7
URBAN CHANGE AND
THE LATE ANTIQUE
COUNTRYSIDE
An enormous amount has been written in recent years about towns in late an-
tiquity. There are several reasons for this. In the fi rst place, the development
of late antique archaeology, which we have noted in many contexts already, is
important. The effects are cumulative: there is not only more material avail-
able, but also more highly developed techniques for assessing it. This in turn
has generated more good evidence, since the more sites that are well exca-
vated and well recorded, the more possible it becomes to arrive at plausible
interpretations of the data in an individual case. Unlike the medieval world,
the civilization and high culture of classical antiquity, and thus also of the
Roman empire, rested on a network of cities. The end of classical antiquity
thus seems to imply the end of classical cities, and vice versa. There is also a
special factor so far as the eastern empire is concerned, in that historians of
Byzantium have been engaged in a controversy of their own about the disap-
pearance or survival of cities during the seventh century, and thus whether
or not there was a more or less complete break or discontinuity between
medieval Byzantium and its classical roots; many cities did disappear in this
period but some cities in the Near East seem to have carried on a vigorous
urban life well into the Islamic period.^1 So little excavation has taken place in
Anatolia which focuses on the later Byzantine period that the same may in
fact be true there. But the outpouring of work on late antique urbanism re-
mains extraordinary. It is not perhaps surprising if there is now something of
a turn towards emphasizing villages and small settlements (below), but more
excavation of sites from the later Byzantine period might indeed case us to
modify the prevailing picture.
Town and countrysideThough on the whole in the Roman empire the maintenance of culture, gov-
ernment and administration depended on cities, the proportion of the popu-
lation working on the land was extremely high, and the proportion of over-
all revenues that derived from the land was even higher. Only a very few
ancient cities – Rome, Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria – were
large by modern standards, and most were extremely small. The population