The Ancient City: From Fustel de Coulanges to Max Weber and Beyond

Abstract

The Graeco-Roman world, with which I am concerned to the exclusion of the pre-Greek Near East, was a world of cities. Even the agrarian population, always a majority, most often lived in communities of some kind, hamlets, villages, towns, not in isolated farm homesteads. It is a reasonable and defensible guess that, for the better part of a thousand years, more and more of the inhabitants of Europe, northern Africa and western Asia lived in towns, in a proportion that was not matched in the United States, for example, until the Civil War. (Admittedly only a guess is possible, since statistics are lacking for antiquity.) The ancients themselves were firm in their view that civilized life was thinkable only in and because of cities. Hence the growth of towns as the regular and relentless accompaniment of the spread of Graeco-Roman civilization; eastward after the conquests of Alexander as far as the Hindukush, to the west from Africa to Britain with the Roman conquests, until the number of towns rose into the thousands.