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Cities and the Meanings of Late Antiquity
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Mark Humphries - 978-90-04-42261-2

Cities and the
Meanings of Late Antiquity
By
Mark Humphries
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Mark Humphries - 978-90-04-42261-2

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Mark Humphries - 978-90-04-42261-2

Contents
Cities and the Meanings of Late Antiquity 1

Mark Humphries
Abstract 1
Keywords 1
1 Introduction: a Tale of Two Cities? 2
2 Sources and Debates: Discovering the City in Late Antiquity 10
3 What Was a City in Late Antiquity? 16
3.1 Rhetorical Constructions: Defining Cities and Identities 18
3.2 New Definitions of the City in Late Antiquity 23
4 Cities and the State in Late Antiquity 31
4.1 Cities and the Imperial Court 33
4.2 Space, Ritual, and Power: Making Imperial Constantinople 35
4.3 Adventus Ceremonial and Ruler Interactions with Cities 38
4.4 Imperial Cities and Absent Emperors 40
4.5 Cities after Empire 42
5 Cities and the Transformation of the Ancient Economy 44
5.1 Sources, Statistics, and Stories 45
5.2 A Tale of Many Cities 47
5.3 Cities and the Late-Antique Countryside 50
6 Religion and the City 52
6.1 Religious Change and Urban Governance: the Rise of the Bishop 55
6.2 The Making of Christian Cities 56
6.3 Sects in the City: Urban Change and Religious Conflict 59
7 Space, Sense, and Performance: Material Remains and Urban
Populations 64
7.1 The Performance of Social Hierarchy 68
7.2 Social Habits and Topographic Change 77
7.3 Coda: the Late-Antique City as a Sensory Space 82
8 Cities and the Meanings of Late Antiquity: Decline, Fall, Transformation,
or Rise? 82
8.1 Decline, Fall, Transformation, or Rise? 84
8.2 Whose Cities and Whose Late Antiquity: a Tale of Multiple
Cities? 86
8.3 Concluding Observations: the Future of the Late-Antique City 89
Appendix: Recent Studies of the Late-Antique City 90
Acknowledgements 91
References 92
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Mark Humphries - 978-90-04-42261-2
Cities and the Meanings of Late Antiquity
Mark Humphries
Department of Classics, Ancient History, and Egyptology, College of Arts and
Humanities, Swansea University, UK
m.humphries@swansea.ac.uk
Abstract
The last half century has seen an explosion in the study of late antiquity, largely
prompted by the influence of the works of Peter Brown. This new scholarship has
characterised the period between the third and seventh centuries not as one of cata-
strophic collapse, but rather as one of dynamic and positive transformation. Where ob-
servers formerly had seen only a bleak picture of decline and fall, a new generation of
scholars preferred to emphasise how the Roman Empire evolved into the new polities,
societies, and cultures of the medieval West, Byzantium, and Islam. Yet research on
the fortunes of cities in this period has provoked challenges to this increasingly ac-
cepted positive picture of late antiquity and has prompted historians to speak once
more in terms that evoke Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire. This study surveys the nature of the current debate, examining problems as-
sociated with the sources historians use to examine late-antique urbanism, as well as
the discourses and methodological approaches they have constructed from them. It
aims to set out the difficulties and opportunities presented by the study of cities in
late antiquity, how understanding the processes affecting them has issued challenges
to the scholarly orthodoxy on late antiquity, and how the evidence suggests that this
transitional period witnessed real upheaval and dislocation alongside continuity and
innovation in cities around the Mediterranean.
Keywords
late antiquity – cities – Christianity – transformation – decline and fall – spatial turn
© Mark Humphries, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004422612_002 Mark Humphries - 978-90-04-42261-2

2 Humphries
…
For Morgan—a most urbane and civilised chap
∵
1 Introduction: a Tale of Two Cities?
At Harvard University in April 1976, Peter Brown delivered the Carl Newell
Jackson lectures, which he published two years later as The Making of Late
Antiquity. Here he analysed the social, religious and cultural changes that over-
came the Roman world between the second and the fourth centuries of the
Christian era. He began with a characteristically Brownian flourish: ‘I wish I
had been one of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus’.1 The reference was to a me-
dieval legend, attested in a wide variety of versions from Gregory of Tours to
the Quran,2 that related the fate of seven pious Christians at Ephesus in Asia
Minor during the persecution of the Church enacted by the third-century
pagan emperor Decius. The seven were blocked up in a cave outside the city
and left to die, but instead they fell into a miraculous sleep from which they
were revived two centuries later in the reign of that most Christian emperor
Theodosius II.
In the lengthiest version of the story, related by Gregory of Tours on the
basis of a Syriac original, the Seven are led by Maximian, the son of a local
magistrate. They are interrogated in Ephesus by Decius himself, who is en-
raged at their stubborn refusal to repudiate their faith, and orders them to re-
consider their conduct while he travels to other cities. For this purpose, they
are sent to a cave on Mt Celion outside Ephesus. When Decius returns to the
city, he is furious to find their obstinacy undiminished, and orders the mouth
of the cave to be blocked up, thereby abandoning the Seven to their fate. There
they fall asleep, until they are awakened at an opportune moment to show the
folly of certain Christian sectarians living under Theodosius who rejected the
resurrection.
1 P. Brown 1978: 1.

2 Gregory tells the story twice: succinctly in his Gloria Martyrum 94; and at greater length in
the Passio Sanctorum Martyrum Septem Dormientium apud Ephesum. The Quranic version is
in Sura 18 (The Cave). The story was widely disseminated in Greek (BHG 1593–9) and Latin
(BHL 2313–19), as well as various Eastern languages (BHO 1012–22).
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The Seven themselves, however, are unaware that centuries have passed.
Thinking that they have only been asleep for one night, they resolve to send
one of their number, Malchus, into Ephesus to purchase some food. On ap-
proaching Ephesus, he finds, however, a city that is startlingly different from
the one he had left:
Approaching the city gate, he saw the sign of the Cross over the gate, and
in stunned amazement he asked himself: ‘How can it be that since leaving
the city yesterday at sunset, Decius’ heart has been so changed that he has
set up the sign of the cross over the gate?’ He entered the city, and heard
people swearing oaths in Christ’s name; and he saw a church, and priests
hurrying about the city, and the walls rebuilt; utterly dumbfounded, he
said to himself: ‘Do you think that you’ve entered a different city?’
Appropinquans autem ad portam civitatis, vidit signum crucis supra

portam, et stupefactus, miratus est, dicens infra se: ‘Numquid ab die hester-
na post solis occasum, cum ego egrediebar de urbe, cor Decii inmutatum est,
ut crucis signaculo portam civitatis muniret?’. Ingressusque urbem, audivit
homines per Christi nomen iurare atque ad eclesiam aspicere clericosque
per urbem discurrere moeniaque renovare, stupensque magis, dicebat ad
semet ipsum: ‘Putasne, quia in aliam urbem ingressus es?’3
Only after he produces coins inscribed with Decius’ name, as he attempts to

purchase food, does the truth begin to emerge. When Malchus is brought be-
fore the city’s bishop Marinus and its prefect, he asks them where Decius is,
only to be told that Decius is long dead: now at last he realises that he and his
companions have slept not for one night, but for centuries. Bishop Marinus re-
turns to the cave with Malchus and finds his fellow martyrs looking just as they
had when Decius had ordered them incarcerated. Astonished at the revelation,
Marinus calls on the people of his Christian city to rejoice, and sends word of
the miracle to Constantinople, summoning the Christian emperor Theodosius
himself to visit Ephesus and witness it. The emperor duly arrives, approaches
the cave, and prostrates himself before the Seven Sleepers, proclaiming that in
them he sees a miracle evocative of Christ’s raising of Lazarus—thereby pro-
viding compelling evidence of the reality of resurrection in opposition to any
sectarians who might deny it.
3 Greg. Tur. Passio Sanctorum Martyrum Septem Dormientium apud Ephesum 7, ed. B. Krusch,
MGH SRM 1.2 (Hannover, 1885), 400–401.
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4 Humphries
Their sacred mission now completed, the Seven hand up their souls to God.
An offer from Theodosius to bury them in seven golden coffins is rejected by a
miraculous of vision of the martyrs, leading to a change of the emperor’s plans:
Then the emperor built over their remains a huge basilica, and made there
a refuge for the poor, ordering them to be supported at public e xpense.
And when bishops assembled there, the emperor celebrated the saints’
feast day, and everyone praised God, whose honour and glory is perfected
in the Trinity, for ever and ever.
Tunc imperator fabricavit super eos basilicam magnam et fecit ibi receptac-
ulum pauperibus, imperans eos alere de publico. Convocatisque episcopis,
celebravit festivitatem sanctorum, et omnes glorificaverunt Deum, cui est in
Trinitate perfecta honor et gloria in saecula saeculorum.4
The story of the Seven Sleepers neatly encapsulated for Brown the transforma-
tions in religion and mentalités that he sought to explore in The Making of Late
Antiquity; indeed, having related their tale, he remarked that his aim in writ-
ing the book had been ‘to enter into their surprise’.5 Over some five decades,
work by Brown, alongside that of a legion of disciples and collaborators, has in-
spired other scholars to examine similar types of transformation in a variety of
contexts.6 The result has been to recast the period spanning the third century
to the seventh (or, in some formulations, the mid-second to the eighth) in two
interrelated ways.7 First, and in deliberate counterpoint to the famous char-
acterisation of the epoch as one of ‘decline and fall’ by Edward Gibbon in the
late-eighteenth century, it has come to be regarded as an age of dynamic, even
positive transformation. Secondly, the period has been redesignated as ‘late
antiquity’, a more neutral term that carries with it none of the negative con-
notations customarily associated with phrases such as ‘decadence’, ‘Byzantine’,
or ‘Bas Empire’.8
4 Greg. Tur. Passio Sanctorum Martyrum Septem Dormientium apud Ephesum 12, ed. B. Krusch,
MGH SRM 1.2 (Hannover, 1885), 403. Presumably the assembly mentioned is the Council of
Ephesus in 431.
5 P. Brown 1978: 1.
6 For Brown’s influence, see E. James 2008; cf. the reflections of Brown himself (1997a and
1997b), and the responses in Bowersock, Averil Cameron, E. Clark, Dihle, Fowden, Heather,
Rousseau, Rousselle, Torp and Wood 1997. For a recent challenge to aspects of Brown’s
approach (with specific reference to P. Brown 1971, but with potentially wider implications)
see MacMullen 2019: 2–4 and 22–26.
7 For varying chronological definitions of late antiquity: Marcone 2008: 4–19; Inglebert 2017.
8 For an overview of this confident consensus, see Humphries 2017: 16, with references.
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The image of Ephesus with which Brown began The Making of Late Antiquity
suggested furthermore that the transformations of society and culture in late
antiquity could be appreciated particularly from an analysis of cities. The tale,
as related by Gregory of Tours, is punctuated with arresting images of urban
transformation: it begins with a thoroughly pagan Ephesus, visited by the
equally pagan Decius; in counterpoint, it ends with a Christian city visited by
the pious Christian Theodosius. Moreover, there are significant topographic
markers of the change, such as the presence of a cross over the city gate, the
existence of churches in the new urban topography, and the construction of a
basilica, at imperial expense and with public endowments, over the Sleepers’
cave and burial spot. The transformations are so profound that the astonished
Malchus is forced to ask himself if he has entered another or different city
(in aliam urbem).
Already around the same time as the Brownian vision of late antiquity was
beginning to exercise dominance, some scholars of urban centres were begin-
ning to see how transformations of topography could indicate wider shifts in
late-antique politics, society, and culture. For Ephesus itself, as well as for a
number of other cities in Asia Minor, important contributions were made al-
ready in the 1970s by Clive Foss.9 In addition, such considerations underpinned
analyses of Rome especially, but also of Constantinople and Milan, produced
towards the end of his career by one of the twentieth century’s most energetic
historians of early Christian and Byzantine architecture, Richard Krautheimer.10
More recently, aspects of urban transformation have commanded consider-
able attention among archaeologists and historians working more specifically
on late antiquity as a distinct historical period. Many important studies of
cities—whether dealing with individual cities, providing regional overviews,
or examining the topic as a whole—have been published, and, particularly
from the 1990s onwards, numerous conferences and volumes of essays have
been devoted to examining the theme from a variety of perspectives.11 Yet, for
all that the study of urbanism has burgeoned as part of the renewed interest in
9 On Ephesus, see Foss 1979 (esp. 3–102). His other important studies include Foss 1975,
on the impact of the seventh-century Persian invasion of Asia Minor on urban centres,
and Foss 1976 (esp. 1–52) on Sardis. For more recent overviews of Ephesus’ late-antique
development, see Scherrer 1995: 15–25; F. Bauer 1996: 269–99; Ladstätter and Pülz 2007.
10 Krautheimer 1980, xv, explained that he aimed to narrate Rome’s history ‘during a
thousand years, through, rather than of, her monuments’ (emphasis in the original); cf.
Krautheimer 1983 for a comparative study of Rome with Constantinople and Milan.
11 For reviews of work up until c. 2001, see Lavan 2001a: esp. the gazetteer at 24–26; also the
items cited in Humphries 2001 (actually published in 2003): 47–48 and the works cited
there. Grig 2013 takes the study forward a decade. Of course, studies of the late-ancient
city have continued to appear; for summary details, see the appendix.
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6 Humphries
the late-antique period, it is precisely amongst scholars working on cities that

disquiet first came to be expressed vocally about the essentially positive view
of late antiquity championed by Brown and his associates.12
A clear statement of this new scepticism was voiced by Gian Pietro Brogiolo
and Bryan Ward-Perkins in their introduction to a volume dealing with the con-
cept of urbanism in late antiquity and the early middle ages that was published
as part of the European Science Foundation’s project on ‘Transformation of
the Roman World’.13 They observed that scholars working on cities were begin-
ning to arrive at a less optimistic vision of late antiquity than that which had
dominated historical discourse in the shadow of Peter Brown:
We have tended to take a rather bleaker view of the ‘Transformation

of the Roman World’ than is common within the overall project, and,
indeed, than is at present fashionable amongst north-European scholars.
Towns were so central to Roman styles and structures of life and culture
that they were particularly hard hit by the changes that took place in
Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. From the perspective of any
research into urbanism that starts with the Roman period, it is very dif-
ficult to view developments in the sixth and seventh centuries, except
for the late-antique christianization of the city, as part of some neutral
(or even positive) ‘transformation’. The changes that occurred in urban
life generally look more like the dissolution of a sophisticated and im-
pressive experiment in how to order society—an experiment developed
by the Greeks and Romans and centred on the Mediterranean.14
This pessimistic view has been amplified by some subsequent work. Ward-
Perkins himself, for instance, produced a vigorous critique of the positive
view of late antiquity (exemplified not only by Brown, but also by Walter
Goffart’s studies that argue for an essentially non-violent process of barbar-
ian settlement in Roman territory), and sought to recast the entire period as
one of genuine disruption that caused the collapse of many aspects of Roman
civilization.15 The study of cities remained a central focus for this debate,
12 For early critiques of the optimistic Brownian late antiquity, see Schiavone 1996 and
Giardina 1999. For responses to such scepticism, see (e.g.) the essays in Straw and
Lim 2004. More recently, some aspects of Brown’s approach have come in for critique
from the point of view of methodology: see MacMullen 2019.
13 For the project and its ideological underpinnings, see Averil Cameron 2004: 73–74;
E. James 2008: 28–29.
14 Brogiolo and Ward-Perkins 1999: xv–xvi.
15 Ward-Perkins 2005.
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in which Gibbon’s casting of the period as one of ‘decline and fall’ gained a
new vogue.16 Indeed, the title chosen for Wolf Liebeschuetz’s 2001 analysis
of the fate of cities (especially from an institutional perspective) between
the fifth century and the seventh—The Decline and Fall of the Roman City—
self-consciously evoked Gibbon.17 More than a decade later, Adam Rogers’s
study of late-Romano-British urbanism still evoked the concept of decline (not
least in its title), while also offering a challenge to its value as a hermeneu-
tical tool.18
One consequence of these debates is that scholars are perhaps now more
willing than before to acknowledge that even if late antiquity could be associ-
ated with developments that might be couched as ‘positive’ or ‘dynamic’ (such
as the creation of new forms of religious, political, and cultural e xpression),
these arose concurrently with significant ruptures, and that any forward de-
velopment of scholarship on the period needed to acknowledge that.19 In
an otherwise positive appraisal of new trends in late-antique scholarship as
eschewing old-fashioned teleologies, Aldo Schiavone nevertheless remarked
that it ‘tends to overshadow an essential point’, by ‘downplaying the disruptive
and catastrophic aspects of the changeover’ between antiquity and the Middle
Ages.20 The last decade or so has certainly seen a revival of histories that exam-
ine the history of the period in terms of political disruption,21 while the value
of histories of events, and not just synchronic overviews, has been reasserted.22
Through such studies it would appear that the Brownian vision of a progres-
sively dynamic late antiquity has entered something of a period of retrench-
ment and crisis: Brown himself has had to mount a robust defence of his views
in the face of mounting scholarly opposition,23 while in works written for a
16 Wolf Liebeschuetz has produced several important criticisms of the optimistic vision of
late antiquity; note esp. Liebeschuetz 2001b; also, Liebeschuetz 2001c, with responses by
Averil Cameron (negative), Bryan Ward-Perkins (positive), and Mark Whittow (negative),
with a summary by Luke Lavan at 238–45. The question of urban decline was also ad-
dressed in Slater 2000, which contains several essays on European urbanism in late
antiquity.
17 Liebeschuetz 2001a. Cf. Grig 2013: 555–56 for an assessment.
18 Rogers 2011; for further discussion, see ch. 8 below.
19 Noted by Halsall 2008, 384. For recent appraisal, see Carrié 2017.
20 Schiavone 2000, 24–25.
21 Important examples, which eschew the loaded narrative of decline and fall in favour of
sophisticated analyses from the perspective of interactions between imperial centres and
provincial society, include Halsall 2008 and Delaplace 2015.
22 A striking example is Traina 2009, including the affirmation in the introduction to the
English edition by Averil Cameron that ‘events matter and so do specific contexts’ (x).
23 P. Brown 2013: xi–xlvii.
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8 Humphries
broader popular audience Gibbonian notions of catastrophic decline and

collapse (often somehow connected with the rise of Christianity) remain as
tenacious as ever, however much scholars who have devoted their careers
to re-evaluating late antiquity along more positive lines might deplore such
developments.24
In such circumstances, it seems to me that it would be a valuable exercise
to review the current state of the discipline with particular reference to cities,
where the debate has been especially intense. But this exercise needs to be
prefaced by a warning: the range of archaeological and documentary material
now available to scholars makes any overview of late-antique urbanism a risky
enterprise, since general theses are open to challenge from particular pieces of
evidence, not to mention new discoveries.25 In what follows, therefore, while I
aim to delineate general trends both in the development of cities in late antiq-
uity and in the ways in which they have been studied, I also wish to emphasise
that the picture emerging from the research of recent decades defies any ef-
fort to impose broad, all-encompassing interpretations on the evidence, and
instead offers a picture characterised by considerable diversity.
I will begin with a review of the development over the last half century of
the discipline of late antiquity as it pertains to cities (section 2). Then I will con-
sider some of the difficulties found in late-antique sources and experienced by
modern scholars in defining even what a city was in late antiquity (section 3).
Next I will examine key areas of urban change in late antiquity. It is tempt-
ing to put religion at the forefront of this survey, since stories like that of the
Seven Sleepers highlight it, and because this is an area where the transforma-
tions of the period might most easily be viewed in a positive light, as Brogiolo
and Ward-Perkins in fact noted. I have chosen, however, to commence my sur-
vey of different types of urban change with examinations of the role played
by cities in political (section 4) and economic life (section 5), and only then
to turn to religion (section 6). I have chosen to approach religion in this way
not because I think that its importance has been overstated in much modern
scholarship on the period. For instance, I cannot agree with Ward-Perkins’ as-
sertion that the importance of religion in modern late-antique studies is some
sort of peculiar, faddish obsession that can be rejected by anyone with mod-
ern secularist sensibilities.26 Far from it, religion permeated so many areas of
24 For example, note, recently, Nixey 2017, with the review by Averil Cameron 2017.
25 Such discoveries cannot be divorced, either, from new methodologies: note, e.g., Lepelley
2004: 25–27 (on the impact on studies of the Roman empire of post-colonial perspectives
after the Second World War) and 31–32 (sociology, philosophy, and history).
26 Ward-Perkins 2005: 180: ‘The new Late Antiquity is fascinated by the history of religion.
As a secularist myself, I am bewildered by this development’. Cf. 179: ‘we seem to prefer
to read about things that are wholly different from our own experience, like the a scetic
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life and e xperience in late antiquity that any effort to diminish its importance
strikes me as running the risk of misrepresenting the texture of late-antique
society and culture. Rather, my decision to approach religious factors after po-
litical and economic ones is made because I want to situate religious changes
within a context of possibilities that was often circumscribed by political and
economic considerations: consider, for example, how the church of the Seven
Sleepers at Ephesus was built at the orders of the emperor.
An important consideration throughout my analysis will be to push the de-
bate beyond the mere enumeration of topographic features, as if, for example,
simply counting the number of churches in cities provides a transparent and
easily interpreted guide to the rise of Christianity. To this end I aim to apply to
the late-antique evidence a critical approach that has increasingly been ap-
plied to ancient cities more generally, which is to see them as stages on which
were played out a variety of human actions, ranging from mundane social and
economic functions to ritualised performances of political and religious power
(section 7). I will conclude (section 8) with a meditation on the current debate
on ‘decline’, ‘fall’, and ‘transformation’ as appropriate terms to describe urban
evolutions in late antiquity, but here too I want to challenge some accepted
parameters for the debate. I will suggest that simple binary oppositions—for
instance, between decline and transformation, or between pagan Ephesus and
Christian Ephesus as in the tale of the Seven Sleepers—risk obscuring a more
complex series of changes experienced in myriad and varied ways in thou-
sands of urban communities across the Mediterranean world and its adjoining
territories. To put it another way, we are dealing with something more complex
than just a tale of two cities—one at the beginning of late antiquity, the other
at its end.
Finally, it should be noted that the approach adopted here is avowedly
that of a historian working with both textual and archaeological material,
rather than that of an archaeologist. I do not mean to imply that one or other
approach is preferable. On the contrary, it seems to me that the most fruitful
way of exploring the debates surrounding cities in late antiquity is through
dialogue, between historians and archaeologists, and between scholars work-
ing in different disciplines, such as social history, art history, and the history of
the liturgy.27
saints of the late and post-Roman worlds, who are very fashionable in late-antique
studies’. MacMullen 2019 offers a corrective to entrenched modern perspectives on such
ascetics. See also Averil Cameron 2004: 72–73 for a more measured assessment of the
place of religion in modern studies of late antiquity.
27 Contrast, for example, the approach (mainly textual) taken by Claude 1969 and that
(incorporating more archaeology to interrogate texts) of Saradi 2006.
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10 Humphries
2 Sources and Debates: Discovering the City in Late Antiquity
The current vitality of the study of late-antique urbanism (and particularly its
centrality to debates on the end of the ancient world) reflects how scholars
working on the subject now have access to a vast array of source materials.
Traditionally, exploration of the topic accorded priority to various types of
written evidence, particularly law codes (of both Roman emperors and bar-
barian kings) and inscriptions (notably dedications of monuments, both
secular and ecclesiastical, and epitaphs), but also literary sources (primarily
narrative histories, but also letters, rhetorical works such as speeches, and
various Christian writings, including hagiographical works like the account of
the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus). This trend, which focused on the history of
civic institutions, was epitomised by the two chapters on cities (one a broad
survey, the other focusing on Rome and Constantinople) in A. H. M. Jones’s
The Later Roman Empire, published in 1964, but elaborating an approach that
he had pioneered in earlier studies of cities in the Hellenistic and Roman
East.28 Jones confessed that he would avoid detailed consideration of such ar-
chaeological evidence as was available to him when he was writing.29 Written
documentation remains central to any appreciation of the definitions,
functions, and identities of cities in late antiquity, and recent decades have
seen an increase in terms of the available quantity of, especially, epigraphic
sources. Nevertheless, it is precisely in the field of archaeology that the most
significant advances have been made in the study of late-antique urbanism.30
The process by which archaeological evidence has come to bear on broad-
er interpretations of urban development in late antiquity has, of necessity,
been fitful, varying according to the richness and accessibility of late-antique
strata in the material record for particular cities (not to mention a willingness
to preserve them). For historians in particular, documentary sources, of the
type prioritised by Jones, long held sway as providing the interpretative frame-
work within which archaeological material tended to be read. For example,
28 Jones 1964: 687–766. For his earlier studies see Jones 1937 and Jones 1940. For an assess-
ment of his contribution, see Lavan 2008.
29 Jones 1964: vii: ‘My most lamentable gap is the archaeological material. I have not read
the excavation reports of late Roman sites’. On this aspect of Jones’ work, see the judicious
comments in Lavan 2008: 177–78. For a comparable classic study, focusing on Italy but
similarly reliant on literary evidence, see Ruggini 1961. A more recent effort is represented
by Durliat 1990.
30 Grig 2013: 556–57. For a convenient overview, focused on Italy but illuminating broader
trends, see Brogiolo and Gelichi 1998: 9–43. An important pioneer in seeing archaeologi-
cal material alongside documentary evidence was Claude 1969.
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up until comparatively recently the archaeological evidence for the devel-

opment of cities in late antiquity tended to concentrate on one category of
artefact, extant monuments, with a particular focus on monumental b uildings,
and above all on churches.31 Indeed, given that late antiquity as a discrete area
of historical enquiry barely existed before the revolutionary contributions of the
last fifty years, much of what would now be termed “late-antique archaeology”
tended to fall under the rubric of “early Christian archaeology”.32 This meant
that remains of churches were studied as a distinct category of building, often
divorced from the urban framework within which they were constructed.33
Moreover, since a traditional feature of the study of Christian history in general
is to focus on the linear development of the faith,34 there has been a tendency
to examine church buildings in terms of the evolution of particular architectural
forms such as the basilica, and to highlight what they could reveal of normative
Christian practices, such as the liturgy and the cult of saints.35
The surge in interest in late antiquity that has prompted a more thorough
archaeological investigation of cities in the period means that church build-
ings can now be viewed as part of a richer archaeological context. Even in
some cities that have continued to flourish down to the present, archaeology
has made considerable strides. A particularly striking example is Rome, where,
until comparatively recently, there was little consideration of late-antique evi-
dence beyond church buildings; moreover, archaeological priorities at Rome
in the period since the emergence of the modern Italian state in the nine-
teenth century had shown most interest in the classical (i.e. pre-late-antique)
past, with almost disdain for anything that followed it.36 But since circa 1990,
a number of important excavations in the centre of Rome, particularly in the
imperial fora and at Crypta Balbi in the southern Campus Martius, have al-
lowed for a more careful appreciation of the city’s transformation between an-
tiquity and the middle ages. These have demonstrated, for instance, that the
pace and nature of change varied considerably from district to district within
the city.37 Moreover, this rich seam of evidence is studied carefully in terms
31 The works of Krautheimer 1980 and Krautheimer 1983 are indicative of this trend: for
recent critique, see Goodson 2010: 81–90; cf. Humphries 2007: 21–26.
32 For what follows, detailed and wide-ranging analysis is now accessible in Pettegrew,
Caraher, and Davis 2019.
33 Perceptive comments in Bowden 2001: 57.
34 This and similar shifts are noted in E. Clark 2015: esp. 28–33.
35 Helpful overview in Bowden 2001: 59–60. For recent, sophisticated analyses of the archae-
ological evidence for saints’ cults, see Crook 2000 and Yasin 2009.
36 On, e.g., the search for classical, imperial Rome in the Fascist era, see Painter 2007.
37 For a splendidly illustrated survey, see Meneghini and Santangeli Valenzani 2004. For
Crypta Balbi: Manacorda 2001.
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12 Humphries
of its stratigraphic context, which is crucial for questions of relative dating.

There have been major advances in the study of certain types of material evi-
dence that can assist our understanding of chronology and economic life. For
example, the excavations at Rome have yielded a much more detailed under-
standing of pottery sequences, which can be used to establish chronologies
not only for Rome itself, but for other sites, particularly in central Italy, where
such material also turns up.38
Across the Mediterranean, ceramic evidence is similarly driving reassess-
ments of the impact and nature of late-antique changes to settlement patterns,
both within cities and in their rural hinterlands. This explosion of the quan-
tity of available evidence reflects shifting archaeological priorities, not least in
terms of a significant growth in archaeological survey projects in the country-
side surrounding cities, encompassing not only traditional field survey of the
type developed in the post-Second World War period, but also the adoption
of new technologies, such as geophysical resistivity survey. This allows for a
keener appreciation of the broader context of the rural landscapes in which
cities stood, against which we can judge something of the vitality of local econ-
omies and the density of rural settlement.39 Above all, this has led scholars to
challenge pessimistic narratives drawn from documentary sources that stress
political, military, and demographic disruption.40 Another consequence is a
keener appreciation of regional variations across the Mediterranean.41
It is now abundantly clear that no appreciation of urban developments
in this period can afford to ignore the material evidence discovered in re-
cent decades.42 An example of how scholarly approaches have changed can
be sensed from Anthony Bryer’s review of Clive Foss’s study of post-classical
Sardis (published in 1976—the year of Peter Brown’s Carl Newell Jackson
38 On the important seventh-century ceramic evidence from Crypta Balbi in Rome, see
Meneghini and Santangeli Valenzani 2004: 25–27. For the utility of such evidence in in-
terpreting site near Rome, see Patterson and Rovelli 2004. On the wider implications, see
Ward-Perkins 2005: 107.
39 For an overview, with references to further work, see Bintliff 2007 and 2017; on geophysics,
Boyd 2007; for a bibliographical overview: Chavarría and Lewit 2004; on the scholarly
challenges, Christie 2004.
40 Note the lessons drawn from the overview of survey evidence from Greece in Pettegrew
2007: 778: ‘Just as recent scholarship on Corinth itself has begun to revise an overly pes-
simistic picture of the Late-Antique city, so the history of activity and settlement in the
territory east of Corinth needs to be read in a more positive light’.
41 As Grig 2013: 557, notes: ‘Regional and local studies are absolutely crucial’. For a useful
overview of the importance of a regional understanding of the Mediterranean world
(and its immediate neighbours), see Wickham 2005: 17–55 and 720–819.
42 Perceptive summary in Brandes 1999: esp. 36–41.
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lectures). Noting how heavily Foss relied on often sparse documentary data,
Bryer expressed some disappointment at how little archaeology seemed to be
capable of revealing at that time:
Even on the site one is left with the feeling that the archaeology of Sardis
which Foss samples and interprets, should, and will, be telling us more:
dare one hope that environmental archaeology comes to Lydia? At pres-
ent even the 39 maligned sources presented in this book are still more
informative than the 43 photographs and plans …43
It would be hard to imagine a similar view being expressed today, even if schol-
ars are aware that the archaeological evidence available to them is still in many
respects patchy, uneven, and always open to qualification by new discoveries.44
Nevertheless, we should not allow ourselves to be carried away by the en-
thusiasm that such new evidence engenders. For example, the wealth of new
evidence from Rome is specific to the particular context presented by that city,
with its unique dynamics in terms of the persistence of imperial and aristo-
cratic authority, and the emergence of a powerful local Church.45 The extent
to which models derived from Rome are applicable elsewhere is a matter of
considerable debate.46 In broader terms, looking at the late ancient world
as a whole, even the recent glut of archaeological evidence presents its own
difficulties. On the one hand, the picture yielded is often quite variable. The
intensity of archaeological investigation differs from city to city, and region
to region, as factors such as continuing patterns of settlement can inhibit the
recovery (whether by survey or excavation) of evidence;47 in addition, modern
regional conflicts (such as the tragedies unfolding in Syria and Libya in the
last few years) can lead to its destruction and impede further investigation.48
43 Bryer 1978: 141.

44 Lavan 2008: 179–80.
45 The city has been the subject of several important collaborative volumes, such as Harris
1999; Cooper and Hillner 2007; Fuhrer 2012 (comparing it with Milan); Grig and Kelly 2012
(comparing it with Constantinople); Salzman, Sághy, and Lizzi Testa 2016.
46 Cantino Wataghin 1999: 149 and n. 7.
47 For general considerations, see various critical remarks in Liebeschuetz 2001a: 85
(problems with evidence from the West), 300 and 304 (difficulty of identifying early
Islamic pottery sequences), 388–90 (problems with evidence from field survey); on the
problems confronting archaeological understanding of the impact of Christianity on
cities, see Cantino Wataghin 2003.
48 For Syria, see A. Bauer 2015 (including coverage of Iraq). On Libya, Munzi and Zocchi 2017:
esp. 56–65, usefully situating the recent destructions in a wider context, and offering a
salutary reminder that there is much more than just the ‘classical’ heritage that is at risk.
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14 Humphries
On the other hand, the increased volume of archaeological evidence can be

difficult to digest in such a way as to produce syntheses. This problem has
made collaborative studies particularly valuable in bringing order to large
bodies of evidence, as, for instance, in recent projects focusing on statues in
late-antique urban contexts or the development of the early Christian cult of
saints.49 It is also a difficulty that can confront even individual sites which have
produced such rich seams of evidence that are difficult to synthesize.50 There
is a problem too that our understanding of the phenomenon risks fragment-
ing as scholars focus on specific aspects of urban development. For instance,
while it is certainly the case that recent work has fleshed out the context in
which late-antique church building took place, several scholars have remarked
that one of the current challenges in understanding the late-antique city is
in providing an integrated analysis that reconciles archaeological evidence for
church construction with that for the development of society more broadly.51
This increasing quantity of raw data reflects also the application of new
techniques to the investigation of late-antique cities. The advance of so-
phisticated mechanisms of, for instance, resistivity survey can reveal struc-
tures w ithout the need to excavate, while laser scanning of visible structures
can improve the accuracy of our understanding of architectural plans and
construction techniques.52 Indeed, technological advances offer new oppor
tunities for the study of late-antique urbanism. The application of digital
49 For the Last Statues of Antiquity project, see Smith and Ward-Perkins 2016, together with
the online database at http://laststatues.classics.ox.ac.uk/ (accessed 20 May 2019). For the
Cult of Saints, see http://cultofsaints.history.ox.ac.uk/ (accessed 20 May 2019).
50 On the matter, see the pungent remarks of Rothaus 2000: ix, about the availability to
scholars of as yet unpublished material.
51 Bowden 2001. Similar problems are highlighted for instance by Christie 2006: 74, ‘there
is hesitation on the part of many archaeologists studying the fourth and fifth centuries
to involve themselves in the archaeology of the Church—and, equally, historians of the
early Church tend to steer clear of understanding the changes wrought elsewhere in the
late Roman fabric’; see also Marazzi 2000: 40, ‘the time has come to produce a model for
late-antique Rome that goes beyond the divisive confrontation between two polarities,
the classical and the Christian’.
52 The bibliography here is vast, so I cite only a few particularly instructive examples. For
geophysics, note the pioneering work done in the 1980s at Nicopolis ad Istrum, detailed in
Strange 1995; the identification of the likely cathedral of Ostia in Bauer and Heinzelmann
2001: 278–79; investigations of the late-antique and early medieval phases at Forum
Novum (Vescovio) in the Tiber valley north of Rome, published by Gaffney, Patterson,
and Roberts 2004; and the hugely increased understanding of late-antique phases at
Portus, set out in detail by Keay, Millett, Paroli, and Strutt 2005: 63–66 (methodology) and
71–145 (results). For laser scanning, see Hori and Lavan 2015 (esp. 600–12 on the forum of
Constantine at Constantinople).
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visualisations and virtual reality offers opportunities to experience recon-

structions of late-antique cities and the spaces within them as never before.53
Moreover, scholarship does not develop in a bubble, isolated from the wider
challenges confronting the societies in which it takes place. This can lead to
asking new questions, for example about the sensory experience of urban
space, or its use by groups usually marginalised in traditional historiography,
such as women, the poor, or those with disabilities.54 New questions and new
tools for analysis can converge: thus, in recent years, scholars have begun to
ask new questions about, for instance, the impact of ecological changes on
cities. While some factors, such as the silting up of harbours and changing river
courses, had long been understood as impacting upon urban fortunes, we now
have access to a wide range of new environmental data that suggests that late
antiquity coincided with significant developments in terms of changing cli-
mate and the incidence of epidemic disease. Consequently, any appreciation
of the urban transformations in this period needs to factor such developments
into any new narrative.55
In short, while it is certainly the case that new evidence (particularly from
archaeology) and new analytical lenses have vastly increased the scope of
enquiry into late-antique urbanism, we should not expect them to make our
understanding of the topic any easier. If anything, the new approaches have
provoked more questions than answers. This can be regarded in itself as a
positive contribution, as our understanding of the processes of urban evolu-
tion has become increasingly problematised. Several of these problems will
be examined in more detail below. Nevertheless, we need to concede that an
overarching interpretation of the development of cities in late antiquity is,
in spite of recent efforts at synthesis, perhaps more difficult to achieve now
than it was when documentary evidence dominated the perspectives of his-
torians like Jones. In large measure, that surely explains why the debate on
late-antique urbanism, and its implications for our understanding of the pe-
riod as a whole, has been so intense. Yet it is not the only difficulty confronting
53 See, for example, the Digital Roman Forum project, http://www.digitales-forum-romanum
.de/?lang=en (accessed 20 May 2019). For theoretical considerations, see Lavan, Swift, and
Putzeys 2007: 18–20.
54 For sensory perceptions, see in more detail ch. 7 below. On marginalised groups, see
Neri 1998; Bond 2016 (on marginal professions); Laes 2018 (on the disabled).
55 It would be difficult to cite much more than a sample of the scholarship here. Harper
2017 provides a convenient overview. On the environmental constraints on agriculture,
especially in the Near East, see Decker 2009: 7–27 and 174–203. Little 2007, assembles im-
portant studies of the early medieval plague. See, however, the important note of caution
advocated by Sessa 2019 (who also gathers a comprehensive bibliography).
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16 Humphries
scholars: another, which brings us back to late antiquity itself, is the problem
of what constituted a city in the period, and to this we now turn.
3 What Was a City in Late Antiquity?
In much modern scholarship, cities are regarded as symbolic of the attain-

ments of the civilization of the Graeco-Roman world.56 That this is so re-
flects the view found in many ancient writings that cities were central to the
Greeks and Romans’ views of their own achievements. Thus in the fourth
century BCE Aristotle asserted that the natural habitat of humankind was the
polis, that is, the communities based on urban centres, and their surrounding
territories, found throughout most of the Greek world.57 Similarly, the expan-
sion of Roman power and culture in later centuries was inextricably linked,
for both ancient commentators and modern scholars, with the proliferation
of cities.58 Such ideas persisted into late antiquity, and a neat encapsulation
of the importance of urban forms to civilised living can be found in the late-
fourth-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus’ famous description of the
Huns. What marked them out as abnormally savage was their lack of a range of
attributes—buildings, fire and cooking, agriculture—that were hallmarks of
the Graeco-Roman world’s urbanised society; indeed, they regarded city walls
and even houses with suspicion; and their sense of identity, in stark contrast
to that of many in the Graeco-Roman world, completely lacked any sense of
an attachment to a place of birth.59 Such ideas were persistent: in the sixth
century, the great historian of Justinian’s wars, Procopius, reflected dismally on
the hovels inhabited by the Slavs and Antes appearing on the empire’s Balkan
frontier.60 The same cultural prejudice is attested by an anecdote preserved by
the twelfth-century writer Michael the Syrian, which describes how, when the
Slavs ransacked Corinth in the reign of Maurice, they made off with an altar
canopy, which their leader then used a hut.61
56 References here could be reduplicated endlessly, but for an indicative discussion see
Alcock 1993: 129–32.
57 Arist. Pol. 1253a.
58 Among ancient writers, see e.g. Tac. Agr. 19–20; Aristid. Or. 26 (Εἰς ῾Ρώμην) 93; for modern
assessments, we have already encountered Brogiolo and Ward-Perkins 1999: xv–xvi, on
cities as ‘a sophisticated and impressive experiment in how to order society’.
59 Amm. Marc. 31.2.3–10.
60 Procop., Wars 7.14.22–28.
61 Mich. Syr., Chron. 10.21, trans. Chabot 1901: 362.
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Modern scholars seem to agree with these positive verdicts on the signifi-
cance of ancient urbanism, even if they are sometimes imprecise in their use
of modern terminology to describe urban centres, applying words like ‘city’
or ‘town’ interchangeably.62 Yet while it may be possible to describe in ge-
neric terms what cities looked like and how they ordered their inhabitants’
existence in terms of politics, administration, and economic, social, cultural,
and religious life, it is also true that the cities of the Roman world presented,
in their individual forms, a considerable diversity of layouts and architectural
components, which by themselves point to myriad variations in lived expe-
rience across the Roman world. A few examples will need to stand here for
wider trends. In north-western Gaul and Britain, for example, a distinctive
form of temple architecture was found (the so-called ‘Romano-Celtic temple’)
which had a central cella surrounded by a veranda on all sides, and which con-
trasted markedly with temples of the classical Roman type which stood on a
high podium with steps and a colonnaded porch at the front of the building.63
Buildings for public entertainment were common throughout the Roman
world, but their form varied considerably. Theatres in the western provinces,
with their semi-circular tiers of seating and tall stage buildings represented
more monumental structures that their Greek predecessors. The arrival of the
Romans in some parts of the Greek world led to the reconstruction of theatre
buildings to accommodate Roman-style spectacles: at places such as Athens, or
Tindari in Sicily, these were altered, by separating the front rows of their seating
from orchestras which were now repurposed as arenas to permit the mount-
ing of gladiatorial combats or wild-beast hunts (venationes).64 Such architec-
tural modifications reflect the absence generally from the Greek world (with
exceptions, such as Corinth, which had been refounded as a Roman colonia)
of that most emblematic of Roman buildings, the amphitheatre—although at
various points in the Roman period, and stretching into late antiquity, some
stadia, such as those at Ephesus and Aphrodisias in Asia Minor, had small are-
nas built into one end likely to facilitate venationes.65 These subtle differences
62 For use of the term ‘town’ in preference to ‘city’, see, e.g., Christie and Loseby 1996; Brogiolo
and Ward-Perkins 1999; Brogiolo, Gauthier, and Christie 2000; Slater 2000; Rogers 2011. In
modern English, terms like ‘city’ or ‘town’ tend to distinguish urban centres of different
orders of magnitude or define them according to different criteria (such as administrative
status).
63 Goodman 2007: 128–38.
64 On Athens, and the process more broadly, Welch 1999: 127–33; for Tindari: Wilson 1990:
59–60.
65 Welch 1998: 564–69, citing other examples, and tracing the origins to the complex built
for Augustus’ Actian games at Nicopolis; cf. Welch 1999: 133–38 for Corinth.
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18 Humphries
from region to region serve to remind us also that such uniformity as there
seems to be across the Roman Mediterranean basin reflects centuries of devel-
opment that tended towards congruence.
This tension between generic description and individual diversity observ-
able under the early Roman empire is mirrored in late antiquity: here, as in
earlier periods, the definition of what a city was varied over both space and
time. In this section, I want to approach the question from two perspectives.
First, I will examine a number of late-antique literary sources for their per-
spectives on cities as both physical places and locations of identities in the
period. This will demonstrate not only continuity with the classical past, but
also innovations, not least in new Christian definitions of city and community.
The second part of this discussion will examine how late antiquity saw the
emergence of different and distinctively post-classical urban forms.
3.1 Rhetorical Constructions: Defining Cities and Identities

By the time we reach the period covered by late antiquity, Graeco-Roman cities
had existed in the Mediterranean world for close to a millennium. The urban
form was deeply embedded, and, at first sight, there appears to have been some
general sense that any concentrated, sizeable human settlement might be de-
scribed as a city. That explains, for instance, why an inscription from Boğsak
island, off the coast of Isauria (southern eastern Turkey) dated to the fifth or
sixth century, could describe a rather haphazard and unplanned settlement
called Asteria that developed there—in other words, hardly the sort of settle-
ment we would describe as a city—as being ‘like a polis’ (ὡς πώλης).66 However
much the inhabitants of classical poleis might have been aghast at the name
being applied to Asteria, the use of the term shows how ingrained it had be-
come to describe organised human settlement on a particular scale, even if, by
late antiquity, it was used to indicate different types of settlements from ear-
lier periods.67 Moreover, a city was not just a place and space, but also an em-
bodiment of the people who lived in it. A number of late-antique descriptions
of cities, for places more conventionally resembling cities than rocky Asteria,
survive, and which may get us some way to arriving at an understanding of
how cities in general were defined in this period.
An interesting starting point is provided by extant inventories describing
three of the Empire’s greatest cities: Rome, Constantinople, and Alexandria.68
66 Varinlioğlu 2017: 262–63. On the site, see further p. 28 below.

67 Brandes 1999: 26–31 discusses a range of usages.
68 On these texts, and for what follows here, see Arce 1999 on Rome; Matthews 2012 and
Havaux 2017 on Constantinople; and Fraser 1951 on Alexandria.
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The fifth-century Latin notitiae for Rome and Constantinople list public
buildings (including, for Constantinople, churches) and private residences
as well as the administrative apparatus of each of the cities’ regions; that for
Alexandria, which is preserved in Syriac translation in Michael the Syrian’s
twelfth-century chronicle, is a less detailed text, which does not list individual
buildings, but rather provides numerical totals (demonstrably unreliable) for
each category of building in each of the five sectors into which the city had
been divided since Hellenistic times.69 Cumulatively, these texts present an
image of cities as physical and administrative spaces, but they also hint at other
perceptions of cities. The lists for Constantinople and Alexandria, for instance,
begin with passages praising their cities as surpassing all others—and that for
Alexandria concludes with a similar statement.70 Thus, the ostensibly statisti-
cal enumeration of each cities’ buildings and offices exists not for its own sake,
but rather serves to demonstrate their greatness. This indicates that cities ex-
isted not just as physical spaces or forms of social organisation, but as markers
of social, political, and cultural identities, both collective and individual.
A further trawl through late-antique written sources shows that this was
a theme subject to extensive elaboration. In a concrete sense, cities could
be regarded as possessing a sort of identity themselves, articulated through
personifications, often as a divinised female figure or representation of the
city’s good fortune (tychē). In the Hellenistic period, for example, the identi-
fication of the newly arrived Romans with a divinised personification of their
city as Thea Roma provided a mechanism through which Greek communi-
ties could express their political relationships with the new imperial power.
By late antiquity, the depiction of city personifications or tychai was common
in various media: they appear on coins, ivory diptychs, and as sculptures;71 in
almanacs such as the Chronograph of 354 which includes illustrations of fe-
male personifications of Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Trier;72 and
in cartographic sources like the Peutinger Table, where the great metropoleis
69 On the administration of Alexandria, see Haas 1997: 47–48.

70 Constantinople: Seeck 1876: 229, trans. Matthews 2012: 86. Alexandria: Fraser 1951: 104.
71 Weitzman 1979: 173–82; Grig 2012: 42–51.
72 Salzman 1990: 27–28. A portrait of Constantinople likely served as a frontispiece to the
Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitana. The copy in the Bodleian library, which pairs the text
with a Notitia, siue Libellus de regionibus, urbis Romae (and various other documents,
including the Notitia Dignitatum), prefaces its Constantinopolitan inventory with a topo-
graphical painting of the city; the Roman list, however, is prefaced by a portrait of an
enthroned tychē of Roma: Bodleian Library MS. Canon. Misc. 378, 80v (Rome) and 84r
(Constantinople). A digitised copy of the full manuscript can be accessed at https://digital
.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/inquire/p/557836ae-25ee-46ea-a918-b80c8a90c748 (accessed 14 May
2019). For summary discussion, see Matthews 2012: 83.
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20 Humphries
of Rome, Constantinople, and Antioch are depicted as enthroned female

divinities.73
Marking out certain cities for such treatment is indicative of an assumed
hierarchy of cities, and this too finds rhetorical elaboration in late antiquity,
as in the fourth-century Gallic poet Ausonius’ Ordo Urbium Nobilium (Order
of the Famous Cities). Some of its rankings of the twenty cities it describes are
entirely conventional, by late-fourth century standards: Rome comes first,
almost without comment, and Constantinople follows, jostling for second
place with Carthage, while Alexandria and Antioch are ranked fourth and
fifth. Others, however, are idiosyncratic (Athens is relegated to fifteenth place
after a series of Italian, Gallic, and Spanish cities), while others still reflect
Ausonius’ personal proclivities.74 When he comes to list Aquileia in ninth
place, he admits that the city did not traditionally merit such a rank, but that
recent events had elevated the city’s status (non erat iste locus: merito tamen
aucta recenti); this was because the usurper Magnus Maximus, who had risen
to power by violently overthrowing Ausonius’ tutee and patron Gratian, had
been defeated in battle and stripped of his ill-gotten power near the city.75 The
work ends with praise for another deeply personal choice, Ausonius’ home city
of Bordeaux (Burdigala), which provides an occasion for the poet to reflect on
how his identity was defined in terms of his relation to it and to Rome:
as illustrious Rome leads at one end of the rank, so at this end let
Bordeaux establish her place, leaving the precedence unsettled. This is
my own country; but Rome stands above all countries. I love Bordeaux,
Rome I venerate; in this I am a citizen, in both a consul; here was my
cradle, there my magistrate’s chair.
utque caput numeri Roma inclita, sic capite isto

Burdigala ancipiti confirmet vertice sedem.
haec patria est: patrias sed Roma supervenit omnes.
diligo Burdigalam, Romam colo; civis in hac sum,
consul in ambabus; cunae hie, ibi sella curulis.76
73 Grig 2012: 48–51. For later examples, in Levantine mosaics, see Bowersock 2006: 81–88.
74 The order is: Rome (1), Constantinople and Carthage (2 and 3), Antioch and Alexandria
(4 and 5), Trier (6), Milan (7), Capua (8), Aquileia (9), Arles (10), the Spanish cluster of
Seville, Merida, Cordoba, Tarragona, and Braga (11–14), Athens (15), Catania and Syracuse
(16 and 17), Toulouse (18), Narbonne (19), and Bordeaux (20).
75 Auson. Ord. urb. Nob. 9.1 and 4–9. On Aquileia’s relative political importance in the fourth
and fifth centuries, see Sotinel 2005: 17–24.
76 Auson. Ord. urb. Nob. 20.37–41.
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For Ausonius, as for members of elites across the empire, sense of self
was also a sense of place, and such places deserved praise alongside the indi-
viduals who came from them. In such ways, cities were both physical spaces
and repositories of collective identities.
This is amply demonstrated in the late-third-century rhetorical handbooks
that have come down to us under the name of Menander Rhetor.77 His first
treatise contains lengthy instructions on how to praise the physical amenities
of cities, including their location, climate, and harbours, alongside encomia of
their founders, the physical and moral character of their populations, the an-
tiquity of their foundations, and significant developments in their h istories.78
Civic identities also loomed large in Menander’s instructions in his second
treatise for speeches to individuals. His most famous set of instructions, for
the basilikos logos, the speech in praise of the emperor, included injunctions
to praise the emperor’s home city—unless it was wholly undistinguished
or obscure, in which case it should be passed over in silence.79 Meanwhile,
speeches inviting governors to visit a city should extol its physical appearance
and the vitality of its festivals.80 Panegyrics from late antiquity show that such
rules were followed in practice. The fourth-century Athenian rhetor Himerius,
for example, provides vivid accounts of cities such as Thessalonica and Philippi
in terms that clearly evoke Menander’s precepts.81
A particularly interesting survival from the period is the Antiochikos, a
speech in praise of his home city delivered probably at the local Olympic festi-
val in 356 by the celebrated fourth-century Antiochene rhetor Libanius, which
demonstrates amply how myth, history, urban fabric, and civic identity could
be interwoven.82 For historians of late-antique cities, it is probably the latter
half of the speech, in which Libanius describes the physical spaces of the city
in his own day, including its imperial palace, that might seem at first to be
of most interest. It describes such features as Antioch’s streets, market places,
suburbs, and harbour in arresting detail. But in terms of what the city meant
to Libanius, it was as much intangible qualities such as its history that defined
Antioch for him. In compliance with the precepts that we find in Menander
77 Russell and Wilson 1981.

78 Men. Rhet. Treatise I.346.26–359.15.
79 Men. Rhet. Treatise II.369.18–28.
80 Men. Rhet. Treatise II.426.7–428.6, 429.13–23; cf. 430.30–431.13 for similar features in a
speech of leave-taking.
81 Himer. Or. 39.4–7 (Thessalonica) and 40 (Philippi); cf. Penella 2007: 35–36, noting the par-
allels with Menander. See also p. 54 below for Himerius’ descriptions of Constantinople.
82 The speech is the subject of two useful recent translations and commentaries: Norman
2000, 3–65 (English); and Casevitz, Lagacherie, and Saliou 2016 (French).
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22 Humphries
Rhetor, Libanius devotes an early part of the speech to the city’s enviable
location, fine climate, and abundant natural resources.83 Its history was impor-
tant for him, too, because, given the city’s current prosperity as a centre of im-
perial activity, it was all too easy to forget that Antioch’s importance stretched
back into the distant past: thus he relates the city’s early history not only from
its formal foundation under the Seleucids, but, further back, its mythologi-
cal associations, its prominence already under the Persians, and the favour-
able view taken by Alexander the Great of it as an eventual residence once
his conquests were done.84 The city’s foundation was endorsed by divine good
will; later, the city was accepting of Rome’s rise to power, which guaranteed its
continued prosperity and importance under the emperors.85 Next, Libanius
offers praise of the city’s political institutions as being in perfect harmony: the
devoted service of its boulē (assembly), its good relationship with its imperial
governors, its peaceable people.86 The significance of these qualities is dem-
onstrated both by recent events, such as the city’s resistance against attacks by
the Persian king Shapur I in the mid-third century or its rejection of the usur-
pation of Eugenius at the beginning of the fourth,87 and by Antioch’s open-
ness to foreigners seeking to make a life for themselves in the city.88 The city’s
importance, revealed by its choice as an imperial residence, is reflected also
in its status as a centre of culture—a theme dear to the heart of a teacher and
rhetor like Libanius.89
It is only comparatively late in the speech—about two-thirds of the way
through it—that Libanius finally turns to Antioch’s physical fabric, with
emphasis on its colonnaded streets, imperial palace, public buildings, and
houses; it is, moreover, a bustling place, constantly being redeveloped as its
prosperity booms—which even its experience of earthquakes can barely
83 Lib. Or. 11.12 (summary), 13–28 (fertility of local countryside), 29–33 (climate; cf. §§ 222–
226), 34–41 (benefits of a location close to the sea).
84 Lib. Or. 11.10–11 and 131 (linking past and present); 44–58 (local myths), 59–71 (Persians),
72–77 (Alexander), 77–129 (Hellenistic monarchs).
85 Lib. Or. 11.110–18 (divine favour), 129–30 (rise of Rome).
86 Lib. Or. 11.132 (harmony), 133–138 (boulē), 139–49 (governors: cf. §§ 193–95), 150–56
(people).
87 For this recent history, see Lib. Or. 11.158 on Shapur’s invasions of the 250s, and 159–62
on the usurpation in 303. The tendentiousness of this latter account is highlighted by its
marked contrast with the grimmer testimony elsewhere in Libanius’ oeuvre, which attests
to the violent suppression of the revolt and the execution of the orator’s grandfather for
his involvement (Or. 19.46–47; 20.17–21).
88 Lib. Or. 11.163–76, picking up themes of the city welcoming outsides at §§ 58 and 91–92.
89 Lib. Or. 11.77–180 (emperors), 181–93 (culture).
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dent.90 Moreover, its physical qualities are presented as embodying aspects

of the city’s less tangible qualities: thus its topography is as harmonious as its
institutions, while its architecture allows Antiochenes to enjoy year-round
benefits of the local climate.91 Libanius then turns his attentions to the city’s
surrounding countryside, the source of its abundant supplies of water, and
placing special emphasis on the suburb of Daphne, with its oracular shrine
of Apollo.92 Finally, Libanius extolls the riches of Antioch’s food supply, both
from local sources and from trade with the rest of the world, all of which
serves to underscore the unique good fortune and prosperity of the city—no
wonder, he concludes, that visitors from elsewhere should wish to make the
city their home.93
In Libanius, as in Himerius, we can see cities identified and praised ac-
cording to long-established principles of classical rhetoric, neatly set out in
Menander Rhetor, in which a city was not just space and place, but also peo-
ple and qualities. Yet it would be a mistake to think that they saw their cit-
ies as essentially unchanging spaces. On the contrary, their praises of cities
were tempered by considerations of recent history (such as Ausonius’ admira-
tion for Aquileia as the site of Maximus’ doom, or Libanius’ praise of Antioch
as imperial residence) and of the capacity of cities to change and grow over
time. Their cities were clearly palimpsests of past and present, a feature neatly
encapsulated in Libanius’ remarks that building works at Antioch always un-
cover foundations of an earlier age, and that different parts of his city were
used for different purposes at different times.94 In short, cities, and along with
them civic identities, were endlessly dynamic.
3.2 New Definitions of the City in Late Antiquity

Two centuries after Libanius’ encomium of Antioch, the city was described by
another of its sons in a different literary form: the Chronicle of John Malalas.95
Like Libanius, Malalas incorporates in his narrative some of the mythical
past for Antioch,96 and praises the buildings erected in the city by Roman
90 Lib. Or. 11.196–221 (buildings), 227–229 (development in spite of earthquakes).

91 Lib. Or. 11.196 (harmony), 220–226 (buildings and climate).
92 Lib. Or. 11.230–243 (suburbs and Daphne), 244–248 (water supply).
93 Lib. Or. 11.249–264 (supply), 265–269 (prosperity), 270–271 (the city’s greatness in the eyes
of everyone).
94 Lib. Or. 11.227 (changing uses of space), 229 (earlier foundations).
95 For his account, see Agusta-Boularot 2012.
96 Joh. Mal. 2.6–7 (p. 29 Bonn) and 8.13 (p. 200 Bonn); cf. Lib. Or. 11.44–57 and 86–88
respectively.
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24 Humphries
emperors while they resided there.97 But there are significant differences too:
where Libanius had been a devotee of the old gods, Malalas was a Christian,
and began the narrative of his Chronicle with God’s creation of Adam. His
vision of Antiochene identity correspondingly encompasses elements that
would have been thoroughly alien to the thought-world inhabited by Libanius.
Thus his account of the reign of the Seleucid Antiochus IV Epiphanes in-
cludes reference to suppression of the Jewish Maccabees, while his narrative
of early imperial history details the presences of the apostles Paul and Peter
at Antioch.98 Naturally, neither element is found in Libanius, and they reflect
Malalas’ concern to see his city’s role in a Christian salvation history stretch-
ing back to biblical times. This is continued later in references to persecutions
of Christians at Antioch and, after Constantine, the construction of church
buildings.99
The divergences between Libanius and John Malalas reflect a shift towards
rather different conceptions of city and urban identity, chiefly under the influ-
ence of Christianity. This is a trend that predates Malalas, of course, and which
has been traced in the voluminous works of Libanius’ younger contemporary
the prelate John Chrysostom. His sermons at Antioch not only shed light on a
surprising range of aspects of late-antique civic life, from theatrical shows to
sewers, but also attest to an effort to refocus the city and its identity through
a Christian lens.100 These different literary portraits of Antioch can be com-
pared with the contrasting images of pagan and Christian Ephesus that book-
end the tale of the Seven Sleepers. Yet it would be an oversimplification to see
Christianity as offering only new and positive ways of looking at cities. From
certain perspectives, cities—both collectively and individually—could be re-
garded with suspicion. Thus Palladius, the fifth-century collector of anecdotes
about monastics, noted how the former imperial count Verus and his wife
Bosporia, having adopted an ascetic lifestyle, sought to safeguard their morali-
ty by avoiding cities and the temptations to sin that they offered.101 Meanwhile,
Gregory of Nazianzus, writing around 380, could regard Constantinople with
97 E.g. Joh. Mal. 13.30 (pp. 338–339 Bonn) on building work by Valens (albeit confused with
his brother Valentinian I).
98 Respectively Joh. Mal. 8.23 and 10.15 (pp. 206–207 and 242 Bonn).
99 Joh. Mal. 12.43 (p. 310 Bonn), and 13.3 (p. 318 Bonn).
100 Theatrical shows: Leyerle 2001; sewers: Leyerle 2009. See also Lavan 2007 on public space
(making sensible observations on the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ spaces
in John’s homilies); and Mayer 2012 on Antiochene topography more generally. For the
light John sheds on shifting (and competing) identities, see (amongst many other works)
Hartney 2004, Maxwell 2006, and Sandwell 2007.
101 Pall. Hist. Laus. 66.2.
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suspicion because of its dalliance with forms of Christianity that he regarded

as heretical.102
In spite of such misgivings, there is abundant evidence of various ways in
which Christianity could provide new and different focal points for the ex-
pression of urban identities. A well-known example is the celebration of local
saints, particularly martyrs.103 Around the year 400, for example, the Spanish
Latin poet Prudentius prepared his Peristephanon (The Crowns of Martyrdom),
a series of hymns celebrating Christians who had made the ultimate sacrifice
when faced by persecution. It is possible to detect in them a certain pride
taken by the poet in saints from his native Spain.104 But he was aware, too, that
cities across the Christian world boasted martyrs of their own, and that, when
the final reckoning at the end of time came, they would be presented as proof
of each community’s piety:
When God, seated on a fiery cloud and shaking his flashing hand, shall
come to set up his true balance for the nations and weigh them justly,
then from out the great world every city will raise its head and go quickly
to meet Christ, carrying its costly gifts in baskets.
cum Deus dextram quatiens coruscam

nube subnixus veniet rubente
gentibus iustam positurus aequo
pondere libram,
orbe de magno caput excitata
obviam Christo properanter ibit
civitas quaeque pretiosa portans
dona canistris.105
This represents a significant shift in the construction of urban identities, and

one articulated with an eye to a specifically Christian understanding of history,
time, and the world.
It is all too easy to present these poles as diametric, incompatible opposites.
The contentious character of their representations can, perhaps, lead us
to forget that Libanius and John Chrysostom were describing the same city,
102 Greg. Naz. Or. 21.5. For Gregory’s orations in Constantinople, see Elm 2012: 157–58.
103 See also pp. 11, 76, 80.
104 For Prudentius in his Spanish context, see Hershkowitz 2017: esp. 76–122 on the
Peristephanon.
105 Prudent. Perist. 4.9–16, trans. Thomson 1953: 157.
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26 Humphries
but seeing it through very different eyes. This reminds us that we need to see
Christianity as an element of urban identity being grafted on to a pre-existing
(and concurrently and continually developing) set of identities, as will be
discussed later in connection with Constantinople.106 An early stage in this
process can be glimpsed in the famous inscription recording a petition to
Constantine by the inhabitants of Orcistus in Asia Minor in the aftermath of
the first Christian emperor’s victory over his last rival for empire, Licinius, at
Chrysopolis in 324.107 It was prompted by the Orcistans’ local rivalries with
their neighbours, the inhabitants of Nacoleia, who, it seems, had been seeking
to subject Orcistus to some sort of inferior status.108 The crux of the dispute
was that Orcistus had long since enjoyed city status (nomen civitatis), and that
Nacoleia was encroaching upon that. In their defence, so we surmise from the
imperial rescript in which Constantine lists their grievances, the Orcistans had
pointed to everything that indicated their community deserved recognition.
Many of these are conventional enough, and can be compared to the crite-
ria invoked by Menander or Libanius: a rich history of local grandees and an
abundant population; a situation favoured by nature and connections to
the wider world that made Orcistus an excellent staging post (mansio) on
the imperial road network; fine local amenities including a water supply
and watermills, bathhouses, and a forum boasting many imperial statues.109
Constantine had begun his rescript advertising his determination to support
the cities of his empire, assisting ancient ones or those imperiled by the pas-
sage of time. Now, having reviewed Orcistus’ claims, he instructed that it was
unworthy of his times that such a city should be stripped of its status. But at
this point he reports that the Orcistans had made a strikingly novel marker of
civic distinction in their petition to him:
To all these things could be added, like a sort of crowning achievement,

that all who live there are said to be followers of the most holy religion.
Quibus ominibus quasi quidam cumulus accredit quod omnes [i]bidem

sectatores sanctissimae religionis habitare dicantur.110
106 See below pp. 53–54.

107 Text: CIL 3.352 = MAMA 7.305; re-edited by Denis Feissel in AE 1999: 1577, reprinted with
translations in Van Dam 2007: 368–72, and Lenski 2017: 109–13.
108 As Lenski 2017: 99 observes, ‘[t]he precise development of the dispute between Orcistus
and Nacoleia can probably never again be recovered’.
109 Lenski 2017: 99, comments on the traditionalism of the claims.
110 Text and translation from Lenski 2017: 111.
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In short, the canny citizens of Orcistus, mindful of the religious proclivi-

ties of their new imperial suzerain, had added Christianity to the various
more traditional distinctions that marked out their city as a worthy recipi-
ent of the nomen civitatis.111 That religion should be regarded as a marker
of local identity is no novelty: for centuries, cities in Asia Minor had relied
on particularly powerful local cults as markers of identity.112 More recently,
during the Great Persecution enacted by Diocletian and his fellow tetrarchs in
303, a small (and, in the sources, anonymous) community in Phrygia had been
burned, along with its inhabitants, for advertising itself as Christian.113 The
people of Orcistus were being openly opportunistic in stressing their religious
alliance with the emperor, and this reminds us that what we are seeing here
is Christianity emerging side-by-side with more traditional markers of urban
identity: even if it was a chief feature (cumulus) of their city, it remained one
among many.
This elision of Christian and civic identities developed apace in the gen-
erations that followed Constantine’s reign. One pointer towards this merging
of identities was that, already within the fourth century, bishops came to be
identified by the names of the cities in which they held office. Lists of episco-
pal subscriptions from Constantinian and later church councils list bishops by
their name and by their city (a shorthand, of course, for the Christian congre-
gations that they led in these cities—much as was the case when the apostle
Paul, already in the first century, addressed letters to Christian communities
in Corinth, Ephesus, and elsewhere).114 The principle that bishops should only
be found in cities was disputed in some places, such as North Africa and Asia
Minor, where large rural populations demanded the appointment of ‘country
bishops’ (chorepiscopi); confronted by such challenges, however, the bishops
assembled at a church council at Serdica (modern Sofia) in 343 rejected this
rural episcopate, stating that for villages and small towns a presbyter would
suffice, and that bishops should only be appointed in cities that already had
them, or which were populous enough to require them.115 This is only to scrape
the surface of how Christianity became associated with the redefinition of
cities: further examples will be considered below in section 6.
111 This has been doubted by some, most recently Van Dam 2007: 176–82, who sees the for-
mulation as ‘perhaps intentionally cryptic’ (176). However, Lenski 2017, 100–101, marshals
sufficient evidence to the contrary.
112 The relationship, however, was a complex one: Dignas 2002.
113 Eus. Hist. eccl. 8.9.1; cf. Lactant. Div. inst. 5.11.10.
114 The classic study of the urban texture of Pauline Christianity remains Meeks 1983.
115 Conc. Serd. can. 6 (VIb). See Hess 2002: 154–57 (discussion), 214 (Latin text), 230 (Greek
text).
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28 Humphries
The rise of Christianity as a marker of urban status allows discussion to

return to the settlement of Asteria on Boğsak island off the Isaurian coast
as being ‘like a polis’ (ὡς πώλης). The settlement there rather confounds the
expectations of orderly urban living one might expect from the study of cit-
ies across the Mediterranean world: the inhabitants lived in houses densely
packed, with little in the way of a clear street plan, on steeply sloping ground
on the eastern side of the rocky island.116 And yet, for all that, the settlement
did boast some amenities that made the claim to being like a city not entirely
absurd: the houses were built of well-dressed masonry; there were cisterns
built to provide a water supply; steps leading down to the shoreline were cut
into the rock on the western coast of the island, facing towards the Isaurian
shore; above all, the settlement featured a number of churches.117
In short, Asteria challenges traditional conceptions of what is meant by the
term ‘city’, and points to a variety of new forms of urban centre which were
beginning to emerge in late antiquity. A type that deserves particular atten-
tion is one that hints at another important factor in the development of cities
in the late Roman and post-Roman world: the enclosing of hilltop sites with
walls to make for more easily defensible urban cores.118 A particularly strik-
ing example is provided by a new urban foundation at Caričin Grad in Serbia,
which scholars identify with the city of Iustiniana Prima, a foundation by
the emperor Justinian at the place where he had been born. The city is men-
tioned in a v ariety of sources from the sixth and early seventh century, the
period that c oincides with the likely extent of its occupation, as deduced from
archaeological evidence (circa 530–after 615).119 At first glance, the site looks to
be decidedly defensive in nature: it is dominated by a heavily-fortified acropo-
lis, and is surrounded by a number of subsidiary fortifications; this seems to
cohere with what we can deduce about the site from Justinianic sources, which
present it as a new centre for the secular and ecclesiastical administration in
Illyricum.120 Closer study of the site, both within the walls and in its exten-
sive hinterland, however, demonstrates that Caričin Grad was an impressively
116 This perhaps explains why earlier generations of scholars, confronted by their disorderly
plans, imposed something altogether more regular when it came to reconstructing the
late-antique Syrian hill-towns above Antioch: Foss 1996: 48–50.
117 Varinlioğlu 2017, esp. 262–65.
118 The phenomenon has been studied particularly in the northern and central Balkans: in
addition to important early studies such as Dagron 1984: 6–10, Dunn 1994, and several
contributions to Poulter 2007, see now Heinrich-Tamáska 2017. For the comparable devel-
opment of incastellamento in Italy, see Brogiolo and Gelichi 1996.
119 Major sources: Procop. Aed. 4.1.17–27; Justinian Nov. 11; Greg. Mag. Reg. 3.6–7, 5.8 and 16;
8.10; 9.157; 11.29, 12.10–11.
120 Justinian, Nov. 11, with analysis in Sarantis 2016: 149–55.
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built city, planned and laid out on previously unoccupied land, with colon-
naded streets, a circular piazza, an impressive cathedral church (the home of
its bishopric), and, outside its walls, an impressive network of aqueducts sup-
plying it with water.121 This archaeological data confirms the assertion, found
in Procopius, that Iustiniana Prima was no mere defensive site, but a well-
appointed city. His descriptions runs as follows:
he [Justinian] built a very notable city which he named Iustiniana Prima

(this means ‘first’ in the Latin tongue), thus paying a debt of gratitude to
the home that fostered him. Yet all Romans should have shared this debt
among themselves, for this land nourished a common saviour for all of
them. In that place also he constructed an aqueduct and so caused the
city to be abundantly supplied with ever-running water. And many other
enterprises were carried out by the founder of this city—works of great
size and worthy of especial note. For to enumerate the churches is not
easy, and it is impossible to tell in words of the lodgings for magistrates,
the great stoas, the fine market-places, the fountains, the streets, the
baths, the shops. In brief, the city is both great and populous and blessed
in every way—a city worthy to be the metropolis of the whole region, for
it has attained this rank.
τὸ χωρίον πόλιν ἐπιφανεστάτην ἐδείματο, ἥνπερ Ἰουστινιανὴν ὠνόμασε Πρῖμαν

(πρώτη δὲ τοῦτο τῇ Λατίνων φωνῇ δύναται) ταῦτα τῇ θρεψαμένῃ τροφεῖα
ἐκτίνων. καίτοι Ῥωμαίους ἐχρῆν ἅπαντας τοῦτο δὴ ἀλλήλοις ἐπικοινοῦσθαι
τὸ ὄφλημα, ἐπεὶ καὶ σωτῆρα ἐθρέψατο ἡ χώρα κοινὸν ἅπασιν. ἐνταῦθα δὲ καὶ
ὀχετὸν τεκτηνάμενος ὕδασι τὴν πόλιν ἀειρρύτοις διεπράξατο ἐπιεικῶς πλήθειν.
πολλὰ δὲ καὶ ἄλλα τῷ τῆς πόλεως οἰκιστῇ ὑπέρογκά τε καὶ λόγου πολλοῦ δια-
πεπόνηται ἄξια. θεοῦ μὲν τεμένη διαριθμεῖσθαι οὐ ῥᾴδια, καταγώγια δὲ ἀρχό-
ντων φράζεσθαι λόγῳ ἀμήχανα, στοῶν μεγέθη, ἀγορῶν κάλλη, τὰς κρήνας, τὰς
ἀγυιάς, τὰ βαλανεῖα, τὰ πωλητήρια. πόλις ἁπλῶς μεγάλη καὶ πολυάνθρωπος
καὶ τὰ ἄλλα εὐδαίμων καὶ οἵα τῆς χώρας ἁπάσης μητρόπολις εἶναι· εἰς ἀξιώμα-
τος γὰρ τοσόνδε ἥκει.122
But we need to be careful in using Procopius’ description merely to elucidate

the remains excavated by archaeologists.123 For him, what is remarkable above
121 Major studies: Bavant 2007 is a convenient overview; more recent archaeological evi-
dence, including that from the surrounding territory, is reviewed in Ivanišević 2017.
122 Procop. Aed. 4.1.19–25, trans. Dewing 1940: 225–7.
123 Useful critique in Sarantis 2016: 155–61.
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30 Humphries
all about Iustiniana Prima is that it rose on the emperor’s birthplace, and was
a fitting monument ‘to the home that fostered him’; in that context, as
Procopius remarks summing up, ‘since the city is the Emperor’s own, any ac-
count of it necessarily falls short of the reality’.124 In other words, Procopius’
account of the city (and, indeed, of other foundations by Justinian) amply
demonstrates that the tradition of classical ekphrasis continued to be di-
rected towards describing urban foundations, and that connections with the
precepts laid down in Menander Rhetor still held firm.125 The description of
Iustiniana Prima’s various urban amenities is, in this respect, entirely second-
ary, and that explains why much of it (describing aqueducts, streets, bath com-
plexes, and so on) is rather conventional, and echoes similar remarks found in
the Orcistans’ description of what made their settlement a city, or Libanius’
account of Antioch. Of course, some details, such as the enumeration of its
churches, or references to its status as a metropolitan see, firmly belong to the
Christian world of the sixth century, and not to any earlier period.126 Their
presence demonstrates how ekphrasis could be adapted to describe the sorts
of new structures that were emerging in the cities of the Christian empire (and
its successor states). Procopius’ references to churches at Iustiniana Prima find
a contemporary parallel in Paul the Silentiary’s description of Justinian’s Hagia
Sophia at Constantinople; earlier examples are known (such as Eusebius of
Caesarea’s panegyric on Constantine’s church at Tyre, and the non-extant en-
comium of Constantius II’s church at Antioch by one Bemarchius, known only
from the bemused comments on it as incomprehensible by Libanius).127 Such
adaptations of the tropes of classical ekphrasis, as much as the archaeology
of Caričin Grad, above all with its heavy defences and huge basilica, are dem-
onstration enough that something had, however, changed between the fourth
century and the sixth. For all Procopius’ enthusiasm, Iustiniana Prima will
have been a very different sort of place from Libanius’ Antioch; nevertheless,
both qualified as cities.
In seeking to define what a city was in late antiquity, this section has ranged
widely, in terms of the sites it has examined, chronology, and the sources
124 Procop. Aed. 4.1.27: ἐπεὶ τῷ βασιλεῖ προσηκούσης τῆς πόλεως ἐλασσοῦσθαι αὐτῆς ἅπαντα
λόγον ἐπάναγκες.
125 See above on Menander. For this aspect of Procopius’ account, see Webb 2001.
126 Procop. Aed. 4.1.23 (churches) and 25 (episcopal status).
127 On Paul the Silentiary, see the commentary in P. Bell 2009: 79–95, 189–212. For the means
by which classical ekphrasis was adapted to the description of churches, and the chal-
lenges arising from describing a symbolic space according to such principles, see above
all Webb 1999: esp. 60–62, 67, 70–72. For Bemarchius, see the caustic glee expressed in Lib.
Or. 1.39–41.
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considered. Several general trends are visible. One is that cities were always
defined not just in terms of their physical form, but also in terms of what
that physicality revealed about their status and the character of their inhab-
itants. Another is that well-entrenched tropes for the description of cities
proved remarkably tenacious, even in the face of observable changes, such as
the emergence of Christianity, or the shift to smaller, more heavily-defended
sites. This question of size highlights one area where we are largely ignorant
about late-antique cities: the extent of their populations. Any figures suggested
by scholars are essentially guesses, as the sources are often opaque on such
questions.128 At most, the comparative extent of archaeological sites suggests
that there must have been some considerable variation in the size of cities at
this time (as, indeed, for antiquity as a whole).129 Any evaluation of changes
to cities in late antiquity needs to take account, therefore, of the considerable
variety of urban forms found throughout the Mediterranean world. Yet change
there surely was, since the period of late antiquity—whether we subscribe to
positive or more circumspect appraisals of the age—was one that saw consid-
erable upheavals in terms of the resilience of the state and of the economies
that it supported. These were factors that were to have a profound impact on
the city, and to them we turn now in greater detail.
4 Cities and the State in Late Antiquity
From early in antiquity, cities were closely identified with conceptions of the
state. The poleis of the archaic and classical Greece were autonomous states
in their own right; their constitutional systems were described as politeia;
and their administrative workings were politeuma. For the Roman empire,
the world of the citizens (cives) was the world of its cities (civitates). Political
integration into the Roman world order involved varying degrees of Roman
citizenship until 212, when the emperor Caracalla granted the status of Roman
citizens to all free inhabitants of the Empire. Given this background, it should
occasion no surprise that the state continued to play an influential role in the
life of cities in late antiquity.
The political fortunes of the state have been regarded as impacting on the
development of cities in late antiquity in various ways, many of them negative.
For instance, increased political insecurity in the face of barbarian invasions
128 E.g. the celebrated details in Olympiodorus of Thebes, frr. 25 and 41.1–2 Blockley. On the
question more broadly, see Jones 1964: 712–18.
129 Ward-Perkins 1998: 374, fig. 2.
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32 Humphries
from the third century onwards has been linked to the construction of new
urban fortifications, many of them encompassing urban centres that often
were much reduced in area by comparison with the early Roman empire.130
Similarly, the apparatus of the state has been depicted as behaving in ways
that were inimical to the fortunes of the city: in particular, the imposition of an
increasingly oppressive imperial bureaucracy from the late-third century has
been regarded as eroding civic autonomy and diminishing the fiscal resourc-
es available to cities.131 One manifestation of this, readily appreciable from
the epigraphic and archaeological evidence, is the increasingly prominent
role played by provincial governors in acts of patronage in cities across the
empire.132 It is also clear, especially from epigraphic evidence in the East, that
new civic officials, such as the ‘Father of the city’, were invested with responsi-
bilities for overseeing the administration of civic finances.133
While such bleak assessments of civic fortunes seem to be accurate enough
in broad outline, it must be remembered that the picture presented by indi-
vidual cities varies considerably over time and space. There can be little doubt
that in some regions at least, the construction of circuits of walls reflects in-
creased military and political insecurity. A new wall built at Athens surely in-
dicates such insecurities in the third century: its construction in the wake of
a Herulian invasion of the Aegean was noted in later sources, while archaeo-
logical remains in the agora reveal a fortification constructed at precisely this
date from the spolia of earlier buildings.134 At fifth century Aquileia in Italy,
following a sack by the Huns in 452, a new fortification wall reduced the urban
core to approximately half its former extent.135 But circuits of walls are not
always evidence of urban insecurity and contraction. It has been argued with
reference to western Asia Minor, for instance, that the construction of city
walls in the third and fourth centuries did not necessarily always reflect defen-
sive needs, but rather was linked to the idea that walls were becoming part of
an accepted ideal of what physical amenities a city should possess; moreover,
130 For the period from the mid-third to mid-fourth centuries, see Bachrach 2010; Rizos 2017b.
131 Classic statement in Jones 1964: 732–34, 737–63; cf. Dey 2015: 25–33 for a recent overview.
For an observer like Libanius, Julian’s attempt to restore autonomy to town councils
could be regarded as a virtue: Lib. Or. 18.146–47; classic discussion in Millar 1983: 76–79.
Emperors themselves were well aware that this would be seen as a virtue: Constantine
made precisely this point at the opening of his letter to the Orcistans: see above p. 26.
132 Lewin 2001: 31–36; Slootjes 2006: 77–104.
133 Liebeschuetz 2001: 110–20.
134 Hist. Aug. Gallienus 13.8; Zos. 1.29.3 and 1.39.1; George Syncellus, Chronographia AM 5768
(pp. 466–467 Mosshammer). Archaeology in Frantz 1988: 1–11.
135 Sotinel 2005: 253–57. For similar circuits of walls in Gaul enclosing reduced areas:
Heijmans 2004: 83–125.
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the circuits enclosed not diminished urban cores, but the whole area of the
settlements.136 As for the reduced financial resources available to cities, the
picture again points to considerable regional variation. In North Africa, for
instance, a rich seam of epigraphic evidence attests to the endurance of tra-
ditional patterns of elite patronage through the fourth century and into the
fifth, thus continuing after the supposed contraction of such activities under
Diocletian and Constantine.137 A similar picture has emerged from the study
of various cities in Asia Minor, where classical urban administration has been
argued to have continued into the seventh century.138
4.1 Cities and the Imperial Court

The direct impact on cities of the activities of the state was not always
negative. For instance, between the late-third century and the late-fourth,
emperors customarily resided in cities in the provinces, with the result that
several cities—most spectacularly Trier, Milan, Thessalonica, Constantinople,
Nicomedia, and (as we have seen in Libanius’ testimony) Antioch—were rede-
veloped in ways that reflected their new political importance. This had several
impacts. One was a significant geopolitical shift in the shape of the empire
away from one centred on Rome to one that stretched along the frontiers of
the Rhine and Danube and across Asia Minor to Syria. The result, as Bryan
Ward-Perkins has stressed, was ‘a most unusual empire’, indeed one that could
be described as ‘an empire turned inside-out’, in which the long-established
relations between centre and periphery were inverted.139 The traditional cen-
tre at Rome became, in some sense, a political backwater (even if it was never
wholly irrelevant), while the new ‘centre’ of power (or perhaps it is better to
think of multiple centres of power) could be found closer to the frontier, and
wherever the emperor—or, more usually, plural emperors—resided. Alongside
this came a transformation in the balance of relationships between emperors
and elites based in these provinces.140
For cities favoured with regular imperial visits, this meant the acquisition
of architectural spaces associated with the emperor and his administration,
for example palace quarters, circuses, imperial mausolea, impressive public
baths, and the monumental accoutrements of imperial ceremonial, such as
triumphal arches (of which that of Galerius preserved at Thessalonica is the
136 Whittow 2007: 379.

137 The classic study is Lepelley 1979–1981; for more recent work, see Leone 2013.
138 Whittow 1990.
139 Ward-Perkins 2014: 112–22.
140 For courts and provincial aristocracies, Matthews 1975 is the classic treatment; see now
also Kulikowski 2015, and, for the mid-fourth century, Moser 2018.
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34 Humphries
finest survival) and grandiose processional streets.141 In no small measure,

the development of these cities was designed, as an anonymous panegyrist
of Constantine in 310 remarked in his description of Trier, to evoke the an-
cient capital at Rome. Having described in general terms the prosperity of
Trier under the patronage of a not-yet demonstratively Christian Constantine
(a benefaction that the orator hopes will be extended to his home city of Autun
[Augustodunum]), he opines:
I see a Circus Maximus to rival, in my opinion, that at Rome, I see basili-

cas and a forum, palatial buildings, and a seat of justice raised to such a
height that they promise to be worthy of the stars and sky, their
neighbours. All these, assuredly, are favours due to our presence. For
in whatever places your divinity distinguishes most frequently with his
visits, everything is increased—men, walls, and favours; nor more abun-
dantly did the earth send forth fresh flowers for Jupiter and Juno to lie on
than do cities and temples spring up in your footsteps, Constantine.
Video circum maximum aeumulum, credo, Romano, uideo basilicas et

forum, opera regia, sedemque iustitiae in tantam altitudinem suscitari ut
se sideribus et caelo digna et uicina promittant. Quae certe omnia sunt
praesentiae <tuae> munera. Quaecumque enim loca frequentissime tuum
numen inlustrat, in his omnia et hominibus et moenibus et muneribus
augentur; nec magis Ioui Iunonique recubantibus nouos flores terra sum-
misit quam circa tua, Constantine, uestigia urbes et templa consurgunt.142
In several cities, we can observe how layouts imitated Rome: at Thessalonica

and Constantinople, for example, the palace and hippodrome sat s ide-by-side,
a topographical arrangement that clearly imitated the proximity of the im-
perial residence on the Palatine and the valley of the Circus Maximus at the
ancient capital.143 Moreover, it was not just spaces that advertised imperial
connections, but also the use to which such spaces were habitually put. The re-
cent discoveries at Nicomedia of polychrome monuments depicting ceremo-
nies such as imperial adventus, likely belonging to the period of joint rule by
Diocletian and Maximian when the city had become one of Diocletian’s main
residences, underscore the opulence that the imperial presence could lend to
141 Overview in Dey 2015: 33–57. For mausolea, see Johnson 2009.
142 Pan. Lat. 6 (7) 22.5–6, trans. Nixon and Rodgers 1994.
143 On the centrality of the circus/hippodrome to imperial ceremonial and encounters with
the populus, see Curran 2000: 230–252; McCormick 1986: 80–100.
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a city’s appearance, in terms of both the monuments erected and the ceremo-
nial enacted there.144
For many of these cities, moreover, the developments under Diocletian’s
tetrarchy represented the beginning of a long-term association with emperors
and their courts that lasted into the late-fourth century (and in some cases
beyond). Such imperial buildings and the associations that went with them
could be a source of local civic pride, as Libanius shows at Antioch.145 The
presence of the imperial court could define the character of politics at a city,
in some cases providing a rival focus of authority to entrenched local elites. If
a bishop like Ambrose of Milan is remembered above all for his interactions
and confrontations with emperors and other figures at court, that is because
the frequent imperial presence in his city presented a challenge to his local
authority: it is striking that several of the stories told about Ambrose as bishop
focus precisely on matters of rival imperial and ecclesiastical claims to juris-
diction over church buildings.146
4.2 Space, Ritual, and Power: Making Imperial Constantinople

The development of Constantinople in many ways encapsulates these vari-
ous trends.147 From its refoundation by Constantine on the site of Byzantion,
the city acquired buildings (including churches) that served as a backdrop
to the exercise of imperial power, especially as the emperors increasingly
settled in the city in the fifth century;148 here too we find the association of
palace and circus evocative of Rome. There were, furthermore, structures
that served to provision the burgeoning metropolis, of which the aqueduct of
144 Şare Ağtürk 2018. Lactantius offers a vivid, but obviously polemical, account of Diocletian’s
building at Nicomedia; he too notes the desire Nicomediam … urbi Romae coaequare
(De mort. pers. 7.10).
145 Lib. Or. 11.205–207, extols the grandeur of the imperial quarter at Antioch as ranking
alongside those of Rome and Constantinople.
146 McLynn 1994; cf. Lenox-Conyngham 1982: 356–63, teasing out the complex and confusing
topographical details found in the sources. The classic version of Ambrose’s confronta-
tions is to be found in Paulinus’ Vita Ambrosii, often heavily reliant on Ambrose’s own
accounts of the episodes found in his letters.
147 It would be quite beyond the scope of this study to give an exhaustive bibliography for
Constantinople. The following notes aim to direct the reader to a representative sam-
ple of up-to-date studies. For a recent overviews of the city’s ceremonial space and its
importance, see Dey 2015: 77–84; Bassett 2017; Havaux 2017. Among older works, there is
much of use in F. Bauer 2001. On the whole subject, the classic studies of Dagron 1974 and
Mango 1990 remain seminal.
148 For quasi-permanent presence of the emperor in Constantinople after 400, see
Destephen 2016. Imperial attention to Constantinople had been developing apace in the
later-fourth century: Errington 2006: 142–168.
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36 Humphries
Valens and several vast cisterns are the most impressive surviving examples.149
Constantinople’s development had a significant impact beyond its immediate
confines. This is, perhaps, sometimes regarded in negative terms, in that the
city was embellished not only with works of art taken from cities across the
eastern provinces, as Eusebius of Caesarea’s account of its foundation makes
clear,150 but also with saints’ relics gathered from the same region.151 In both
cases, the accumulation of artefacts served to grant Constantinople a physical
and ideological importance appropriate to its status as, increasingly, the chief
city of the eastern empire. This could be matched also in terms of the fluctuat-
ing status of cities as a result of Constantinople’s rise to prominence. While
the rivalry between Rome and Constantinople has attracted most attention,152
it is clear also that Constantinople’s clout was felt closer to home: the provi-
sions of the sixteenth session of the council of Chalcedon in 451, that the see
of Constantinople should have the right to consecrate bishops in the imperial
dioceses of Asiana, Pontica, and Thrace will surely have encroached on the
jurisdiction of important sees like Ephesus, in the province of Asia.153
All of this had a number of implications. One was that, in the eastern
empire, Constantinople increasingly became the focus for ostentatious dis-
plays of imperial power. This phenomenon is particularly visible under the
Theodosian dynasty, the first imperial line to use Constantinople routinely as
a stage on which to display imperial achievements (and certainly more em-
phatically than the Constantinians, who spent much of their time in other
cities). Already under Theodosius I, the city became the centre for advertise-
ments of imperial success. The resolution of the Gothic war of 376–382 was
celebrated there on New Year’s Day 383, when the orator Themistius praised
before the assembled court and senate the achievement of peace the previous
October.154 More concrete vestiges were left in the aftermath of Theodosius’
victory over the western usurper Magnus Maximus in 388: the victory may
have happened far away in Italy, but it was celebrated at Constantinople by the
erection of an ancient Egyptian obelisk in the city’s hippodrome, and likely
149 Ward-Perkins 2000: 326–30, citing earlier bibliography; for water supply, see Crow 2012;
Ward, Crow, and Crapper 2017.
150 Euseb. Vit. Const. 3.54.1–3. For a useful catalogue, see Bassett 2005. On the problems of
reconstructing Constantinian Constantinople, see Kaldellis 2016.
151 For discussion of this in the context of competition with Rome, see Ward-Perkins 2012:
60–62.
152 Blaudeau 2012 is seminal on ecclesiastical matters; on wider considerations, see Van Dam
2010.
153 For the debates at Chalcedon on this matter, see Gaddis and Price 2005: 3.73–91; analysis
in Limberis 1995: 334–40.
154 Them. Or. 16.
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also in the construction of a triumphal arch (later incorporated into the city’s
fifth-century circuit of walls as the Golden Gate) straddling the main route into
the city from the Hebdomon, the military parade ground at the sixth milestone
from the city’s palatial centre.155 Under succeeding generations of the dynasty,
the embellishment of Constantinople’s topography, both secular and religious,
did much to focus attention on the achievements of Arcadius, Theodosius II,
and Marcian.156
The dynasties that followed engaged in similar activities, notably when
Justinian engaged in a wholesale rebuilding of the city following the destruc-
tion wrought by the Nika riots of 532.157 Certain places in the city boasted
considerable continuity as focal points of imperial activity: the hippodrome
remained a focus for chariot racing until the tenth century, while its use as a
venue for political display by the city’s rulers continued even into the Ottoman
period;158 the Church of the Holy Apostles in the west of the city remained
the location of choice for imperial burials of emperors and their families
(including some western emperors) from Constantine’s death right down to
the eleventh century.159
Yet the development of Constantinople as an imperial centre had other im-
pacts on cities across the region that were not as wholly and immediately nega-
tive as might be imagined from tales of its embellishment with monuments
taken from elsewhere. There is some evidence to suggest that cities such as
Thessalonica and Philippi may have seen increased economic vitality in the
fourth and early-fifth centuries precisely because of the need to supply nearby
Constantinople.160 Moreover, although the death of Theodosius I and the suc-
cession of Arcadius in 395 is sometimes seen as bringing to an end the move-
ment of a peripatetic court, it is clear that this shift was not immediate, with
Constantinopolitan emperors continuing to make expeditions to, for example,
Asia Minor and Thrace into the mid-fifth century.161
155 Obelisk: CIG 4.8612 and CIL 3.737, with Ward-Perkins 2012: 59–60. Triumphal arch: Bardill
1999. See most recently on the city’s triumphal topography Bassett 2017.
156 For aspects of the ritual use of Constantinople under the Theodosians, see Van
Nuffelen 2012.
157 Useful summary in Croke 2005.
158 End of chariot racing: Alan Cameron 1973: 5–6. Ottoman use: Terzioğlu 1995.
159 Nikolaos Mesarites, Description of the Church of the Holy Apostles at Constantinople 39–40
(= Downey 1957: 891–93, 915–16). Discussion in Grierson 1962; Johnson 2009: 119–29.
160 Sodini 2007: 315–316.
161 Seeck 1919: 293, 295, 309, 333, 353, 373, 393; cf. Destephen 2016. For Italy after 395, see
Gillett 2001.
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38 Humphries
4.3 Adventus Ceremonial and Ruler Interactions with Cities

Whether a city was routinely favoured with the emperor’s presence, or only
enjoyed the honour occasionally, the actual event of the ruler’s arrival was an
opportunity for the ostentatious ceremonial display of his power. This was
articulated through the ceremony of adventus, which over the course of late
antiquity developed into a sophisticated set of rituals in which ruler and ruled
could interact with each other.162 One of the most famous surviving accounts,
that by the historian Ammianus Marcellinus of the arrival of Constantius II
at Rome in April 357, highlights the sensory splendour and carefully stage-
managed aspects of the event: the emperor assembled with his entourage,
surrounded by guardsmen, and approached the city, outside which he was met
by local dignitaries (in Rome’s case, members of the senate); he then paraded
into the city to the population’s cheers, while preserving a studied and reserved
dignity in his demeanour; the procession culminated with the emperor ad-
dressing the senate and then taking up residence in the old imperial residence
on the Palatine.163 Descriptions found in the corpus of Latin panegyrics show
that similar ceremonial features were entrenched since at least the days of
Diocletian.164 It is clear, however, that the ceremony was susceptible to change,
not least on account of the shift from pagan to Christian rulers. At Rome, for
instance, it seems that visits to the basilica of St Peter at the Vatican had al-
ready become part of the ceremony by the reign of Honorius.165 It is likely that
the civic welcoming committee would have come to include the city’s bishop
at some point in the course of the fifth century, as was the case by the time the
Ostrogothic king Theoderic visited Rome in 500.
Even when the ruler’s presence was fleeting, his arrival could provoke a
flurry of activity. Such was the case with the city of Dadastana on the borders
of Bithynia and Galatia in Asia Minor in February 364. The city lay on the road
that ran from the Asian shore facing Constantinople through Ancyra, central
Asia Minor, and the Cilician Gates to Antioch, and so must have seen fairly
frequently the passage of the imperial comitatus. But on only one occasion
did an emperor stay there for certain, with tragic consequences, which never-
theless shed light on what an imperial visit could mean. On 17 February 364,
the emperor Jovian stayed there as he made his way from Antioch towards
Constantinople. Accommodation for the emperor was hastily prepared, and
a room replastered for his bedchamber; in addition, a great feast was laid on.
162 See still the classic analyses of MacCormack 1981: 17–89, and Dufraigne 1994.
163 Amm. Marc. 16.10.4–13.
164 MacCormack 1981: 22–33.
165 Liverani 2007, tracing both prior and subsequent developments.
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In the morning, however, it was discovered that Jovian had died in his sleep—
either overcome by fumes from the new plaster or from the brazier in his
room, or poisoned by the food served at his banquet. Whatever the truth of
the matter (and in the tense political atmosphere of the early 360s, which saw
multiple imperial entrances and exits, gossip and rumours of foul play were
rife), the efforts made at Dadastana to provide for the emperor’s comfort had
had gone disastrously, tragically wrong.166
The misstep at Dadastana is a reminder that the arrival of the emper-
or and his entourage necessitated efforts to provide for their supply and
accommodation. This could involve, in centres where the imperial presence
was frequent, an infrastructure, including buildings such as warehouses, to
provide for the consumption of the court.167 Such visits, wherever they went,
seem to have involved a substantial administrative effort, absorbing energies of
imperial agents and local administrators, which we can occasionally glimpse.
A series of letters from September 298, preserved on papyrus, attest to frantic
exchanges between a local military official and Aurelius Plutogenes, also called
Rhodinus, the town council president of Panopolis in the Nile valley in an-
ticipation of a visit by Diocletian: the letters show that Plutogenes was causing
anxiety by dragging his feet in gathering in the necessary supplies.168
A series of details points to how entrenched these ceremonial habits be-
came in late antiquity. One was that similar ceremonies could be enacted for
the arrival not just of the emperor, but of his image. Protocols are preserved
for the dissemination throughout the empire of the wreathed portraits of the
western emperor Anthemius.169 Procopius of Gaza offers a vivid account of
how the arrival in his city of images of Anastasius was an occasion for popu-
lar rejoicing and celebration of the emperor’s solicitude for them.170 A cen-
tury later, a more prosaic account preserved with the correspondence of Pope
Gregory the Great records the reception and acclamation at Rome of images
of the eastern emperor Phocas and his consort Leontia by the pope, the clergy,
and the senate in the basilica of St John Lateran before their installation in
a chapel in the old imperial residence on the Palatine hill.171 By the time of
that event, the empire in the West had disintegrated, but adventus ritual was
now transferred to the rulers of the successor kingdoms: a visit by Theoderic
the Ostrogoth to Rome in 500 saw him welcomed by pope and senate, visit
166 Amm. Marc. 25.10.12–13.

167 Ward-Perkins 1998: 386.
168 P. Beatty Panop. 1.
169 Const. Porph. Caer. 1.87.
170 MacCormack 1981: 68–70.
171 Greg. Mag. Reg. App. 8; Humphries 2007: 21–26, 56–58.
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40 Humphries
the Vatican, and process through the city; around the same time in Gaul, the
Frankish king Clovis could be described processing into the city of Tours in
robes that evoked imperial power.172
Finally, adventus-style rituals could be deployed in contexts quite distinct
from those associated with earthly emperors or kings. For example, evidence
from cities in both East and West demonstrates that the reception of saints’
relics into a city could be the occasion for adventus. A particularly vivid depic-
tion is found on an ivory reliquary preserved in Trier, which shows the emperor
Theodosius II and his sister Pulcheria presiding over the reception of the relics
of Stephen the Protomartyr into Constantinople in 420/421: a procession bear-
ing the saint’s remains enters through a gate and approaches the imperial cou-
ple standing outside a church, while in the arcades behind them the people of
Constantinople are shown with their hands raised in gestures of acclamation.173
Meanwhile, the form of adventus ceremonial could be translated into other
contexts: numerous writers of the period could retell biblical episodes, such as
Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, in terms that sought to evoke his sacred, cosmic
majesty through echoes of the language of imperial arrival.174
4.4 Imperial Cities and Absent Emperors

But the presence of the emperor was felt not only during periods of his direct
presence. The official welcome extended to imperial images sent to cities has
just been noted. We know too that members of the imperial family other than
the emperor might reside in cities, offering a reflection of an imperial pres-
ence there. Thus, some twenty five years after the death of her husband, the
emperor Gratian, we hear of the imperial widow Laeta, assisted by her mother,
paying to feed the needy at Rome during Alaric’s first investment of the city
in 408.175 Beyond that, the emperor was a silent presence in cities everywhere
through a range of images and texts set up in his honour, and that of his family.176
When a riot erupted at Antioch in 387 and statues of the emperor were toppled
from their pedestals and dragged through the streets, there was a genuine fear
172 Theoderic: Anon. Val. 65–67; Clovis: Greg. Tur. Hist. 2.38.
173 Holum 1982: 103–109. For slightly earlier western evidence, see Victricius of Rouen’s De
Laude Sanctorum, translated in G. Clark 1999, with discussion in G. Clark 2001: 173–76.
174 Dufraigne 1994: 297–317, 329–455.
175 Zos. 5.39.4.
176 The display of imperial portraits in appropriate contexts (i.e. not among images of disrep-
utable individuals such as actors) was regulated by law: CTh 15.7.12 = CJ 11.41.4 (394). Such
portraits were often displayed alongside magistrates, as is reflected in the sixth-century
depiction of Pilate judging Christ in the Rossano Gospels (P. Brown 1971: 43), and as part
of the ceremonial inkstands depicted on the early-fifth-century diptych of the vicarius
Urbis Romae Probianus (Matthews 2000: 14–15).
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in the city, evidenced by appeals for imperial clemency from Libanius and
John Chrysostom, that violent reprisals would follow this insult.177 At other
times, for example following episodes of usurpation, the destruction of images
and the erasure from inscriptions of the names of individuals who had claimed
imperial status was actively encouraged.178 Local festive calendars might also
note important imperial anniversaries, as we know was the case at Rome from
the Chronograph of 354.179
The relationship between emperors and subjects was fully reciprocal,
with communication travelling in both directions: efforts to forestall impe-
rial anger after the Antiochene Riot of the Statues demonstrate that, and we
hear of many other representations being made to emperors by aggrieved
communities.180 We also have rather more mundane reports, like those of the
Roman senator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus from his tenure as urban prefect
at Rome in 384 reporting to the emperors how they had received the chanted
approval of the populus Romanus at the games.181 Such details are a reminder
that government in the late empire worked (as it had done throughout the
period of the principate) by a process of petition and response, as urban com-
munities sought out their ruler’s guidance on various matters. The directives
received in response to such enquiries (as well as more general pronounce-
ments emanating from the court) could be set up in prominent public locations,
a visible reminder of the cities’ connections with their rulers, no matter how
distant;182 so too the application of the law could be a theatrical business, as is
specified in Valentinian II, Theodosius I, and Aracadius’ law ordering the burn-
ing of homosexuals at Rome in full public view (spectante populo).183
In addition to such direct channels of communication, the movements of
the emperor, his court, and his army through provincial cities also brought
with it the establishment of various offices of the administration in cities ei-
ther on, or nearby, the emperors’ itineraries, such as mints producing coinage
177 Lib. Or. 19–20; for John Chrysostom’s numerous sermons on the incident, see Paverd 1991.
178 Usherwood 2015 (currently being revised for publication) is a thorough examination of
the process.
179 Salzman 1990: 137–41.
180 Kelly 2004: 114–29.
181 Symm. Relat. 9.4 and 10.2.
182 For the posting of laws, see Matthews 2000: 181–82, Such a practice lies behind the abil-
ity of Eusebius of Caesarea and Lactantius to offer more or less identical transcriptions
of letters to provincial governors issued by Galerius in 311 (Lactant, De mort. pers. 34;
Euseb. Hist. eccl. 8.17.6–10) and Licinius in 313 (Lactant, De mort. pers. 48; Euseb. Hist.
eccl. 10.5.2–14).
183 Coll. Leg. Mos. et Rom. 5.3.
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42 Humphries
or arms factories.184 The wider impact of this pattern of imperial presences

over the long term can be seen, for example, in the administrative divisions
of Italy in the fourth century. It comprised two dioceses: in the south, Italia
Suburbicaria was organised in such a way as to focus on the administration of
Rome; but in the north, Italia Annonaria was organised around the manage-
ment of supplies (annona) for the emperor’s entourage, above all the military
units that regularly traversed the region to and fro between the frontier zones
along the Rhine and Danube.185
Moreover, state-driven factors influencing the development of cities can be
observed not only at the level of the emperor’s influence, but also at that of his
administrative subordinates. Provincial governors could be active patrons of
cities, particularly of the provincial capitals that were their chief residences.
For instance, at Aphrodisias in Caria, almost all inscriptions recording build-
ing work in the fourth century attribute it to governors.186 Indeed, a city’s sta-
tus as a centre of provincial administration could bring wide-ranging benefits.
For example, in either the late-fourth or early-fifth century, insecurity on the
Rhine frontier forced the imperial government to abandon Trier as the major
administrative centre in Gaul and transfer its activities to Arles in the south.
Not only did Arles thus become the centre of operations of the chief imperial
official in Gaul, the praetorian prefect, but the city’s rise in status had ramifi-
cations that affected it in other ways, such as making the bishop of Arles the
most important bishop in the region.187 Of course, the presence of a governor
in a city could cause problems, as such a powerful individual was always going
to attract attentions from those seeking to gain his favour: in fourth-century
Antioch, Libanius offers various complaints of individuals trying to pervert
the course of justice through their influence with the governor,188 while the
celebrated story of the death of the female philosopher Hypatia at Alexandria
in 415 is bound up with competitions for influence between the prefect of
Egypt residing in the city, Orestes, and the local bishop Cyril.189
4.5 Cities after Empire

Such direct impacts of the administration can be detected not only in the
fourth and fifth centuries, but later too. In remaining imperial territories in the
184 Roncaglia 2018: 122–28; also S. James 1988 on fabricae.

185 Ruggini 1961: 1–4; Ward-Perkins 2014.
186 Roueché 2004: Introduction 16.
187 Heijmans 2004: 59–78 and 249–54 traces, respectively, the secular and ecclesiastical for-
tunes of the city in the fifth century.
188 E.g. Lib. Or. 51 and 52.
189 Soc. Hist. eccl. HE 7.13–15. Recent discussion in Watts 2017: 107–134.
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East, as we have noted earlier, the development on a grand scale of Iustiniana

Prima (Caričin Grad in Serbia) represents an ambitious urban project linked
to Justinian’s efforts to restructure the secular and ecclesiastical administra-
tion in the Balkans.190 Similar strategies can be observed also in the successor
kingdoms that displaced the Roman empire in the West. Reference has already
been made to Theoderic the Ostrogoth’s coming to Rome in imperial style in
500. In addition to his adventus, his visit was attended by other rituals designed
to evoke earlier imperial involvements at the urbs aeterna, such as entering the
senate, addressing the people in the Forum, sponsoring games in the Circus,
and residing in the old imperial palace.191 Furthermore, brick-stamps show
that Theoderic contributed to the restoration of one of Rome’s most vener-
able buildings, the Curia Senatus. Various spaces in Rome, both secular and
ecclesiastical, remained important places for the demonstration of royal au-
thority by the Ostrogothic kings in a clear continuation of habits established
under the last western emperors.192 Elsewhere in Italy, other cities served as
stages on which royal power was performed, with Ravenna (another favoured
residence of fifth-century emperors) in particular becoming a focus for embel-
lishment by Theoderic and his successors, with the construction of a palace,
churches, and royal mausoleum.193
Rulers of other western kingdoms similarly aped Roman imperial ceremo-
nial and practice. Gregory of Tours reports on the upkeep of circuses for the
entertainment of his subjects at Paris and Soissons under Chilperic I, while
the Lombard king Agilulf had his son, Adaloald, raised to the throne at the
circus in Milan in 604.194 Such uses of circuses in the post-Roman West evoked
not only continuity with the Roman past, but also imitated contemporary
imperial ceremonial at Constantinople, in which the hippodrome played a
central role. On occasion, this enthusiasm to emulate Roman rulers past and
present could result in western kings investing in the foundation of new cities
to commemorate their achievements. The Visigothic king of Spain Leovigild
is recorded as having founded two such centres, Victoriacum and Reccopolis
(the latter named for his son Reccared), to celebrate his achievement of Gothic
supremacy across the Iberian peninsula.195 Archaeological investigation of
190 See above pp. 28–30.

191 Anon. Val. 66–67.
192 Discussion and references in Humphries 2007: 45–49.
193 Deliyannis 2010: 106–38.
194 Chilperic: Greg. Tur. Hist. 5.17; Agilulf: Paul. Diac. HL 4.30. For the use of space in post-
Roman Gallic cities, see Halsall 2018. On the West more generally, Dey 2015: 127–89.
195 Joh. Bic. Chron. 50 (Reccopolis), 60 (Victoriacum); cf. 66 for his restoration of Roman
Italica.
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44 Humphries
Reccopolis suggests it was a considerable project: the site was designed as a

royal residence, with a palace complex and church at its urban heart, and in
its hinterland are traces of an aqueduct some 5 km in length.196 Such in-
vestment of effort is all the more impressive given that the occupation of
Reccopolis seems in fact to have been short-lived; but that perhaps only under-
scores the imperial-style ambitions of the Visigothic monarchy.
This section has examined different patterns of interactions between cities
and states (both imperial and post-Roman) across late antiquity. It has been
argued that while this is a period often associated with the decline of state
structures, there is still plentiful evidence for rulers interacting with cities,
at least in the core regions of their various territories. This is not to say that
nothing had changed. Far from it, there were various significant shifts: in fa-
vour of cities close to the imperial frontiers between the third century and
the fifth; with the rise of Constantinople from 330 onwards; and with the de-
cision of kings of the successor states to mimic imperial style (both past and
present) in the cities they chose to make their capitals. Under both Roman
and post-Roman rulers, such articulations of power did not necessarily require
the actual presence of the monarch: there existed a complex set of rituals that
allowed authority to be exerted in cities even when rulers were absent. Even
so, interactions between rulers and ruled will always have been most intense
in those cities where imperial or royal courts were actually resident. Alongside
such intense interactions, there will also have been wealth flowing into such
cities as a consequence of their political significance. This indicates important
economic considerations that must now command out attention.
5 Cities and the Transformation of the Ancient Economy
In addition to being centres of political activity, cities also played a signifi-

cant role in the ancient economy, albeit one that is endlessly debated by
modern scholars.197 It seems a reasonable assumption that the relationship
between cities and economic activity was symbiotic. On the one hand, cities
acted throughout antiquity (and beyond) as centres for markets and for eco-
nomic consumption and production.198 On the other hand, the considerable
196 Velázquez and Ripoll 2012; Martínez Jiménez 2017.

197 For some recent collaborative works, see Scheidel, Morris, and Saller 2007; De Blois and
Rich 2002. For late antiquity in particular, see the overviews in McCormick 2001: 27–114
and Wickham 2005: 693–824; also, the essays in Lavan 2013.
198 Morley 2002. Useful reflections on established models in Wallace-Hadrill 2019.
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e xpansion of interregional trade under the Roman empire was surely one of
the factors that contributed to the concurrent flourishing of cities.199 This was
certainly how a number of ancient commentators explained the remarkable
fortunes of the city of Aquileia, situated at the head of the Adriatic, and close
to a communications network that traversed the Julian Alps between north-
eastern Italy and the Balkans, thereby giving Aquileia and its merchants access
to markets in the Danubian provinces.200 Moreover, such contacts had impli-
cations far beyond the strictly economic: trade brought with it wide social and
cultural connections that can be seen reflected, for instance, in the spread of
religious cults, including, by late antiquity, Christianity.201 It is likely, therefore,
that any changes that occurred in economic life during late antiquity would
have a profound impact on cities.
The imposition of tighter state controls on civic finances has already
been referred to, and later in this study, discussion will turn to how the de-
ployment of wealth was influenced by religious change.202 Those scholars
who insist that late-antique cities experienced decline have tended to argue
that this was intimately connected with broader economic transitions that
they regard as marking a significant downturn—even a catastrophic one—
from what they perceive as the prosperity of earlier centuries. In particular,
the contraction of economic activity, especially interregional trade, that has
been observed in the West in the late-fourth and fifth centuries, and posited
for the East in the late-sixth and seventh centuries, has been regarded as a
significant factor in the decline of cities in these regions in precisely those
periods.203 There is not room here to engage in detail with the broader de-
bates on the economic history of late antiquity, so I confine my remarks in
what follows to a number of aspects that have a direct bearing on the fortunes
of cities.
5.1 Sources, Statistics, and Stories

As is so often the case, our picture is fragmented and incomplete: much de-
pends on the quality and quantity of the evidence (which, of course, varies
significantly across time and space), and interpretations often depend on the
extent to which scholars regard examples from particular cities and regions
as capable of being used to elucidate broader trends. Any attempt to reach a
199 Recent overview of the question in Whittow 2013.

200 Str. 5.8; Hdn. 8.2.3.
201 Sotinel 2005: 24–28; Roncaglia 2018: 101–15.
202 See pp. 70–72.
203 The basic argument of Ward-Perkins 2005; for an argument that the East was more
resilient, see Haldon 2016, and the response to it in Tedesco 2018.
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46 Humphries
detailed understanding of the workings of the economy in late antiquity—

and, indeed of the ancient economy as a whole—is fraught with difficulties,
not least in terms of finding evidence on which can be built the sort of statisti-
cal analyses of the sort that economic historians of the modern world are ac-
customed to use.204 Dossiers of documents giving detailed economic data are
generally lacking for late antiquity, with the exception of papyrus archives from
Egypt and a few other places in the Near East, which often dominate schol-
arly discussion.205 This is not to say that such evidence has only limited value.
To take an example of papyrological evidence found outside Egypt, a cache
of sixth-century documents found in a room linked to a Christian church at
Petra in Jordan (and which may have been the city’s cathedral) is revelatory of
the economic and social importance of the institutional church in that city in
late antiquity. Such evidence potentially has wider implications for appreciat-
ing the growing importance of the institutional Church in late-antique cities,
although it is not yet clear to what extent the circumstances obtaining at Petra
can be paralleled elsewhere.206
For the wider Mediterranean world outside Egypt and the Near East,
scholars have needed to examine other categories of evidence. Chief among
these is pottery, which survives in large quantities and has been subjected
to detailed classification of the type that allows it to be used to reconstruct
broad patterns of economic activity.207 For example, the study of a mphorae,
ceramic containers used in the transport of a variety of goods (oil and wine,
but also grain), has revealed a number of distinct types produced in spe-
cific locations, and analyses of their distribution outside their area of pro-
duction can, therefore, give some indication of the range and intensity,
and of the ebb and flow, of interregional trade.208 It is precisely on this
sort of evidence, for example, that Bryan Ward-Perkins built his analysis of
the economic and social downturn (including an imprecisely defined ‘de-
cline of comfort’) that accompanied the collapse of Roman power in late
antiquity.209
204 Schiavone 1996.

205 Indeed, in this connection, it is worth noting that two important analyses of late-
antique economic history have relied heavily on Egyptian documentation: Banaji 2001;
Sarris 2006.
206 For discussion, and an attempt to read the evidence of the Petra papyri in a broader
context, see Whittow 2007: 382–383.
207 Patterson and Rovelli 2004, Ward-Perkins 2005: 107.
208 As has been done, for example, in analyses of the amphorae dumped at Monte Testaccio
in Rome.
209 Ward-Perkins 2005: 87–120.
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5.2 A Tale of Many Cities

Certainly, numerous sites provide evidence of economic change being inex-
tricably bound up with urban transformation. A particularly striking example
has been yielded by the excavations in recent decades in the ancient centre
of Rome. Investigations in the imperial fora, a series of monumental piazzas
constructed between the ages of Julius Caesar and the emperor Trajan, have
revealed that they experienced different fates in late antiquity and the early
middle ages. While the Forum of Trajan seems to have maintained its monu-
mental aspect down to its destruction probably by earthquakes in the ninth
century,210 the neighbouring forum of Augustus and the Templum Pacis under-
went significant change. It is possible that the vast open space of the Templum
Pacis was already being used for commercial activities and burials by the sixth
century, and already by c. 500, there is evidence that the Forum of Augustus
was being used as a quarry for building material.211 This hints at a significant
change in the function of monumental space, and in some cases is even as-
sociated with the ‘ruralisation’ of former parts of the city centre: by the tenth
century, the pavement of the forum of Caesar was removed and the whole area
was converted into vineyards (the trenches in which the vines were planted
were discovered by archaeologists).212 Elsewhere in Rome’s historic centre,
excavations at Crypta Balbi (once a major urban amenity, where the grain of
the annona had been distributed to the populace) points to a similar set of
changes: lime kilns were constructed within what had once been porticoes and
were used for the burning of dismembered fragments of former monumental
buildings to produce lime for fertilising crops.213
This reuse of building elements in new construction projects is, of course,
not unique to Rome.214 Evidence from other centres shows that we need to be
sensitive to the particular circumstances obtaining in individual centres. For
one thing, the reuse of architectural elements does not only appear after 400:
at Athens, for example, it has been argued that buildings in the agora were
210 Packer 2001: 7.

211 Meneghini and Santangeli Valenzani 2004: 175 (templum Pacis), 179 (Forum of Augustus);
cf. 70–72 (for monuments being used as a source for building material) and 175–88 (for the
imperial fora in general).
212 Meneghini and Santangeli Valenzani 2004: 127–32.
213 Manacorda 2001.
214 The bibliography on spolia is vast: see most recently Underwood 2019. Most studies
of late-antique civic architecture (e.g. Jacobs 2013) will consider aspects of the topic
passim. For sensible approaches to ideological concerns, which are often overstated, see
Ward-Perkins 1999 and Leone 2015: 189–234. In addition to the examples discussed here,
see also pp. 79–80 below on the reuse of architectural elements in the construction of
churches.
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48 Humphries
already being dismantled and reused (in many cases immediately) for the con-
struction of defences in response to barbarian attacks in the third century.215
Moreover, it was not only external threats that prompted such instances of
reuse. The harbour at Aquileia shows the construction of two successive phas-
es of fortifications to defend the city along its eastern flank, and these have
been associated by some scholars with the two crises brought on by internal,
and ephemeral, upheavals: the first set, with squared towers that include some
reused inscriptions, seems to have been constructed in response to a siege of
Aquileia in the context of the bid for power by Maximinus Thrax in 235; the
second, characterised by the construction of semi-circular bastions incorpo-
rating some column fragments, have been associated with the city’s resistance
to the bid for power made by Julian in 361 which seemed for a while likely to
provoke a major civil war.216 These examples suggest our understanding of the
causes for the dismembering and reuse of older buildings needs to encompass
not just long term trends indicative, in some ways, of decline, but also rather
more ephemeral, short-lived and localised upheavals. In such cases, we also
need to consider the extent to which cities might recover from such relatively
brief assaults on their existence.
If these examples from Rome, Athens, and Aquileia remind us to be sensi-
tive to specific local contexts, others hint that local variations were a feature
generally of economic life in late antiquity. Here, two instances—the fortunes
of Marseille in southern Gaul and of the port cities of Palestine—will suffice to
illustrate broader trends.
Analysis of the archaeology of Marseille has suggested that the city, in con-
travention of the broader trends of late-antique urban and economic history,
may have experienced considerable prosperity during this period. The total
area occupied by the city seems to have expanded, while its churches were built
on a lavish scale. Altogether more importantly, the recovery in excavations of
statistically significant quantities of African and eastern Mediterranean pot-
tery suggest that the city was flourishing as a centre of long-distance interre-
gional trade through to the end of the sixth century and even into the seventh.
At this point African pottery comes to dominate the archaeological record,
which itself suggests a shift in the patterns of trade into which the city fit-
ted.217 This positive interpretation of Marseille’s economic fortunes needs to
be t empered, however, by the pragmatic consideration that statistics derived
215 Frantz 1988: 6–8.

216 On the sieges, Sotinel 2005: 8–10 and 55–59; fortifications: Bertacchi 1990: 209.
217 Loseby 1992a: 167–72.
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from the study of pottery discovered at Marseille may in fact be deceptive.

What such evidence shows directly is the presence in quantity of imported
containers, and not necessarily imported goods; also, the picture yielded by
statistical analysis of the pottery can really only shed light on fluctuations in
the relative scale of trade, rather than on its absolute volume.218 As to why
Marseille flourished at this time, it is clearly linked to local political conditions:
the city fell under the jurisdiction of the Merovingian Frankish kingdom of
Austrasia, of which it represented an outlying interest in a Provence otherwise
dominated by the Burgundians.219
If material from Marseille points to a possible instance of economic pros-
perity in late antiquity that apparently bucks broader trends, evidence from
ports at the other end of the Mediterranean apparently at first seems to reveal
decline. At Dor and Caesarea Maritima on the coast of Palestine, economic
expansion in the early Roman imperial period had been accompanied by the
construction of artificial harbour installations—those at Caesarea being par-
ticularly impressive examples of the use of concrete in Roman engineering.220
By the late-antique period, however, these harbour structures had all but
disappeared, probably owing to seismic activity along the Levantine coast that
caused sea levels to change and, in the case of Caesarea, the harbour works to
subside.221 In such circumstances, we might expect that both sites would ex-
perience economic decline. Yet analysis of the two cities’ late-antique phases
tells an apparently contradictory story: in fact, both Dor and Caesarea seem
to have prospered. In a development that parallels what we have already seen
at Marseille, the territory occupied by Caesarea even expanded considerably
beyond its early imperial limits, a circumstance that probably resulted from
its status as capital of the province of Palestina Prima from circa 300.222 Hence
the apparent degradation of the harbour installations needs to be interpreted
in the light of other evidence from the cities as suggesting not urban decay,
but rather a shift from accommodating trading vessels in artificial harbours to
using alternative arrangements—in the case of Dor, shipwrecks suggest that
this took the form of natural anchorages provided by offshore islands.223
218 Loseby 1992a: 172–73.

219 Loseby 1992a: 174–78.
220 Holum 1988.
221 Kingsley 2001: 75, 78.
222 Kingsley 2001: 71–75, 78–85; for Caesarea’s prominence in late antiquity, see Sivan 2008:
302–17.
223 Kingsley 2001: 75.
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50 Humphries
5.3 Cities and the Late-Antique Countryside

Analyses of sites such as Marseille and the Palestinian ports, to which many
other examples might be added, suggests not only that the economic fortunes
of cities in late antiquity were subject to considerable variation, but also that
any overarching picture of late-antique urban decline driven by economic
stagnation needs to take account of the particular circumstances in which
individual cities existed. The understanding of these many and varied con-
texts is an area which has seen considerable advances in recent scholarship.
Roman cities—indeed, ancient cities more generally—consisted not solely of
a monumental, residential, and economic urban core, but also of extensive
rural hinterlands (in Greek, chora; in Latin, territorium). As has been noted
above, these ancient landscapes surrounding cities have received increasing
attention from archaeologists since the end of the Second World War, largely
through the development of sophisticated techniques of non-invasive archaeo-
logical survey. A comparatively recent offshoot of the growth in interest in late-
antique cities has been increased analysis of those cities’ rural h
interlands.224
In some regions of the Mediterranean, late-antique occupation of the country-
side was readily apparent, notably among the well-preserved towns and villages
of the upland plateau near Antioch.225 While in other regions the remains
of the late-antique countryside are, superficially at any rate, less spectacular
(with the exception of well-preserved villa sites), archaeological investigation,
particularly that informed by new understandings of ceramic evidence, has
begun to reveal a great deal about the economic relationships that existed be-
tween cities and their rural hinterlands.226
In some cases, it is possible to see declining rural occupation apparently
matching changing economic fortunes and urban contraction. The south
Etruria survey undertaken in the wake of the Second World War already
pointed to a significant reduction in the density of rural settlement in the
area north of Rome between antiquity and the middle ages, which implied
much less intensive agricultural production in this region. More recent work
in the Tiber valley, taken together with a much-enriched picture of Rome’s
fortunes at this period, suggests that the contraction of rural production was
224 Note the proliferation of conference volumes since the late 1990s: Brogiolo, Gauthier, and
Christie 2000; Burns and Eadie 2001; Bowden, Lavan, and Machado 2004; Christie 2004a.
225 Summary in Foss 1996. The importance of the countryside seems to have been appreci-
ated somewhat earlier by historians working on the eastern Mediterranean than those
working on the West: see e.g. also various contributions to King and Cameron 1994.
226 For a helpful overview, see Chavarría and Lewit 2004.
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intimately linked to the changing fortunes of the former ancient capital.227

Elsewhere, however, the reconsideration of evidence, particularly ceramics,
is challenging conventional pictures of generalised stagnation and decline.
Recent work at Corinth, both in the city itself and in field survey undertak-
en to the east of the urban centre, suggests (on the basis of ceramic evidence
above all) that it may have seen rather more continuity of economic pros-
perity through to the sixth century than other Greek cities, such as Athens
and Sparta.228
It is no exaggeration that archaeological understanding of the economic
interactions of town and country in late antiquity has undergone a radical re-
evaluation in the last quarter century. Concurrent with this, and no doubt driv-
en by contemporary ecological concerns, has been an increased awareness of
the precariousness of an agriculturally-based economy and of the city dwellers
who depended on it.229 While the topic is still one of considerable debate,
there is sufficient evidence to suggest that changed environmental conditions
in the sixth century might have led to a downturn in economic vitality.230 At
the same time, outbreaks of plague—first attested at Pelusium in the Nile delta
in 541, spreading to Constantinople by the following year, and then found at
regular intervals across the Mediterranean world for the next two centuries—
will have had, by virtue of levels of mortality, some sort of impact on the avail-
ability of agricultural labourers.231 At the current stage of the enquiry, as with
other aspects of the late ancient economy, it would be risky to venture broad
conclusions;232 nevertheless, the wealth of work currently being undertaken
on the late-antique countryside and its relationship to urban centres stresses
once more the importance of paying close attention to the specific contexts
presented by individual regions and cities.233
227 Marazzi 2004.

228 Slane and Sanders 2005; Pettegrew 2007.
229 Decker 2009.
230 Cassiod. Var. 12.25.2–4. For debates on late Roman climate change, see Harper 2017
(in favour) and Sessa 2019 (sceptical).
231 See the essays collected in Little 2007; in particular, Kennedy 2007 argues that the de-
population caused by plague may have been instrumental in causing the abandonment
of the villages in the uplands near Antioch—a transition previously thought to have some
connection with the collapse of imperial power at the rise of Islam.
232 It is noteworthy that many of the contributors to the debates (e.g. in Brogiolo, Gauthier, and
Christie 2000; Burns and Eadie 2001; Bowden, Lavan, and Machado 2004; Christie 2004a)
offer provisional conclusions only; for the desirability of synthesis, however, see Bowden
and Lavan 2004: xxv–xxvi.
233 For a useful review of the status quaestionis, see Christie 2004b.
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52 Humphries
6 Religion and the City
As noted earlier, even scholars who regard late antiquity as an age of urban
decline can conceive of those religious transformations that overcame cities
in the period and which are usually described as ‘Christianization’, as a po-
tentially positive development.234 Indeed, the whole subject of Christianity’s
increasingly visible presence frequently dominates analyses and theoretical
discussions of urban change in late antiquity, much as the religious shift from
paganism to Christianity more generally can seem to dominate studies of late
antiquity as a whole.235 The idea that urban space could be representative of
shifting religious identities is explicit, after all, in the vignette with which we
began: Gregory of Tours’ retelling of the legend of the Seven Sleepers vividly
evokes both an urban landscape utterly transformed in step with the advent of
a Christian society, as well as the eclipse of institutions and spaces that can be
classified as ‘pagan’.
Religious competition within cities is apparent even before the age of
Constantine. It can be seen in the campaign of Christian evangelisation as-
sociated with Paul in the New Testament Acts of the Apostles: Paul preaches in
public places and Jewish synagogues while his opponents gather to denounce
the threat he poses, as the silversmiths of Ephesus do when they gather in their
city’s theatre to chant acclamations in support of their local goddess Artemis,
whose worship they regard Paul as threatening.236 As we move through the pre-
Constantinian phases of Christian history, such urban topographical markers
remain flashpoints for religious tension: martyr acta, for example, frequently
refer to confrontations between Christians and their persecutors in the forum
or the circus, where there was often a demand made that sacrifice be offered
to the pagan gods.237 Such evidence as we have indicates that Christianity
only began to acquire an identifiable monumental presence—in terms of
buildings adapted for ritual use, like that excavated at Dura Europos—in the
third century.238 But as soon as this development occurred, such buildings
became a focus for religious competition, as can be deduced from records of
234 Brogiolo and Ward-Perkins 1999: xv–xvi.

235 It is possible to cite only a few exemplary cases here. Krautheimer 1983, for example,
considered Rome, Constantinople, and Milan in the fourth and fifth centuries express-
ly as Christian capitals. Compare Curran 2000 and Cooper and Hillner 2007 on Rome.
Sotinel 2005 examines the growing importance of Christian identity at Aquileia. Leone
2013 examines African transformations in terms of ‘the end of the pagan city’.
236 Acts 19.27–28 and 34.
237 On these aspects of martyr acta: Barnes 2010: 43–66.
238 MacMullen 2009: 2–10.
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the s o-called “Great Persecution” begun under Diocletian. One of the opening
acts of this purge was the destruction at Nicomedia of a Christian building—
visible from the palace, but sufficiently flimsy to be demolished in a single day.239
The end of the persecutions brought with them, as Constantine and Licinius’
instructions to provincial governors in 313 state quite clearly, the restitution
of Christian properties.240 But any aspirations towards religious co-existence
that might have lingered in the early fourth century were gradually undone
as, already under Constantine’s tutelage, Christianity began to gain the upper
hand. Already in Eusebius of Caesarea’s description of Constantine’s founda-
tion of Constantinople (written within two years of the first Christian em-
peror’s death), we find the city being presented as a fundamentally Christian
space, a physical manifestation of the eclipse of paganism that Eusebius gener-
ally attributes to Constantine’s reign. He remarks:
In honouring with exceptional distinction the city which bears his name,
he [Constantine] embellished it with very many places of worship, very
large martyr shrines, and splendid houses, some standing before the city
and others in it. By these at the same time he honoured the tombs of the
martyrs and consecrated the city to the God of the martyrs. Being full of
the breath of God’s wisdom, which he reckoned a city bearing his own
name should display, he saw fit to purge it of all idol-worship, so that
nowhere appeared those images of the supposed gods which are wor-
shipped in temples, nor altars foul with bloody slaughter, nor sacrifice
offered as a holocaust in fire, nor feasts of demons, nor any of the other
customs of the superstitious.
τὴν δέ γ’ ἐπώνυμον αὐτοῦ πόλιν ἐξόχῳ τιμῇ γεραίρων εὐκτηρίοις πλείοσιν ἐφαί-
δρυνε μαρτυρίοις τε μεγίστοις καὶ περιφανεστάτοις οἴκοις, τοῖς μὲν πρὸ τοῦ
ἄστεος τοῖς δ’ ἐν αὐτῷ τυγχάνουσι, δι’ ὧν ὁμοῦ καὶ τὰς τῶν μαρτύρων μνήμας
ἐτίμα καὶ τὴν αὐτοῦ πόλιν τῷ τῶν μαρτύρων καθιέρου θεῷ. ὅλως δ’ ἐμπνέων
θεοῦ σοφίας, ἣν τῆς ἐπηγορίας τῆς αὐτοῦ πόλιν ἐπώνυμον ἀποφῆναι ἔκρινε,
καθαρεύειν εἰδωλολατρίας ἁπάσης ἐδικαίου, ὡς μηδαμοῦ φαίνεσθαι ἐν αὐτῇ
τῶν δὴ νομιζομένων θεῶν ἀγάλματα ἐν ἱεροῖς θρησκευόμενα, ἀλλ’ οὐδὲ βωμοὺς
λύθροις αἱμάτων μιαινομένους, οὐ θυσίας ὁλοκαυτουμένας πυρί, οὐ δαιμονικὰς
ἑορτάς, οὐδ’ ἕτερόν τι τῶν συνήθων τοῖς δεισιδαίμοσιν.241
239 Lactant. De mort. pers. 12.3–5.

240 Lactant. De mort. pers. 48.9 and 13; Euseb. Hist. eccl. 10.5.9–11. The instruction is implicit
also in Galerius’ instructions of 311 (Lactant. De mort. pers. 34.4; Euseb. Hist. eccl. 8.17.9).
241 Euseb. Vit. Const. 3.48.1–2, trans. Cameron and Hall 1999: 140.
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54 Humphries
Eusebius’ view is certainly extreme, and scholars have challenged not just
details of his analysis but also some of its basic assumptions.242 Nevertheless,
the idea that Constantinople represented a contested religious space was al-
ready apparent within a generation when, probably in the first half of 362,243
Himerius delivered a speech there praising Julian, and dwelling on the apos-
tate emperor’s contributions to—and, in essence, subtractions from—the
city’s religious topography. Julian, he remarked, had not just embellished the
city with new buildings:
He has also washed away by his virtue the darkness that was preventing
us from lifting our hands up to the Sun and has thereby given us the gift
of raising us up to heaven as if from some Tartarus of lightless life. He has
raised up temples to the gods, has established religious rites from abroad
in the city, and has made sacred the mysteries of the heavenly gods intro-
duced into the city.
ἀλλ’ ὅτι τοῦτο μὲν αὐτὸς τὸν κωλύοντα ζόφον ἀνατείνειν χεῖρας εἰς Ἥλιον
ἀρετῇ καθήρας εἰς οὐρανὸν ἀναπέμπειν οἷον ἐκ ταρτάρου τινὸς καὶ ἀλαμποῦς
βίου δεδώρηται, τεμένη μὲν ἐγείρων θεοῖς, τελετὰς δὲ θείας καθιδρύων τῇ πόλει
ξένας, τῶν δ’ εἰς αὐτὴν θεῶν οὐρανίων μυστήρια θεοποιῶν·244
How much Julian might have achieved during a brief sojourn in Constantinople
is hard to gauge, but given the Christian character of Constantine’s city stressed
by Eusebius, and the further embellishments, such as the importing of apos-
tolic relics to the city by Constantius II, the symbolic significance attached by
Himerius to Julian’s activities is unmistakable, and the idea that this city (along
with others pregnant with ideological capital, like Rome) could be a battle-
ground for rival religious ideologies seems clear enough.245
A rather more pragmatic understanding of the role of Christianity in urban
identities under Constantine has already been noted in the case of Orcistus in
central Asia Minor.246 Nevertheless, no study of urban developments across
the Mediterranean world between the third century and the seventh can fail
242 E.g. Errington 1988: 314, challenging the accuracy of Eusebius’ picture of temples ran-
sacked for the benefit of the new foundation.
243 Date: Penella 2007: 34–35.
244 Himer. Or. 41.8, trans. Penella 2007: 62.
245 For this interpretation, see Penella 2007: 44–45, and 62 n. 69. On Constantius’ contri-
butions to Constantinople’s sacred identity and religious topography, see Henck 2001:
289–93.
246 See above, pp. 26–27.
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to arrive at the conclusion that Christianity came to exercise a decisive influ-

ence on urban centres, in terms of both topography and power. Conventional
views of the impact of Christianity on urban change can be outlined as follows:
as the traditional institutions of classical Roman urban administration con-
tracted and the Church increasingly shouldered the burdens of administrative
responsibilities in cities (often, it should be noted, with the encouragement of
the imperial state), so too the landscape of cities came to be redefined in a way
that reflected this new dispensation. In broad terms, this meant that churches
increasingly became the most prominent buildings in an urban e nvironment,
their importance reflecting their centrality not only to the religious life of
the community, but also to its social and administrative functions.247 As we
move through the late-antique period, the prominence of church buildings in
the urban fabric increases, thus enshrining in urban topographies the wider
societal, cultural, and administrative transformations of the era. The extent of
the available evidence on this topic is vast, as is the scholarship that has de-
bated it. The following discussion aims to highlight the main trends as well as
highlighting areas where the evidence is ambiguous or open to debate.
6.1 Religious Change and Urban Governance: the Rise of the Bishop
The concurrent rise of Christianity and the redefinition of cities brought with
them profound institutional changes in terms of how cities were run. This is
visible, above all, in terms of the rise to prominence of the Christian bishop in
urban communities throughout the Mediterranean world from the fourth cen-
tury onwards.248 Of course, bishops had been prominent in Christian commu-
nities before Constantine, as pastoral leaders, representatives of their flocks
in interactions with others, and administrators of such property as came the
way of the church. These roles continued in the post-Constantinian period:
it is important not to forget that pastoral duties remained their paramount
responsibility.249 Even so, it is clear that the temporal influence of bishops
increased massively in the post-Constantinian period, a feature that has
247 For the archaeological prominence of churches, and the problems it poses, see Bowden
2001: 57; for churches as a locus of social and administrative activity, see Lavan 2003b:
324–25.
248 The bibliography on this subject is vast. Convenient overviews can be found in
Liebeschuetz 2001a: 137–68; a model regional study is Lizzi 1989; useful collections of
studies include Rebeillard and Sotinel 1998; and Fear, Fernández Urbiña, and Marcos
Sanchez 2013.
249 Rapp 2005 represents a powerful restatement of this theme. Besides sermons, numerous
episcopal letters (such as those of Ambrose of Milan, or the Festal letters of Alexandrian
bishops like Athanasius, Theophilus, and Cyril) make the point abundantly clear.
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56 Humphries
been stressed in some influential studies.250 From the very beginning of the
Christian empire, this occurred sometimes with the explicit encouragement of
the emperor: already under Constantine we find legislation granting bishops
important roles in the arbitration of legal disputes and the manumission of
slaves; and in connection with the Council of Nicaea (325), we also find him
putting the apparatus of the cursus publicus at the disposal of bishops wishing
to attend.251
The association of cities with episcopal leadership provided a powerful
vehicle for continuity from late antiquity into the middle ages—indeed, in
some places where direct archaeological continuity is difficult to establish, it
is the only element that connects the ancient and medieval phases of cities.252
Where continuity throughout the period is observable, the process of coalesc-
ing urban and ecclesiastical identities is highlighted by a perceptible shift in
the topography of cities to cluster around cathedral churches while older foci
of social and political power, such as fora and agorai, were abandoned.253 The
new centrality of episcopal structures in urban centres is strikingly observable
in several new urban foundations in late antiquity, such as Grado in north-
eastern Italy and Caričin Grad, where from the beginning churches were the
dominant buildings.254 In the latter case particularly, the fact that its acropolis
was dominated by a large cathedral complex has been interpreted as a reflec-
tion of how, by the time of the site’s foundation under Justinian, the church
had effectively become an arm of the imperial administration.255
6.2 The Making of Christian Cities

The typical topographical model of the Christian city in late antiquity is of
a cathedral within the walls and martyr shrines clustered in cemeteries out-
side and usually adjacent to its walls, and numerous examples can be adduced
250 The classic statement is Bowersock 1986.

251 CTh 1.27.1 (c. 318: courts), 4.7.1 (321: manumission); Euseb. Vit. Const. 3.6.1 (cursus publicus).
Recent discussion of these and other privileges in Wipszycka 2015: 171–93; Lenski 2016:
197–206.
252 Note Verhulst 1999: 21–23, 149, on the region between the Somme and the Meuse in north-
western Europe; cf. Loseby 2000: 92 on the endurance of towns ‘as centres of identity and
authority … in a gradually changing society’.
253 Aquileia: Sotinel 2005: 250–270; Ephesus (and other examples from Asia Minor): Jacobs
2013: 322–326.
254 Grado: Zanini 1998: 231–232. Caričin Grad: see above pp. 28–30. See in general Zanini
2003.
255 For the increased role of bishops in civic administration in the eastern empire by the
sixth century, see Liebeschuetz 2001a: 152–55.
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to support this general picture.256 Yet interpreting the power dynamics that
led to this broad pattern is less straightforward, as a brief consideration of
the example of Milan will demonstrate. A comparison of its topography at
either end of the fourth century would appear to demonstrate remarkable
change. At the outset, when it was a favoured residence of the western em-
peror Maximian, Milan’s appearance—with its impressive walls, colonnaded
porticos, and imperial quarter—resembled that of other tetrarchic ‘capitals’.257
A hundred years later, however, Milan’s outward aspect had been radically
transformed into that of an emphatically Christian city; this was most obvious
in its extramural areas, where the main approaches to the city were dominated
by large churches.258 The latter stages of this development coincide with the
career of the city’s most celebrated fourth-century bishop, Ambrose: in his
episcopate, the city had acquired an important cult of martyrs, with whom
Ambrose associated himself for eternity by arranging for his own burial amid
their shrines in the city’s western cemeteries.259 Thus it appears that the trans-
formation of Milan’s topography provides an eloquent physical manifestation
of the increased prominence of ecclesiastical leaders in imperial society in the
fourth century.260
On closer inspection, however, the picture is considerably more ambiguous.
Not all Milanese churches constructed before c. 400 can be attributed to the
building activities of Ambrose. This arises from the reality (demonstrable in
spite of Ambrose’s efforts in his own writings to present himself as the city’s
leading light) that Ambrose’s dominance at Milan was less than complete,
and that he was challenged not only by heterodox Christian o pponents,
but also by the apparatus—indeed, the very presence—of the imperial
court, which was established in the city for many years before and during
his episcopate. Hence any picture of Milan’s transformation in the fourth
century needs to take account of these other players. In the case of the im-
perial court, it is clear that it could commandeer ecclesiastical space in op-
position to Ambrose. Similarly, it is likely that the enormous intramural
cathedral at Milan, which is much the largest church of this period found in
Italy outside Rome, was built with imperial patronage, perhaps decades be-
fore Ambrose became bishop. Thus the topographical development of Milan
in the fourth century does not reflect a straightforward transformation of
256 For western Europe, see Cantino Wataghin 2003; on Greece, Rothaus 2000: 99–104; for
Asia Minor, Jacobs 2013: 307–26.
257 Dey 2015: 73–77.
258 Krautheimer 1983: 77–92.
259 McLynn 1994: 226–37.
260 Indeed, Ambrose’s case is central to the argument of Bowersock 1986.
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58 Humphries
power ‘from emperor to bishop’ (to use Bowersock’s classic formulation);

rather, it can be regarded as the physical residues of various interest groups
in the city, sometimes working in concert, but equally sometimes working in
opposition.261
Around the same time that Ambrose was seeking to assert his dominance
at Milan, a similar struggle for power and influence, again with topographi-
cal ramifications, can be seen at Rome during the pontificate of his older
contemporary, Damasus I. His elevation had been contested, as an opposing
faction with the Roman Church supported a rival bishop, Ursinus. This division
was manifested in the seizure of rival basilicas within the city, with Damasus’
supporters attacking Ursinus’ partisans (and killing 137 of them) in the ba-
silica of Sicininus (later the church of Sta Maria Maggiore).262 Even after the
end of this affair, Damasus was compelled to assert and reassert his episco-
pal authority over Rome, and his efforts to heal a bitterly divided Christian
community was expressed through topographical means. Above all, Damasus’
pontificate is associated with a systematic reorganisation of the cult of the
Roman martyrs and the extramural cemeteries in which they were venerated.
It has been argued compellingly that this intervention in Roman ecclesiastical
topography—with the setting up of monumental verse inscriptions extolling
the martyrs’ virtues—was undertaken in large measure to provide a common
identity for Rome’s Christians that might overcome the divisions visible at the
time of his election.263
The cases of Milan and Rome make clear the necessity of paying special at-
tention to local contexts in order to reach a nuanced picture of the impact of
Christianity on the city. Indeed, as studies of the late ancient city multiply, it
is becoming clear that the Christianization of urban centres was diverse over
time and space. In part this reflects the variable rate at which Christianity ex-
panded in different parts of the Mediterranean world—indeed, it should be
noted that the rate at which Christianity grew even in purely numerical terms
is a subject of considerable debate.264 Thus, in some regions, such as Spain,
church buildings only begin to appear in cities at a rather later, fifth-century
date by comparison with, for example, parts of Italy where such developments
261 Conflict: McLynn 2004: 158–219. Milan’s cathedral: Krautheimer 1983: 74–77. Architectural
palimpsest: Humphries 1999: 196–202.
262 For the topographical dimension to the conflict, and a discussion of the major sources,
see Curran 2000: 137–55.
263 Major studies (in addition to Curran 2000), include Sághy 2000, Trout 2003, and
Trout 2015, with the most up-to-date discussion and commentary of the inscriptions.
264 See, inter alia, Salzman 2002.
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were already well underway in the fourth century.265 Even within regions there
could be considerable variation from city to city in terms of where churches
were constructed.266
It is also clear that the pace at which change occurred reflected the way
in which church authorities intersected with local interest groups. In this re-
spect, a comparison between the topographies of Rome and Constantinople
(where the evidence is richest) is instructive.267 In both cities, churches were
built with imperial patronage, but in very different locations. At Rome, the
imperial foundations, such as St Peter’s and the Lateran, tended to be on the
fringes of the urban centre, whereas at Constantinople, from its foundation by
Constantine, the church of Hagia Sophia rose at the political centre of the city,
close by the imperial palace and hippodrome. Such distinctions hardly reflect
different levels of imperial patronage of the church, but rather the extent to
which church, state, and local concerns intersected. At Constantinople, the re-
development of the city was from the outset controlled in fundamental aspects
by Christian emperors; at Rome, by contrast, imperial foundations needed to
fit into a dense architectural fabric developed over several centuries.268
6.3 Sects in the City: Urban Change and Religious Conflict

Yet religious change in late-antique cities cannot simply be measured by
counting the appearance of Christian buildings. A major problem facing
historians, not just of cities but of the Mediterranean world more generally, is
the ways in which conversion to Christianity brought about the demise of pre-
existing cult systems, particularly the traditional Graeco-Roman religious ac-
tivities grouped under the title of ‘paganism’.269 It is a difficult task to observe,
never mind to quantify, this process in terms of urban change. To be sure,
265 Kulikowski 2004: 220–40, noting that churches in Spanish cities only begin to appear
in numbers in the fifth century, and even then only in peripheral locations; for Italia
Annonaria, see Humphries 1999: 188–207.
266 As Loseby 1992b notes for southern Gaul.
267 Few cities other than Rome or Constantinople present such rich documentary and ar-
chaeological records; even so, the impact of local dynamics on changing patterns of
church use can be explored for Alexandria (see McKenzie 2007: 240–51, esp. 250–51 on
competition for space between Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian factions after 451)
and for Antioch (see Shepardson 2014, including, at 204–40, a useful overview of cities
across the empire).
268 Ward-Perkins 2012.
269 For debates on the nature of conversion, see esp. the nuanced analysis of Markus 1990.
On the extent to which Christian preconceptions inform (or even distort) normative
constructions of religion, see Boyarin 2004. For the question in relation to cities, see,
e.g., the methodological reflections of Rothaus 2000: 1–7.
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60 Humphries
the destruction of temples by Christian activists did occasionally occur, and

sometimes temples were destroyed (or adapted) to make way for churches.270
Unsurprisingly, such episodes were embellished in narrative sources written
from partisan perspectives; in turn, these need to be treated extremely care-
fully in any attempt to reconstruct any approximation of what might actually
have happened.
A particularly celebrated example is provided by the fate of the great cult
complex of the Serapeum in Alexandria, destroyed in the early 390s. This
temple, begun by Ptolemy I and embellished by many successors, was still in
the fourth century celebrated as one of traditional religion’s great cult centres.271
Its destruction is narrated by a number of fifth century—and later—Christian
sources, all of which suggests that the episode became something of a cause
célèbre in history of religious confrontation in the late Roman world. The
earliest account is in Rufinus’ Ecclesiastical History, written only a decade
after the destruction, but already showing signs of recasting for propagandist
ends, in that it places emphasis on the character of the Alexandrian bishop
Theophilus as hero of the story, obliterating this most ostentatious symbol
of traditional cult in the city, and building over its ruins a monastery, a con-
struction that exemplifies the transition from paganism to Christianity.272 In
fact, archaeological investigation of the site suggests that such new Christian
structures as there were rose not on the site, but along its western flank.273 In
short, the destruction of the Serapeum took on a rhetorical significance in ac-
counts of the Christian triumph over paganism that is not matched by the ar-
chaeological evidence from the site itself.
The case of the Serapeum demonstrates that we need to be extremely
cautious in our use of literary accounts of religious confrontation leading to
temple destruction and church construction. What is true of ecclesiastical his-
toriography is even more so for another dominant narrative form of Christian
late antiquity: hagiography. Saints’ lives from across the Mediterranean world
routinely recount their protagonists’ participation in the destruction of pagan
cult sites. Some seem, at first sight, to provide insights that might well shed
light on aspects of urban change: Mark the Deacon’s Life of Porphyry of Gaza,
270 Fowden 1978 was a pioneering study. More recent overviews, advocating caution, are pro-
vided by Dijkstra 2008, 2011, and 2015; Jacobs 2013: 294–95; and the essays collected in
Hahn, Emmel, and Gotter 2008.
271 Late-antique descriptions are conveniently assembled in McKenzie, Gibson, and
Reyes 2004: 104–107.
272 Main sources: Ruf. Hist. eccl. 11.22–23; Soc. Hist. eccl. 5.16; Sozom. Hist. eccl. 7.25. Recent
discussion in Hahn 2008 (particularly good on rhetorical exaggeration) and Dijkstra 2015.
273 McKenzie, Gibson, and Reyes 2004: 107–109.
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for instance, recounts the destruction of a major cult site in that city under
episcopal leadership in the early fifth century.274 In narrative terms, however,
such episodes serve to exemplify the saints’ powers over demonic forces, so
much so that we can sometimes see the stories of the destructive powers of
Christian saints confronted with pagan shrines accumulate and grow more
impressive in successive retellings.275 Therefore, we would be well advised to
resist accepting such accounts at face value and be constantly alert to possible
exaggerations. Nevertheless, such texts, even if they can be questioned on spe-
cific matters of detail, still provide us with vivid insights into shifting attitudes
to pagan cult sites in an increasingly Christian world.
Some indication of how we need to temper our enthusiasm for accounts of
topographical change in Christian narrative texts can be deduced from other
documents, such as the legislation promulgated by Christian emperors. While
the laws generally adopt, as is well known, a rhetorically intransigent pose in
terms of condemning pagan cult and cult places, the bold assertions in some
laws are sometimes contradicted by others that present a more measured
and circumspect attitude. Thus in a famous law of 341, the western emperor
Constans forbade in trenchant terms anything that smacked of superstition;
yet only a year later, the self-same emperor was adopting a more circumspect
tone, permitting the continued existence of extramural temples if they were
connected with the processions that started circus games.276 Later emperors
were certainly concerned to preserve temple buildings as urban amenities, and
we should be wary of assuming that there is some axiomatic relationship be-
tween condemnation and destruction.277
Ultimately, it is extremely difficult to gauge the extent to which such
instances reflect widespread religious change or imply a kind of active
“de-paganization”. It might be the case, after all, that pagan cult could continue
in domestic settings quite independently of temples and other monumental
structures.278 Once more, it is important that such evidence as we have should
be interpreted with an eye to local contexts and with the understanding that
274 On the essential unreliability of the text, see Saradi 2008: 117–22.
275 For a classic analysis, see Delehaye 1962: 101–18 on the medieval metamorphosis of
Procopius of Caesarea (first mentioned by Eusebius), including (at 108) his ability in a
later retelling to smash pagan images to pieces by making the sign of the cross.
276 Contrast CTh 16.10.2 (341) and 16.10.3 (342).
277 On the legal evidence, its limits, and the preservation of temples as civic amenities, see
Jacobs 2013: 286–91, 296–300. On condemnation without destruction, see Hahn 2008:
340–42.
278 Frankfurter 2017 offers a suggestive study of religious change in domestic contexts, empha-
sising the difficulty of categorising materials as straightforwardly “pagan” or “Christian”.
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62 Humphries
any picture likely to emerge will surely suggest considerable regional diversity.
Similarly, observations of the persistence of paganism must be read carefully,
if distorted pictures of pagan resistance to the Christian state—such as that
once postulated for Rome in the late-fourth and early-fifth centuries—are not
to result.279
Furthermore, we also need to bear in mind that our understanding of re-
ligious change in late-antique cities needs to move beyond the traditional
grand narrative organised around a binary opposition between paganism and
Christianity. It should also take into consideration co-existence and conflict
with other religions, such as Manichaeism and Judaism, as well as the palpa-
ble division of Christians into rival groups, such as Donatists and Catholics in
Africa, or the rival patriarchates in Alexandria that emerged from the divisive
debates at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Presumably, similar sorts of divi-
sions will have been important also with the advent in the west in the course
of the fifth century of barbarian rulers who adhered to heterodox brands of
Christianity different from those to which their new subjects belonged. Exactly
how such differences worked out in cities and the spaces within them across
late antiquity is difficult to gauge, except for cases when we hear, as we do
under Ambrose at Milan, of rival groups taking control of different topographi-
cal locations.280 This presumably led to conflict in some places, although our
sources are far from transparent and usually report such interactions accord-
ingly to ideological stances. For Vandal Africa, for instance, we have a bleak
picture from a variety of authors, such as Prosper of Aquitaine and Victor of
Vita, which stress instances of violent desecration of Catholic places of worship
by the region’s new Arian overlords.281 Again, however, the perspectives of the
sources must be considered: Victor in particular sought to present the Vandals
as ruthless persecutors, deserving of imperial attention (as, indeed, turned out
to be the case when Justinian launched his reconquest of Africa in 534).
More significantly, and in archaeological terms more easily visible, our
picture of late-antique religious topographies needs to encompass the con-
tinued vitality of Jewish communities. While some Christian literary sources
tended to highlight episodes of conflict, this needs to be set beside the evi-
dence of monumental late-antique synagogues that have been excavated in
various cities, such as Sardis and Ostia.282 Equally, however, authors with less
279 Exploded in a series of studies culminating in Alan Cameron 2011.

280 See above pp. 35, 57.
281 Prosper, Chron. s.a.439.5. For Victor, see Lancel 2002.
282 Sardis: Magness 2005. Ostia: Olsson, Mitternacht, and Brandt 2001; cf., for social interac-
tions with Christians, Boin 2013: 155–58, 167–70.
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of a polemical agenda stressed religious harmony between Christians and

Jews as a public good. An anonymous chronicle of the reign of Theoderic the
Ostrogoth in Italy mentions both the king’s respectful attitude to the bish-
op of Rome, in spite of their confessional differences, and his protection of
Jewish communities.283 The continued vitality of Judaism, not least in its an-
cient Levantine homeland, provides an interesting counterpoint to the con-
ventional tale of inexorable Christianization. At Capernaum in the Galilee,
for instance, any picture of the development of a church on a site identified
as the house of the disciple Peter needs to take account also of the construc-
tion nearby of a large synagogue complex.284 Moreover, if we include the
rise of Islam in our periodization of late antiquity, then we need also to con-
sider the impact that it had on urban centres. As with Christianity, however,
the picture yielded by the evidence suggests a complex picture of continuity
and change.285
Yet another important consideration concerns chronology, and particularly
identifiable gaps between the ‘end’ of a pagan cult locus and its replacement
by a Christian one. Even where Christian churches rose on or within pagan
sanctuaries, they rarely did so immediately following upon any destruction of
the pre-existing fabric; moreover, the repurposing of a pagan temple for use
as a church did not always occur for ideological reasons, as mundane con-
siderations of practicality and cost also probably played a role.286 In other
words, pagan cult buildings did not simply come to be abandoned because
of Christian mobs destroying them or forcibly converting them into churches,
however much this might be the preferred narrative of late-antique texts. In
many cases, temples and shrines seem to have fallen into disuse not because
of direct, dramatic, and destructive Christian action, but rather as a result of a
long-drawn-out process of abandonment as the numbers of pagans dwindled
over time. Between 379 and 383, so we learn from an inscription, a statue which
had long been toppled from its perch was re-erected in the Capitolium at
Verona by the local provincial governor.287 Far away in the middle Nile valley,
the centuries-old temple at Luxor was repurposed in the tetrarchic period as a
military fortress—an act hard to imagine if the complex still retained the full
283 Anon. Val. 65 (pope) and 81 (Jews).

284 Hoppe 1994: 33–40.
285 Hillenbrand 1999; Dey 2015: 213–20; Jacobs 2013: 677.
286 This point is emphasised, for the eastern provinces, by several contributors to Hahn,
Emmel, and Gotter 2008. For North Africa, an analogous process is suggested in
Leone 2013: 27–82.
287 C IL 5.3332: statuam in capitolio diu iacentem.
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64 Humphries
range of its cult functions.288 The reasons for such abandonments were likely
quite varied, and perhaps we would do well to think of every pagan temple
having its own particular trajectory along this path.
Finally, however much we attempt to include non-Christian religions in
our consideration of changing city topographies, a concentration on sacred
space still produces only a narrow picture of urban change in late antiquity.
As previous sections have shown, cities were centres not only of religious life,
but also of politics, administration, and economic life, and such factors will
have had an impact on developments of religious topography in various ways.
In cases of imperial patronage at cities where emperors resided, like Rome,
Milan, or Constantinople, or in cities like Jerusalem or Bethlehem,289 where
Christian emperors sought to advertise their relationship with God by erect-
ing basilicas over sites associated with Christ’s earthly ministry, the increased
prominence of church buildings reflected political transformations as well as
religious change. Similarly, the construction of church buildings must clearly
be linked to the economic fortunes of cities and their populations, as the in-
vestment by lay elites in ecclesiastical construction can be regarded as attest-
ing a transformation of classical habits of architectural patronage.290 Thus any
interpretation of urban transformations needs to set those patterns of religious
change in the context of other transformations that were occurring in late
antiquity.
7 Space, Sense, and Performance: Material Remains and Urban

Populations
Thus far, much of the discussion has focussed on the physical appearance
of late-antique cities, whether attested archaeologically or reflected in texts.
We have had glimpses occasionally of the populations of such cities operat-
ing within their physical spaces, such as when they cheered on the arrivals
of emperors and governors, or supported rival religious leaders. But on the
whole, the discussion here has followed a well-entrenched habit in the study
of late-antique urbanism to focus on topographical concerns, and to priori-
tise topographical description, rather than considering cities as spaces within
which people moved about, lived their lives, and articulated their passions.
288 McKenzie 2007: 169–171; for the extraordinary tetrarchic frescoes, see now Jones and
McFadden 2015.
289 For church building in the Holy Land, see Hunt 1982: 6–27.
290 Ward-Perkins 1984: 51–84; Caillet 1993; Jacobs 2013: 479–587.
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This in turn reflects the sorts of efforts scholars have pursued when recon-
structing their picture of late ancient urbanism. In fact, conventional efforts at
picturing late-antique cities shed intriguing light on the whole question. Look
at any study of the subject, and it will be clear that the majority of the illustra-
tions will consist of topographical maps and plans. Useful as such topographi-
cal concerns are, they do not offer an adequate description of what cities in
late antiquity must have been like on a day-to-day basis. There is a risk that
such an approach to the cities of late antiquity ‘leaves them empty and cold …
with no life’.291
It is worth remembering, however, that ancient, late-antique, and early
medieval descriptions of cities regarded them not simply as topographical
entities, but rather as physical concentrations of people, and even where a
city’s monuments were described, they were seen as embodying its popula-
tion’s history and achievements.292 We have seen this eloquently expressed by
Libanius in his Antiochikos. Such descriptions, however, were far from disinter-
ested reportage. Ammianus Marcellinus’ famous description of the adventus
into Rome of the emperor Constantius II in 357 does precisely this, by offer-
ing up a selective account of Rome’s physical fabric that focuses upon ancient
glories, and pointedly ignores more recent accretions, notably churches, all of
which stresses his idealised conception of the physical city as ‘the shrine of
power and every virtue’.293
Indeed, much recent work on cities in antiquity more generally has stressed
the importance of seeing them not simply as places where buildings existed
in some kind of vacuum, but rather as human spaces in which a variety of
actions—political, social, religious, economic—were performed in, around,
and between those buildings.294 As such, their topographies were both a prod-
uct of human action and a space in which that action was played out. That much
is clear from the story of the Seven Sleepers, where the impact of Christianity
on Ephesus is clear not just from physical manifestations such as the cross over
the gate or a church building, but also in the sight of priests hurrying about the
city on their business, or people swearing oaths in Christ’s name. Cityscapes
comprised, then, not just their physical fabric, but also the teeming human-
ity within them. This is an aspect of urban life that is mute in archaeological
plans, but which can be appreciated in late-antique iconographic and textual
291 Lavan 2003: 172.

292 See section 3 above.
293 Amm. Marc. 16.10.13–17, here quoting imperii virtutumque omnium larem (§ 13). For
discussion, see Humphries 2019.
294 For cities as political spaces, see A. Bell 2004.
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66 Humphries
depictions. These can help us go some way to imagining the dynamism of life
in late-antique cities.
A particularly instructive text in this respect is a Syriac hagiography of the
prostitute-turned-ascetic Pelagia of Antioch, probably dating to the early fifth
century, which offers a tableau so vivid that it is worth presenting at some
length. Even if the text is likely fictional in terms of the particular saint it pur-
ports to describe, the verisimilitude in the narrative is striking.295 It purports
to be written by a certain Jacob, who presents himself as deacon to a bishop
called Nonnos, who in turn plays an important role in the story even if crucial
details about him, such as the name of the city where he was bishop, are never
divulged.296 While the main narrative discusses the conversion and redemp-
tion, under Nonnos’ spiritual guidance, of Pelagia, who ends her days living
under the guise of a male monk called Pelagius in Jerusalem, it opens with
Nonnos and Jacob attending a meeting of bishops at Antioch in Syria. Along
with the other clergy attending, Nonnos and Jacob stayed at a shrine of the
martyr Julian outside the city.297 One day Nonnos, Jacob, and the other bish-
ops were sitting at the entrance to the shrine, discussing various theological
matters, when Pelagia came into view. The author then describes her appear-
ance and that of the entourage that attended her:
This prostitute then appeared before our eyes, sitting prominently on a

riding donkey adorned with little bells and caparisoned; in front of her
was a great throng of her servants and she herself was decked out with
gold ornaments, pearls, and all sorts of precious stones, resplendent
in luxurious and expensive clothes. On her hands and feet she wore
armbands, silks, and anklets decorated with all sorts of pearls, while
around her neck were necklaces and strings of pendants and pearls. Her
beauty stunned those who beheld her, captivating them in their desire
for her. Young boys and girls accompanied her in haughty fashion, hold-
ing her lascivious feet; they too were adorned with golden girdles and
had jewellery strung round their necks. Some ran in front of her, while
others escorted her with great pomp. Thus it was that her beauty and
finery lured everyone who saw her to stare at her and at her appearance.
As this prostitute passed in front of us, the scent of perfumes and the
reek of her cosmetics hit everyone in the vicinity. The bishops as they
295 B HO 919; discussions of the narrative in Coon 1997: 77–84, and Burrus 2004: 137–46.
296 We are told that he had been a monk at Tabenessi in the Thebaid, Egypt: Jacob, Life of
Pelagia 2.
297 Mentioned as the burial place of the monk Theodosius in Thdt. Hist. rel. 10.8.
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sat there were amazed at her and her clothes, as well as the splendour of
her c ortege, and the fact that she went by with her head uncovered, with
a scarf thrown round her shoulders in a shameless fashion, as though
she were a man; indeed in her haughty impudence her garb was not very
different from a man’s, apart from her makeup, and the fact that her skin
was as dazzling as snow. To put it briefly, her appearance incited everyone
who set eyes on her to fall in love with her.298
This description is patently a calculated one: it is immediately followed by

the remark that the bishops averted their gaze from the prostitute, but for any
reader it is too late to look away, and the vision of Pelagia and her entourage
is seared into the mind’s eye. The account offers readers a full-blown sensory
assault that enables them to see, hear, and even smell and feel the emotional
impact of the heavily eroticised vista of the prostitute’s parade past the shrine.
While this is a particularly vivid example, it is by no means unique: Ammianus’
description of Constantius II’s Roman adventus, for instance, is peppered with
sensory elements, such as the hissing of air as it passed through the teeth of the
draco standards carried by his military escort, the dazzling light reflected off
the troops’ finely wrought armour, or the thunderous acclamations and cheers
of the populus Romanus as they greeted their emperor.299 In such accounts,
late-antique cities come vividly to life, and it is possible to glimpse how their
populations used the spaces around them. The potential of these and similar
accounts to shed light on the lived experience of ancient cities more generally
has, in recent years, encouraged scholars towards what might be termed a ‘spa-
tial turn’ in their investigations of urban centres.300
In terms of delineating urban transformations in late antiquity, it will be
important here to trace what can be deduced about continuity and change in
the use of urban space. The tableaux offered in Ammianus’ account of Rome in
357 or the hagiographical account of Pelagia’s procession through the suburbs
of Antioch are, in some senses, timeless: even if the particular circumstances
being described belong to late antiquity, there is nothing inherent to either
(except for named participants) that could not have happened in earlier
centuries. Rather, what we need to look for are the unmistakable signs of
change, and, in fact, late antiquity offers a particularly rich repository of sources
that might inform such analyses. Unsurprisingly, these have been traced most
298 Jacob, Life of Pelagia 4–6, trans. Brock and Harvey 1987: 42–43.
299 Amm. Marc. 16.10.7–9.
300 Laurence and Newsome 2011; also, especially for late antiquity, Day, Hakola, Kahlos, and
Tervahaut 2016.
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68 Humphries
especially by scholars working on the Christianisation of the city. Numerous

studies have explored the potential of various Christian texts, such as works
on the liturgy, or sermons composed by bishops, to shed light on the transfor-
mation of civic identity and social habits in the new Christian empire. Such
scholarship has tended to deal with urban topography only obliquely, though
it is clear from studies of, for instance, bishops and urban society in northern
Italy that there is much scope for integrating the findings of archaeology with
details gleaned from episcopal writings.301 In what follows, then, discussion
will cluster around three related themes: first, how the city acted as a stage
on which a particularly late-antique form of social hierarchy was acted out;
secondly, how topographic changes can reflect wider transformations in soci-
ety’s use of space; thirdly, a coda will consider what future directions might be
signalled in some recent research.
7.1 The Performance of Social Hierarchy

In the examples of Constantius’ adventus or Pelagia’s procession, we have per-
formative displays of status and power—displays, moreover, that were recog-
nised in the responses of their respective audiences, whether it was the Roman
people chanting acclamations to the glory of their emperor, or the bishops at
Antioch averting their gaze from Pelagia as a physical manifestation of sin and
temptation. Such elements of dialogue between, on the one hand, actors like
Constantius and Pelagia, and, on the other hand, audiences like the Roman
people or the bishops and clergy at the shrine in Antioch, are a reminder that
spaces in ancient cities—and inside their buildings—were stages on which
various aspects of social hierarchy were on display. In this respect, they strong-
ly resemble acts of patronage, as a result of which cities throughout the Empire
were festooned with inscriptions that both recorded the generosity of local
notables towards their communities and simultaneously served to affirm the
elevated, indeed dominant, social and political status of those self-same elites.302
The appearance of the names of local aristocrats in such inscriptions dem-
onstrates that there was a strong element of public display associated with
assertion of elite status in ancient cities. Thus, in Augustan Pompeii (to cite
but one example), the local magistrate M. Holconius Rufus was celebrated in a
number of key locations, such as an honorific statue at a major crossroads, and
a seat right at the front of the auditorium in the city’s theatre.303 Holconius
Rufus may stand as a useful example of the varied ways in which elite status
301 See esp. Ruggini 1961; Lizzi 1989; Sotinel 2005.

302 See the contributions in Cébeillac-Gervasoni, Lamoine, and Trément 2004.
303 For his prominence and that of his family, see D’Arms 1988.
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was affirmed. In some cases, it was done in ways calculated to leave an indel-
ible mark, through the erection of statues or inscriptions commemorating
acts of patronage. Other aspects, however, will have been more ephemeral:
the inscription recording his seat in the theatre would not have been visible
when he himself was sitting in it; but his social prominence would have been
advertised by the sight of his actual presence. Such practices, both perma-
nent and fleeting, can be paralleled throughout the Roman world. Epigraphic
collections from any city will provide a vivid window onto the composition
of its elite, and of their efforts to be remembered. But it is equally clear that
more ephemeral performances of power were a central aspect of life in an-
cient urban communities: from political campaigns to the morning salutation
of patrons, from aristocratic funerals to seating arrangements in venues for
public entertainment, the status and influence of civic elites was perpetually
on display.304 Above all, when considering spectacle in ancient society, we
need to envisage multiple viewpoints, audiences, and gazes. It was not just the
spectacle on the stage or in the arena that commanded attention: the audience
themselves could be the subject of judgmental gaze.305
Two further points are worth considering here because they were central
to the performance of power in Roman society in the late Republic and early
principate, and because they point towards possible areas of change in late
antiquity. The first point is that public displays of networks of power encom-
passed not just earthly elites and non-elites, but also cosmic forces: statues of
aristocrats were just part of a monumental population in cities that included
also images of the gods; similarly, in terms of ceremonial, the pompa circensis
that opened games began with a procession of images of the gods brought into
the arena on exquisitely wrought floats.306 The second point is that such per-
formances of power and the spaces in which they occurred could bear wit-
ness to social, political, and cultural change. In the febrile atmosphere that
saw Rome transformed from a Republic to a monarchy, for example, public en-
tertainments bore the stigma of bribery: by furnishing them, political oppor-
tunists and, subsequently, emperors enticed the people of Rome to surrender
their sovereignty. To those who hankered after the ostensible democracy of the
304 A. Bell 2004.

305 Suet. Aug. 44.1–2 for Augustan regulations of seating in theatres, noting the colour of
clothing worn by spectators; discussion in Rawson 1987. Hist. Aug. Marc. 15.1 reports on
criticism of Marcus Aurelius reading official papers while attending games in the circus.
At the other end of the moral spectrum, consider the woman described by Petronius
whose sexual appetite for men of the lower orders meant she found nothing to interest
her in the first fourteen rows of seating at the circus: Petron. Sat. 126.
306 Latham 2016: 50–55.
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70 Humphries
idealized, classical Roman republic, it was a sorry state of affairs. In the view of
outraged moral conservatives like Juvenal and Tacitus, the political impotence
of the Roman people had been bought at the price of panem et circenses, ‘bread
and circuses’.307
What changes happened to such deep-rooted habits in late antiquity? On
the one hand, there are pointers to significant changes. The increasing domi-
nance of Christianity offered elites new outlets for the disposal of their wealth.
The most obvious of these is the distribution of charity and alms, for which we
have extensive evidence from right across the empire. Such changes in ethos
also served to underscore significant changes such as the elevated status of
bishops, who became impresarios of the process of taking care for the poor.308
As Paul Veyne noted in his classic study of the practice, however, classical
euergetism is not quite the same as such Christian charity. Euergetism ce-
mented a reciprocal relationship, seeking recognition in the world of the here
and now through the display of names, the awarding of local civic o ffices, and
a tacit acknowledgement that some individuals enjoyed greater status than
others. Charity, by contrast, aimed at recognition in eternity, offering notables
an opportunity to store up ‘treasures in heaven’.309 Yet it would be wholly
misleading to assume that one practice effortlessly eclipsed the other. On the
contrary, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they could over lap and
bleed into one another. A particularly vivid example is provided by Jerome
in his famous letter of 382 to Eustochium offering instruction on how to live
the life of a pious, ascetic, and (crucially) aristocratic female.310 At every turn,
Jerome encouraged Eustochium to give up the habits and obsessions of her
former life, to reject the blandishments of worldly status and respect in favour
of closeness to God. But not all aristocratic Roman women were so successful
in sloughing off such status concerns as they sought to show themselves to be
good Christians. In a striking vignette, Jerome offers up the cautionary tale of
a great Roman lady whose efforts at charitable giving failed spectacularly, pre-
cisely because of a collision between the desire to perform good works and the
concern to display worldly status:
Just lately I saw the greatest lady in Rome—I will not give her name, for
this is not a satire—standing in the church of the blessed Peter with her
band of eunuchs in front. She was giving money to the poor with her own
307 Juv. 10. 78–81; Tac. Dial. 29; the classic modern study remains Veyne 1976.
308 P. Brown 2012: 81.
309 P. Brown 2012: 58–61.
310 Detailed commentary in Adkin 2003.
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hand to increase her reputation for sanctity; and she gave them each a
penny! At that moment—as you might easily know by experience—an
old woman, full of years and rags, ran in front of the line to get a second
coin; but when her turn came she got, not a penny, but the lady’s fist in
her face, and for her dreadful offence she had to pay with her blood.
Vidi nuper—nomina taceo, ne saturam putes—nobilissimam mulierum

Romanarum in basilica beati Petri semiviris antecedentibus propria
manu, quo religiosior putaretur, singulos nummos dispertire pauperibus.
Interea—ut usu nosse perfacile est—anus quaedam annis pannisque
obsita praecurrit, ut alterum nummum acciperet; ad quam cum ordine
pervenisset, pugnus porrigitur pro denario et tanti criminis reus sanguis
effunditur.311
For Jerome, this story advertised the perils of insincere and superficial adher-
ences to Christian charity. The failure of his matron to give up her worldly con-
cern for status points towards the persistence into Christian late antiquity of
well-entrenched habits of social display. It should be remembered that such
continuity did not always lead to the sort of incompatibility or incongruity
that is at the heart of Jerome’s story. When, in 359, the urban prefect of Rome
Junius Bassus died in office, he was buried at the Vatican necropolis in a spec-
tacular sarcophagus carved with scenes from Scripture and emblazoned with
inscriptions that affirmed his secular achievements and Christian virtues side
by side.312 Of particular interest here is the verse inscription from the lid of
the sarcophagus (discovered three and a half centuries after the sarcophagus
itself), which provides a poetic account of Bassus’ funeral, mentioning how
his bier was carried not by his domestics, but by representatives of the people,
that the cortege was the occasion for ostentatious mourning, and that even
the very buildings passed along its route seemed to weep. If, in the end, the
poem concludes by stating that Bassus has gone to a higher glory, the inciden-
tal details about his cortege show that the traditions of social display in Roman
aristocratic funerals remained firm in late antiquity, and, unlike the actions of
Jerome’s matron, could be effortlessly assimilated to a Christian world view.313
Moreover, Bassus was not the only Roman aristocrat of the age to display his
311 Jer. Ep. 22.32; trans. Wright 1933: 133.

312 Struthers Malbon 1990 is still the most detailed study of the iconography. Rutgers 1993 is
more positive about it than is Alan Cameron 2002: 288 nn. 1 and 5.
313 Text: AE 1953, 239; discussion in Alan Cameron 2002: esp. 290–92, making the case for a
public funeral.
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72 Humphries
status at the Vatican: his contemporary, Sextus Petronius Probus, a notori-

ously enthusiastic administrator in the highest echelons of the bureaucracy,
was also buried in a mausoleum there in c. 388, his tomb marked by epitaphs
that celebrated both his political achievements and his piety.314 Of course,
and as Jerome’s anecdote reminds us, such status displays were not limited to
the dead: we know that during the residences of Valentinian III in Rome that
the imperial family routinely attended services in St Peter’s,315 while inscrip-
tions recorded emperors and senators alike contributing to the fabric of the
great church.316
In other cases, too, the performance of status followed well-worn paths.
The games, particularly those in the circus or hippodrome, remained an im-
portant outlet for the display of socio-political order. Much to the dismay
of Christian preachers, images of the gods continued to be displayed in the
pompa circensis.317 Imperial power was still on show there too, to reaffirm the
social order through celebrations of victories over foreign and civil war foes
alike.318 But it was not just cosmic and political power that was exhibited in
venues like the circus. In the late-fourth and early fifth centuries, local aris-
tocrats continued to crave games to mark out their status, or to signal their
sons’ entrance onto a political career.319 A series of ivory diptychs indicate
that consular games involving chariot races and venationes (wild beast hunts)
continued to be an outlet used to affirm elevated social position down to the
sixth century.320 The consistent derision of the games as vainglorious fripper-
ies by a string of ecclesiastical writers throughout the period appears to affirm
that enthusiasm for the games remained strong at all levels of society and that
such displays of status continued to meet with a receptive audience.321 As for
more ephemeral presences, favoured seating locations continued to be found
in venues for public entertainment down to late antiquity. Extensive work at
the odeon and theatre at Aphrodisias in Asia Minor has shown that this sort
of arrangement endured into the late empire. Inscriptions on the seats show
areas set aside for individuals according to their factional loyalties, professions,
314 For his career, PLRE 1.736–740 (Probus 5). Epitaphs: CIL 6.1756, with discussion in
Trout 2001.
315 Thacker 2013 offers a comprehensive overview.
316 Ward-Perkins 1984: 236–37, 240; cf. Humphries 2012: 174.
317 Kahlos 2016; Latham 2016: 186–91.
318 Victories over barbarians: Symm. Relat. 47.2 (Rome); Eunap. fr. 68 Blockley
(Constantinople). Civil war victories: Procop. Vand. 3.3.9 (Aquileia).
319 August. Conf. 1.10.16.
320 Weitzmann 1979: 92–98.
321 Among many others: Amb. de off. 2.21. 109; August. de catech. rud. 11, 48, c. Acad. 1. 2;
Joh. Chrys. de inani gloria 4–6.
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status and religious affiliations.322 In Rome, even as late as the sixth c entury,
this concern to regulate seating can be seen in the Colosseum, where in-
scriptions indicate the places reserved for senatorial aristocrats.323 Like their
emperors, local elites across the empire also continued to seek affirmation of
their position in society through acclamation. Sometimes this would happen
in theatres or circuses, like an Antiochene aristocrat whom John Chrysostom
mentions as being praised on account of his generosity flowing like rivers and
Ocean.324 Numerous inscriptions record these acclamations; their location in
places other than venues of entertainment—such as etched into columns on
arcaded streets—is a reminder of how much interpenetration there was be-
tween public spectacle and the rest of civic life.325
But alongside the persistence of such traditional venues for hierarchical
display, stories like that of Jerome’s Roman matron suggests how such well-
entrenched traditions of performing power could now be acted out on the new
stages provided by Christian churches. Other authors besides Jerome railed at
the habits of social elites coming to church attended by their domestics and
wearing their finest clothes, as if by so doing they were somehow honouring
the Christian assembly, and perhaps even God himself, to echo terms used by
John Chrysostom complaining bitterly about the conduct in church of rich lay-
men and women in Antioch.326 But such denunciations obscure an essential
point: that churches were places in which ecclesiastical and secular hierar-
chies could be displayed side by side. In such circumstances, it is unsurprising
that lay and clerical elites should adopt mutually compatible strategies to as-
sert their pre-eminence in a Christian society.
Turning to Christian worship in late antiquity, we can see the impact every-
where of the civic predilection for spectacle. Since the Constantinian period,
church liturgies had become increasingly spectacular. Within the churches,
chanting and the elaborate robes worn by the clergy showed the impact of
the imperial ritual.327 The buildings themselves often imitated imperial mod-
els such as civic basilicas and palatial audience halls, albeit with alterations to
322 Roueché 2004: nos. 187–93; 195–209, 211–12, 233.

323 Orlandi 2004: 568–69.
324 Joh. Chrys. de inani gloria 4.
325 Roueché 1984; Jacobs 2013: 612–22.
326 References collected in Humphries 2014. For the social significance of women’s clothing,
G. Clark 1993: 106–18; on jewellery, see Stout 1994 (particularly strong on late antiquity).
327 The classic study of these developments, richly documented, is Dix 1945: 397–433; the
influences, of course, went both ways: McLynn 2004; of course, the greatest stage for
such performances, and the one about which we know best, is Constantinople, on which
see Dagron 2003: 13–157.
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74 Humphries
accommodate the needs of the Christian mass. In centres where the emperor
himself was present, like Rome and Constantinople in the fifth century, it is
all too easy, on account of the abundant evidence for the imperial household
stage-managing Christian spectacles, to interpret these developments as a
one-sided process, guided by the emperor himself and his family.328 Yet the
role of the ecclesiastical hierarchy must not be discounted. They knew full well
the advantages of using spectacle to achieve their goals. Ambrose of Milan’s
ambitious architectural programme, together with his careful management of
events such as the inuentio of the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius, show how
successful such a programme could be.329
In the course of these changes, the means by which secular and ecclesiasti-
cal elites might demonstrate their social supremacy were easily adapted from
entrenched habits of civic display. Within the churches themselves, this need
to advertise one’s social position was expressed in the layout of basilicas and
congregational halls. Just as status might be displayed in seating arrangements
in buildings for public entertainment, so too divisions of space to emphasize
the social hierarchy appear in church buildings. Many churches from the late-
antique period boast a variety of features designed to articulate space within
them in ways that concurrently served the needs of the Christian liturgy along-
side the articulation of clerical and social hierarchies. Altar sanctuaries were
distinguished from the rest of the church space by screens (transennae).330 In
many places (Rome, Constantinople, Milan, Aquileia, and Ephesus, to name
but a few) by the fifth century, these screens also enclosed a solea, an elevated
pathway stretching from the altar sanctuary into the nave of the church. The
purpose of these internal structures was elucidated by Thomas Mathews in a
ground-breaking article: using the Ordo Romanus Primus, an eighth century
liturgical manual that preserves elements from older rites, he showed how
soleae in various Roman churches were used particularly in the ceremonial
processions of pontifical entrance and exit.331 The Ordo describes how the
bishop of Rome progressed along the central axis of the church to the altar
and his throne; similar remarks in other sources suggest that soleae in churches
elsewhere in the empire were used for episcopal processions.332 Bearing in
mind how bishops were attended upon during these ceremonial processions
by priests and deacons carrying incense burners, candles, crosses, and even
328 Holum 1982: 103–11; Humphries 2012: 166–67.

329 See above p. 57.
330 Jacobs 2013: 380; MacMullen 2009: 16–17, 89.
331 Mathews 1962; text edited in Andrieu 1948: 65–108 (cf. 38–51 for date).
332 Ord. Rom. i.43–51, 125–26; cf. Mathews 1962: 79–82; Mathews 1971: 144.
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military standards, it is easy to see how this pomp and circumstance would
have done much to stress the elevated position of the clergy in the Christian
community.333 Above all, the bishop processing towards his throne in the altar
sanctuary provides an analogue of the emperor or presiding magistrate taking
his place in the box in the circus.334 Just as the old venues of public spectacle
had emphasized the social prominence of the emperor and his officials, so the
arrangement of space in grand episcopal churches articulated the position of
the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the Christian congregation.
What of the laity? Liturgical sources indicate that the faithful arranged
themselves in the aisles and nave of a church according to status, variously
defined. Once more, the Ordo Romanus Primus sheds interesting light, noting
that the liturgy of the eucharist followed a strict social—and, for that matter,
gender—hierarchy. The eucharistic gifts were received by the pope first from
aristocratic men in a part of the church called, tellingly, the senatorium; only
after the men had been dealt with did the pope move across the church to
receive gifts from the women.335 Later, communion was offered according to
hierarchical procedures: the pope himself, assisted by an archdeacon, admin-
istered the sacrament to nobles in the senatorium, while the rest of the populus
receive it from lower ranking clergy.336 That the populus is distinguished from
those ‘who are in the senatorium’ indicates that that men of different social
rank stood in different parts of the church. Following this, the eucharist was
administered to the women on the other side of the church.337 Other evidence
confirms these arrangements: scenes from the fifth-century ivory reliquary
known as the Pola casket, which likely depicts scenes at St Peter’s basilica at
Rome, also shows men and women on opposite sides of the church.338 Even
though we must allow for regional variations (particularly the organisational
peculiarities unique to Rome that appear in the Ordo Romanus Primus), as well
333 Cf. canon 4 of the Council of Tours, 567 (ed. C. de Clerq, Conciliae Galliae a. 511–a. 695
(CCL 148A: Turnhout, 1963), 178), banning the laity from entering the altar sanctuary dur-
ing mass.
334 Cf. Paul. Silent. Descr. Ambonis, 211, 244–51, describing the impact of such splendour on
the congregation at Hagia Sophia.
335 Ord. Rom. i.69, 75.
336 Ord. Rom. i.113–14.
337 Having completed the communion for the men, the clergy ‘transeunt in parte sinistra’,
which is identified later with the ‘partes mulierum’ (Ord. Rom. i.115, 118). Again, there
was a division according to social status, with aristocratic women receiving communion
from hebdomedary bishops and deacons, and the lower ranking women from priests and
deacons (Ord. Rom. i.116).
338 Elsner 2013.
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76 Humphries
as changes over time,339 some basic components of this ritual may be repre-
sentative of wider practices in the church in late antiquity. For example, the
differentiation of areas reserved for male and female laity is recorded also at
Constantinople by John Chrysostom and Procopius,340 while Augustine re-
cords the practice in North Africa.341
Not even the dead were immune: as the practice of burial in and around
church buildings became more common, so we find that tombs were posi-
tioned with a careful eye to the delineation of space. Hence a certain Lucillus
and his wife Ianuaria specified in their epitaph that they were buried ‘before
the main entrance, at the second column in the portico, as one enters from
the left on the men’s side’ at St Peter’s basilica on the Vatican.342 Such arrange-
ments surely involved the hierarchy: a mosaic inscription from the floor of the
church at Tipasa in north Africa shows that the town’s bishop, Alexander, gave
permission for the deacon Tiberinus to bury his mother inside the church.343
But the compliance of the laity seems to have demanded strict regulation:
when a late-sixth century diocesan synod at Auxerre decreed that ‘it is not
permitted to bury bodies in in the baptistery’, the measure was presumably
drawn up to curb a practice which was already popular.344 Moreover, some
Christians might seek special places of burial indeed, in locations close to the
tombs of important martyrs and saints.345 Burials like those of the senators
Junius Bassus and Petronius Probus on the Vatican were surely meant to capi-
talise on their proximity to the tomb of the apostle Peter; similar aspirations
likely dictated the location of a new imperial mausoleum at St Peter’s in the
fifth century.346
It would be misleading, however, to see churches as spaces in which the
business of hierarchical display was conducted pretty much as usual. Such con-
tinuities as have been noted above need to take account of the presence of spe-
cifically Christian hierarchical concerns in churches. The division of churches
into men’s and women’s sides reflects a view of society deeply informed by
Christian attitudes to gender, and the place of women in God’s creation. The
339 On the clerical peculiarity of hebdomedary bishops at Rome, see Kuttner 1945: 146–52; for
changes over time, Mathews 1971: 117–37, is fundamental.
340 Joh. Chrys. In Ps. 48. 17; Procop. Aed. 1. 1. 55–58; with Mathews 1971: 130–31, for commentary.
341 MacMullen 2009: 53 with 158 n. 9.
342 I LCV 2127.
343 A E 1940 no. 21: ‘ex permissu |Alexandri |episcopi Ti|berinus di|aconus Ro|gatae
matri |dulcissim|ae fecit’.
344 Synod of Auxerre, canon 14 (ed. de Clerq, Conciliae Galliae, 267). See also Fevrier 1987:
918–28 for conciliar debates on appropriate places for burial.
345 Overview with extensive references in Yasin 2009: 70–71, 213–22.
346 McEvoy 2013.
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church did not simply adopt the pre-existing social hierarchy: it introduced its
own distinctions—based on a vision of society deeply imbued with its own
particular moral hierarchies—and these and these too were reflected in the
apportionment of space inside churches. A feature of most late-antique litur-
gies throughout the Mediterranean world was the dismissal from the church
building of the catechumens (those who had not been baptized) after the
readings and sermon, and before the taking of the eucharist.347
Yet clerical control of lay conduct was not always to be taken for granted.
Everywhere we look, we find evidence for the difficulties in controlling the be-
haviour of the laity: a particularly vivid instance is offered by the pilgrim Egeria
in her account of the display of the relic of the True Cross at Jerusalem on Good
Friday in the 380s: the sacred timbers where pinned down by the bishop, while
a guard of deacons watched carefully as the faithful filed past and bowed down
to kiss it: all of these were elaborate security measures designed to prevent any
overzealous pilgrim from biting off a splinter of the sacred wood—a circum-
stance that Egeria claims to have happened at a previous Easter service.348
These last details, and the movement of people around church buildings
that they imply, reminds us that the hierarchy of Christian late antiquity was
underlined not only in the demarcation of space within churches, but also
by the use to which the clergy and congregation put that space. This factor
lies at the heart of Libanius’ derision of the incomprehensibility of the rhetor
Bemarchius’ description of the Great Church at Antioch, which made refer-
ence to columns, courtyards, and ‘intercrossing paths which came out heaven
knows where’.349 This detail unmistakably points to church buildings as spaces
in which people moved about. The challenge for historians of the late-antique
city is to make more sense of such spaces than Libanius was inclined to do.
7.2 Social Habits and Topographic Change

Over the course of late antiquity, then, Christianity came to be embedded
in the physical framework of the ancient city, while simultaneously provid-
ing new outlets for patronage and new stages on which to perform the social
hierarchy. To what extent did these shifts, in turn, impact on cities as physical
spaces? We have just seen the impact on the interior of church buildings, and
in section 6 we considered the influence of Christianity on changing religious
347 Note the remarks of Egeria, a western pilgrim, in her description of the Sunday liturgy
at Jerusalem: ‘missa facta fuerit ecclesiae iuxta consuetudinem, qua et ubique fit’ (Itin.
Egeriae 25.2); cf. Mathews 1971: 152.
348 Itin. Egeriae 37.1–2.
349 Lib. Or. 1.41; cf. another description at Euseb. Vit. Const. 3.50.2.
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78 Humphries
topographies, as traditional temples fell into disuse and their pre-eminence in

the urban sacred landscape was usurped by churches. But the physical space of
ancient cities always consisted of more than just temples, and the end of antiq-
uity saw the disappearance of building types quite apart from them. Another
area where Christianity seems to have played a role in changing social habits
that, in turn, had some impact on urban topography, concerns the demise of
spectacular entertainments and the disappearance of many of the buildings in
which they had been staged, a development that is often regarded as emblem-
atic of the demise of the ancient cityscape.350
Critique of the games was a most common feature of late-antique episcopal
preaching. This reflects a continuation of concerns expressed in earlier cen-
turies that the games provided a context in which the corrupting influence of
sin was ever present.351 Yet it is not always easy to trace, never mind quantify,
such attitudes. Within a Christian community there were surely widely diverg-
ing opinions of spectacles, as is implied quite clearly by the repeated efforts of
bishops to persuade their flocks to give up their passion for the games. As with
so many episcopal injunctions against the behaviour of the laity, we need to
allow for a gap between the aspirations of the ecclesiastical elite and changes
in attitudes among the populace at large;352 we also need to admit that such
condemnations were not purely a Christian affair, but were voiced also by phil-
osophically minded non-Christians.353
That Christianity did have some impact on the celebration of the games has
been posited on the basis of imperial legislation that sought to restrict them
avowedly out of religious scruple. For example, in 392 Theodosius I and his
fellow emperors enacted that ‘contests in the circuses shall be prohibited on
Sundays, in order that no concourse of the people to the spectacles may divert
them from the reverend mysteries of the Christian law’. This prohibition is not
as simple as it first seems, however, for it is qualified by the proviso that the ban
holds force ‘except on the birthdays of Our Clemency’.354 This law neatly en-
capsulates the difficulties facing emperors: on the one hand, the prohibition of
games on Sundays shows a state aiming to keep pace with the changes wrought
350 Ward-Perkins 1984: 92–118.

351 In general, see Markus 1990: 107–23; references for the Latin west were collected by
Jürgens 1972.
352 Even individuals could change their minds: note Augustine’s hardening revulsion in
Conf. 4.1.1 and 6. 7. 12; enarr. in Ps. 96.7 and 19.
353 Barnes 1996: 174–76.
354 CTh 2.8.20: Festis solis diebus circensium sunt inhibenda certamina, [q]uo Christianae legis
veneranda mysteria nullus spectaculorum con[c]ursus avertat, praeter clementiae nostrae
natalicios dies.
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by the rise of Christianity; at the same time, however, by exempting celebra-

tions of imperial birthdays, the state is concerned to retain those traditions
which it feels to be essential for the maintenance of the political hierarchy.
Above all, what is difficult to prove is a direct connection between such laws
and the recommendations of any particular Christian preacher.355
While the nature and pace of change will have varied considerably across
the Roman world, it is possible occasionally to glimpse an association between
the increasing social dominance of Christianity and the end of venues for
spectacles. At Tarragona in Spain a church was built in the arena of the city’s
amphitheatre, perhaps to commemorate the death of a local martyr there.356
An altogether more striking example is provided by the great extramural
church at Milan known since the middle ages as San Lorenzo, and plainly
incorporating a great deal of late-antique fabric, even if the precise date of
its construction is not known. What is clear, however, is that the building of
S. Lorenzo required the systematic dismantling of Milan’s amphitheatre: its
massive blocks were transported a short distance and carefully arranged to
form the platform on which the church was then constructed.357 In the cases
of both Milan and Tarragona it is clear that their populations no longer had
a need for amphitheatres, but did for the churches that replaced them; but it
would be perilous to extrapolate from such instances any wider conclusions
about the apparent ideological triumph of Christianity over the games. The
use of the rearranged blocks from the amphitheatre in the construction of
S. Lorenzo is only one example of the use of spolia (architectural elements
culled from older monuments) at the church: it was fronted by an atrium en-
closed on the west side by a colonnade constructed from sixteen re-erected
Corinthian columns taken from an as yet unidentified building in the city.358
We have already seen that the use of spolia generally is unlikely to have been
dictated solely by ideological considerations, and that it is just as likely to have
355 The temptation, though, has proved tempting to some: Vandenberghe 1955: 43, sought to
link John Chrysostom’s preaching with Arcadius’ legislation against Sunday games in 399
(CTh 2.8.23); Roueché 1993: 5–7 offers more circumspect analysis.
356 Cantino Wataghin 2003: 243–44 and fig. 15.
357 The date accepted by most is mid-4th century, allowing the church to be identified with
the basilica Portiana which featured in the dispute between Ambrose and Justina in 385–
386: e.g. Kinney 1972, arguing for Constans in the 340s; endorsed by Krautheimer 1983:
81–92. But Kinney’s dating was attacked by Lewis 1973, arguing for a late-4th century date.
An outlier, commanding little assent, is Lemerle 1952, arguing, on the basis of architec-
tural parallels, for a 5th or even 6th century date. For an overview, see Rossignani 1990.
The question will doubtless run and run.
358 For similar atria in the eastern provinces, see Jacobs 2013: 326–42.
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80 Humphries
been motivated by opportunistic pragmatism, in that certain buildings had al-

ready fallen out of use and presented a ready source of construction materials.
For all that it is clear there was a gradual process by which the use of
urban space changed in response to shifting religious dynamics. At Rome,
Constantinople, and Jerusalem, for example, the urban landscape came to host
impressive liturgical processions, in which both clergy and laity participated,
that indicate the extent to which Christianity had come to penetrate the texture
of life in those cities.359 At Rome, over the course of the Middle Ages, the routes
taken by these liturgical processions gradually influenced the development in
the city of a new layout of streets, quite distinct from its ancient predecessor.360
Yet the process by which this came about was not s traightforward, since until
the seventh century ecclesiastical rituals will have developed side-by-side with
continued imperial ceremonial.361
Other instances of the use of urban space reinforce this sense that the
transformation of cityscapes was driven by processes in which ideology and
pragmatism were held in tension. One clear example of the erosion of classi-
cal conceptions of urbanism was the increasing appearance of burials within
city walls. In earlier periods, the dead, except in extremely rare circumstances,
were buried in extramural zones. But in the course of late antiquity, the dead
began to move within city walls: in some cases, these were relics of saints, trans-
lated to intramural churches; but in other cases, and particularly as we move
through the seventh century, burials began to appear within urban c entres, in
a trend that points to the development of the churchyard of the central medi-
eval period.362
Another instance often associated with the demise of classical urbanism is
the disappearance of the elegant streets flanked by porticoes that were char-
acteristic of many of the more prosperous cities.363 In an important, and still
influential, article published in 1934, Jean Sauvaget postulated (on the basis of
archaeologically observable circumstances at sites across the Levant) that the
medieval Arab sūq was a direct descendant of the ancient colonnaded street:
over time, spaces between columns had been walled-in to make small booths,
and gradually the classical colonnade completely disappeared; the whole argu-
ment was made all the more appealing by means of a pleasing graphic which
359 The classic study, which seeks to incorporate archaeology and liturgy, is Baldovin 1987.
360 Krautheimer 1981: 248–49.
361 Humphries 2007: 51–58.
362 For discussions of the theoretical problems presented by the evidence, see Cantino
Wataghin 1999.
363 Important overview of streets and thoroughfares in Jacobs 2013: 111–204.
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represented the transformation in striking visual terms.364 For some scholars,

the failure of urban administrations to control such streetscapes is often seen
as indicating a complete collapse in classical urban sensibilities, comparable
to the emergence of intramural burials or the simple dumping of rubbish in
sites within cities.365 Yet what we might be dealing with here might be less of a
radical change in conceptions of urbanism than a shift in the way in which the
use of space was controlled. It is hard to visualise how such colonnades must
have appeared in antiquity, but it is likely that they were bustling with life, as
all sorts of activities took place in the shade they afforded.366 In terms of the
postulated transition from street to sūq, there is some evidence to suggest that
colonnades and other spaces along thoroughfares in ancient cities may quite
routinely have been occupied (and therefore blocked) by temporary stalls and
booths.367 As such, the appearance of more permanent structures dividing up
colonnades is perhaps better regarded as the fossilisation of practices that had
been customary for centuries. To see it as anything other than that is, perhaps,
to stress an elegant and idealised vision of the use classical urban space that
perhaps never really existed.368
In short, transformations of the use of space reveal several factors con-
currently at play. In some cases, ideological changes, such as the dominance
of Christianity, will certainly have played a role; in others, such as declining
control of public space, the erosion of civic government must also have been
decisive; so too the contraction of urban finances (or the expenditure of aris-
tocratic wealth in other directions) will have given rise to instances where
various types of damage were just never repaired. But in all cases, we must un-
derstand that populations adapted to their changed environments with little
sign of difficulty. Spaces were changing—but life went on.
364 Sauvaget 1934. For recent appeals to his model see, e.g., Kennedy 1985 (citing it with
approval); Ward-Perkins 1999: 240–44 (more critical and circumspect); Avni 2011 (critical);
Dey 2015: 65–66 (citing other uses).
365 Jacobs 2013: 598–612.
366 Evidence for Antioch is assembled in Liebeschuetz 1972: 52–61. For efforts to control
the activities of shopkeepers, see Frayn 1993: 5 n. 5; Owens 1991: 166–70; Robinson 1992:
59–79.
367 Such evidence is, by its very nature, bound to be slight. For an overview of evidence from
Italy, see Frayn 1993: 5, 34, 105, 128–29; cf. DeLaine 2005: 36–39, offers analysis of tempo-
rary trading spaces in Ostia. For archaeological evidence for such temporary structures,
see (e.g.) Potter 1995: 36–39 (Africa); Jacobs 2013: 627–35 (eastern provinces); Rogers 2011:
149–75 (Britain); Cirelli and Fentress 2012: 102–107 (Cosa).
368 Rogers 2011: 149.
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82 Humphries
7.3 Coda: the Late-Antique City as a Sensory Space

The discussion in this section has demonstrated how shifts in the delinea-
tion of space in late-antique cities reflects changes in the use of such space.
It therefore allows us the repopulate reconstructions of late-ancient cities,
whether they exist in the form of topographical plans or three-dimensional
models. But to visualisation we can begin to add other aspects, such as sound
and smell—precisely those sorts of details depicted so vividly in descriptions
like those of Constantius’ entrance to Rome or Pelagia’s erotic parade at Antioch.
In recent years, scholarship has begun to demonstrate a new sensitivity
to such aspects of cities, both for late antiquity and the ancient world more
generally. This has seen scholars turn to the sometimes florid descriptions of
cities or buildings in the late-antique ekphrasis with a greater appreciation that
buildings and spaces existed to be used.369 Some of the most challenging work
has focused precisely on the sensory experience of those individuals who par-
ticipated in the use of such buildings. There has been a particularly interesting
strain of scholarship that has sought to explore how, for instance, the ceremo-
nial aspects of the late-antique liturgy might be experienced, not just in terms
of those aspects outlined above, such as the use of space to articulate social
hierarchies within the Christian population, but in terms of other aspects that
we know to have been part of it, such as the performance of music, or the use
of incense. Late-antique sources are littered with oblique references to such
aspects of the use of spaces in churches and elsewhere.370
Apart from their mention in the sources, performances of hymns or the
wafting of incense leave no other trace: they are gone with the last reverbera-
tion of a note, with the last breeze blowing through a church. But they exem-
plify the multiplicity of sensory experiences must surely have been an integral
part of how late-antique populations experienced the cities and spaces they
inhabited. Any effort to re-imagine urban centres needs to account for such
aspects alongside more physical remnants of the use of space.
8 Cities and the Meanings of Late Antiquity: Decline, Fall,

Transformation, or Rise?
The previous sections have stressed the inherent messiness of late-antique

urban change, and the near impossibility of arriving at any straightforward,
369 Webb 1999.

370 For the period down to the fifth century, see MacMullen 2009: a helpful regional survey.
For the singing of hymns in the streets, see (e.g.) Severus of Minorca, Ep. 13.1–2 and 14.
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elegant analysis that encompasses the myriad changes that occurred in differ-
ent ways, at different rates, in different places. The state, whether Roman or
post-Roman, was a variable presence, its impact on urban life being felt to dif-
ferent degrees in different places at different times. Even so, there can be little
doubt that cities remained the favoured locations for ‘political activity’, whether
we think of that in imperial, royal, ecclesiastical, or local terms. This was the
case not least because cities were places where the sorts of administrative ap-
paratus existed upon which governments—whether secular or ecclesiastical—
depended; they also provided the ideal backdrop for the performance of the
ceremonial trappings through which power could be a rticulated. Cities’ eco-
nomic fortunes also varied considerably: in general, there can be little dispute
that long distance trade and civic finance contracted, much to the detriment
of urban life; but examples like Marseille, Constantinople, and Caesarea in
Palestine show that some cities could experience growth amid such general
decline; interestingly, the reasons for those cities’ prosperity also demonstrate
the continued importance of state networks in facilitating growth. Religious
topography and its relationship to urban identity saw radical change across
the period—but it is important not to see that narrative in simplistic terms.
In individual centres throughout the late-antique world, there were plentiful
examples of temples falling into slow decay and being repurposed for other
uses: sometimes that could have been as a church, but in most cases temples
lay abandoned for a long time before anyone ever thought of reusing them
for Christian rituals. In other words, the triumphalism associated in textual
(especially literary) sources with paganism’s displacement by Christianity
proves to be difficult to identify archaeologically in any but a handful of cases.
All told, we can see in the ways that urban populations used the spaces
around them evidence for various types of gradual change, occurring in re-
sponse to varied local circumstances, and played out across the Mediterranean
world in diverse ways. Taken together, and viewed in broad outline, there can
be little doubt that change did occur—changes that could make the definition
of rocky little Asteria as being ‘like a city’ completely comprehensible, however
different it might have been from metropoleis like Rome, Constantinople, or
Antioch, or from new cities like Iustiniana Prima.
What is readily apparent from the summaries just given is that it is possible
to offer a presentation of urban change which, by prioritising some parts of
the evidence while de-emphasising others, permits the presentation of super-
ficially persuasive pictures of whatever type of late antiquity we might want
to emphasise—whether it is one that focuses chiefly on the decline of certain
‘classical’ modes of urbanism, or, conversely, one that foregrounds the emer-
gence of new forms, particularly those associated with the rise of Christianity.
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84 Humphries
What this study has aimed to do, however, is to problematise those descrip-
tions and interpretations at every turn.
To bring matters to a close, I want to offer two sets of reflections on what the
history of cities in this period can offer us in terms of delineating some sort of
‘meaning’ (perhaps it might make sense to speaking of multiple ‘meanings’) to
late antiquity. In both cases, my concerns relate to the sorts of narratives we
seek to construct (or illustrate) from late-antique urbanism. The first of these
is relatively straightforward: what sort of narrative do we want to construct,
and how does it encompass elements such as the decline, fall, transformation,
or even rise of aspects of urbanism? The second question, however, is rather
more complex, and only the barest sketch of an answer will be essayed here:
this concerns not just what narrative, but whose narrative we are seeking to tell.
8.1 Decline, Fall, Transformation, or Rise?

It was noted at the beginning of this study that it was precisely in the assess-
ment of urban history that the first major misgivings came to be expressed
about the essentially positive transformation paradigm that had characterised
scholarship on late antiquity since Peter Brown’s early contributions. While,
on the face of it, the resurgence of terms like ‘decline’ and ‘fall’ in such studies
(not least in some of their titles) might seem to hint at Gibbon redivivus, that,
of course, can never be the case: approaches to the historiography have shifted
dramatically, just as the available evidence has increased exponentially. There
can be no question of simply going back to Gibbon, however influential his
thinking (and rhetoric) have been.371
Equally, there is a clear realisation among most scholars that the kind of
story one tells (or wants to tell) is often dictated by an individual’s personal
choices. Thus Wolf Liebeschuetz remarked that any verdict as to whether late
antiquity represented catastrophic decline or the reverse was essentially a sub-
jective ‘value judgement’.372 Such choices include choosing what to focus upon
in order to make its loss particularly regrettable: thus Liebeschuetz considered
not just political, economic, and religious factors, but also cultural ones, re-
garding the demise of classical literary culture as a hallmark of the decline
he sought to trace.373 But how much did its disappearance really matter? In
his recent, robust critique of conventional, post-Brown approaches to the rise
of the holy man in late antiquity, Ramsay MacMullen has remarked that such
high literary culture can hardly be indicative of the values of more than a very
371 Rogers 2011: 14–26.

372 Liebeschuetz 2001a: 415.
373 Liebeschuetz 2001a: 233–48, 318–41.
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select minority of the Roman world’s population.374 To this we might add,

perhaps, the following question: will its loss have really been a cause for wide-
spread regret? The loss of a classical aesthetic (visual, this time, as opposed to
literary) has been traced also in Ine Jacobs’ study of eastern cities through the
seventh century, which suggests that some aspects of urban appearance that
had been considered important in the early empire apparently came in later
centuries to mean nothing at all.375
A feature of both Liebeschuetz and Jacobs’ approaches was also to refine
the chronological parameters of the period in which they perceived decline as
occurring. Both described a ‘late’ or ‘later’ late antiquity (roughly meaning the
later sixth and seventh centuries) in which they located decline, and which
they distinguished from an earlier phase of late antiquity (third or fourth to
sixth centuries) that had been marked by stronger continuities with the past.376
This later epoch coincides neatly with the period that Brogiolo and Ward-
Perkins had delineated as seeing the most precipitous decline ‘[f]rom the per-
spective of any research into urbanism that starts with the Roman period’ and
encompassing the sixth and seventh centuries. But much depends not just on
where the narrative begins, but also where it ends. This is neatly demonstrated
by Adriaan Verhulst’s analysis of cities in the region between the rivers Meuse
and Somme in the early middle ages: while he could certainly regard the sixth
and seventh centuries as representing ‘the nadir of urban life’, he could also
ultimately describe the period stretching from the end of the Roman empire to
the twelfth century as one characterised by the rise of cities.377
Yet finding a narrative arc that is all encompassing is no easy task. It sure-
ly makes sense, as Neil Christie and Adam Rogers have argued, to stress that
late Roman phases of urban settlement represent just one stage in a continu-
ous urban history—a continuous history that includes also earlier stages in a
settlement’s history, stretching back even to its pre-Roman phases.378 To do
otherwise is to prioritise particular definitions of urbanism that inevitably en-
courage subjective analyses of the sort described by Liebeschuetz. Ultimately,
374 MacMullen 2019: 2–3, noting that ‘the mind of “the West,” that is, of the Roman Empire,
is to be read through the writings of the intellectual elite and of no more than nine or ten
among them scattered across more than four hundred years. Their readership cannot be
imagined above a few thousand in any decade. This sampling, however, is used to justify
a general conclusion that some half-billion persons were noticeably anxious across this
very considerable stretch of time’.
375 Jacobs 2013: 644–78.
376 Liebeschuetz 2001b: 1–11; Jacobs 2013: 675–78.
377 Verhulst 1999: 24–43.
378 Christie 2006: 185; in more detail, pertaining mainly to Britain, Rogers 2011: 47–72, 177–79.
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86 Humphries
it perhaps makes better sense to think about late antiquity not in terms of one
overarching narrative (be it decline and fall or transformation), but rather in
terms of it belonging to a multiplicity of diverse and often overlapping micro-
narratives, which can be sensitive to the developmental trajectories of cities
down to the level of individual regions and settlements. After all, urban decay
had been noticed at earlier periods of urban history: already by the first and
second centuries CE, writers like Strabo and Pausanias were complaining
about the ruinous decline of some cities in Greece.379 Furthermore, we must
recognise that there can be no single cause and effect narrative, and certainly
not one in which ‘barbarian invasions’ are offered as the chief explanatory
factor.380 As recent work on the impact of environmental factors and epidemic
disease has stressed, not all changes in period might be so easily ascribed to the
sorts of anthropogenic factors that have traditionally been central to ‘decline’
and ‘fall’ narratives.
8.2 Whose Cities and Whose Late Antiquity: a Tale of Multiple Cities?
Questions such as those posed in the previous section about the correlation
of cause and effect in urban change are not merely of historical interest. The
telling of particular narratives presupposes a particular set of presuppositions,
notably about where those narratives begin, how they are framed, and how they
play out. At the beginning of this study, we saw how the disquiet about a positive
and dynamic picture of late antiquity arose among scholars working on cities,
who argued that it was difficult to view late-antique developments, apart from
Christianisation, ‘as part of some neutral (or even positive) “transformation”,’
and that on the contrary what seemed to be happening appeared instead to be
‘the dissolution of a sophisticated and impressive experiment in how to order
society—an experiment developed by the Greeks and Romans and centred on
the Mediterranean’.381 But that very assertion is loaded with presuppositions.
It has a particular geopolitical focus (the Mediterranean world of the Roman
Empire), and a specific set of analytical frameworks in mind, which priori-
tise the unmaking of a particular set of urban institutions (Graeco-Roman
ones), which are subjectively lauded as ‘sophisticated and impressive’ as
if what came after them was not. Even if it claims to begin with the Roman
Empire, its starting point elides centuries of urban evolution and change
throughout the archaic, classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods (during
379 Discussion in Alcock 1993: 145–51.

380 Cf. Loseby 2000: 91.
381 Brogiolo and Ward-Perkins 1999, xv–xvi.
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which cities u nderwent significant changes, embodying a wide diversity of

political systems, and social and cultural profiles), by speaking of urbanism
abstractly as ‘an experiment developed by the Greeks and Romans’. It sees reli-
gious change chiefly in terms of one religious phenomenon (Christianisation):
not only does this mean a complementary narrative to one of the dissolution
of Graeco-Roman urban institutions, since Christianisation often implies, as
a corollary, the end of classical paganism, but also it leaves little room in this
narrative trajectory for non-Christian factors such as Judaism and, later—if
we opt for a long periodisation of late antiquity—Islam. In short, everything
about this approach to urban development—be it chronological framing,
geographical centre of gravity, or particular elements of its narrative plot—
seems designed to frame a story that is marked by bleak contemplation of
decline and fall.
There is a further feature of this analysis that might be called into question,
and that is its embeddedness in specifically western conceptions of historical
narrative. This sees the disruptions that occurred in late antiquity as an in-
terruption of an emphatically western tale of progress, in which the end of
the ancient world is too often seen as interposing a hiatus in the evolution of
the western world. It strikes me that two aspects of this analysis have made
an impact on the analysis of cities in late antiquity. First, casting the end of
Graeco-Roman urbanism in terms of decline is not just merely subjective, but
also assumes a value judgement: it is underpinned by the assumption that cit-
ies as they existed before the transformations of late antiquity were inherently
superior to those that emerged by its end, thereby making the disappearance
of ancient, classical features a cause for particular regret. But secondly, and
more importantly, it lionises a specifically Greek and Roman version of an-
cient urbanism as inherently superior to its alternatives, both in terms of what
Greek and Roman urbanism replaced, and in terms of what in turn replaced
it. But neither the Greeks nor the Romans had a monopoly on urbanism. They
were themselves, after all, inheritors of urban experiments undertaken in the
Ancient Near East in the Bronze Age. Moreover, such non-Graeco-Roman
forms of urbanism did not suddenly come to an end, but continued to devel-
op in a parallel history.382 One of the striking features of late antiquity is that
some features of these urban forms that developed outside the Graeco-Roman
world were now introduced to it with, for example, the advent of Islam, not
just in the Levant and North Africa, but also in the Spanish territories that be-
came al-Andalus. But it would be wholly misleading to see these aspects as a
382 For a suitably global overview, see the essays assembled in Yoffee 2015.
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88 Humphries
wholly alien imposition, obliterating what went before. On the contrary, the
development of cities in those parts of the Caliphate that had once been part
of the Roman empire (or its successor states) represented a dynamic interac-
tion between Islamic and pre-Islamic forms.383
Such instances are a reminder that any appreciation of developments in
later antiquity needs to be undertaken with sensitivity to a diversity of local and
regional circumstances. While it is certainly true that certain phenomena—
changing religious topographies, the transformations of public spaces,
spoliation, and so on—can be described as characteristic of late-antique ur-
banism more broadly, we must never cease stressing that the contexts in which
such changes occurred were emphatically local and regional, and that broad-
brush analyses need to encompass a wide diversity of experiences. The alter-
native is to impose narrative on diverse experiences, sometimes for ideological
reasons: stressing decline and fall, or any of its alternatives, is, in the end, a
subjective choice. But such subjective choices can, if abused, have d eleterious,
indeed downright dangerous, consequences. Consider, for example, assertions
found in modern xenophobic discourses that the ‘West’ is Christian, and
that the topographic presence of Islam in the form of mosques represents a
threatening intrusion. This is not merely a subjective analysis (though it is, of
course, this too, in that it defines as ‘western’ something that is the product of
long evolutionary processes); it is also a dangerous distortion (even a denial)
of the palpable reality that cities—whether Greek, Roman, late-antique, or
modern—are always evolving. Sublimating the developments in cities to a
simplistic discourse of decline and fall, from which equally simplistic histori-
cal lessons can supposedly be learned, brings with it risks of underpinning
the poisonous assertions of extremists, who like to deal in absolutes, and for
whom nuances are anathema. A contemplation of the late-antique urban evo-
lutions of an Ephesus, Aquileia, Carthage, or Cordoba might seem far removed
from such concerns; but historians should never underestimate the capac-
ity of extremists to distort their work for malevolent ends. We can, however,
go some distance to countering such narratives by constantly qualifying and
challenging their broad sweep, by pointing out the complexity and diversity
of the d evelopments (and the lived experiences that lie behind them) we are
discussing. To put it another way, by being sensitive to the wide range of tra-
jectories that characterise late-antique urban development, we can stress that
there is no single, simple, straightforward story. It is not the tale of one city, or
even of two, but rather of thousands.
383 Dey 2015: 153–60 (Spain), 213–20 (the Caliphate).
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8.3 Concluding Observations: the Future of the Late-Antique City

So where, in the end, do we go from here? Does the admission that there are
multiple micro-narratives rob us of any attempt to achieve a ‘big picture’
analysis? That would be too pessimistic, I think; on the contrary, by seeing
multiple narratives as part of a longue durée history of urban settlement, we
are offered multiple trajectories into which we can attempt to fit the stories
of individual cities, rather than force them to fit an overarching picture that
serves the increasingly sterile debate about whether late antiquity is best un-
derstood as period of transformation or as one of decline and fall (surely it
is both). In particular, I would suggest that a focus on ‘grand narratives’ risks
obscuring exciting and dynamic approaches to those micro-narratives, which
seek to examine the histories of particular sites from a variety of analytical and
theoretical perspectives. I began this study by considering how approaches to
late-antique cities had once been dominated by consideration of textual evi-
dence, but that the last half-century had seen a veritable explosion in terms
of the availability of archaeological evidence. I have endeavoured to incor-
porate as wide a range of evidence as possible in my considerations of the
topic, not least because that can encourage a nuanced and variegated picture
of urban evolutions. One area where archaeology and documents can come
together fruitfully is in the emphasis that has been made here on considering
cities above all as lived-in spaces, made meaningful by the interactions of their
populations with the physical spaces that surrounded them and with each
other. There is still too much insistence on seeing the classical and Christian
aspects of cities as representing discontinuous histories, not as facets of the
same story. I would reiterate calls made by other scholars to eschew such polar-
ised views,384 and to integrate all the evidence at our disposal—from potsherd
analyses to ceremonial precepts in liturgical sources—to arrive at a holis-
tic understanding of late-ancient cities as spaces within which people lived
and interacted.
It seems to me, moreover, that advances can be made not solely in terms
of evidence-bases or analytical frameworks, but also by making the greatest
use of the tools now available to us and the opportunities that they present.
Reference was made earlier to the application of digital technologies in the
recovery and recording of data. But there are digital applications that can be
applied also to the interpretation of that (and other) data, such as the con-
struction of computer models and the use of virtual reality that can help us
to visualise, as never before, cities in their late-antique condition. Of course,
384 Marazzi 2000: 40.
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90 Humphries
reconstructions have been used before, often in the form of carefully docu-
mented drawings and paintings. Digital models, however, offer scope for
considerable manipulation, showing spaces either empty or crowded, or in
different lighting conditions. Heretofore, such reconstructions have found
greatest application in the contexts of museum exhibition or education.385 Of
course, the validity of such reconstructions depends on the robustness of the
data and interpretation underpinning them; but it seems to me that they offer
an extraordinary opportunity to go beyond the limitations of purely printed
resources, and to offer us the chance to visualise in diverse ways the cities of
late antiquity as we surely should want to see them: variably dynamic, ever
changing, and pulsing with life.
Appendix: Recent Studies of the Late-Antique City
The following appendix sets out some of the major works on late-antique
urbanism that have appeared since Lavan’s overview of the bibliography
(Lavan 2001a). Given the constraints of space, it makes no pretence to com-
pleteness, and favours monographs and edited collections. It begins with
works that provide general overviews, and then proceeds to examine different
regions and/or cities; within each entry items are listed in chronological order
of publication.
General surveys: Liebeschuetz 2001a is fundamental and has exercised

a profound influence over work ever since; subsequently see Jacobs 2013 on
archaeology; Dey 2015 on ceremonial space; Lenski 2017 on administration.
Major collections on the topic include Krause and Witschel 2006; Rapp and
Drake 2014; Rizos 2017a. Much recent work has focussed on the interrelation-
ships between urban centres and their rural hinterlands; for recent essay
collections, see Burns and Eadie 2001; Bowden, Lavan, and Machado 2004;
Christie 2004. Two collections examining longer term trajectories and discon-
tinuities are Slater 2000, and Christie and Augenti 2012. In the last few years,
Mohr Siebeck has begun publishing a series Civitatum Orbis Mediterranei
Studia, which so far has included studies that encompass the late-antique
period in Antioch and Ephesus (see, respectively, Bergjan and Elm 2018;
Georges 2017); the volume that has appeared so far on Alexandria offers only
slight coverage on the period.
385 Nicholls 2016 gives a convenient overview.
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Spain, Gaul and Britain: Heijmans 2004 on Arles; Kulikowski 2004 and
Bowes and Kulikowski 2005, on Spain. Rogers 2011 offers a thoughtful analysis
of Britain.
Italy (excluding Rome): Savino 2005; Sotinel 2005 (on Aquileia); Ghilardi,
Goddard, and Porena 2006; Christie 2006; Deliyannis 2010 (Ravenna);
Fuhrer 2012 (Milan); Roncaglia 2018. For Ostia and Portus see, respectively,
Boin 2013 and Keay, Millett, Paroli, and Strutt 2005.
Rome: Curran 2000; Brandenburg 2004. Lizzi Testa 2004; Meneghini and
Santangeli Valenzani 2004; Cooper and Hillner 2007; Grig and Kelly 2012;
Fuhrer 2012; Salzman, Sághy, and Lizzi Testa 2016.
North Africa (excluding Egypt): Lepelley 2001; Leone 2007 and 2013;
Sears 2007.
Balkans and Greece (excluding Constantinople): Rothaus 2000;

Poulter 2007; Hodges, Bowden, and Lako 2005; Pettegrew 2006; A. R. Brown 2018.
Constantinople: Bardill 2004; Bassett 2005; Van Dam 2010; Grig and
Kelly 2012.
Aegean, Asia Minor and Middle East: Bitton-Ashkelony and Kofsky 2004
(Gaza); Saliou 2005 (Gaza); Cabouret, Carrié, Feissel and Saliou 2012 (Antioch);
Shepardson 2014 (Antioch); Casevitz, Lagacherie, and Saliou 2016 (Antioch);
Deligiannakis 2016 (Aegean islands); Georges 2017 (Ephesus); Bergjan and
Elm 2018 (Antioch).
Egypt (including. Alexandria): Alston 2002; Bagnall 2007, esp. Kiss 2007
and Van Minnen 2007; McKenzie 2007; Wipszycka 2015.
Acknowledgements
This survey aims to provide readers with an overview of the challenges at-
tached to the study of urbanism in the late Roman world. That is a broad topic,
and in a sense this essay reflects thinking on the subject that I have been doing
ever since I started working on late antiquity. Correspondingly, I have accumu-
lated immense debts, too many to enumerate here. That said, some individuals
deserve special thanks. First and foremost, I am grateful to Daniëlle Slootjes
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92 Humphries
for inviting me to contribute to Brill Research Perspectives on Ancient History:

in an age of increasing specialisation and ballooning bibliography, it is not
difficult to identify the value of such surveys—even if they remain very much
the personal views of their individual authors. Her series co-editor, Lee Brice, as
well as Mirjam Elbers at Brill, also provided outstanding (and patient) s upport.
I am also deeply grateful to two anonymous readers for the p ublisher, whose
reports were encouraging, but also demanded some refinement from which
the final product has benefited. I also want to put on record my debts to those
who, by involving me in projects (research seminar series and conferences as
well as publications) linked to late ancient cities, have done much to stimulate
my thinking on the topic: these include Richard Alston, Nicholas Baker-Brian,
Rasmus Brandt, Kate Cooper, Marios Costambeys, Roald Dijkstra, Lucy Grig,
Guy Halsall, Julia Hillner, Michael Humphreys, Gavin Kelly, Christopher Kelly,
Bertrand Lançon, Conrad Leyser, Carlos Machado, Oliver Nicholson, Shaun
Tougher, Dorine Van Espelo, Giorgia Vocino, Bryan Ward-Perkins, Johannes
Wienand, and Jeroen Wijnendaele. I am grateful to my colleagues in the
Department of Classics, Ancient History, and Egyptology at Swansea University,
not least for helping to keep my spirits up when the delights of bureaucracy
threatened to overwhelm us all. The topics touched on in this study have also
featured in my teaching for many years, and I should not ignore the impor-
tant contribution made to my thinking by successive cohorts of students: they
might not think that they are research partners, so it is only right for me to
stress that they are. My greatest debts remain the most personal: to Rachel, for
not minding my mental absence while I completed this; and to Morgan, who
lights up my life, no matter how far away he is.
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Cities and the Meanings of Late Antiquity

Mark Humphries - 978-90-04-42261-2

Lee L. Brice (Western Illinois University)

Jeremy Armstrong (Early Rome) (Auckland University)

Mark Humphries - 978-90-04-42261-2

Mark Humphries - 978-90-04-42261-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019915594

ISBN 978-90-04-42260-5 (paperback)

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Mark Humphries - 978-90-04-42261-2

Cities and the Meanings of Late Antiquity 1

Mark Humphries - 978-90-04-42261-2

© Mark Humphries, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004422612_002 Mark Humphries - 978-90-04-42261-2

1 P. Brown 1978: 1.

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Appropinquans autem ad portam civitatis, vidit signum crucis supra

Only after he produces coins inscribed with Decius’ name, as he attempts to

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the late-antique period, it is precisely amongst scholars working on cities that

We have tended to take a rather bleaker view of the ‘Transformation

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broader popular audience Gibbonian notions of catastrophic decline and

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2 Sources and Debates: Discovering the City in Late Antiquity

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up until comparatively recently the archaeological evidence for the devel-

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of its stratigraphic context, which is crucial for questions of relative dating.

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43 Bryer 1978: 141.

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On the other hand, the increased volume of archaeological evidence can be

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visualisations and virtual reality offers opportunities to experience recon-

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3 What Was a City in Late Antiquity?

In much modern scholarship, cities are regarded as symbolic of the attain-

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3.1 Rhetorical Constructions: Defining Cities and Identities

66 Varinlioğlu 2017: 262–63. On the site, see further p. 28 below.

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69 On the administration of Alexandria, see Haas 1997: 47–48.

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of Rome, Constantinople, and Antioch are depicted as enthroned female

utque caput numeri Roma inclita, sic capite isto

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77 Russell and Wilson 1981.

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dent.90 Moreover, its physical qualities are presented as embodying aspects

3.2 New Definitions of the City in Late Antiquity

90 Lib. Or. 11.196–221 (buildings), 227–229 (development in spite of earthquakes).

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suspicion because of its dalliance with forms of Christianity that he regarded

cum Deus dextram quatiens coruscam

This represents a significant shift in the construction of urban identities, and

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1 P. Brown 1978: 1.

43 Bryer 1978: 141.

66 Varinlioğlu 2017: 262–63. On the site, see further p. 28 below.

69 On the administration of Alexandria, see Haas 1997: 47–48.

77 Russell and Wilson 1981.

90 Lib. Or. 11.196–221 (buildings), 227–229 (development in spite of earthquakes).

106 See below pp. 53–54.

136 Whittow 2007: 379.

166 Amm. Marc. 25.10.12–13.

184 Roncaglia 2018: 122–28; also S. James 1988 on fabricae.

190 See above pp. 28–30.

196 Velázquez and Ripoll 2012; Martínez Jiménez 2017.

199 Recent overview of the question in Whittow 2013.

204 Schiavone 1996.

210 Packer 2001: 7.

215 Frantz 1988: 6–8.

218 Loseby 1992a: 172–73.

227 Marazzi 2004.

234 Brogiolo and Ward-Perkins 1999: xv–xvi.

239 Lactant. De mort. pers. 12.3–5.