This article examines the impact of the increasing connectivity and economic change on Crete after its subjugation to the Romans, to the urban landscape of the island. The study begins with an outline of the economic developments that took place in Crete from the Hellenistic to the Roman imperial period, which affected the urban system(s) of the island; then it continues with a presentation of characteristic case-studies of cities, the archaeological investigation of which offers us adequate evidence; and it concludes with a comprehensive discussion, where an attempt is made to put the evidence from Crete in a broader context.

It is generally accepted that the late-Hellenistic era (c. 150–31 BC) was a period of disturbance for Greece. The wars between Republican Rome and the Hellenistic kingdoms as well as the Roman civil wars took place in major part on Greek soil. The ancient writers of late-Hellenistic but also of Imperial times (e.g. Polybios, Strabo, Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom and Pausanias) speak of ruins, depopulation and decline, and in fact this turbulent situation had negative effects both at province and city level. ‘Augustus and his successors tried to stop this decline by introducing some changes which favoured some large cities,’ but how successful were these changes in recovering the cities of Greece at a general level is not clearly defined.

This is a particular book, written by a refugee of second generation from Aivalik, who dedicated his life to the history of his homeland (he has studied Aivalik from 1969 till his death in 2008). An electrical engineer and architect by profession, a ‘‘technician’ and not an academic or a professional writer’, as Psarros himself states (579), the author prepared a book free of the scientific constraints that sometimes academic writings possess. Although his focus was on topography, settlement evolution and architecture, the author was not afraid to enter into the field of history, and the information he includes from his numerous oral interviews enlivens the places the author describes. In fact, reading, or better, wandering through the book, one has the feeling that he meets Fotis Kontoglou’s ‘heroes’ of his Το Αϊβαλί η πατρίδα μου (Athens 1962).

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Roman rule signalled radical changes in the urban systems of the Mediterranean. More complex is the understanding of the restructuring that occurred in the Greek speaking lands, where a dense network of poleis existed already since the Archaic period. In the province of Achaia, although the basic elements of its Classical past were maintained (e.g., a modular urban system with hundreds of self-governing poleis which were sustained mainly by surpluses produced in their territories), in the Roman period this area was characterized by a significantly smaller number of cities and rural sites, in respect to pre-Roman times. Of great importance was the establishment of a few highly-centralized administrative centres of free or colonial status and economically privileged, that now became the focus of Roman administration and wealth. The majority of minor centres had from now on a marginal role, and many of them remained completely outside the new economic system.