Anglo-American Conference of Historians 2009: Cities
Institute of Historical Research, 2 - 3 July 2009
City Development and Urban Change in the Roman Empire – The Explanation of Regional Variation
Chair: Louise Revell (University of Southampton)
The Roman Empire was an empire of cities that appear to replicate a similar ‘design concept’. This factor has caused modern architects to view this historical phenomenon as an object of curiosity and some even see this network of cities as the origin of all later urban phenomena. Although archaeologists and historians recognise the global phenomenon of the Roman City, they are also interested in defining an urban dynamic of difference and variation in time (c.500 BCE – 500 CE) and in space (from the Atlantic seaboard to the Euphrates). Over the course of the last three years, the participants in this session, each an expert on a different region of the Roman Empire, have discussed the nature of Roman city and have sought to explain with reference to each other’s research the causes of variation of the physical form of the Roman city and related these phenomena to the ways of life of the inhabitants. Some of the results of this dialogue on Roman urbanism are presented here. The papers deconstruct the modern ideal of a single conception of the Roman city, yet resist the abandonment of the global concept of the city in the ancient context. The three papers in dialogue with one another present a case for understanding the development of the Roman city as a historical process that varies in time and space, yet is capable of producing cities and reproducing an urban concept over a long temporal period. In so doing, the session as a whole defines the nature of city development and the maintenance of a stable concept of the city over the period from c.80 BCE – 250 CE.
Abstracts
Urban change in Italy
Ray Laurence (University of Birmingham)
The cities of Italy at the beginning of the first century BCE displayed a degree of unity of urban form; most had city walls, temples and streets with a clear division of sacred, private and public space. However, some cities had developed additional features: heated bath buildings, stone theatres and stone amphitheatres. These three monument types were to be built in cities in Italy over the course of the next two hundred years (down to c.130 CE). Interestingly, the dynamic for the building of these new types of monument in stone was not in Rome itself, nor would it seem that finances for them were raised locally. Instead, the impetus would appear to come from an elite who had a perception of Hellenistic urban forms and finance derived from estates that lay beyond the local region of their home city. However, this period of rapid urban development was undertaken over a relatively short period of Roman history and would appear to have stopped by 150 CE. Moreover, the mirage of a developed network of monumental cities was created by a relatively small number of people. In setting out these dynamics of urban change, the paper will argue that the decision making and funding of urban development was initiated by a relatively small number of individuals over a short period of Roman history.
From 'Friends, Romans, countrymen' to 'Onward, Christian soldiers': Roman cities and the production of citizens
Simon Esmonde Cleary (University of Birmingham)
The physical form and the materiality of the city, the types of its public buildings, monuments and spaces, are often seen as a passive reflection of the social structures and cultural values of the society that created it. Here it will be argued that they played an active role in the construction of the social and cultural expectations of their inhabitants and were agents in the production of the type of citizen favoured by the society at any given time. An important element of this was the types of activity and behaviours promoted (and discouraged) by the range and type of buildings and monuments available and their place in the upbringing and daily life of the citizen. Alongside this more ‘active’ role was the more ‘passive’ one of the manifestation of expectations and examples; what cultural and societal values were displayed by the forms the city took and thus experienced by and inculcated into the citizen; how were the presence and the memory of the past used to confer ‘natural’ status on contemporary values?
This paper will exemplify these approaches by examining the cities of Roman Gaul in the first half-millennium CE. In the earlier part of this time period the cities exhibit what are nowadays considered classic Roman urban attributes in plan (e.g. street-grids), in public buildings (e.g. forum, baths, amphitheatres), in monuments (e.g. sculpture, epigraphy); all these conditioning the social and cultural expectations and practice of the citizenry. By the end of the time period, the cities were physically transformed, being much reduced in area, with many of the buildings and monuments characteristic of the earlier period abandoned or destroyed. Instead, there were now two dominant monument types: city walls and churches. These changes have traditionally been read as proofs of ‘decline’, de-urbanisation and the growing power of the church. But it is equally possible to read them as indicators of the move to a new expectation of the citizen and the ways in which such citizens were constructed and conditioned.
'The Towns are not as they once were …' urbanism in late Roman Britain
Roger White (University of Birmingham)
The Roman towns that Gildas, probably writing the words of this title in Britain during the sixth century AD, will have seen and known about were indeed very different from the entities created in the first decades after the Roman conquest. Could they, in fact, still be called towns at that date? In seeking to establish what Roman towns looked like in Britain we must take into account the very different interpretation of the urban form that the Romano-British created from the Classical ideal, and how even this version evolved under the varied economic and political pressures in Britain during the Roman period into new and diverse forms of urbanism. While perhaps celebrating the diversity of urban form in the Roman Empire, this paper will also address quite how we can strive to reach agreement as to the commonalities of urban life and form both temporally and spatially within the Roman world. In short, can we agree on a definition of what Roman urbanism might be that can fit the diversity visible in the archaeological record?
