Segobriga (Saelices) was a municipality on the route between Toletum (Toledo) and Valentia (Valencia). Its wealth depended on agriculture and the local lapis specularis, a translucent gypsum used for windows as far away as Rome. Appearing in the Augustan period, the site saw limited development under the Julio-Claudians but experienced a major surge in monumentalisation, statuary and epigraphy from the Flavians into the early second century, a surge that did not last, with a circus of the mid-second century abandoned unfinished. Thereafter, the erection of statues and inscriptions fell away and eventually the forum and other monuments were encroached upon by ‘parasitic’ structures. It is nevertheless recorded as a seat of a bishop in late antiquity.

Many of the features, factors and processes that recur in discussions of the development of urbanism on the Iberian peninsula during the Roman period are exemplified by Segobriga and considered in this thought-provoking volume. The book consists of 16 papers (13 in English and three in Spanish) divided between a first part on ‘General issues’ (six papers) and a second on ‘Case studies’ (ten papers). This is one of a number of recent Spanish/Portuguese publications that seek to re-examine old assumptions about the fate of Roman-style urbanism in the Hispaniae, with traditional explanations such as the ‘third-century crisis’ and ‘barbarian invasions’ generally discarded. Segobriga's Flavian surge of monumentalisation matches that evidenced at many cities across the peninsula. This was apparently a response to the grant of the status of municipium or of ius Latii, which provoked the construction of archetypally Roman monuments such as theatres and amphitheatres as well as the commemoration of emperors and local worthies in statues and inscriptions. But this enthusiasm does not seem to have lasted for more than two or three generations, as the data for construction, statuary and epigraphy across the peninsula show. What is often considered the durable imprint of Roman urbanism was in fact contingent and transient; those modern plans with civic monuments plotted in the certainty of black ink need a lot more nuance. The start date of the volume's title (the second rather than the third century) is important and entirely justified. So, what happened?

Segobriga suffered as improved window glass displaced its expensive lapis specularis. Some other towns saw natural resources exhausted or substituted in the second century, particularly the major centre of Carthago Nova (Cartagena), with the demise of its silver mines, but also smaller sites such as Sisapo (La Bienvenida), known for its cinnabar. Some have suggested demographic decline, though the widespread concentration of urban excavations on civic monuments rather than private housing makes this difficult to document. The increased acquisition of Roman citizenship by municipal elites may have tempted them to seek their fortune elsewhere, either in the larger cities or in the upper orders of Roman society, and so deprived their home towns of their euergetism. Or perhaps these elites found other, more congenial ways of displaying their wealth.

Several papers make the point that early imperial Hispania had a huge number of urban locations arranged in networks and hierarchies. One of the crucial processes seems to have been that some networks flourished whilst others atrophied; this is nicely exemplified in Diarte-Blasco's paper on the Ebro valley, where it was the coastal cities that prospered due to their maritime networks, while the inland networks and their nodes deteriorated. So there seems to have been a series of regional upheavals, resulting in an overall urban frequency that, as Brassous shows, resembled that north of the Pyrenees. The ultimate effects of these upheavals are reflected in where episcopal sees were established in due course: in locations which were by then the urban centres.

Britain's Roman towns and cities may seem a long way from all this, but the Spanish experience has wider lessons to offer. One counters the impression of progressive and irreversible urbanisation and monumentalisation down to the end of the second century. The uncompleted forum basilicas at London and Silchester (at least) may now look more like the pattern seen in Hispania: a rush of elite enthusiasm soon ebbing away. How many other fora and baths or amphitheatres need to be re-examined in this light, with less certainty of black ink? Do we tend to be more concerned with identifying and dating construction rather than abandonment? Does evanescent elite enthusiasm help explain the notorious lack of statuary and inscriptions from Romano-British cities? How should we look at the balance between node and network, individual cities and urban patterns, including the ‘small towns’? What was really going on in the third century, often glossed over as a long sleep between the second and the fourth centuries? So, the cities of Hispania can inform their cousins in Britannia. But the mid-fifth-century clothed burial of a macaque with belt-fittings and rings in the forum of Iulia Libyca (Llívia) may not find a direct parallel.