The book under review is P.'s second synthesis of London's Roman history, following his 1991 Roman London. Like R. Hingley's Londinium. A Biography (2018), London in the Roman World benefits from the avalanche of high-quality archaeological evidence accumulated by London's archaeologists in the last three decades in fieldwork, the lab and the archive. This, however, is no mere update. In an engaging and provocative argument, P.'s Londinium is created to consolidate and extend the hegemony of emperors and their delegates in Rome's north-west. Its history was recurringly interrupted by ‘exogenous shocks’, i.e. war, pandemic and political dislocation, the latter ultimately terminal for the city's fortunes. Although the introduction invokes contemporary shocks, Brexit and Covid, this thesis about the Roman period was already outlined in P.'s work preceding both.
The clear outline of the volume, succinctly framed by introductory and concluding chapters, lends itself to a wide audience. Chapter 1 introduces Londinium both as contemporary ruins and as an ancient urban community, briskly sketching the city's story and the volume's argument before summarising the history of fieldwork in London (Chapter 2) and situating P.'s reading of the city within scholarship on the Roman world (Chapter 3). Twenty-five chapters in six parts subsequently map Londinium's changing fortunes, sandwiched between discussions of the riverine and rural landscapes from which it came and to which it reverted. Superficially familiar as an organising principle for Roman urban histories, this chronological structure masks two key differences from the genre. First, period divisions are tight: chapters covering the era from foundation (c. 48 ce) to the later second century mostly focus on periods of a decade or so. This maximises the opportunity offered by dendrochronology to establish a high-resolution phasing for buildings and infrastructure, otherwise rarely possible for Roman towns. Second, the argument focuses unrelentingly on the corollaries of the premise that ‘London was built by and for the exercise of imperial power’ (p. 5).
Chapters 4–13 see the city created as a military camp and supply hub, flourishing despite the first ‘shock’ visited on the city, i.e. the Boudican revolt of 60/61 ce. Emperors, governors and procurators built their symbolic authority through urban monuments, forum-basilica, amphitheatre, bath houses etc., and housed their military-administrative cadres in forts north of the river and a likely mansio in Southwark. Extensive quays underpinned Londinium's nodal role in imperial logistics in arrangements modelled on the annona. Part 4 (Chapters 14–18), at first glance a traditional excursus on urban life, investigates ‘the working city’ brought into being as a consequence of Londinium's roles of representing power, supplying armies and extracting provincial wealth. As well as soldier-bureaucrats, P. identifies a community of ‘carpet-baggers’ (p. 399), i.e. traders and artisans, and of enslaved and free labourers, unloading the ships, carting the grain and building the walls. He finds few traces of a curial class, London's ‘alien’ role stymieing the development of a Roman self-governing city. Instead, painted and mosaicked masonry houses and monumental tombs manifest the wealth of merchants enriched by military supply contracts. The city's strategic role and demand for goods and services generated a supply network extending through south-east England into continental Europe and a demand for multiple craft specialisms.
Through Chapters 19 to 21 new temples and larger houses succeed military near-disaster and fire in Hadrian's reign as the city flourished up to the mid-second century ce. Thanks to the next shock, plague, Londinium contracted before the Severans used it again as a supply base and walled it as a dynastic statement (Chapters 22–4). The identification (Chapter 22) of the Antonine plague as a cause of urban contraction is a pioneering analysis of the archaeological footprint of a pandemic in Roman towns. The revival of Londinium's fortunes following Severan investment, manifested in new buildings such as the mithraeum, lasted only a generation as long-distance military supply withered. Chapters 25–9 delineate the alternating military disruption and short-lived renewals of the third and fourth centuries. Later third-century walling-off of the waterfront represents a culmination of Londinium's shift from redistribution centre to administrative stronghold. The latter status continued to draw people from the wider empire through opportunity or compulsion, vividly demonstrated through biomolecular analysis of human skeletons. The same connection brought Christianity, but remote from power centres of the late antique empire, and with no role in organising local surplus, Londinium's end came quickly; scarcely a house or artefact date to the fifth century (Chapter 30).
As an extended demonstration of current scholarly emphasis on the violence and exploitation of Roman imperialism, and of effective integration of textual and archaeological evidence, rather than siloing them in separate chapters on urban institutions and city life, London in the Roman World will find readers well beyond those with a specialist interest in the city (as P. advises, the 2011 map of Londinium will help them link Roman to modern London). It will remain an enduring reference source for London's ‘depths of measured riches’ (p. 3; the appendix tabulates c. 370 sites), but this detail always serves the argument. Londinium's smallness even at its peak, for example, is memorably measured in the short flight to rural ground needed for its mole and vole supper by the owl that regurgitated the pellet found on the basilica's second-century floor (p. 167).
Inevitably not all the evidence that could be cited is here. The large fresco documented at 21 Lime Street (2016), its scheme near identical to panels in Augst and Cologne, would have emphatically supported P.'s claim for Londoners commissioning artisans from northern Europe to decorate their homes. The house-church at Lullingstone is absent from the discussion on London's Christianity. Some evidence that does feature could be nuanced further. The arch, for example, which frames the funerary portrait of a likely beneficiarius, is now thought unlikely to be part of this tomb (fig. 18.1, p. 221), while the notorious castration clamp for Cybele's priests (p. 319) has been more prosaically interpreted as a twitch, a veterinary instrument for calming horses.
More importantly, it is essential not to overlook the fragmentary character of evidence for the hypotheses advanced and the scope for challenging inferences drawn from it. Whether London begins as a marching camp can likely be determined only by future excavation of more ditch sections central to the disputed interpretation (Chapters 5–6). A more convincing explanation for the many skulls in the Walbrook, victims here of a Hadrianic war (Chapter 20), may be the disturbance of graves by stream action in the burial area north of the city. More generally, the focus on external elites risks obscuring the agency of others. The argument for the absence of a local curial class seems overstated, since it depends on an absence of inscriptions celebrating amenity gift-giving, which also typifies other Romano-British cities, where urban self-government is not disputed. As P. concedes, London's fine houses and tombs could be explained by a municipal as well as by a mercantile elite (Chapter 21); in any case the distinction between the two may be overdrawn. While it is refreshing to see relatively little said on London's shadowy role as a provincial capital, the likely assemblies linked to it offer another mechanism for Romano-British elites sponsoring Londinium's monuments. As P. notes, his chosen focus also leaves non-elite Londoners less in view. There is limited exploration of how neighbourhood and household dynamics might shape the city (L.M. Wallace's 2015 The Origin of Roman London shows the potential here); the presence of women is relatively limited, outnumbered more than ten to one in the named mortals listed in the index, a consequence of the biases in the stone inscriptions and writing tablets, where imperial elites and their enablers dominate.
It is a fortunate coincidence that Londinium now benefits from two recent syntheses after a 30-year hiatus. For this reviewer, P.'s city shaped by Roman power convinces more than Hingley's moulded by continuity from Iron Age cultural practice. Whichever persuades most, together they illustrate the potential for writing enriched and complex Roman urban histories from recent archaeological evidence.
