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.

Archaeology and roman society: Integrating textual and archaeological data

“…Debate about the Roman economy centers on the attempt to characterize it as either "minimalist-primitivist" [as a preindustrial state that redistributed tribute, and had a simple local economy; only elites engaged in the long-distance trade of luxuries--the position of Biicher (1901), Finley (1973Finley ( , 1985a, and Jones (1974)] or "modernist-market" [with a complex regional and local economy integrated by a market orientation and attribution of rational economic motives--the view of Meyer (1924), Mommsen (1908), Rostovtzeff (1957), and Yeo (1952)]. The dichotomy is probably epistemologically sterile (Woolf, 1992); response to Finley suggested that the debate was "a small and rather unimportant duel" (Frederiksen, 1975, p. 170) that had been largely laid to rest by most anthropologists (Pearson, 1957).…”

“…Weber's work is relevant for studying the Roman economy for the renewed interest it sparks in the applicability of the "consumer city" model to the Roman world (Finley, 1977, remains the best introduction; Engels, 1990;Rich and WallaceHadrill, 1991;Comell and Lomas, 1995;Parkins, 1997b). Finley (1977) attributed to Biicher-Sombart-Weber the notion of the city of antiquity as a "consumer/ parasite" with four chief characteristics: ancient cities did not functionally separate town and country (Biicher), they depended on external agricultural labor for subsistence (Sombart), and they housed consumers deriving income from rural rents rather than commerce (Weber).…”

“…Finley (1977) attributed to Biicher-Sombart-Weber the notion of the city of antiquity as a "consumer/ parasite" with four chief characteristics: ancient cities did not functionally separate town and country (Biicher), they depended on external agricultural labor for subsistence (Sombart), and they housed consumers deriving income from rural rents rather than commerce (Weber). Finley added that only petty commodity production occurred (Whittaker, 1990, p. 110).…”

Matters of Use and Consumption

“…The study of city-country relationships in classical antiquity has gradually shifted from a traditional urban-rural dichotomy, which had long been an important aspect of both archaeology (papers in Rich and Wallace-Hadrill 1991) and ancient history (Finley 1977;Brtihns 1985;Whittaker 1995; but see Garnsey 1979). More nuanced perspectives in archaeology (e.g.…”

“…These perspectives-informed by either the Weberian historical-sociological approach in the Anglophone academy (e.g. Finley 1977;Wallace-Hadrill 1991;Parkins 1997) or Marxist-inspired approaches, particularly in Mediterranean countries (e.g. Carandini 1985;López Castro 2007)-have contributed significantly in the past to reconstructing patterns of rural exploitation and city-country relationships, in which cities figure prominently and exploit a mostly undifferentiated countryside (e.g.…”