Panel 8.4 – The Economics of Urbanism in the Roman East

Organiser/Chair:

• Rinse Willet (Leiden University)

External Discussant:

•   Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen (University of Southern Denmark)

Speakers:

• Rinse Willet (Leiden University)
  The nature of ‘the town’ in the Roman East and the case of Anatolia
• Michalis Karambinis
  Urban Networks in Early Roman Greece
• Damjan Donev (Leiden University)
  Aspects of Roman urbanism in the Hellenistic Balkans
• Paul Kloeg
  Roman settlement patterns in the Near East
• Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen (University of Southern Denmark)
  Roman urbanism in the Pontic frontier zone

The urban geography of the Roman Empire has a long historiography, with scholars like A.H.M. Jones already making an excellent monograph of the cities of the Eastern Roman Empire in the 1930's. Yet these studies focused primarily on the history of cities and they saw the ancient town as an isolated historical phenomenon or at best as an index of the spread of Hellenism or Romanitas. Unlike these studies, "An Empire of 2000 cities" adopts a different approach to the study of Roman urbanism. The current project is an attempt to take a step further and place the town in its socio-economic context, collecting the most up-to-date archaeological evidence and using statistics to appraoch the urban phenomenon in the Roman East. The data used, however, is often disparate and complex and many uncertainties surround the theme of urbanism. To achieve a more balanced treatment in the various regions that constitute the Roman East, we will base our discussion on the most basic parameters of urbanism: the number of towns per province, their spatial distribution and size under the High Empire. The panel will consist of four presentations that will focus on particular regions or provinces of the Roman East. The first issue to be analysed is our solution to the fundamental difficulty of deciding what a town is in the first place, in order to arrive at a simple definition that will encompass all the different regions in the study. Subsequently we shall show that much can be inferred from the variations in the number of towns per province or region, their geographic foci and the variations in size. Equally intriguing questions emerge when we attempt to interpret the distribution of the urban settlement in terms of the character of the regional economies and the distribution of wealth. What was the share of the structural factors of landscape, climate and infrastructure and the continuity or discontinuity of pre-Roman urbanism? In order not to get lost in the particularities of the Roman East, the panel intends to lift the results out of regional isolation for cross-regional comparison, allowing for an in-depth discussion of the nature and economy of ancient cities in general. We invite at least one distinguished scholar of Roman urbanism who has studied a different part of the Roman Empire to comment on the pattern of urban settlement and its implications in the socio-economic sphere from a comparative perspective.

1. Rinse Willet (Leiden University)

The nature of ‘the town’ in the Roman East and the case of Anatolia
Although many words have been committed to paper concerning cities during the Roman Empire, their definition often remains unclear. Relatively few volumes have been written on the city in the eastern half of the Mediterranean, which often emphasize the civic status of settlements. An archaeological appraisal of the city in the East as a whole is therefore needed, which allows for a synthesis to place the town in its wider socio-economic context.
This paper introduces the work of four specialists working in the ERC funded “An Empire of 2000 cities” project of Leiden University. An overview of their joined work is provided to show the general patterns of urbanism in the Balkan, Greece, Anatolia and the Levant during the Roman Imperial period. The density of settlement and urbanization in these regions is quite diverse, from which, already, many implications for the socio-economic workings of cities can be inferred.
From this overview, a more detailed account from my own research on Roman Anatolia is provided. The regional diversity is elaborated, focusing particularly on the economic implications heavily settled and more empty regions. The socio-economic success of cities is the result of a multitude of factors, such as historical path-dependency, agricultural potential, connectivity and institutional context. The product of these and other factors results in a complex pattern of urbanism in Anatolia during the Roman Imperial period.

2. Michalis Karambinis

Urban Networks in Early Roman Greece
This paper presents the results of my research into the urban systems of Roman Greece and Roman Cyprus, which is being undertaken in the context of the ERC Advanced Project “An empire of 2000 cities: urban networks and economic integration in the Roman Empire” (Leiden University). The chronological focus of the paper is the Roman imperial period (1st – 3rd century AD). It has to be noted, however, that attention will be paid to the transition from the urban configuration of the late Classical and early Hellenistic periods to the Roman pattern. The obvious reason for this is that a diachronic perspective must be considered an essential element in identifying and interpreting the profound changes in the urban networks of Greece that took place under Roman domination.
Based primarily on archaeological sources, this paper demonstrates that the poleis in Roman Greece were not only fewer but also smaller than in Classical-Hellenistic times, indicating a less urbanised landscape of Roman Greece. Although the Roman conquest resulted in a drastic reconfiguration of the urban systems of various sub-regions, this paper shows that Greece as a whole maintained the modular urban system which it had inherited from the Classical and early-Hellenistic periods. Its cities continued to be sustained by basic foodstuffs produced in their territories, and production was mostly for local consumption.

3. Damjan Donev (Institute for Archaeological Research, Macedonia)

Aspects of Roman urbanism in the Hellenistic Balkans
The very first word that comes to one’s mind when looking at the basic parameters of the urban geography in the study area is modularity. This is inscribed in the physical geography of the Balkan Peninsula, comprising sequences of discrete micro-regional units, separated by high mountains. Although there is some kernel of truth in this description of the regional urban geography, it is far from encapsulating the regional specifics and it entirely ignores the dynamic aspects of the urban system.
The principle goal of this study is to demonstrate the differential developments in the urban system of the Hellenistic parts of the Balkan Peninsula. We will begin by presenting the evidence for the urban map in the area in the period preceding the Roman conquest and the geneses of the newly-founded settlements. The area in question is quite diverse and it doesn’t comprise an integrated territorial entity, so much emphasis will be placed on the regional developments. We will then present the evidence for the size of the settlements in the period of the High Empire. These data will then be juxtaposed with the regional road-networks and above all, the evidence for Roman colonization in the area, whether in the guise of colonies or municipia or large communities of Roman citizens. We will demonstrate that quite often, though not universally, urban growth coincided with the strategic importance of the towns’ locations and the presence of a strong community of Roman citizens.

4. Paul Kloeg

Roman settlement patterns in the Near East

Cities have always stood in the centre of attention in historical studies, just as much as cities themselves have always been focal points of many spheres of human activity, ranging from the social, economic and demographic to the cultural and religious. Naturally, even purely from a demographic sense, a focus on the urban will lose sight of the larger part of human past, and even with today’s highly urbanised societies, globally this would still miss almost half the world population. Nonetheless, for a student of the past, they tend to leave brighter, more visible afterimages of past worlds, where much of the extra-urban realities have faded away.
This paper discusses some of the results of a phd-project on the urban network of the Roman Near East, an area where the urban past has been shining longer and brighter than in many other parts of the Roman Empire. Here, past cities ranging from Ebla and Ugarit to Ashdod and Jericho paved the way for the vast urban centres of Roman Syria, often built on the same sites as their forebears, and covered themselves by cities of later times.
Two of the themes treated in the project will be discussed: the spatial patterns of the Roman cities in the Levant, and the interplay between cities and natural, environmental limitations, looking in both cases for the reach of human agency and imperial strength within the bounds of nature and the shadows of the past.

5. Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen (University of Southern Denmark)

Roman urbanism in the Pontic frontier zone
Following the defeat of Mithradates VI Eupator, the victorious Roman general, Pompey the great, was faced with the problem of creating a viable and economically self-sustaining structure of civic self-government. This he attempted to solve by establishing a string of cities on the polis model along an east-west highway from Nikopolis on the Armenian border to Pompeiopolis in central Paphlagonia. Pompey’s work was soon undone by Mark Antony, but a century later. The Pontic cities were re-integrated into the Imperium Romanum. The subsequent and diverse life histories of Pompey’s cities throw light upon the dynamics of urbanisation in the north-western Anatolian frontier zone and the inherent contradictions between politico-administrative objectives on the one hand and economic realities on the other.