2. EXPLORING THE LONGUE DURÉE FROM ARCHAISM TO A WORLD-EMPIRE

The ambitious task of exploring the world of the city from the Rhine to Asia Minor, and from pre-colonial Greece to late antiquity, is taken up by Esposito and Pollini, editors of Cités nouvelles, villes des marges. This volume collects a wide array of essays, 27 in total, divided into three sections following a preamble: most of the chapters are in French, but there are also a few in English, Italian and German.

The editors have assembled a team of contributors to analyse the broad-ranging phenomenon of the ancient city through specific angles, focusing on (re-)foundations, colonial urbanisation dynamics and the marginality of frontier-areas. The assemblage of such apparently diverse topics is the result of the volume’s publication process, which collects the proceedings of conferences held between 2014 and 2019. The tripartite structure of the book mirrors this origin and harmonises its themes. Each section begins with a theoretical essay, followed by chapters arranged chronologically in the first two sections and geographically in the last. Although this structuring principle is not immediately apparent to the reader, it greatly helps the volume’s fruition. A lack of synthesis partly complicates this fruition. Though the variety of approaches, sources and methodological backgrounds adopted by the contributors is clearly an asset, it may have an overpowering effect without the editors’ attempt to propose a coherent narrative or at least a research direction. Nonetheless, most papers engage in internal dialogue, addressing enduring questions about ancient urban contexts.

The first section collects eight contributions on the theme of foundations. After M.C. D’Ercole’s introductory discussion of the distance between ancient terminology and modern translations of the sources and of the propagandistic tone of colonisation narratives, A. Jacquemin openly addresses the issue of the dehumanisation of Sicilian indigenous populations in Greek historiographical and mythological sources. P. Kossmann and J. Goeken keep the focus on Greek forms of colonisation through urban foundation: while Kossmann provides a thorough survey of Ptolemaic foundations in Asia Minor between 309 and 197 bce, Goeken switches to the reception and representation of colonial urban spaces in rhetoric, through pseudo-Menander’s processes of acculturation underlining the (re)writing of the history of a city. M. Humm’s paper applies the cultural paradigm of the ideal city sustaining colonial foundations to the Roman conquest in the Republican period by looking at the archaeological remains of the coloniae’s public spaces. M. Coudry partly returns to the issue of the displaced and the dispossessed in the context of Pompey’s and Caesar’s diverging colonial designs, while S. Lefebvre is more explicit in assessing the extent to which the sources skew our judgement in favour of the conquerors as she studies the rocky political process of Carthage’s refoundation. Finally, S. Marcos draws on a wide range of evidence to paint a full picture of how the foundation of Augusta Emerita spatialised Rome’s power.

The second part also consists of eight chapters and remains within the theme of colonial urban spaces. Humm and Lefebvre provide the introductory notes with an essay of great clarity, delineating the guidelines for reading the documentation about colonies in relation to scale, functions and diachronic developments, and identifying three main themes: colonial models, organisation of civic spaces between centre and periphery, and the discrepancy between colonial identity and integration of local populations. Most of the essays deal with these crucial issues by focusing on case studies selected from the Greek colonial world, both in the Eastern and in Western Mediterranean: S. Fourrier uses the cases of Kition and Salamis in the second millennium bce to advocate against ‘ethnic’ models of urbanisation; G. Boffa looks at the early stages of Eretria’s life to inquire into the complex relationships between metropoleis and apoikiai; F. Frisone focuses on Greek ‘secondary’ colonisation in Magna Graecia, as R. Roure and M. Toubas do for the West. G. Labarre opts for a longue durée approach, focusing on Pisidia and its different phases of colonisation under Alexander and Augustus, and on the difficult adaptation of local Anatolian populations. B. Lemaire and R. Plana-Mallart expand on socio-cultural mediations between Greeks and indigenous people by exploring peri-urban spaces in Western Greek colonies. A. Álvarez Melero concludes the section with a new Hispanic case study, Valentia, and the hybridisation of its colonial pantheon.

The third section comprises eleven essays centred on the theme of marginality. Esposito and Pollini provide some introductory remarks, followed by X. Charalambidou’s study of Skala Oropou’s settlement at the border of Attica, C. Weber-Pallez’s analysis of frontier villages in the Argive territory and C. Müller, T. Lucas and J. Buffet’s case study of the margins of the Boeotian koinon. These all engage with the idea of the frontier as a physical zone of hybrid cultural identity in the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods respectively. L. Ficuciello brings readers to Lemnos by arguing that the entire island was an artificial frontier zone, shaped by the Athenians for its peculiar position in the North Aegean: the permeability of its networks and migration patterns profoundly impacted both the local population’s identity and Athenian perceptions. E. Deniaux provides an interesting case to look at marginal colonial spaces in a cross-cultural perspective by reconstructing the history of Buthrotum from Homeric to Roman times, while A. Becker selects two case studies from the Rhine limes to show how crucial frontier cities shaped Roman self-representation at the margins of the empire in the late Republican and early Imperial periods. The last four papers continue to document this extreme chronological, geographical and methodological diversity. M. Čaušević-Bully examines the region of Liburnia as a space of emerging importance in late antiquity for its strategic frontier position; S. De Vido returns to the origins of polis-culture in sixth- and fifth-century bce Segesta. The Archaic to late Classical chronological framework is maintained in S. Bouffier’s study of the hinterland of Marseilles between land and hydrographic resources, and in L. Mercuri’s analysis of Sicily as a frontier zone that creates an interface for communication, networking and clashes between Greeks and local populations.

All three themes are potentially linked to the most novel and welcomed proposition the editors put forward in their preamble: the issue of the colonised, the autochthonous, the marginal hence excluded or segregated. The enormous gap in the evidence, which has erased the perspective of most groups subjected to forced displacements and even genocide in the ancient period, is undeniable; however, the volume leaves readers with the feeling that this theme is still somewhat underexplored. Nonetheless, it provides them with a wide array of conceptual, empirical and methodological tools to embark on further research.

3. THE QUEST FOR COMPREHENSIVENESS AMONG THE MULTIFARIOUS

4. EXCEPTIONS AS FORAYS INTO POLIS-CULTURE: THE CASE OF EGYPT

The concept of ‘polis-culture’ is also at the core of Free’s monograph on Hermopolis Magna, Polis und Metropolis im römischen Ägypten: an eight-chapter, engaging reconstruction of the history of this civic context from the first to the fourth centuries ce.

As Free perceptively acknowledges in the preface, it is complicated to adapt the concept of ‘city’ to the urban realities of ancient Egypt. Although we find a legal distinction between polis-, metropolis- and kome-status, the lifestyle associated with the Greek ‘city’ receives only a partial and slow-paced reception among Egyptian city-dwellers, who sometimes even attribute the title of polis to their communities in the absence of the legal requirements associated with it.

The first chapter directly tackles this issue by providing a full overview of the sources and a clear roadmap of the book. Free sets out from the beginning his research question: how can there be a growing polis-culture in second- and third-century Egypt? The case of Hermopolis, still understudied despite its administrative role, presents the perfect opportunity to investigate the self-portrayals of civic inhabitants in Roman Egypt, where urban and rural populations still had somewhat differentiated access to rights based on ethnicity. Although the metropoleis, as a Roman administrative invention to control the nomoi, do not fully fit the Greek polis-framework, Free contends that we witness a clear self-representation of these urban contexts as full-fledged cities from the second century ce onwards – although Hermopolis would legally reach that status only in the fourth century. This polis-culture shift becomes decidedly evident when we compare Hermopolis’ trajectory with that of the neighbouring Antinoopolis, expressly founded as a polis by Hadrian.

In the second chapter Free presents a detailed account of excavations from the eighteenth century onwards, both in Hermopolis and in Antinoopolis: from those a wealth of literature emerged, which crystallised scholarly prejudices about an alleged ‘Egyptian’ – i.e. uncivilised – character of Hermopolis. As a result, the metropolis was relegated to a marginal position in scholarship, which largely affected the preservation and publication of the material and, in turn, knowledge of it. Free’s mission, at this point of the book, is clear: to recover Hermopolis from the differential role it was attributed in comparison with the ‘Greek’ Antinoopolis.

To fulfil this mission, he begins with the Roman period: Chapter 3 traces the impact of the first-century bce organisation of Egypt as a province of urban communities. Although Egypt already had a substantial Greek colonial elite, it had maintained ‘exceptional’ characteristics in the context of the Hellenistic, and then Roman, Mediterranean: the administrative nomos-structure, an ethnically diverse population, and even differential cults and cityscapes. Though social coexistence seems to have been the norm, polis-culture never fully engaged with local populations’ self-identification – at least until the second century ce, when a new, ever-evolving idea of the polis began to emerge.

Chapter 4 takes up the story from the second century ce: Hermopolis did not yet meet the requirements of a polis, but its elite families began to craft their self-image as if they were part of a quasi-political community. The landed aristocracy started this process of self-promotion by adhering to the traditional Graeco-Roman ideology of political participation, civic benefactions and competition for public honours. In this context the founding of Antinoopolis on the opposite bank of the Nile is seen as an exemplary catalyst of Greek urban culture in the region, although Free convincingly argues that Hermopolis knew autonomous cultural developments.

With the establishment of a boulé in Egyptian metropoleis in the third century, Hermopolis took a step forward in its quest for polis-status recognition – as recounted in Chapter 5. This way, it also entered renewed competition for status with the neighbouring communities, which expressed itself through the symbolic representation of the urban domain as a full-fledged Greek-style city. This process is mirrored in the emergence of a series of honorific titles for Hermopolis, which enhance its mythological origins, monumental landscape, illustrious inhabitants, loyalty to the princeps and administrative status.

Chapter 6 switches from outer representations to a fine-grained depiction of the city’s different social groups, their interests, their socio-political and economic agency, and how they shaped the polis’ panorama. A rich panoply of papyrological and epigraphic evidence brings bouleutai and elites, civic officials and military men, Hermopolitan and Antinoopolitan citizens, pagans and Christians to life. The story of Aurelius Neilammon is a fitting conclusive parable before the last two chapters – the seventh, which takes stock of the chronological developments discussed in the book, and the eighth, which helpfully collects significant primary sources. Neilammon’s legal case, set in the late-third/early-fourth centuries, vividly exemplifies how social, religious, political and economic changes left much room for continuity: better to speak of transformation processes, as the author does. Christian Hierapolis was still a flourishing polis with no signs of economic or demographic decline, a strong elite at its head, and the same inequalities that structured its Graeco-Roman past.

As is evident, the book focuses on Hermopolis, whose history Free reconstructs with a decided and productive micro-historical attitude: its citizens, its cityscape and its relationship with the chora are all explored with a full palette of colours. Moreover, when he brings in the regional competition with other urban centres in the province, first of all Antinoopolis, Free is able to reach conclusions going beyond the single community. His cultural approach, based on the representation of a seemingly ‘marginal’ urban community within the imperial Mediterranean rather than on institutional structures, offers a welcome novelty compared to the more traditional scholarship on this theme.

5. CIVIC LIFE ON THE VERGE OF EPOCHAL TRANSITIONS

Wallace-Hadrill adopts a similar cultural outlook on representation in his The Idea of the City in Late Antiquity, his first foray into late antique cultural history. The idea of reading late antique depictions of urbanitas through the lens of resilience presents a fascinating shift from the ‘actual’ cities to the ‘notion’ of the city. The reconstruction revolves around a central, well-identifiable theme – the cultural history of the ‘city’ in late antiquity –, whose picture is constantly expanded upon with new nuances through the overlapping voices of carefully curated evidence.

The selection of sources clearly marks the shift, as they – unexpectedly – mostly include literary sources, which are effective for tracing the survival of a concept. The preface presents the rationale for this choice of evidence by linking it to the book’s main research question: how did the idea of the city survive the partial collapse of unified imperial control in the fifth century ce?

Chapter 1 sets out from Augustine’s narrative of the sack of Rome to tackle two main concerns: on the one hand the argument that cities are resilient, fluid organisms capable of surviving extreme shocks in ages of transformation, on the other the concept of ‘city’, which in Graeco-Roman political thought since Alcaeus is defined as ‘not walls, but men’. After discussing previous scholarly narratives of the ‘end of the ancient city’, Wallace-Hadrill proposes a clear and helpful roadmap to understand how the book is constructed.

Chapters 2–8 focus each on a specific literary corpus or author and are arranged following a semi-chronological principle. The second chapter shows how there is no caesura in artistic and rhetorical representations of cities from the fourth century onwards. By shifting from iconographical representations to literary ones, Wallace-Hadrill convincingly argues that the laudes urbium appear quite early in Graeco-Roman literature – already in Pliny the Elder’s eclectic collection of mirabilia –, present a stable and codified structure from the fourth century across the late antique period until their renewed peak in the Middle Ages (twelfth–thirteenth centuries) and construct civic patriotism as an essential principle of human society despite the chronological and geographical diversity. Chapter 3 turns to definitions of ‘city’ and ‘citizenship’ in Orosius, Augustine and Salvian of Marseille – all of whom mediate their concepts from Cicero and adapt them to Christian realities. Readers are then transported to Ostrogothic Italy through Cassiodorus’ Variae, which Wallace-Hadrill defines as ‘resilience at work’, since it translates the social memory of Roman traditional values into Gothic terms to create an illusion of governmental succession, in Chapter 4. The fifth chapter adopts a new case study that examines the motif of the ‘political city’ at court, though in a somewhat more complex vein: Procopius’ volatile sympathies for Justinian across the spectrum of his literary production are carefully assessed. The aim is to show how sixth-century Byzantium recast the age-old city-foundation phenomenon both as a mark of civilisation and to embody imperial power. Chapter 6 is more directly concerned with the relationship between town and hinterland as presented in the Ravenna Papyri and with the legal framework regulating the integration of these two worlds, despite the ideological, legal, social and even physical divide between property-owners and rural workers. It is a changed world with emerging actors – such as the church – in which cities continue to function as systems of social control. Church-related structures become the main protagonists in the seventh and eighth chapters, as the writings of the bishops Gregory of Tours and Isidore of Seville are scrutinised. Gregory’s Merovingian Gaul is still very much a world of civitates, where notables and bishops interact to exercise forms of socio-economic and political control in the context of shifting allegiances to Clovis’ dynasty. The Spain where Isidore lives is also a land of cities – and, more importantly, of cives – so vital that Visigothic conquests are fought around them. Literary civic representation in sixth- and seventh-century Italy, Gaul and Spain appears starkly homogeneous: but credibly so, given the wide range of the evidence analysed.

The last chapters mark a substantial turning point by examining more ‘standard’ sources for urbanisation, such as drawings, topographical reconstructions and archaeological remains. Chapter 9 goes beyond the ‘decline-vs-change’ narrative of the late antique city by originally reusing material evidence to construct a cultural history of settlements. The final takeaway is that late antique cities were not founded on new parameters but were informed by the desire to replicate classical traditions. Finally, in Chapter 10 the inquiry into the ‘embodied’ late antique city acquires a new potency as it materialises the world of resilient ideas. What we are left with is an enthralling picture of immutable change: despite refuting the ‘transformation’ theory and recentring resilience, Wallace-Hadrill does not negate epochal changes in favour of strands of continuity; on the contrary, he highlights them as the necessary stage on which adaptability must be performed.

Wallace-Hadrill’s narrative is most effective in bringing together a deep, scrupulous knowledge of the sources with the flexible theoretical tools provided by the resilience framework: the result is a captivating reading of different case studies from a wealth of sources seamlessly blending into the discussion, whose narratives are masterfully brought together, effectively balancing ideal representations and physical groundings of the late antique city. The authors he presents show the vitality of ideas drawn from the classical past, disentangled from a collapsing empire and repurposed to adapt to a new system. The book’s most important achievement is not to provide a cultural history of an idea, but a more flexible model of development, change and adaptation to account for what Wallace-Hadrill defines as the ‘biographies’ of cities surviving well beyond their ‘ancient’ past.

6. CONCLUSIONS: A WORLD OF CITIES OR THE WORLD(S) OF THE CITY?

The magnificent collection of publications discussed in the previous sections presents the author with a very welcome paradox: how can a long-studied, key and sometimes even over-exploited theme such as the ‘ancient city’ still be a thriving field of research, far from being exhaustively and conclusively debated? In what follows I will take a leaf out of the contributions I reviewed and confront the titanic task of providing a few suggestions for future debates that these volumes, in the rich diversity and cross-cultural dialogues they propose, will indubitably foster.

Some of these debates are based on a well-established, ever-renewing tradition:

1. 1. The issue of city-planning vs organic development of urban spaces is as old as the debate over the ancient city – if not older. Still, it is worth engaging both with the physical and spatial remains of ancient conurbations and with ancient and modern discourses about them, as the rationale for urban planning is a politically charged theme across millennia.Footnote ⁶

2. 2. The impact of modern models and theorisations is evident in debates over the city’s economies. While we attempt to go beyond the ‘primitive-vs-modernistic’ debate, which roughly corresponded with the ‘consumer-vs-parasitic city’ models, we are still confronted with an abundance of reconstructions whose value cannot be fully appreciated if not in their constructive dialogue.Footnote ⁷

3. 3. The matter of the scale at which we read human interactions, representations and identities is crucial, especially – but not solely – for the Greek-style cities in the Eastern Mediterranean, confronting regional and global superpowers such as the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman empire. This also directly impacts issues of representation within urban communities, particularly in the Roman period. Although it is sometimes tempting to see the Roman empire as an inclusive space of interconnected identities, the reality is that it created an uneven system of power based on eliteness and exclusiveness, and we mostly see those elites represented as included in the broader imperial space.Footnote ⁸

4. 4. Another long-standing question, mainly concerning the Eastern empire, is the political make-up of Roman poleis and whether their democratic structures survived the Roman conquest or earlier Hellenistic trends towards the oligarchisation of political spaces continued to develop.Footnote ⁹

For other debates, the volumes gathered here mark the beginning of a coherent scholarly discourse. Although they are not brand-new themes, they are now starting to come to the forefront in studies about the ancient city:

1. 1. The cultural meaning of the city in the ancient world and its persistence and/or transformation into later periods is a welcome addition to this scholarly discourse and is already yielding productive debates: this engages not only with issues of (self-)representation, but also with ancient and modern constructions about what makes a city.Footnote ¹⁰

2. 2. A new, problematised version of the ‘ancient’ city is emerging from the discussion about Mediterranean particularism vis-à-vis a comparative approach with other premodern urbanised societies.Footnote ¹¹

3. 3. A need to focus on rural-urban interactions in a complex landscape is felt.Footnote ¹² At first glance, in fact, the centrality of the city in ancient history appears quite puzzling: recent figures estimate that only 20% of ancient people lived in urban environments.Footnote ¹³ Cities, however, take up much of the imagery and the reconstructions linked to the ancient world, both in academic and in popular settings. This optical illusion is partly based on written sources, mainly highlighting the civic dimensions of life in a world where even the idea of ‘community’ – politeia and civitas – is intertwined with the idea of city. Archaeological material also mostly comes from cities, as urban spaces are easier to identify, classify and excavate. Although this desideratum for rural spaces is being addressed by field-archaeologists,Footnote ¹⁴ urban communities, still at the core of a productive field of research, will need to be seen in their dialectical – rather than oppositional – relationship with the hinterland and its populations.

4. 4. The role of ancient cities within imperialism, particularly in the physical creation of hierarchies in indigenous-colonial dynamics, is increasingly relevant to post-colonial discussions in the study of ancient colonialism, which Western visions of imperialism have often dominated.Footnote ¹⁵ Ancient evidence, primarily Greek and Roman sources, complicates the picture by often portraying colonization as a civilizing mission. However, it frequently was a violent expansion, often ideologically justified. One should therefore approach the sources critically without ‘excusing’ them by virtue of their age and origin, since accepting ancient colonialism as a positive or at best neutral event undermines decades of post-colonial scholarship showing that imperialism is inherently savage – regardless of the chronological milieu, political affiliation and ethnic identity of both conquerors and conquered.

To conclude, talking about urbanism in the ancient world seems a straightforward operation, but the ‘ancient city’ has long become a powerful symbol for ‘ancient civilisation’, already in the works of Greek and Roman authors. In the end, it is this picture that we are left with along with the issue of problematising and adding historical depth to it. Graeco-Roman cities present themselves in a wide and complex range of forms, both in a physical and identitarian sense, and they represent only part of the ancient experience of urbanism, mainly populating the shores of the Mediterranean Sea from the eighth century bce to the seventh ce. It is nowadays impossible to talk about Graeco-Roman cities without confronting the manifold examples of imperialistic conquests and expansions – most notably, but not only, in the Archaic, Hellenistic and Roman periods – that led to phenomena of settler colonialism where the foundation or re-foundation of cities went hand in hand with the marginalisation, if not eradication, of indigenous populations and the establishment of colonial forms of rule where examples of coexistence went along with more or less strict differential, ethnic-based legal systems.Footnote ¹⁶ One cannot even escape the issue of how urban communities shaped their own identity vis-à-vis broader political systems, or as a form of culturally refined and politically advanced ‘otherness’ in the face of the vast majority populating and working the rural landscapes around them.

As the scholarly community attempts to move from an inherently good representation of the Greek and Roman past under the influence of post-colonial and intersectional theorisations towards more nuanced and polycentric reconstructions, dealing with more or less idealised models of ‘ancient city’ might make people feel quite uneasy. From this feeling of uneasiness derives the vast, manifold and inescapably conflictual wealth of historical reconstructions provided by the publications reviewed. It is a great richness that stems from challenging the past in its more problematic, discussed or even dark sides with historical method, and that shows how speaking of ancient urbanism means tackling directly complex and debated issues related to how we (used to) talk about ancient constructions of identity, imperialism and politics. These volumes represent a much-appreciated and long-overdue step forward; and in the wide range of diverse – even conflicting – perspectives they collect, they will provide fuel for scholarly discourses to come.