To what extent did the coastal location of a city influence its physiognomy, its functional organisation and the perception of its contemporaries? This book, the publication of Stefan Feuser’s habilitation thesis, answers this question. With its focus on the study of the urban development of port cities in the Eastern Mediterranean from the High Hellenistic period to the Late Roman Empire, this book is a good fit for De Gruyter’s Urban Spaces collection, which hosts works dealing with the history of construction and town planning and their reception in Antiquity.
This work stands at the intersection of two fields of study that have recently undergone a renewal: on the one hand, the study of ancient ports in the framework of international projects (e.g. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – Häfen von der Römischen Kaiserzeit bis zum Mittelalter; ERC Project in Southhampton Portus Limen – Rome’s Mediterranean Ports) and local projects integrating the geoarchaeological dimension; and on the other hand the study of the perception of the ancient Mediterranean following the work of Horden & Purcell on connectivity and microecologies.[1] On the basis of a corpus of well-studied port areas, the author bases his analysis on an interconnected Mediterranean space, in which port areas represent dynamic communication hubs on coasts in constant transformation. How has the nature of this transitional space influenced the organisation of the port city, its periphery and the social composition of its inhabitants?
As usual in academic archaeological studies, the book is organised in two parts. The first is devoted to five case studies (II.1–II.5) on Miletus, Alexandria (of Egypt), Ephesus, Caesarea Maritima and Leptis Magna. Each of these case studies is a synthesis of recent but consensus-based research, organised in such a way as to be able to follow the evolution over several centuries of the phenomena analysed in the cities chosen: their coastal topography and their development. The whole is clear and comprehension is facilitated by the reproduction of maps, plans and architectural reconstructions which allow the specificities of each of the places studied to be understood. Wherever possible, the study also refers to the importance of the port and the sea for the social life of the city, based also on the possible rites and processions that occurred in these places. To this end, the author relies, among other things, on literary and epigraphic sources and related studies.
The choice of these case studies is well justified by the fact that these port cities were of supra-regional importance in the Hellenistic and/or Roman periods, that they were central places of their region and that they had distant maritime relations. They are therefore important communication hubs of the Mediterranean, whose importance changed over time. If Alexandria remains an essential place throughout the period, Miletus reached its apogee at the beginning of the Hellenistic period, Caesarea Maritima at the beginning of the imperial period, Ephesus during the 1st-2nd centuries AD and Leptis Magna after 200 AD. The diversity of their topographical situation—on low and slightly indented coasts (Caesarea Maritima, Leptis Magna), in a flat delta as with the Nile, οr at the mouth of rivers bringing sediments and leading to a continuous displacement of the coastline, as is the case with the Cayster or the Meander—allows for an in-depth analysis of various cases.
The second part synthesizes the elements highlighted in the case studies, whose results are nuanced by adding some specific analyses related to other port cities.
Chapter III deals with the architectural development of port cities in order to understand whether ports were understood as an integral part of the city and how the relationship between the urban space, the coastal strip and the open sea changed between Hellenistic and Roman times. The ports have been established on sites suitable for anchoring boats, but nevertheless subject to constantly changing natural conditions. The installation of wave-breakers, jetties and quays (III.1.1), especially from the Hellenistic period onwards, made it possible to integrate the coast and the sea into the city. These developments nevertheless modify the natural environment which leads to new problems requiring an architectural and/or functional adaptation of the ports. Boat shelters (III.1.2) were military and symbolic buildings of the Hellenistic cities whose impressive architecture was sometimes preserved long after the time of their glorious use, showing their importance for the identity of the cities. The author shows that the monumental lighthouses (III.1.3) also had a dual function as maritime markers but also as representational devices. This function was linked to the location of the harbours, entry and exit points of the city, but also to their nature as living places. The author studies precisely the organization of the space between the sea and the harbour basin (III.2), then the use and possible division of the spaces of the harbour basin (III.3) before looking at the links between the harbour and the urban space (III.4). Harbours thus appear as spaces, sometimes fortified, but also of representation for the local elites and sovereigns, and as symbolic places where rituals for the arrival and departure of ships were organised. Their connection to the city changed: whereas in Hellenistic times harbours were open and connected by their facilities to the streets leading to the agora, the monumentalization of the passages between the harbour and the city during the imperial period, allowing a closer control of traffic, resulted in the spatial separation of the harbour from the urban centre.
Chapter IV focuses on ports as living places and multifunctional spaces. This includes observing how the various professions connected with the harbours were socially, economically and politically integrated in the town, and how they were present in the image of the city. The first function—that of trade (IV.1)—was carried out on two levels: the ports had supra-regional long-distance relations with important Mediterranean ports. These long-distance trade relations were dominated by Italian merchants (IV.1.1) and Roman citizens. As individuals or in groups they had the financial means and political influence to offer or renovate buildings and statues in honour of their members, protectors or relatives of the imperial house. Relations with small local and regional coastal harbours were made by naukleroi (IV.1.2) who were mostly captains and owners of their coastal vessels. They represented a significant part of the social and economic life of the port cities, were able to erect stelae for their protectors and to participate in the financing of sanctuaries. However, although their economic situation seems to have improved between Hellenistic and imperial times, they rarely belonged to the ruling strata of society.
The second—artisanal and commercial—function (IV. 2) was represented by the craftsmen and workers of the sea who worked in and around the harbour and who are more or less well represented in the sources. This is the case of shipbuilders (IV.2.1), who rarely appear in the evidence, which could indicate that there were no large construction sites in the ports of the Eastern Mediterranean (IV.2.4). The situation is different for the porters (IV.2.2) (phortegoi, sakkophoroi), who loaded and unloaded the ships and must have been numerous in the ports, as well as for the ferry drivers (IV.2.5) to whom the port cities leased the right to transport people along the coasts and to the islands, which provided cities with substantial revenues. Finally, it seems that the fishermen, mussel and crab fishers (IV.2 6-7) were numerous and that their profession provided them with a sufficient income to live on.
The third function studied is that of the port as a place of representation (IV.3). This mainly involves rulers (IV.3.1) wanting to demonstrate their ability to overcome the elements, such as Herod at Caesarea Maritima, or Septimius Severus at Leptis Magna. On the other hand, for the upper classes of the cities, the harbour appeared less as a place of munificence compared to other places in the city such as sanctuaries, stoai and baths. Some places in the harbour, however, seem to have been preferred for the installation of monuments and honorary statues: the sea gateway seems to have been a privileged place of representation of the local communities (IV.3.2), which exposed their economic and political power there, as in Miletus, or showed their allegiance to a governor, as the Lycians did in Patara. The areas around the monumental gates, places of transition between the harbour and the city, were places of representation for the local and provincial elites, who could display their wealth and loyalty to the emperor. The great monuments and gates were financed by the city itself or by the ruling classes of the cities.
This chapter on the port as a living place concludes with the function of waste and sewage disposal (IV.4). The author describes the port basins as quite dirty and leaving all kinds of artefacts floating around. He concludes by assuming that “in ancient times, the strong olfactory pollution emanating from the harbour basins was only perceived as a limited nuisance” (p. 321) since few measures were actually undertaken for the cleaning of ports.
The fifth chapter focuses on the analysis of the aesthetics and perception of ports and urban coasts. It examines by which architectural measures the coastal strip was integrated into the urban space and staged. First of all, the coastline was integrated into the city (V.1) through the spaces gained from the sea by the mole quays and other wave-breakers, which could delimit a closed port space. This was made possible thanks to the innovation of opus caementicium. On the other hand, the spaces won from the sea were built in the former marshes which had been drained by the alluvial deposits of the rivers (e. g. Meander, Cayster).
Concerning the architectural development of the urban coastline (V.2), the harbours were laid out as squares surrounded by porticoes, temples, honorary monuments, monumental gates and pavements, so as to stage the port in the panorama. The author then analyses the harbour as a place of commemoration (V.3) of maritime victories, in particular through the exhibition of large ships on display in dry docks or permanently moored. The port was also integrated into the sacred topography of the city (V.4), in particular through the numerous sanctuaries that were located in the immediate vicinity of the ports. This chapter ends with an analysis of the ports and the urban coasts in the figurative representations (V.5). These last analyses, however, are based, as a matter of fact, only on Italian documents, mainly from Portus (coins) and the frescoes of Pompeii and Stabiae. While they are published in black and white on paper, the author also refers to online illustrations in colour. Harbour scenes on mosaics are only evoked. From the documentary corpus presented, it emerges that while in the figurative representations ports were characterised as working spaces, the architectural aesthetics of the port in the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean were determined only to a limited extent by the functional requirements: harbours had the same types of buildings as the rest of the city. Here, as in the city, the shops of the stoai, for example, allowed the trade of merchants and craftsmen, but on the harbour, it concerned coastal and maritime activities.
In conclusion, it can be said that Stefan Feuser’s book clearly demonstrates how the port cities of the Eastern Mediterranean developed and were organized from an urbanistic, functional and aesthetic perspective. In addition to being a precise and well-documented study, the book manages to bring port people to life. After having defined and drawn up the background of the port cities, he shows us the various crafts but also the different strata of society that were represented there, right up to the rulers who sought to display their power for the different types of travelers who arrived in the city through the ports. It is a good synthesis on which to base further research on the ports chosen as case studies, and especially for their future comparison with the western Mediterranean.
Notes
[1] P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting Sea. A Study of Mediterranean History, Oxford, 2000.