Sizing up Roman urbanism

An interesting window onto the urban life of the ancient world comes from a speech delivered by the orator and author Aelius Aristides in Rome in AD 154 before the imperial household. This was his moment, and his address was intended to win favour in the court by glorifying the achievements of Rome. The text is important, nonetheless, since it gives us an impression of what contemporaries understood, or at least what they chose to emphasize, about the singular changes to the ancient world that came with imperial rule. The orator not only relates that there was a dramatic increase in the numbers of cities (‘when were there ever so many cities?’), but also that, while old sites continued to flourish, new sites were also founded (‘some newly founded, others increased under and by you’; Aelius Aristides, To Rome, 93–4). Intriguingly, the rhetor (teacher of rhetoric) also calls up an image of cities lying cheek by jowl (‘did ever a man who lived then travel across the country as we do, counting the cities by days, and sometimes riding on the same day through two or even three cities, as if he was passing through one only?’; Aelius Aristides, To Rome, 93–4). The sense throughout is not only of greater wealth, affluence and prosperity, but also of the embellishment of cities through new amenities and comforts, new-found confidence in their ability to endure, and the explosion of urban life. Yet, what do we know about the urbanism of the Roman Empire? To what extent was the development of cities the cause or the result of the new connectedness and integration that must have come with the expansion of the empire? In general, scholarship on ancient urbanism has been defined by two trends (Hanson 2016). The first is that we have never had a reliable idea of how many cities there were, how they were distributed across space and time, or how many individuals lived in them. We have never had a comprehensive list of sites or complete maps of their distribution. Although N.J.G. Pounds (1969) attempted to create a tentative map of cities in the ancient world in the second century AD (Figure 5.1), which has been reproduced several times (including in the Very Short Introduction to Classics series (Beard 1995)), his work was seriously hampered by his reliance on a mixture of ancient sources, such as Pausanias’s Guide to Greece, Pliny’s Natural History and Caesar’s Commentaries, which cannot be expected to be consistent. This means that his work not only misses out half the empire, but also gives no sense as to how cities developed or how large they eventually became. Although there has been much discussion about the sizes of ancient cities, we have never had an indisputable method for estimating their numbers of residents. We have some idea about a couple of the most important sites, such as Rome, but we have almost no information about other settlements in the ancient world. This means it has been virtually impossible to discuss with confidence the size of the overall urban population, the urbanization rate or the total population.