Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s book is the result of an ERC-funded research project, the Impact of the Ancient City. This particular circumstance must be kept in mind to understand the book, as this book has to be seen as complementing the three edited volumes (Oxbow, 2022) that had first came out of the project. Indeed, it is evident through this monograph’s pages that Wallace-Hadrill’s book drinks from the numerous sources, dozens of examples and lengthy academic discussions that defined the project. Rather than being a conclusion to these contributions, the book distils the concepts and ideas that defined the project into a beautifully-written synthesis that addresses one of the main questions in late antique studies: whatever happened with the cities of the Roman Mediterranean after the fourth century?
The book takes an innovative perspective considering the city as a concept. By focusing on the city as an idea rather than as a settlement (an aspect which is not, however, ignored), Wallace-Hadrill follows the ancient definition of what a city was through a series of case-study late antique authors. This allows him to underline how the concepts of citizenship and urban landscapes of the Classical period were shared from Syria to Iberia between the fourth and the ninth centuries. By comprehending the “ancient city” as a category of analysis, Wallace-Hadrill can bypass the continuity/transformation debate so to counter most of Wolf Liebeschuetz’s (2001) arguments and the narratives that focus on institutional decline to explain physical transformations. Liebeschuetz, Wallace-Hadrill argues, sees the end of the ancient city as a constitutional issue. Wallace-Hadrill points out the long life that the curial caste has both East and West, arguing that the “decline of the curiales” cannot be a crisis if it extends from the third to the seventh centuries; the ongoing presence of these urban elites through the centuries must be a testament to their adaptability. Wallace-Hadrill uses Resilience Theory to conclude that the city of the Ancient Mediterranean and its elites could bounce back and exist through the many crises they endured, with conscious and measured adaptations.
The book contains ten chapters, and it is illustrated thoroughly with good colour images and maps. The first chapter looks at the modern historiography of the ancient city, following the arguments put forward by the key authors who have come to define it. He first goes to Henri Lefebvre to define the city as a cultural entity of handed-down practices, before moving on to the nineteenth-century invention of the ancient city as a way to justify urban development in Europe and colonial urbanism beyond. Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, Max Weber, Francis Haverfield, Moses Finley and Hugo Jones all came up with religious, political, architectural and economic definitions of the ancient city which fell short and tried to work on a fixed ideal of a city that was in constant flux. This review of theories and interpretations, however, serves to introduce the limits of these definitions and idea of resilience applied to the city as an ever-changing organism.
Chapter two moves to what can be considered the ‘insider’ understanding of the Ancient city. The Classical starting point seems here to be that cities are the epitome of civilisation, that culture belongs in cities, and that the city is the natural habitat of humanity. In this sense, cities are already defined by an intrinsic duality: a physical settlement and a political community. This understanding is completed with an analysis of the laudes urbium, starting with Quintilian and then moving towards Libanius, Ausonius, Cassiodorus, Procopius and the early medieval texts. This genre of urban panegyrics relies on a long-established rhetorical structure which is used constantly and hardly without changes through time. Despite the rosy filter and the inevitable exaggerations, these laudes underline the importance of civic pride as a vector in the formation of group and individual identities into the eleventh century.
The next chapter (pp. 74-114) focuses on the writings of a selection of late Roman authors: Orosius, Augustine and Salvian. Caracalla’s edict had conflated local, municipal belonging with universal, Roman citizenship, something which Wallace-Hadrill highlights as a non-issue in Roman constitutional thought, thanks to Cicero’s two patriae. This overlap of community belongings (local, imperial) allowed the extrapolation of civic language to Christian belonging, which was the model Augustine used to explain the civitas Dei not as the city of God, but as the citizenship of heaven. In Augustine as in Salvian, Wallace-Hadrill remarks, citizenship is a contract with rights and values, and civic behaviour among fellow citizens becomes the Christian model. Civitas, in a mundane and heavenly meaning, is consensus and mutual benefit; civic values, civic order and civic law define how one should be a Christian and a Roman, and Salvian use this in his sermons to denounce the behaviour of his flock. The Christianisation of the urban landscape, which Wallace-Hadrill also addresses, did not, in his analysis, affect the concept of the city or of civic culture.
The fourth chapter is devoted to Cassiodorus. Wallace-Hadrill takes advantage of the most recent and up to date discussions on Cassiodorus (Shane Bjornlie’s translation and Giardina’s edition and commentary) to work through his letters, showing that the Ostrogothic kings’ spokesman was perfectly aware of the growing distance between the cities of his time and the city that he understood from the tradition. The city in Cassiodorus is the natural place for people to live and the only civilised way of organising communities. Urban government is essential in the running of the state, and his work with the Ostrogoths was to ensure that the state ran. As a consequence, Cassiodorus finds himself dictating what urban elites should be doing, reminding them of the right order of things, from bathing and otium to municipal responsibilities and munera. The most interesting point that Wallace-Hadrill makes in his chapter on Cassiodorus is the concept of modernus, the new building style used in the construction and maintenance of new, needed structures in a way that mirrors and imitates the works of the ancients. Modernus is, moreover, paired in Wallace-Hadrill’s analysis with civilitas; the urban way of life and elite behaviours that demand the adhesion to the old ways while serving modern needs. Both modernus and civilitas are the epitome of the desire and capability of adaptation, the agency behind the ancient city’s resilience in early sixth-century Italy.
Chapter five looks at Procopius of Caesarea. Wallace-Hadrill here analyses Procopius’s three, interrelated works: the “Buildings”, the “Wars” and the “Secret History”, which are respectively Justinian’s panegyric, chronicle and criticism. The nature of each of these works means that the way cities are presented varies slightly, but in combination they can be used to understand what the early Byzantine idea of the city was: the link to the early Roman tradition. Justinian is the mightiest founder of cities in the “Peri Ktismaton”, and they are the main military objectives in the “Wars”; the emperor wants to promote urban values with his repairs and reconstructions, always adding to what the ancients had left (similar to the Cassiodoran modernus). Justinian is a new Augustus and a new Constantine. This, however, contrasts with the needs of the sixth-century empire, and the “Secret History” denounces how Justinian removed the cities’ municipal economic independence, dismantling the nature of ancient urban politics. The idea of the city, however, remains central in the understanding of the Empire.
The sixth chapter returns to the West, to the Ravenna papyri, the municipal records of Gaul, and the formulae that have survived from Iberia. This chapter leaves the writings of the elites and focuses on the practicalities of city rule, a direct comment on Liebeschuetz’s focus on the decline and collapse of Roman constitutional rule and nuancing Mark Whitthow’s assessment of the “rule of the magnates”. Wallace-Hadrill demonstrates that, despite all the imposed changes and limitations, the municipal institution was sufficiently flexible and useful to survive. In the successor kingdoms, the curiales were still responsible for the public archives as registrars, which was and essential resource of governance for these post-Roman polities. The municipal proceedings, with the civic processions and ritualised public readings, were also essential in the preservation of the urban social order. This evidence shows that in Italy, Gaul and Iberia urban elites still had plenty of administrative roles to fulfil into the seventh century. Naturally, the curial rule was not the same as it had been in the fourth century, but cities are still ruled by the landowning elite, preserving a social structure (and a social contract) established in the ancient city. And here is where Wallace-Hadrill presents the church not as an external, outsider institution but as a local landowner, and the involvement of bishops in the running of cities as an organic adaptation of the city.
Chapters seven and eight look at two almost-coeval authors: Gregory of Tours and Isidore of Seville. The nature of their writings is hardly comparable, as Gregory’s narratives have little to do with Isidore’s prose, but in both we see the same aspects that define the late antique city that we have encountered in the two other authors who were closer to the Imperial core. Gregory was an educated and elite provincial who had been raised up in the late Roman tradition of urban culture; he understood the importance of community (i.e., citizen) interaction in municipal affairs: the importance of consenso civium. In his writings, cities (with bishops) are seen acting as one and recognised as such by the various Merovingian kings. The presence of counts and bishops as the top figures does not undermine the continuity of the idea of the city as a civic community still in the late sixth century. This is a concept that Isidore expands in his “Etymologies”. The key question that Wallace-Hadrill addresses in his eighth chapter is how far Isidorian definitions were still applicable in the seventh century. By looking at the broad range of Visigothic evidence, it is clear that Isidore was not digging up antiquities, but rather synthesising the academic consensus of his time.
The analysis of these texts is completed in chapter nine with an assessment of the material dimension of the late antique city. Wallace-Hadrill does not deny that there are evident, physical transformations in the city of the fourth to seventh centuries and avoids the entanglements of contemporary debates. As he did in chapter one, Wallace-Hadrill opens this chapter with a short historiographical assessment of the archaeology of the late antique city, dismantling the “suq paradigm” as a colonial, orientalising theory. After this, Wallace-Hadrill uses five sets of newly-built fourth- to ninth-century foundations to exemplify how urban ideas were implemented in these building projects. The degree of monumentality and life-span of these examples varies greatly, but in all cases they became the physical representation of the urban ideal. The variety and disparity, moreover, serve to underline Wallace-Hadrill’s point: that the material record can be used to address archaeological questions, but that the idea of the city that underpinned all of these constructions was far more homogeneous than the physical remains that were inspired by it.
The final chapter is the concluding essay on Resilience Theory applied to the ancient city tested against three different modern cities with an ancient past (Antioch, Mérida and Naples). The main conclusions are that the interaction with the inherited past were always a dialogue within the city, inside the same community and its shared space. Any feeling of separation with the Classical past was religious only. The second main conclusion is that the platonic ideals of the city and its urban community framed all interactions with their ancient past to justify their present. This is the core of Resilience Theory applied to the ancient city: the connections to the past and the adaptability of the community allowed cities to endure and bounce back, even while physical aspects of it were discontinued, creating a discourse that validated and perpetuated long-held understandings of urban life. Finally, Wallace-Hadrill returns to a definition of the ancient city and the question about its end. Resilience Theory shows the capability to change and endure, but the “ancient city” is a fixed category of analysis.
To conclude, Wallace-Hadrill’s book offers an excellent overview of the late antique thoughts about the city, without ignoring the material dimension or the multiple discussions that have been published in the last thirty years about late antique urbanism. Neither studies on ancient citizenship, nor the application to Resilience Theory to ancient urbanism are new in late antique studies. This book, however, brings them together into a single synthesis, into a clear, elegant discussion that will be a point of reference in any future work on both the late antique urbs and the late antique civitas.
References
Bjornlie, M.S. (2019). Cassiodorus, The Variae: The Complete Translation. Berkeley.
Giardina, A. (2006). Cassiodoro politico. Rome.
Giardina, A. et al. (eds.) (2014-). Flavio Magno Aurelio Cassiodoro Senatore, Varie. 6 vols. Rome.
Liebeschuetz, J.H.W.G. (2001). The Decline and Fall of the Ancient City. Oxford.