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52 results

Page 1 of 3

  • 8 - Administration and politics in the cities of the fifth to the mid seventh century: 425–640

  • from PART II - GOVERNMENT AND INSTITUTIONS
  • Edited by Averil Cameron, University of Oxford, Bryan Ward-Perkins, University of Oxford, Michael Whitby, University of Warwick
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    29 March 2001, pp 207-237

  • Summary

    EAST AND WEST: COMMON TRENDS

    This chapter is concerned with the political evolution of the ancient city – that is, of a political unit comprising an urban core serving as administrative centre of a rural territory – in a period of great change. As the western empire broke up, the relatively uniform environment that had been provided by the imperial administration was replaced by a great variety of conditions. In view of this, it is perhaps surprising that the evolution of cities in different regions continued to a large extent to follow parallel lines and that comparable developments can be observed in the new barbarian kingdoms and in areas which remained under imperial control, regional differences often being a matter of timing rather than substance.

    Taking the city of the second century as a standard of comparison, the type survived better in the east than in the west, but not uniformly well even there. The classical city with an urban population, monumental buildings, games and a highly literate upper class continued in at least the provincial capitals of western and southern Asia Minor, in Syria, Arabia, Palestine and Egypt right up to the Arab invasions, and in the areas under Arab rule even beyond that. In the west the Roman version of the classical ideal survived best in North Africa – but only up to the Vandal conquest – in southern Spain, in Provence and in much of Italy, especially the north.

  • 35 - Religion

  • from PART Vb - ART AND CULTURE
  • Edited by Alan K. Bowman, University of Oxford, Peter Garnsey, University of Cambridge, Dominic Rathbone, King's College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    12 October 2000, pp 984-1008

  • Summary

    The Roman empire produced a lot of movement of people, and it was this that gave scope to the spread of so-called mystery religions, almost all cults derived from the ancient cultures of the Near East. The heart of Roman religion continued to be the traditional ceremonies of the ancestral religion as practised at Rome. Under the Flavians, the process by which each province acquired a provincial assembly and festivals of the imperial cult was completed in the western provinces. The importance of the so-called oriental or mystery cults is greater than the numerical strength of their followers, perhaps never more than a small fraction of the population. This is because these cults, despite the comparatively small numbers and relatively modest social level of their membership, did express, if in different ways and to different degrees, 'the new mood' which was to dominate the religion of the empire through to the triumph of Christianity.

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