walls and gates, public architecture for religious, political or ceremonial/entertainment purposes and some element of town planning. It is perhaps in this sphere that the intuitive understanding of a settlement as ‘urban’ (we know it when we see it) is strongest. Thus Cortés and his Conquistadores, upon entering Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire of Mexico, immediately recognised the place as urban, as ‘a great city’, despite the fact that it was the product of a civilisation entirely alien to them, a culture that had developed independently on another continent.Footnote 18
As if taking their cue from this famous encounter, in a tradition stretching back to V. Gordon Childe’s famous 1950 paper on ‘The Urban Revolution’, archaeologists working on ‘early cities’ in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Asia, Africa and the Americas have increasingly engaged in wide-ranging comparative studies of urbanism. They have observed striking similarities between cities across space and time, particularly in terms of layout and the general structure of urban landscapes, for instance between New World and Old World urbanism, or, to mention just one particular example, between the city of Amarna in New Kingdom Egypt and late medieval London.Footnote 19 Structural similarities between pre-modern cities have also been noted by historians and sociologists, most prominently by Gideon Sjöberg, who argued that the pre-eminent distinction in urban development throughout time was that between the preindustrial and the industrial city.Footnote 20 Even this long-accepted distinction is now being questioned. As Monica Smith has argued, pre-modern and modern cities share such features as fluid urban-rural boundaries (i.e. it is often impossible to mark clearly the point where the city ends and the countryside begins as urban features might continue well beyond official ‘city limits’ or city walls; in other words, there is nothing specifically modern about ‘suburban sprawl’). Pre-modern and modern cities might also share characteristics such as links with distant hinterlands through exchange and the use of luxury goods as social markers. What all these similarities through time and space suggest is ‘that the capacities for human interaction in concentrated locations are exercised within a limited set of parameters’.Footnote 21 This, in turn, prompts the observation (in Glenn Storey’s words) that ‘[h]uman nucleation behaviour into cities might be a form of [evolutionary] group selection strategy that has proved eminently adaptable for humans and has fostered strong interspecific ties of cooperation’.Footnote 22
Along such broad interdisciplinary lines, combining insights from human geography, ecology and evolutionary biology, we may eventually be able to arrive at some universal understanding of urbanism. However, the attempt requires analysis at a very high level of generality, which might at first sight seem unhelpful to historians and archaeologists interested in specific urban cultures. Yet the broad comparative study of world urbanism does supply us with a rough cross-cultural template that can be used to sketch the outlines of a particular type of urbanism, in order to bring out, as sharply as possible, its cultural specificities.
To do this properly, however, we need, in addition to the mostly ‘etic’, outside analytical perspectives mentioned so far, to try also for a more ‘emic’ approach that looks at the ways in which people in the past themselves defined and thought about those settlements in their society that we would call ‘urban’. One way to do this is to look at the legal and political terms and criteria used to define cities within the society one studies, a strategy often employed by historians. Thus, for instance, historians of medieval Europe have focussed on civic charters and the legal and political terminology used to describe and acknowledge civic status.Footnote 23 In the ancient world, particularly under Roman rule, cities often had clearly defined legal statuses, being, for instance, municipia, coloniae or civitates peregrinae (see Chapter 5). In looser terms, ancient texts from Homer to Constantine recognise as essential elements required of a polis or civitas (i) the presence of a political community, a citizenry and (ii) the presence of a particular set of public buildings and civic amenities.Footnote 24 Although often somewhat tautological, such statements and descriptions allow us some insight into the criteria by which Greeks and Romans distinguished their poleis and civitates from other types of settlement. On occasion, the emic approach can seem misleading: the Greek travel writer Pausanias, writing during the Roman imperial period, noted that even an insignificant place like Panopeus in Phocis, Greece, which had no public buildings at all, was in his day thought of as a polis (10.4.1), while a large and powerful polis like Classical Sparta arguably had no clearly defined urban centre (Thucydides 1.10.2).Footnote 25 On the whole, however, Greek and Roman sources do refer to either one, and often to both, of the two elements just mentioned (citizenry and urban core with public buildings and amenities) when describing poleis and civitates.Footnote 26
What, then, is a city? Given that, through application of a few very strict criteria to define urbanism, we often lose more, in cross-cultural terms, than we gain, and since a clear scientific definition of urbanism as a type of human nucleation behaviour still lies in the future (if indeed it will ever be forthcoming), it is probably best to work with concepts of urbanism, whether general or culture-specific (e.g. Greco-Roman urbanism), that are a bit fuzzy around the edges. One relatively useful strategy has already been mentioned, which was also successfully employed by Mogens Herman Hansen and his colleagues at the Copenhagen Polis Centre in their massive research project on the Archaic and Classical Greek polis, namely to focus on those settlements that the Greeks (and, for this book, Romans) themselves considered to be poleis (or civitates, municipia, or coloniae…).Footnote 27 Another, compatible approach is suggested by Glenn R. Storey in his introduction to a recent collection of papers on Urbanism in the Preindustrial World, namely to regard as cities those places which are considered to be cities by the majority of specialist scholars who study them, even if such sites ‘may not look like a city according to our modern standards’.Footnote 28 Though not ideal, these two strategies, when combined, in practice mostly suffice for the purpose of comparative research, and they also underlie my approach in this book.
What, though, was ‘the ancient city’? Can we actually, with any intellectual justification, speak of ‘Greco-Roman urbanism’, as I have done so far? My argument, in this book, is that we can, and the book itself is an attempt to provide a sketch of this particular type of urbanism. There were some essential differences between Greek and Roman cities, of course, and to some extent these will become apparent in subsequent chapters. Concepts of citizenship differed somewhat, for instance, with the Romans developing a far more legalistic notion (citizenship as a clear, legally defined set of duties and privileges), making it much easier for them to admit foreigners and even freed slaves to the citizen body.Footnote 29 To mention some other differences, Roman centuriation practices arguably imply a far greater desire to control and administer the shape and division of civic territory than we can find among the GreeksFootnote 30, and Roman cities from the earliest days of imperialist expansion in Italy had been part of a hierarchy of strictly defined civic statuses, with each status implying a specific legal relationship with the city of Rome itself.Footnote 31 On the whole, however, the similarities outweighed the differences, as I hope this book will make clear. Since this argument is essentially contained in the chapters that follow, I shall limit myself here to discussing briefly several famous earlier attempts to formulate a general ‘model’ of the ancient Greco-Roman city.
‘Roman cities were just like Greek cities’, Nicholas Purcell has recently written, referring to strong similarities in the manner of exploitation of territories, social structure, expressions of communal identity and urban landscapes. Purcell’s essay is mildly polemical, for, as he notes, ‘the idea that ancient urbanism should be taken as a single phenomenon … has not been popular among ancient historians’ even though ‘[i]t is familiar to archaeologists’. He justifiably singles out Frank Kolb’s major study of Die Stadt im Altertum as one important exception among more recent scholarship.Footnote 32 However, for several important nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers, ‘the ancient city’, comprising both the Greek polis and the Roman civitas, was an analytical category of crucial significance. Here I refer primarily to Fustel de Coulanges, Max Weber and Moses Finley. For all three, delineating the contours of ‘the ancient city’ as an ideal type served to stress the essential differences between antiquity and modernity, and for each of them, emphasising these differences served a broader political and intellectual agenda.
The French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges was provoked to write his La Cité antique, published in 1864, by the use Jacobin revolutionaries had made of ancient Greco-Roman examples to justify radically egalitarian policies.Footnote 33 In this he was a late representative of the Idéologues, a group of liberal intellectuals who in the decades around 1800 had already sharply criticised the Jacobin use of antiquity as inspiration for the (violent) reform of French society.Footnote 34 Greek and Roman mentality and institutions, Fustel argued, were irremediably different from those of later Europe. The ancient polis or civitas, according to Fustel, found its origin in a primordial, Indo-European notion of private property (which at a stroke also ruled out ‘primitive communism’ as mankind’s pristine state, another revolutionary favourite).Footnote 35 Early Greeks and Romans worshipped their ancestors, who were spiritually located in the hearth of the household. Ancestor worship was therefore closely linked with the cult of Hestia or Vesta, the hearth-goddess. Given that this religion was centred on the family house and the family tomb, possession by the family of the house and its tomb and the land on which these stood was sacred and inalienable. Over time, the unification of families (gentes) into phratries, tribes and, ultimately, cities transferred these notions to the level of the community, exemplified by the cult of the civic hearth. Ancient cities, Fustel aimed to show, thus came into being in a way fundamentally alien to the medieval and early modern European urban experience.
The great German sociologist Max Weber was similarly preoccupied with the differences between Greco-Roman and medieval European cities, but in his case the preoccupation stemmed from his desire to explain the origins of European capitalist modernity. Although he would famously stress the role played by the Protestant Reformation in stimulating ‘the spirit of capitalism’ in northwestern Europe, the origin of European commercialism lay for Weber in the specific structures of the medieval city and the collective mentality of its burghers. In this he stood in a tradition going back, via Werner Sombart, Karl Bücher, Karl Marx and others, to Adam Smith.Footnote 36 Like the economist Bücher, who in 1893 had aroused the ire of contemporary ancient historians, above all Eduard Meyer, by contrasting the medieval ‘city economy’ (Stadtwirtschaft) and modern national economy (Volkswirtschaft) with what he called the ancient ‘household economy’ (Hauswirtschaft), Weber employed an ideal type of the ancient city to bring out, by contrast, the unique characteristics of the medieval city. Ancient cities, according to Weber, were in origin clubs of warrior-farmers, whose membership (citizenship) and political participation were predicated on their ownership of land in the community’s territory, and who supplied their own armoury.Footnote 37 The ancient polis or civitas thus represented a union of town and country, and even when the cities became more ‘democratic’, admitting the landless to their citizen bodies, agrarian interests continued to reign supreme, as exemplified by the thetes’ and proletarians’ eternal call to redistribute the land and abolish debts.Footnote 38 Citizens might engage in some trade and manufacture on the side, but, especially among the elite, agriculture remained the most important source of income. Since this income was derived from the countryside as rent, without providing a stream of manufactured products in return (as the medieval producer city did), the ancient city was a consumer city, a concept Weber borrowed from Sombart.Footnote 39 The presence of slaves, moreover, restricted free labour and blocked the formation of a true and prosperous trading and manufacturing class organised in guilds. The ancient city was, first and foremost, a political association of citizens, and ancient man a homo politicus, unlike the medieval European homo economicus.Footnote 40
The most famous model of the ancient city, and one that has played a dominant role in ancient historical debates over the past forty years, was however developed by the Cambridge ancient historian Moses Finley. Finley was strongly influenced by Weber, and took over his notion of the ancient city as a consumer city, yet developed it more fully in a highly specific way, so that it came to form the analytical core of a much broader model of ‘the ancient economy’.Footnote 41 According to Finley, the strong link that existed in antiquity between citizenship and agriculture bred a mentality, particularly among the citizen-elites of the poleis and civitates, which was fiercely anti-commercial and acquisitive, not productive, discouraging productivity-enhancing investments. This mentality, along with the prevalence of the ideal of the free, self-supporting citizen-farmer, led to an offloading of commercial and manufacturing work onto marginal groups, mainly slaves, freedmen and resident foreigners, which obstructed the formation of a commercial middle class. The same ideal, moreover, prevented the development of proper markets in land (real property could be owned only by citizens), labour (working for a wage was considered slave-like) and capital (lending at interest between citizens was morally suspect, and most borrowing was for non-productive purposes).Footnote 42 Thus, the social structure of the ancient city, and the mentality and ideals associated with it, directly blocked the development of a commercial and industrial capitalism along later European lines.
Two of the most distinctive characteristics of the ancient Greco-Roman world, slavery and democracy, were also direct products of the ancient city and its particular citizenship structure. Finley linked the rise of slavery to the abolition of debt-bondage and the development of citizenship in Archaic Greece and Rome, which generated a direct need for an alternative source of exploitable labour. When, in the later Roman Empire, citizenship lost its socio-political value, the statuses of slaves and ordinary citizens gradually converged, since the free poor could now be exploited again as easily as their distant debt-bound ancestors in early Archaic times.Footnote 43 Even if slavery was a distinct element of the ancient city, however, the notion of the basic political equality of all adult male citizens also created the conditions for a historically unique level of political participation, particularly during the Greek Classical period and in Republican Rome.Footnote 44
These models of the ancient city, particularly the one developed by Finley, were to exert an enormous influence on subsequent scholarship, an influence which continues to this day. Much of the reception has been (highly) critical, and has led not just to a questioning of whether one could justifiably employ a model of ancient urbanism that encompasses both Greek and Roman cities, but also, in the case of the post-Finley debates, to a devaluation of the phenomenon of urbanism itself as a variable in broader analyses of ancient economic and socio-political development. Fustel, Weber and Finley have all been praised for their comparative approach. Yet it will not have escaped notice that, in stressing the otherness of antiquity, all three were engaged in a much broader discourse concerning the nature and causes of western exceptionalism, that is, the unique development towards capitalism, the Industrial Revolution and modern liberal society in which western European medieval cities were thought to have played a crucial part. It is to these issues, and the impact they have had on recent research concerning the ancient city, that we shall now turn.
Grand Debates, New Directions
In Finley’s model of the ancient economy, his conceptualisation of the ancient city as a consumer city served as an explanation for the ancient world’s relative economic underdevelopment (compared to medieval and early modern Europe). As we saw, Finley’s strong emphasis on the ideological link between agriculture and citizenship that comes to the fore particularly in elite texts such as Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and Cicero’s De Officiis led him to conclude that in the ancient city, trade and manufacture were driven to the social margins, carried out by relatively poor, low status individuals (slaves, freedmen, resident foreigners). Hence, unlike their medieval counterparts, ancient cities did not produce a bourgeois class that could initiate a commercial take-off which would lead, ultimately, to capitalism and industrialisation (here Finley differed slightly from Weber, who had identified, in some periods of antiquity, notably the late Republic, a ‘political capitalism’ based on imperialist exploitationFootnote 45).
Responses to Finley’s views of the ancient city and its role in the ancient economy can be divided into two broad categories. First, there were those who (with some justification) argued that Finley had ignored whole swathes of mainly documentary evidence (e.g. inscriptions, papyri, and coins) and archaeological data that showed that the ancient urban trading and manufacturing sectors had been considerably more sophisticated and important in social and economic terms than his model allowed for. Scholars who took this line strongly questioned Finley’s identification of ancient cities as consumer cities and often argued for the existence in antiquity of a variety of city types, while some created their own ideal types, such as ‘the service city’ (as we shall see in Chapter 3, however, despite the arguments of Finley and those of most of his critics, there is no a priori reason why the presence of consumer cities should imply a commercially underdeveloped, static economy).Footnote 46
A second broad response to the Finley model, which developed partly out of weariness over the stalemate that the debate on the nature of the ancient economy had reached by the late 1990s, was to question the validity of the city as an explanatory variable as such. Thus, scholars have increasingly drawn attention to institutions and notions of community that transcended or existed alongside or within the civic community, such as ethnos (nation, people, ethnic group) or clubs and associations (phylai, phratries, hetaireiai, collegia) of all kinds, their studies suggesting a more complex and multifaceted model of ancient social relations in which ‘the polis’ was not people’s sole frame of reference.Footnote 47
Similarly, economic historians have questioned whether it is justified to speak of a single ‘ancient economy’ with a ‘Greco-Roman city’ as its nucleus, as Finley did.Footnote 48 It has been felt that the difference in scale between Archaic and Classical Greece, on the one hand, and the Hellenistic kingdoms and Rome, on the other, in terms both of the territorial extent of states and of the size and number of cities, slides into a difference of quality, making, say, pre-modern China or Mogul India a better comparison to the Roman Empire than the Greek societies that preceded it.Footnote 49 Analysis of larger structures (urban systems, kingdoms, the empire) is becoming the norm: one is hard put to find in the recent Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World much analysis of the possible effects of the city, civic structures and civic ideology on economic performance.Footnote 50 In addition, the incorporation of archaeological survey data into ancient history has focussed historians’ attention on rural society and the peasantry, on life ‘beyond the Acropolis’ as actually lived by the majority of the ancient world’s inhabitants.Footnote 51 Finally, in recent ecologically inspired accounts of ancient Mediterranean history, the city recedes into the background completely, becoming, in the words of Horden and Purcell, ‘“epiphenomenal” to larger ecological processes’.Footnote 52
These ancient historical arguments ‘against the city’ are in many ways in line with a general development within pre-modern European and world economic history away from the city as an important category of explanation. Some ancient historians questioned the stark contrast Finley, following Weber, had drawn between ancient consumer cities and medieval and early modern producer cities, arguing that in pre-modern Europe, only a handful of cities could really be characterised as the sort of (proto-)capitalist commercial powerhouses Weber and particularly Finley had in mind.Footnote 53 In this they were following the lead of their colleagues specialising in later periods: R. J. Holton called the theory that the medieval European cities and their commercial bourgeoisies were the most important factor in ‘the Rise of Capitalism/the West’ an ‘ex post facto folk myth of the modern western bourgeoisie and its urbanist intellectuals’.Footnote 54 Robert Brenner argued that agrarian class relations rather than commercial cities provided the best explanation for western European exceptionalism while E. A. Wrigley demonstrated that the sustained economic growth of the Industrial Revolution resulted from the adoption of fossil fuels as sources of energy rather than from a centuries-long development of capitalism with a distant origin in medieval urban communities.Footnote 55 All of this, of course, prompts a question: if medieval and early modern European cities were not, after all, that important to the ‘Rise of the West’, are ancient historians not also wasting their time when they study Greco-Roman cities as a means to explaining ancient economy and society?Footnote 56 Do cities actually matter?
The problem with framing the question in this way, of course, is that despite all of the arguments pro and contra the importance of cities we still remain locked in a rather narrowly Eurocentric discourse, in which we allow the intellectual value of the attempt to study cities in other periods and parts of the world to be determined by the relative value accorded to cities as an explanatory variable in European history. This is, to say the least, an arbitrary and parochial point of view. By this I do not mean to argue that medieval and early modern European urbanism cannot be used as a comparative example when studying ancient cities, just as one would refer to urbanism in other parts of the world (indeed, in the chapters that follow references to later Europe are often made); the argument is rather that to privilege the European urban experience at the expense of the rest of the world may in the end not be very helpful if we want to come to a better understanding of Greek and Roman cities.
Here we touch upon another argument that has recently been made against allocating a central position to the ancient city in our accounts of ancient history. The ancient city has exerted a powerful influence in modern political thought, for instance in the work of thinkers such as Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt, while a tendency to use the ancient world to formulate theories on how to change contemporary politics and society, which Fustel so deplored among the Jacobins, can be traced back at least to Machiavelli. Yet, as Kostas Vlassopoulos has recently shown, accounts of Greek history that settle on the polis as the primary form of political, social and economic organisation in the ancient Greek world start appearing only from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, following in the footsteps of an earlier, Romantic-era conceptualisation of the ancient Greeks as a ‘nation’.Footnote 57 Behind this relentless focus on the polis, which continued to characterise scholarship well into the late 1990s and beyond, Vlassopoulos detects a Eurocentric master narrative in which the Greek polis is separated from its wider Mediterranean and Near Eastern context and presented as ‘the first stage’ in the history of the West. This, Vlassopoulos argues, has been to the detriment of ancient historical scholarship: other ancient Greek forms of socio-political organisation besides the polis (e.g. ethnos and koinon) were largely ignored, as was diversity among the Greek poleis themselves, and ancient historians lost their connection with developments in scholarship on the ancient Near East.
Vlassopoulos certainly has a point, and his concerns have been felt to some extent by other scholars. As he himself acknowledges, recent studies have in various ways attempted to break free from the dominant polis perspective. Catherine Morgan has done important research on ethne, while, paradoxically perhaps given their exclusive focus on the polis, the highly empirical work of the Copenhagen Polis Centre has dispelled a number of historiographical myths concerning ‘the polis’ (e.g. that political autonomy was a key characteristic of the polis).Footnote 58 Most revolutionary perhaps has been the ecologically inspired account of Mediterranean history by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, in which they, as we saw, reduce cities, in ecological terms, to epiphenomena and focus on the fragmentation of the Mediterranean region into diverse micro-ecologies and the interaction (connectivity) between these.Footnote 59 Vlassopoulos himself argues that we should aim to study Greek poleis as part of a système-monde (a concept he borrows from Fernand Braudel), a larger system of interacting entities (communities, groups and regions) that is, in a sense, a world unto itself.Footnote 60
What are the implications of these views for a book such as this? Is writing a book on ‘the ancient city’ an intrinsically Eurocentric affair? Are we engaged in the study of a mere epiphenomenon? I would disagree. Vlassopoulos actually points to the way forward, by highlighting a number of important similarities between Greek poleis and Near Eastern cities in terms of political organisation and deliberation: the close study of urbanism in different cultures is important precisely for comparative purposes (as is also evident from the comparative volumes on ‘city-state cultures’ produced by the Copenhagen Polis Centre).Footnote 61
But what if cities are indeed as unimportant to the grand sweep of (Mediterranean) history as Horden and Purcell claim? Horden and Purcell’s polemic contre villes is partly a consequence of the fact that they are so strongly focussed on combating Finley and his model of the ancient economy, in which cities assume primary importance, that they feel compelled to marginalise the role of cities. Yet, for instance, precisely the excess mortality characteristic of pre-modern cities, necessitating, according to many scholars, a constant flow of migrants from country to city to keep urban populations numerically intact, would have contributed significantly to the mobility of people which Horden and Purcell rightly place at the centre of their analysis. Also, the local and regional ecological impact of cities (as relatively large and dense concentrations of human beings) in terms of requirements of food, water, fuel, clothing and building materials, as well as waste disposal, will have been pronounced, which again makes it hard to understand why, especially in an ecological history, they should have been sidelined as epiphenomena.Footnote 62 Then there is the fact, emphasised by Purcell himself in a different context (that is, the essay quoted at the beginning of this section), of the strong similarities in many respects between Greek and Roman cities spread across the Mediterranean region and beyond, in widely different micro-ecological contexts, which suggests that ecology explains much but certainly not all. Finally, in response to both Vlassopoulos and Horden and Purcell, we should point again to the world-historical importance of urbanism as a near-universal form of human settlement behaviour in complex societies. Close study of cities in particular societies produced with the aim of easing future comparative research are of crucial importance if we want to achieve a better understanding of urbanism in this broadest, world-historical sense. Cities matter not just because we happen to find them in Greece, Rome or medieval Europe, but because we find them almost everywhere.
In addition to such arguments, there are also a number of recent scholarly developments ‘closer to home’, as it were, which suggest that the intensive study of polis and civitas remains paramount. For reasons of space, I will only very briefly mention those I find most promising. To begin with, the recent wave of studies devoted to non-polis and sub-polis/civitas forms of organisation mentioned above, instead of signalling the analytical dead-end of city-based approaches, might actually have the potential to take our understanding of the ancient city to a new level. For instance, research by the Copenhagen Polis Centre has exploded the old distinction between ethnos and polis in the Greek world, noting that areas dominated by a regional ethnos did in fact often contain many communities organised as poleis.Footnote 63 Then again koina, or leagues of cities, often had their own magistrates and assemblies, mimicking the structures of their component parts. In similar vein, the study of civic subgroups, such as clubs and associations (collegia) and of sub-polis settlements and villages, has demonstrated that such bodies almost without exception organised themselves as mini-poleis or mini-civitates, with their own elected magistrates, assemblies, ‘laws’, cults, festivities and public buildings.Footnote 64 What this suggests is that ‘the civic model’ was and remained the crucial template for socio-political organisation in antiquity, even at the supra- and sub-city level, providing some substance to an idealised vision of society in which even the Roman Empire could be viewed as one big city (Aelius Aristides, Roman Oration 36). This is a topic that would bear further study.
Another theme, already alluded to above, is the ecological impact of cities and the specific ecology of the pre-modern urban milieu. Scholars have studied the extraordinary economic, agricultural and demographic impact of the imperial city of Rome with its one million inhabitants on the Italian countryside and the wider empire, but the analysis can be extended to include other, more ‘normal’ cities in the ancient world. Recently, for instance, Andrew Wilson has drawn attention to the massive fuel requirements of Roman cities generated by the presence of heated public baths, which might well have caused a certain degree of deforestation over the centuries, while a considerable amount of scholarly attention has been paid in recent years to the complexities of the urban food supply, particularly of larger cities.Footnote 65 Ongoing research into the urban disease environment and the health and nutritional status of urban inhabitants, particularly through the study of skeletal remains, despite many methodological problems increasingly provides us with glimpses of what life actually may have been like, at a very basic level, in ancient cities.Footnote 66
A similar sense of how ancient urban lives may actually have been lived emerges from recent studies into movement and the use of space in urban environments.Footnote 67 The study of urban landscapes has increasingly shifted from the static analysis of buildings and monuments to a consideration of how buildings, streets, squares and so forth were actually used and experienced by ancient urban inhabitants. How did people, animals and goods flow through the city, on ordinary days and nights, but also, for instance, during religious festivals and public events? Sophisticated analysis of architectural remains, artefacts and textual sources, with the aid of novel methodologies and software applications, increasingly homes in on these lived urban experiences, ‘repopulating’ the urban landscapes that often seem so desolate and artificial in many 3-D digital reconstructions.Footnote 68 This focus on space and movement is a highly important new current that increasingly allows us to bridge the analytical gap between the city as a material entity and the city as community, integrating archaeological, historical and social scientific approaches.
Finally, I signal the recent work, primarily among social scientists, economists and historians of early modern Europe, on the possible links between participatory, inclusive political systems and socio-political stability, institutional performance and economic development. Inspired by political science studies – such as those of Robert Putnam on civic engagement as expressed in a strong associative life (civil society) and its effects on democratic participation, public trust and economic prosperity – early modernists have increasingly engaged in research on guilds and associations and the effects of such participatory institutions in early modern cities.Footnote 69 Economic historians and economists have similarly stressed the importance of urban citizenship and what has been termed inclusive political institutions for the rational use of public goods, the discouragement of elite predation, the lowering of transaction cost and the securing of property rights, all of which are beneficial to economic growth.Footnote 70 The analytical relevance of all of this for ancient urban history requires no special pleading; Greek and Roman cities were thoroughly participatory at all levels (even if they were by no means all radical Athenian democracies), especially when we also take into account their strong traditions of voluntary associations.
These issues, and many others, will be addressed in the chapters that follow, with the intention of providing food for thought and in order to stimulate discussion and productive disagreement. As the foregoing will have shown, ‘the ancient city’ has always been a highly contentious topic, and, if the vehemence of its current detractors is anything to go by, it will probably continue to be just that. This book aims to contribute to these ongoing debates, but will also, I hope, succeed in pointing out some possible routes that we might follow to move beyond them.
