Preface

The city is widely regarded as the most characteristic expression of the social, cultural and economic formations of the Roman empire, perhaps especially in the Latin-speaking areas of the empire where urbanism was much less deeply engrained than in the Greek East. Yet there is no textbook (or book for that matter) that provides students with an overview of the city in the western Roman Empire. There are numerous reasons for this, one being that most academics focus on the study of the city in a single province or within a limited geographical region. We took a step to overcome this limitation to our understanding of the Roman city and began a dialogue that shared our expertise on the Roman city in North Africa (Sears); in Italy (Laurence) and in the North-West provinces (Esmonde Cleary). This three-way discussion produced some unexpected results that altered the way we conceived of the Roman city: certainly all of us gained from the experience. What it showed was that any single region could not encapsulate the variation in form, time and space associated with the Roman city. The results of our discussion are presented here.