THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYThe late antique townWhat do we mean by the late antique city? The model of the typical provincial
city of the Roman empire, with its monumental architecture, its public build-
ings, baths, theatre, temples, forum, broad colonnaded streets and perhaps
also its circus or amphitheatre, continued into late antiquity – Aphrodisias in
its heyday provides a good example. Such cities were planned for public life
and well equipped for the leisure of their well-to-do citizens, the members
of the curial class, who were also the city’s benefactors; here and at Ephesus
their statues and inscriptions proudly display their generosity and civic pride.^27
With the coming of the fourth century, the upkeep of the cities had become
more diffi cult and building had slowed down, but the arrangement of public
space remained much as it had been. Such cities seemed to contemporaries
to be the embodiment of culture. Procopius describes in panegyrical terms
the founding of a new city at the spot where Belisarius’ expedition landed in
North Africa, and where, he claims, a miraculous spring had gushed forth to
give them water just when they needed it; with the building of a town wall and
all the accoutrements of a city, the rural population of the headland hence-
forth adopted civilized manners and lived like men of culture:
The rural people have cast aside their ploughshares and live like city-
dwellers, exchanging their rural lifestyle for civilization.
(Buildings VI.6.15, cf. Vandal Wars I.15.31ff.)Elsewhere Procopius lists among the standard attributes of a city, stoas, a bath,
an aqueduct and lodgings for magistrates.^28 This model was already coming
under strain when Procopius wrote. It was an urban style which had required
public and private investment, both to build and to maintain its public build-
ings. It also implied a life of cultured leisure, or at least civic involvement, if
only for the richer citizens, with a range of public activity, in the forum, at the
baths, at the circus, while in the Roman period its temples characteristically
looking out over the forum implied the survival of paganism.
The changing cityJust such a city, named Justiniana Prima, and generally identifi ed with Cˇaricˇin
Grad (45 km south of Nisˇ), is attributed to the initiative of the Emperor Jus-
tinian and commemorated his own birthplace in Illyricum – or so Procopius
claims, for his account of this new foundation is even vaguer than it is for the
new city on the African coast, simply listing some of the standard elements
noted above.^29 Yet generalizations are dangerous, and close examination of
every site and literary reference is needed. ‘Classical’ cities were far from being
the norm everywhere, if they ever were. The large sixth-century site of And-
rona in Syria, for instance, is identifi ed as a kome, a large village, like others in
the east in this period, though it had such urban features as two sets of circuit
walls, large extra-mural reservoirs, a kastron, a Byzantine bath, and nearly a