In this wide-ranging synthesis, Greg Woolf seeks to place ancient Mediterranean city building squarely within the broader frameworks of comparative urbanism and the environmental sciences. This is a welcome endeavor given that Classicists traditionally have been reluctant to engage in cross-cultural approaches to urbanism (particularly the robust scholarship on ancient urbanism in the Americas), and overviews of early cities in other disciplines tend to exclude the Mediterranean (one notable exception is Norman Yoffee's edited volume, Early Cities in Comparative Perspective, 4000 BCE–1200 CE, 2015). More novel still, Woolf boldly proposes that cities should be understood as “natural” (hence the subtitle)—that is, as analogous in evolutionary terms to the ways that other socially complex species have come to shape their environments (termite mounds are a favored example).

The Life and Death of Cities presents this far-reaching narrative across four parts, ranging chronologically from the earliest origins of cities to the fall of Tenochtitlan, and geographically encompassing the Near East, China, the Americas, and beyond. But the heart of the book is dedicated to the emergence and development of cities in the Mediterranean. In the first part, Woolf presents a lucid tour of the evolutionary dimensions of early sedentism and the transition from “a world of villages” (p. 54) to the earliest cities. The causes of what V. Gordon Childe famously termed the “Urban Revolution” that gave rise to cities 6,000 years ago remain obscure. Why did humans depart from several hundred thousand years of nonurban, relatively egalitarian existence to live in hierarchal cities? Central to Woolf's argument is that this was in no way inevitable. After all, any narrative of the forward march of civilization is belied by the false starts, collapses, and lack of a single urban prototype that characterize the global history of cities. In Woolf's formulation, humans are “accidentally urban” (p. 24), but they are also preadapted to be successful in an urban environment. The particular evolutionary qualities of humans that allow them to thrive in cities also means, according to Woolf, that when cities do come about, they tend to out-compete other forms of organization. This, in turn, helps explain why many cities are so long-lived and resilient.

Following a nimble exploration of the rise of Mesopotamian urbanism in Uruk and its subsequent diffusion across the ancient Near East, the core of the book is dedicated to cities in the Greco-Roman world. The book promises a “more sober account” (p. 13) of Classical urbanism, hewing more closely to the archaeological and documentary record that elucidates the lived experience of cities than to the literary accounts of urban elites. A recurring theme—drawing in particular on Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell's The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (2000)—is that the particular challenges presented by the ecology of the Mediterranean kept most cities small in size and population, a salutary reorientation away from the exceptional cases of Athens, Rome, and Alexandria. Woolf argues that these natural checks on urban growth meant that cities always remained somewhat precarious and that the exceptions, the megalopoleis, were only created and sustained by exceptional imperial powers. In elucidating these themes, Woolf ranges widely. Although the book admirably avoids the limitations of the “case study” approach, there is also little chance to delve deeply into finer textures of “life” in specific cities. In particular, the agency and lifeways of the people who inhabited ancient cities, so richly documented in some cases, rarely come to the fore. Additionally, Woolf rightly observes that although approximately two-thirds of the population in the Mediterranean in Classical antiquity did not live in cities, the proximity of cities necessarily transformed the lives and livelihoods of rural dwellers, but their role in this network is left largely unexplored along with the relationship of city and hinterland. As a result, the perspective at times reverts to the traditional focus on the political and monumental aspects of the ancient city, but Woolf's treatment is always lively, challenging, and full of interesting insights.

Less true to its title, the book does not explore the “death” of ancient cities systematically. Indeed, a basic assumption of Woolf's approach is that the disaggregation of settlements is the natural state of Mediterranean ecology, and therefore the contraction of urban settlements or return to village life requires no particular explanation. Yet, just as Woolf has rightly emphasized in the case of the rise of cities, their eclipse or decline was also due to various causes and took on a multitude of forms. Here, the archaeological evidence can be particularly eloquent in the dismantling, reuse, transformation, and destruction of urban monuments and infrastructure in late antiquity. Woolf brings aspects of this process out in vivid detail, pointing the way to a burgeoning area of study.

Woolf's learned and impressive investigation signals the flourishing state of current research on ancient urbanism and the insights that new methodologies have brought to established fields in ancient history. It makes for interesting reading alongside Monica Smith's new (and very different) book, Cities: The First Thousand Years (2019). Both, written by distinguished scholars in very different disciplines, show the potential for high-level, cross-cultural comparative work on ancient cities.