Urban Society In Roman Italy

Tim J. Cornell, Kathryn Lomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781857280333
• eBook ISBN: 9781135361983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This collection of original essays focuses upon Roman Italy where, with over 400 cities, urbanization was at the very centre of Italian civilization. Informed by an awareness of the social and anthropological issues of recent research, these contributions explore not only questions of urban origins, interaction with the countryside and economic function, but also the social use of space within the city and the nature of the development process.; These studies are aimed not only at ancient historians and classical archaeologists, but are directed towards those working in the related fields of urban studies in the Mediterranean world and elsewhere and upon the general theory of towns and complex societies.

1

Do theories of the ancient city matter?

C.R.Whittaker

Introduction: A Plethora of Books

In his recent excellent book, Cities, capitalism and civilization, R.J.Holton¹ says:

The “city” appears as such a prominent feature of social life in so many contrasting cultures and historical epochs that one might have supposed the question of what all such “cities” have in common to be long settled. Yet this supposition is quite unwarranted.

The theme of more or less irredeemable confusion in the general theory of the ancient city in particular is reflected in many of the publications in recent years, which seem to have reached a crescendo in the last decade. In the last two or three years alone we have had, from Italy, Pietro Rossi (ed.) Modelli della città— (1987), a study of ancient and modern cities from the oriental antique to recent American; from France (though printed in Italy) the papers edited by Andreau & Hartog, La città antica? La cité antique—the result of a table ronde held in Paris in 1988 in memory of Moses Finley and published in 1991 as Opus 1987–89; and from Britain, out of that excellent Nottingham-Leicester stable, comes City and country in the ancient world (1981), edited by Rich & Wallace-Hadrill. All this is not to mention a spate of monographs like Wim Jongman’s Economy and society of Pompeii (1988), Donald Engels’s Roman Corinth (1990), Philippe Leveau’s slightly older Caesarea de Maurétanie (1984) and Burnham & Wacher’s Small towns of Roman Britain (1990).

Every one of these works I have selected for mention because they concern themselves with, or challenge, the Bücher-Sombart-Weber-Finley economic model of the consumer city. Probably there are many others that I have missed. Certainly there are others which deal with the ancient city and indirectly or to a lesser extent with its economy—works such as Gros & Torelli, Storia della urbanistica (1988), Bedon, Chevallier & Pinon’s (1988) study of urbanism in Gaul, Becker-Nielsen’s Geography of power (1988), Patterson’s Samnites, Ligurians and Romans (1988) and Vittinghoff’s Europäische Wirt schafts—und Sozialgeschichte (1990). It seemed to me, therefore, that it would be helpful to review some of these more recent studies, partly to clear my own mind. I have confined myself more strictly to economic theories of the city and in doing so I have reverted to a question which I and Jean Andreau independently posed at the table ronde in Paris: “Do theories of the ancient city matter?” But the question and the question mark really go back to Finley’s last work on Ancient history: evidence and models, where he voiced serious objections to Weber’s theory of the Greek city.

What is striking in all the studies I have mentioned is how each begins with a ritual disclaimer that anyone can understand or even discover a respectable model for the city. Rossi², for example, talks of the “insuperable plurality of models”. “What does the ‘ancient city’ mean?”, asks Wallace-Hadrill,³ and “Is it a phenomenon about which useful generalisations can be made?” In the recent Barker-Lloyd book on Roman landscapes,⁴ Simon Keay’s introduction to the section on towns and territories is more optimistic but claims the relationship is “only partially understood”. But Rihill & Wilson quickly check any premature joy, and at the same time take a swipe at the Gordian knot, by saying it is better to disregard urban theory because of “the futility of this difficult and often sophistic literature for students of ancient society”.⁵

The picture, in short, is one of confusion not unmixed with pessimism. Worshippers at the postmodernist Gallic shrines will no doubt tell us that this is one of those power-laden “metanarratives”, which have become far too prescriptive, lost in their own language, and have failed to problematize their own legitimacy.⁶ Or perhaps, rather, we should agree with those who tell us that obsession with “the city” is a legacy of Whig history, which associated urbanism with economic progress or the fruits of industrial capitalism; and that it was this which stimulated the great names such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Pirenne into believing that the city was somehow an independent phenomenon which constituted a causal factor of social change.⁷

On the other hand we can also take heart from theorists such as Abrams⁸ or Wallerstein,⁹ who urge urban students to transcend the urban-rural dichotomy foisted onto modern historiography by Adam Smith’s stress on the importance of commerce of the towns for the improvement of the countryside; instead, modern historians are told, they should return to “the city-state writ large”—that is to the model of the ancient integrated polis, though with the proviso that we understand urban-rural as dramatic representations of more fundamental social relations.

Weber and the Consumer City

What it is important to note in this contemporary debate is that studies in the 19th century, and especially those of Marx and Weber, were characterized by interest not so much in the city itself as in the rise of capitalism and the question of power in society. Categories such as consumer city and producer city served only to identify a particular historical function of a city in relation to this question, not to produce a general theory of the city.¹⁰ A quite excellent survey of Weber’s views on the ancient city by Hinnerk Bruhns¹¹ points out the “embarrassing” changes in Weber’s perspective from the Agrarverhältnisse to the posthumous publication of Die Stadt after its extraction from Economy and society.

The pity is, in my view, that those who launch unguided missiles against the consumer city model do not follow these perspectives, since it is clear that by the time that Weber reached Die Stadt, which is the usual object of the attack, he had really lost the interest in the ancient city that he had shown in his earlier work. It was in the Agrarverhältnisse that Weber displayed his deep knowledge of relations between town and country in the ancient city, in which he stressed again and again the way the large, aristocratic families controlled political power and used it to increase their wealth by rents or by commercializing their surpluses. In Die Stadt his interest had shifted to the central question of why the ancient city, in contrast to the medieval city, never laid the foundations of capitalism, and it is only in this context—a fact often misunderstood by modern commentators—that he used the much over-quoted tag of homo politicus to distinguish the ancient citizen’s incapacity to turn to rational, productive investment, as opposed to the medieval homo economicus.

Whether or not Weber was right about medieval man, it is a caricature of Weber’s, followed in this respect by Finley’s, thought to say that both denied that ancient landlords had an interest in making money or in maximizing the sale of their urban produce. Those who allege this have either not understood the context of the model or, more often, have failed to read even the translation of Weber’s The city, described recently¹² as “one of the best-known and least-read contributions to sociology”. The observation by Osborne,¹³ in a most interesting study of 4th century Athens, that the rich of Athens were “heavily involved in the market” and that this goes “against firmly held modern convictions” is one such example. Another is that by Arthur,¹⁴ who in discussing wine production in northern Campania, believes that the stamping of names of aristocrats on amphorae disproves the supposed orthodoxy of their “apparent reluctance to advertise their involvement in the mechanics of trade”.

Since Osborne’s paper is claimed to be a critique of Finley’s rather than Weber’s consumer city model, it is worth elaborating the point. On several occasions in the Ancient economy¹⁵ Finley explicitly discusses “estates farmed for cash incomes” and in response to misunderstanding on exactly this score, he quotes¹⁶ with approval the statement:

The idea that rich landowners were not involved or interested in the profits from the produce of their land…is quite simply absurd.¹⁷

This to him, he said, was “self-evident”, yet in no way support for “profitmotivated capitalist exploitation”. I am unable to discover in the operations of Phainippos of Athens (whom Osborne uses as an example), whether through his sale of estate produce, or through his renting of public land or in his silvermining operations, which were undertaken to satisfy his consumption needs, anything which undermines the consumer model, as is claimed.¹⁸

Wallace-Hadrill¹⁹ in the same volume, in his discussion of elites and traders in Roman towns, correctly quotes Weber²⁰ that the Roman elites “were as eager for gain as any other historic class” and he usefully demonstrates how the rich were as much involved in urban as in rural property management. But I cannot see how that fact, or the letting out of such property to traders, in any way undercuts the important distinction which Weber made, in the same paragraph from which Wallace-Hadrill quoted, between the acceptable face of property investment by the rich and the unacceptable face of entrepreneurial capital profit.

The Service City

One of the most explicit, detailed defences of the consumer city model in recent years has been Jongman’s study of Pompeii,²¹ which has sought the aid of a battery of econometric searchlights to illuminate the twilight. It is not my intention to discuss that work, but simply to say that the book has not been received with unalloyed enthusiasm everywhere. Among the more hostile reviews is that by Bruce Frier in vol. 4 of the Journal of Roman Archaeology, who for the second time in a review commends to our attention an “alternative model” to the consumer city of what is called the “service city”, as developed by Engels in his recent book on Roman Corinth.²²

The bare bones of the service city are relatively simply to trace and, since they will already be known to many, I shall...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Do theories of the ancient city matter?
• 2. The limits of the ancient city and the evolution of the medieval city in the thought of Max Weber
• 3. Public honour and private shame: the urban texture of Pompeii
• 4. The organization of space in Pompeii
• 5. The Insula of the Paintings at Ostia i.4.2–4: Paradigm for a city in flux
• 6. Urban elites and cultural definition: Romanization in southern Italy
• 7. Warfare and urbanization in Roman Italy
• 8. Religion and rusticity
• 9. The Roman villa and the landscape of production
• 10. The idea of the city and the excavations at Pompeii
• 11 “Slouching towards Rome”: Mussolini’s imperial vision
• Index