Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s new book enters a crowded, contested field. Whether Late Antiquity represents decline or transformation has been intensely debated in terms of its cities. Indeed, W.-H. frames his discussion partly in response to Wolf Liebeschuetz’s Decline and Fall of the Roman City (2000). Yet the approach here is distinctive, examining cities less as agglomerations of buildings than as defined by their inhabitants, whose shifting needs shaped and reshaped the physical spaces around them. At the heart of much of the discussion is the apparent paradox that even if ancient authors from Alcaeus (34) to Isidore of Seville (271) insisted that cities consisted of their people rather than their walls, those walls, along with the rest of the physical fabric, were central to conceptualisations of cities in antiquity. The key concern is to examine resilience (373–7), both of city-dwelling communities and of the urban ideas and ideals that they constructed around themselves. An essential prolegomenon is that however much modern scholarship invokes sources from Aristotle to Aelius Aristides to archaeology, its accepted paradigm of ‘the ancient city’ is a comparatively recent construct, shaped by, amongst others, Fustel de Coulanges, Weber, Haverfield, John Ward-Perkins, Jones and Finley. If we reject this ‘simplified typology’ (28), then the urban transformations of Late Antiquity emerge as part of a continuous trajectory of variegated changes rather than the decline and fall of some exceptional social form.

Most chapters examine literary texts for what they reveal about how late antique writers thought about what cities were. Continuity and adaptability are emphasised: in ch. 2 the rhetoric underpinning laudes urbium ‘provides a clear thread from antiquity into the Middle Ages’ (44), even if the patterns of production of such texts were patchy and uneven (70). The robustness of ideals of the city, envisioned chiefly in terms of law, justice and civitas (citizenship), is argued in ch. 3 to underpin some of those authors who, at first sight, seem most hostile to it. By juxtaposing Augustine and Salvian with imperial law and reflections on citizenship in Claudian and Orosius, W.-H. posits that they sought not to challenge the basic concept of the city, but to disentangle it from the worst excesses of Roman imperialism and repurpose civic ideals along the lines of the civitas Dei (114). Alongside citizenship, the city represented civilitas: ch. 4 explores how Cassiodorus’ Variae articulated a vision of the Ostrogothic kingdom in which Theoderic, far from being an enemy of cities and the values associated with them, instead championed them as hubs through which a new harmonious social and political order could be articulated for Romans and Goths, Christians and Jews. Ch. 5 examines cities in the works of Procopius: they provide the stage for events in the Wars, while the panegyrical work on Justinian’s building activities presents him, above all, as a worldwide city founder like no other — an image undercut in the Anekdota, which adds subversion of urban institutions to the emperor’s sins. Ch. 6 focuses on a rather different category of texts, the sorts of municipal records found in collections of Ravenna papyri, papal letters and Frankish formularies. Rather than being treated as evidence for debates on the tenacity of curial government, they, and the rituals of record-keeping they enshrine, become ‘a mechanism for adaptation’ in terms of how cities ‘continued … to structure territories and societies’ (234). This arc of discussions of textual cities concludes with Gregory of Tours, fiercely proud of his Roman aristocratic forebears, defining the city in relation to its bishops and saints (ch. 8), and Isidore of Seville negotiating his way through a vast etymological tradition concerned with the vocabulary of cities amid the realities of life in Visigothic Spain (ch. 9).

W.-H. is sensitive to the risk that written sources reflect rhetorics more than realities: hence his treatment of Cassiodorus’ works in dialogue with the physical fabric of Ostrogothic Ravenna (123–7). That physical matrix comes to the fore in ch. 9 as the embodiment of the ideas traced in texts. Entrenched orthodoxies, such as Jean Sauvaget’s contention that the classical colonnaded street degraded into the Arab suq, are subjected to scrutiny, and encroachment on public spaces is demonstrated to begin much earlier than Late Antiquity, so that what was once regarded as an indication of decline was anything but. New foundations of various types, from Constantinople to Reccopolis to ‘Anjar and even Aachen, are considered as demonstrations of the adaptability, resilience and plurality of urban forms. Physical fabric looms large too in ch. 10 to show how ancient substrates remain influential across longer timespans at Antioch, Merida, and Naples. Their different fates epitomise urban resilience.

Slips are few for such an expansive project. Asserting that Gregory of Tours offers ‘accounts of sixth- and seventh-century Gaul’ (31) attributes remarkable clairvoyance to an author who died in 593 or 594. One might wish for the missing reference to Agnellus of Ravenna’s account of renovations in S. Apollinare Nuovo (123: it is Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis 86–9). A misplaced apostrophe grants Procopius multiple personalities (167). Justinian becomes plural ‘emperors’ (183). A reliance on Dewing’s Procopius transforms Goths into Gauls (174). These and other infelicities can easily be corrected in reprints — and I hope there will be plenty of those, since W.-H., by eschewing excessively rigid conceptualisations of the ancient city, has shed fresh and refreshing light on one of Late Antiquity’s great debates.