Space, Movement and the Economy in Roman Cities in Italy and Beyond

Frank Vermeulen, Arjan Zuiderhoek, Frank Vermeulen, Arjan Zuiderhoek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367757229
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000379389
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: History

How were space and movement in Roman cities affected by economic life? What can the study of Roman urban landscapes tell us about the nature of the Roman economy? These are the central questions addressed in this volume.

While there exist many studies of Roman urban space and of the Roman economy, rarely have the two topics been investigated together in a sustained fashion. In this volume, an international team of archaeologists and historians focuses explicitly on the economics of space and mobility in Roman Imperial cities, in both Italy and the provinces, east and west. Employing many kinds of material and written evidence and a wide range of methodologies, the contributors cast new light both on well-known and on less-explored sites. With their direct focus on the everyday economic uses of urban spaces and the movements through them, the contributors offer a fresh and innovative perspective on the workings of Roman urban economies and on the debates concerning space in the Roman world.

This volume will be of interest to archaeologists and historians, both those studying the Greco-Roman world and those focusing on urban economic space in other periods and places as well as to other scholars studying premodern urbanism and urban economies.

PART I

Introducing the themes

1Introduction

Space, movement and the economy in Roman cities

Arjan Zuiderhoek and Frank Vermeulen

‘Location, location, location!’ is the universal mantra of real-estate agents. Anyone who has ever tried to buy or sell real property will be all too familiar with its fundamental truth: where a building is located in relation to other aspects of its geographical environment, both natural and artificial, is a fundamental determinant of its value. At the same time, accessibility, that is the ease with which a house can be reached and its links to accessible networks of travel and transport, is vital. This is a fortiori true for firms that need good access to road networks, waterways, airports and the like to be able to operate. Given all this, it follows that closeness, that is reducing the friction of distance, pays. It is an empirically observable fact that in most complex societies, people and firms (production units) tend to concentrate and cluster geographically. Another empirically observable fact, noticed by economists, is that economic productivity tends to rise in tandem with increasing growth and concentration of population. This phenomenon is dubbed ‘agglomeration economies’, and it offers one possible explanation for the existence of cities. Economies of agglomeration have been variously attributed to transport cost reductions brought about by the concentration of population, to the productivity gains that result from pooling labour or to the increased speed in the circulation of ideas in cities, which fosters innovation and causes a rise in human capital, yet the debate continues.¹ What matters for our purposes, however, is that, potentially, this analysis has the power to integrate the four central themes of this volume, space (in the sense of place, location), movement (mobility, transport), economies and cities, into an overarching explanatory framework. In fact, a range of modern social scientific disciplines, such as spatial economics, location theory and urban economics, have been developed to study this particular nexus of space, mobility/transport and urbanism.

Yet, for students of pre-modern societies, such as historians and archaeologists of the Greco-Roman world, such an explanatory framework, with all of its barely hidden universalizing assumptions, raises more problems than it solves. The statements above, for instance, imply a well-functioning market economy. But can we simply assume the existence of a market for real property in antiquity? Did Greek and Roman producers operate within a system of interlinked supra-regional markets that required the sort of easily accessible and efficient transport networks emphasized above? Can we take it for granted that an economic explanation for city formation such as the agglomeration economies model just referred to is true for cities everywhere, in all periods of history (if indeed it is correct for modern western cities)? Phrased in more general terms, to what extent were urban space and movement in Greco-Roman antiquity affected, shaped or determined by the needs and requirements of economic life, that is, by economic considerations? Can the study of these urban spaces and movements in turn tell us something meaningful about what kind of economy and what sorts of economic behaviour were characteristic of the Greco-Roman world? These are the kinds of questions that motivated the editors and contributors to put together this collection of studies and to organize the conference from which it derives. As regards its chronological and geographical scope, even though this introduction will range a bit wider at times, our contributors, an international mix of archaeologists and historians, all focus on different areas of the Roman Imperial world² broadly conceived, that is Italy and the provinces, including the East. We have chosen this focus not because Republican Italy or the pre-Roman Greek world are uninteresting but to keep our topic manageable and thematically coherent. That is, we are concerned with the study of economic aspects of space and movement/mobility in cities that were part of a single imperial political system that left its own specific material and monumental imprint on the urban landscapes within its domains, even if often primarily through the agency of cooperative local elites. This, at least, is a feature that all of the cities studied in this volume share. We focus on cities, furthermore, because, as allocation centres of agricultural surplus and as hubs of manufacture and exchange, they are the focal points of economic activity. Moreover, as almost entirely artificial landscapes, they are the places where space and movement can be most easily and visibly manipulated to serve specific societal needs. The chapters in this volume thus present case studies of the links between space, movement and economic life in cities in various parts of the Roman world. They are followed by a concluding chapter in which each contribution to the volume is briefly discussed and where the main connecting threads are highlighted. In the following pages of this introduction, we present a brief overview of some of the various strands of debate associated with our theme, and we discuss some of the important issues that can and should inform research on economic space and movement in ancient cities.

Ancient views

The Greek and Roman written sources do not present us with a uniform picture of the relationship between space and economic life in antiquity. In Plato’s ideal polis as sketched in the Laws (952d–e), a strict spatial separation was to be maintained between traders visiting the city and the citizens themselves; the magistrates in charge must receive traders ‘at the agoras, harbours and public buildings outside the city (ἔξω τῆς πόλεως)’ – a separate suburban landscape, it would seem, created especially for commerce. Aristotle famously wished to follow the example of the Thessalians in providing his ideal city with a ‘free agora’ forbidden to traders, artisans and farmers selling their produce, which was to be spatially separated from ‘the agora for buying and selling’, that is the city’s commercial market (Politics 1331a–b). Other sources, mostly also focusing on the agora or forum, refer, however, to the intermingling of economic and other kinds of activities in civic space, rather than their spatial separation. Thus, Livy, relating how the Roman king Tarquinius Priscus supposedly refurbished the city, has him not only constructing porticos and workshops (porticus tabernaeque factae) along the forum area but also laying the foundations for the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol (1.35, 1.38) nearby. From a preserved fragment of a play by the fourth-century bce playwright Euboulos, we learn that at Athens in the agora, everything was for sale: not only figs, grapes, turnips, roses, cottage cheese but also summons officers, witnesses, laws and indictments (fr. 74, in Athen. Deipn. 14.640b–c), a comedic reference to the spatial intermingling of diverse social spheres (politics, law, commerce) that was characteristic of the agora.³ Yet even in such multilayered civic locations, where economic activity and economic spaces were enveloped within and combined with other forms of behaviour and spatial structures, there could still be signs of a considerable degree of economic and commercial specialization, which was generally expressed spatially. Thus, for instance, different parts or sections of the Athenian agora were devoted to distinct and well-defined types of commerce, and people would say: ‘I went to the wine, the olive oil, the pots’ or ‘to the onions and garlic, to the clothes’ (Pollux, 9.47–8). In the imperial city of Rome, the ancient world’s only true megalopolis, the same principle held, but on a much grander spatial scale, in the form of numerous specialized markets, for selling cattle, vegetables, pork, fish, wine and so on.⁴

Modern debates

As will be evident from this all too brief selection, a simple perusal of the ancient sources does not allow one to gain an easy understanding of the spatial economy of ancient cities. At first glance, modern literature does not offer much more comfort either. The topic indeed stands at the intersection of three complex and long-standing debates within ancient history and classical archaeology, which have only very recently begun to become more integrated: debates on space, on the character of the ancient city and, related to this, on the nature of the ancient economy.

While drawing inspiration from space-related scholarship on other historical periods and within the social sciences, the ‘spatial turn’ in the study of the Greco-Roman world received a lot of stimulation from archaeology, the spatial discipline par excellence. Close study of individual buildings and building types has led to an outpouring of research on domestic space, on public monuments, religious architecture.⁵ In scholarship on the Roman world, the spectacular remains at Ostia, Pompeii, Herculaneum and Rome have prompted endless studies of the structures of civic space. Methodological developments, moreover, such as field survey, the analysis of aerial photography, geographical information systems (GIS) and, more recently, a variety of non-invasive techniques have all contributed a great deal to our understanding of the spatial structures of ancient landscapes and cities.⁶ Historians and archaeologists have also increasingly focused on the uses ancient actors made of urban spaces, on their patterns of movement through buildings and urban landscapes, and on perceptions of civic space and its meaning in terms of providing contemporaries with a sense of identity.⁷ This work has also brought into focus the reciprocal relationship that exists between people – that is society with its norms, values and institutions – and the urban landscape. People create urban landscapes that reflect their society’s world view and patterns of behaviour, but this world view and these patterns of behaviour are in turn strongly supported, maintained and reinforced through the urban landscape. In the words of the urban design scholar Quentin Stevens, ‘The built environment in general is a particularly durable part of habitus which inspires and gives structure to the actions of everyday life. Built forms tend to suggest what behaviour is “appropriate” or “desirable’’’.⁸

Yet while analyses of urban space, both historical and archaeological, have explored many dimensions of urban life, be they social, political or religious, scholars for a long time did not pay much attention to the economic dimension of urban space. In particular, there was (and still is) not much interaction between scholarship on urban space and the long-standing debates on the nature of the ancient city and the ancient economy. Surveys of the material remains of ancient cities rarely deal with the strongly comparative debates on the economic structure and role of the Greco-Roman city. Conversely, while archaeological evidence plays an ever-increasing part in the analyses of the Greek and Roman economies, rarely have participants concerned themselves much with issues of urban space. Only comparatively recently has this changed, with the work of a new generation of scholars. We might, for instance, mention Miko Flohr’s analysis of the material evidence of fullers’ workshops (see also his chapter on tabernae, this volume, Chapter 3), his and Andrew Wilson’s volume on the economy of Pompeii, Stephen Ellis’s study of tabernae, the books by J.W. Hanson, Rinse Willet (see this volume, Chapter 5) and Luuk de Ligt and John Bintliff on urban systems, which take in economic aspects as well, and the work of field archaeologists explicitly interested in economic life such as, for instance, Jeroen Poblome and his team, working on Sagalassos in Pisidia, Asia Minor (see also Chapter 5, this volume) or Frank Vermeulen, one of the editors, working in the Potenza valley in Central Adriatic Italy (see also Chapter 1, this volume), and several other...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• PART I Introducing the themes
• PART II Spaces
• PART III Movement
• PART IV Conclusion
• Index