The book under consideration stems from a 2018 symposium on late antique city walls. The idea was to bridge the “artificial divide between East and West” (p. 1), but also to include papers without an empire-wide perspective “because an ‘empire-wide’ approach cannot be applied to every site or region” (p. 4). The problem of the East-West divide is in fact illustrated by the 14 papers that make up the volume. Eight contributions on the West refer almost exclusively to Western city walls (Hispania, Lusitania, Gaul, southern Gaul, Ravenna, Agedincum, Córdoba, Segni), four chapters on the East hardly mention Western walls (Constantinople and the Balkans, Nicaea, Resafa, Zenobia), and two papers address the post-Roman history of a Western and an Eastern wall, respectively (Rome and Isthmia).
The introduction suggests that this divide may be bridged by comparing the re-use of building material or the length of city walls—in terms of whether they surrounded the whole settlement or only part of it. Other aspects that might benefit from an empire-wide comparison are addressed by some of the papers, even if the results confirm, rather than question, the divide. For example, James Crow, in his contribution, identifies the models—not the “legacy”, as the introduction has it (p. 5)—of the Theodosian Golden Gate at Constantinople, the ‘New Rome’, not at ancient Rome, but in Tetrarchic gates in the Balkans.
Catherine Hof provides a brilliantly illustrated overview of the outworks of the city walls at Resafa in northern Mesopotamia, and comes to the conclusion that they were planned at the outset and constituted an integral part of the fortifications, just as at Constantinople. Hof sketches an independent Eastern tradition of outworks, and hypothesises that they were standard in the late antique East, but were sometimes reduced or omitted because they were costly and unnecessary against lesser enemies.
Carmen Fernández-Ochoa and Angel Morillo question the traditional dating (by coin evidence) of city walls in Hispania, because coins could remain in circulation for a long time. This leads them to distinguish between less defensible walls from the Tetrarchic period and stronger fortifications from around AD 400, when such were required by a changed strategic situation. This brings to (my) mind a later, but comparable, change in Asia Minor that took place between around AD 400, when cities such as Aphrodisias, Hierapolis and Sardis built long walls with low defensive qualities, and the seventh century when short and strong fortifications appear to have been erected against Persian and Arab invasions; for example, at Ephesus, Miletus and Side.
Simon Esmonde Cleary argues that city walls in Gaul were first and foremost a requirement of the central government, which needed fortified strongholds for administrative purposes. According to the same hypothesis, this situation changed with the demise of Roman rule; the fortified precincts became vacant, and the civic population and the church moved in and turned them into civilian settlements. With an empire-wide perspective in mind, one might ask whether other city walls elsewhere could also have been the result of central initiatives; and the numerous long walls that were built in Asia Minor around AD 400 without any obvious local need or purpose, but possibly in response to imperial decrees and by order of the provincial governor, may serve as another example.
A further general point that applies to the empire as a whole may be brought out by contrasting the two papers on the later histories of city walls. While John M. Frey describes the later history of Isthmia, near Corinth, as a series of dis- and misuses, Hendrik Dey elaborates on how the Aurelian Wall of Rome continued to be maintained throughout the Middle Ages. The contrast can serve as a reminder of how quickly city walls could fall into disrepair, what it took to maintain them and that a city did not necessarily remain effectively fortified throughout late antiquity just because it had once been surrounded by a set of walls.
The interested reader will find much more food for thought in many other inspiring contributions to the volume that, taken together, might indeed lend themselves to the elaboration of an empire-wide perspective. This work, however, remains to be done. The book contains no chapter that would address the empire as a whole and bridge the divide between East and West. This is a pity because the existing papers would surely have gained in interest through being tied into an empire-wide discussion. An index would also have helped, if only to show which monuments are referenced repeatedly and in which papers; certain Eastern walls in the contributions by Crow and by Ayşe Dalyancı-Berns on Nicaea, for example. In addition, more editorial work should have been employed on the English language of the many non-native speakers. The authors made a great effort in presenting their thoughts in English, but some would have benefitted from more help and a certain degree of polish, not to mention “less” basic mistakes.
In conclusion, the volume claims to be a gold mine, but presents nuggets only and leaves the mining to the reader, who has to do it with bare hands. Doing so might, however, prove rewarding, and it is thus to be hoped that the book stands at the beginning of a new line of empire-wide research into late antique city walls.
