The City in Late Antiquity

Dr John Rich, John Rich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134761357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The city was the nexus of the Roman Empire in its early centuries. The City in Late Antiquity charts the change undergone by cities as the Empire was weakened by the third-century crisis, and later disintegrated under external pressures. The old picture of the classical city as everywhere in decline by the fourth century is shown to be far too simple, and John Rich seeks to explain why urban life disappeared in some regions, while elsewhere cities survived through to the Middle Ages and beyond.

1
The end of the ancient city

Wolfgang Liebeschuetz

The ancient city: a centre of administration and a way of life

Many sites of ancient cities are occupied by flourishing cities today. Not a few of them have continuous histories since Antiquity. So the Ancient City can be said to have come to an end only in a special sense, the disappearance of those characteristics which distinguished the Graeco-Roman city from others. Of these the most spectacular and influential have been cultural. They involve a particular style of architecture, sculpture and town planning, and a very distinctive literary and intellectual tradition. But the origin of the Ancient City was political and administrative. Its essential feature was the creation of a political, religious and cultural centre (‘the city’ in the narrow sense) for a rural territory around it. The political centre together with its territory represented the city state, or ‘city’ in a wider sense. According to Thucydides the creation of the political centre was the essential action in Theseus’ synoikismos of Athens: he suppressed the local councils of the small communities of Attica and created a common council for the whole territory at what was thereafter the city of Athens (Thucydides 2.15; cf. Cavanagh 1991). The legend expresses the historian’s view that the origin of the Athenian city state was political and administrative. The subsequent history of the city in the Graeco-Roman world, not least in the Later Empire, shows that its political and administrative rôle remained central. For Thucydides the original and essential instrument for creating and maintaining the Athenian city state was the council or boule. In his own time this was just one of the political institutions of democratic Athens, working alongside a popular assembly, popular courts and numerous directly elected magistrates. Under Roman rule popular institutions faded away,¹ and the self-government of territory and urban centre was left in the hands of the council (curia, boule), a body whose size might vary from about eighty to six hundred men according to the size of the city. Membership was lifelong and in practice hereditary. Vacancies were made up by co-option from men of property, above all landed property. The history of the cities in the Roman Empire is closely linked with the history of the city councils and the civic élite (curiales, decuriones, bouleutai) which had come to monopolize membership of the ruling council. In the Roman period possession of a council was considered the essential qualification for city status (Jones 1964, 724; Garnsey and Saller 1987, 29).

Classical cities were above all a means to living a particular kind of good life. Philosophers might theorize about this in different ways. Aristotle wrote that man was a political animal (Politics 1.2), that is, that man is designed to live in a city (polis), and he proceeded to draw up a blueprint for a city which would enable its inhabitants, or at least some of them, to live as nature intended them to (Politics 7–8). This ideal was expressed in political institutions, in art and entertainment, and in architecture. Town planning, architecture, festivals and other public spectacles were more than pure aesthetics. They formed the basis of a calendar of urban ceremony, participation in which symbolized consent to the social order at every level from the family to the Empire. Inasmuch as ritual moulds and transmits attitudes, the ritual of the classical city helped to unite different groups within the town, inhabitants of the city and inhabitants of its territory, and the hundreds of cities that made up the Empire, with a ruler whose image was kept before his subjects by the imperial cult (Clavel-Lévêque 1984; Price 1984; Wörrle 1988). Politics was becoming the concern of ever fewer of the inhabitants of the city. But the institutions which satisfied the aesthetic-architectural definition of the city (Finley 1973, 124) –rectangular street plans,wide public spaces and impressive public buildings, festivals, entertainments and baths – flourished exceedingly. The Romans had adopted the Greek ideal very early in their history, and they introduced it to large areas of western Europe and the Balkans where it had been unknown before (Drinkwater 1987a).

So the consolidation of the Roman empire saw a huge expansion of the classical city.¹ For the mass of the inhabitants the advantages were perhaps mainly intangible, the consciousness of participating in ‘no mean city’. For the well-to-do the city provided not only amenities, but also a position of leadership which was guaranteed by the Romans. The Romans gained in that the cities provided a means of administering large territories which did not require a huge civil service.² So the provincial élite took up the Greek vision of urban life as modified by the Romans, and with the encouragement of the Roman authorities proceeded to build temples, assembly places (fora) and ‘mansions’ (Tacitus, Agricola 19), and to establish games and festivals.³ Finance was provided largely by voluntary or semi-voluntary munificence. This was expensive, and performing administrative services like tax-collecting for the Romans was troublesome, but public spending made the councillors’ wealth and power acceptable to poorer fellow citizens, while their administrative services ensured that the maintenance of the political status quo remained in the interest of the Roman government. Considerations of class-interest apart, there is no doubt that in the first and second centuries AD the pattern of life represented by the classical city had a very great, in fact almost irresistible, appeal. The climax of the physical development of the classical city was reached in some areas at the end of the second century, more generally, in the first two decades of the third century. After that the great flood of private munificence displayed in public buildings, banquets, distribution of money or food, games, statues and inscribed monuments subsided everywhere, and never recovered to anything remotely approaching itsformer level. The Empire was passing through the crisis of the third century, which marks the beginning of Late Antiquity, and the real starting point of this paper.¹

A development which was hastened, if not caused, by the third-century crisis was the splitting of the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western halves. Socially as well as physically the lands to the south and south-east of the Mediterranean had of course always been very different from those to the north and north-east. But the Roman Empire and not least urbanization had made them seem more alike. After the third century the unifying pull of Rome was weaker, and in many respects developments in East and West began to diverge once more. Certainly the crisis affected cities in East and West – the dichotomy of course provides only a very rough classification – in different ways. However, the evolution of cities in East and West was not so much in opposite directions, as out of step. Over a perspective of centuries it will be seen that cities in East and West follow a similar pattern up to say 800, and this fact justifies the procedure of continuing to treat them as a single phenomenon.

The third-century crisis and the inscriptions of Aphrodisias

The crisis of the third century really did affect cities everywhere. The universality of its impact is shown by the fact that, paradoxically, it can be demonstrated most graphically in a city which was relatively little affected, Aphrodisias in Caria. Since Aphrodisias experienced quite exceptional continuity from the Early to the Late Empire, it continued to produce inscriptions at a time when most cities ceased to do so, and these inscriptions testify to profound changes.

The rate of production of inscriptions dropped dramatically. The three hundred years AD 250–550 have left 250 inscriptions whereas the previous three hundred years left 1500 (Roueché 1989a, 20). Among the later inscriptions there is a great and sudden reduction in the proportion honouring private benefactors. The men commemorated after the crisis were usually imperial officials or the emperor. It is also significant that the inscriptions of the Later Empire are quite different stylistically. Verse epigrams tend to take the place of prose in honorific inscriptions. Inscriptions cease to take the form of a public record, and often seem to have been set up for their decorative value. Their appeal has become aesthetic and ceremonial rather than political.

The social development reflected by these changes in the inscriptional habit is the progressive weakening of local politics. Political initiative is in the hands of the imperial governor who has his headquarters at Aphrodisias. The institutions of political self-government decay. The last reference to the traditional chief magistrate is on an inscription dated between 284 and 301. The latest monumental honour put up in the name of council and people dates from the late 360s (Roueché 1989a, 42–3, no. 22). Acclamations replace debated and voted decrees (ibid., 121–36, no. 80–4). The urban élite no longer competes for office, and no longer attaches importance to the ‘immortality’ which consists of a statue with a laudatory inscription set in a public place where their fellow citizens could not fail to see it.

The rise and decline of the epigraphic habit at Aphrodisias is an exceptionally well-documented example of an Empire-wide phenomenon.¹ The evidence for underlying social changes is also Empire-wide, though change came at different rates to different areas of the Empire. That is the theme of much of this chapter.

The inscriptions of Aphrodisias reveal an unexpected episode. The fading out of private and civic commemorations in the third century was partially reversed in the fifth. We have a comparatively large number of inscriptions dating from the middle of the fifth to the middle of the sixth centuries commemorating private benefactions, or work undertaken by a new civic finance officer, the ‘father of the city’, pater tes poleos (Roueché 1979). After this Indian summer secular inscriptions come to an end around AD 600. Later inscriptions are either ecclesiastical or funerary, and there are very few. We are approaching the end of Aphrodisias as a classical city.

This partial revival of civic activities at Aphrodisias in the late fifth and sixth centuries is an example of a phenomenon which has been noted in widely separated areas of what had once been the Empire. For instance church building in Aquitaine, starting at a very low level in the fourth century, rose to a peak in the sixth and declined to nothing in the early seventh century (Rouche 1979, 295). It is perhaps not altogether a coincidence that the cathedral of Trier built in the reign of Gratian, and badly damaged in the invasions of the fifth century, was rebuilt by Bishop Nicetius about the same time as Justinian rebuilt St Sophia at Constantinople (Irsch 1931; Kempf 1964). Obviously the scale and quantity of building in the early sixth-century boom was much greater in the East, but peaks of activity nevertheless appear to have been achieved in the East and West at about the same time.

Factors transforming the city

Why the crisis of the third century had such immediate and lasting effects is a question to which there is no simple answer. Certainly an important factor was a transformation of the view held by the wealthy ruling group of the cities, the decurions, of their relations with their fellow town dwellers, and of their own rôle in the collective life of the community. An unmistakable symptom was the growing isolation of the élite, and the concentration of wealth in fewer hands. This was, of course, a long-term development which the financial hardships of the third century merely accelerated. But it looks as if in Late Roman towns the élite were not ashamed – or afraid – to display their riches in conspicuous consumption such as the building of large town houses, at the same time as they were becoming reluctant to use them in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. The End of the Ancient City
• 2. The Survival and Fall of the Classical City In Late Roman Africa
• 3. Christianity and the City In Late Roman Gaul
• 4. The Use and Abuse of Urbanism In the Danubian Provinces During the Later Roman Empire
• 5. The End of the City In Roman Britain
• 6. ‘The Cities Are Not Populated As Once They Were’
• 7. Public Buildings and Urban Change In Northern Italy In the Early Mediaeval Period
• 8. Antioch: From Byzantium to Islam and Back Again