The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) (8 page)

Day-to-day life was often chaotic. The streets rarely ran in a straight line, but curved, crowded with both people and refuse. In the daytime, the human stampede dominated; an order of Julius Caesar restricted the flow of carts to the evening. When evening fell, the noise and commotion actually worsened. As the satirist Juvenal asked:

What sleep is possible in a lodging? The crossing of the wagons in the narrow, winding streets, the swearing of the drovers brought to a standstill, would snatch sleep from a sea-calf or the Emperor Claudius himself.
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Despite its blemishes, however, Rome represents something new in urban history. The very need to feed, clothe, and bring water to the megacity’s population forced many innovations in economic organization. The purpose of empire, suggested the world-wise Petronius, was to secure the resources to sustain the city’s swelling numbers of households, no matter what the cost in human lives. “The Fates are bent on war,” the courtier observed. “The search for wealth continues.”
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The very task of absorbing these resources presented monumental challenges. The city was served by three ports, bringing in the grain that sustained its population, the luxuries demanded by its wealthy, and the slaves who served them. There were massive warehouses and highly specialized markets for everything from vegetables and pigs to wine, cattle, and fish. Roman commerce was so robust that even ambitious freedmen, like Trimalchio in Petronius’s
Satyricon,
could amass the enormous wealth that allowed them to acquire considerable social status.

Urban retail on a modern scale here makes its first sustained appearance. Dealers in books, precious stones, furniture, and clothing concentrated in specialized districts. There were both the
horrea,
which served as supermarkets, and a vast number of smaller shops, located mostly on the ground floors of the
insulae.
At its most sophisticated, Rome presaged the contemporary shopping center; the Mercatus Traini offered a vast array of products in its five stories of shops.
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Rome’s economy has widely been described as parasitic, feeding off the riches of conquered nations. Dried fish from Spain, walnuts from Persia, wine from Gaul, and, of course, slaves from many countries poured into a city; the world received relatively few Roman goods in exchange.
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Yet if Rome drained the world for its commerce, its genius for the administration of government provided an unprecedented level of security— sparking a new golden age of city building across vast regions of the settled world.

York, London, Trier, Paris, Vienna, and Budapest, important cities of the European future, owe their birthright to the urban genius born on the banks of the Tiber.
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Romanization, in many senses, stood synonymous with the advance of urbanization.

Unprecedented security allowed for these developments. “The Romans,” observed Edward Gibbon, “preserved peace by constant preparation for war.”
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Legions placed near border areas, walls, and roads protected the cities, from the Saharan wastes to the edges of frigid Scotland. Walls and other defensive fortifications were critical to the survival of cities in such remote locations. Yet these places, such as Trier in Germany and Verulamium (St. Albans), were more than military outposts. By the first and second centuries A.D., even British towns boasted street grids, sophisticated drainage systems, bathhouses, and piped water.

Most impressive, this flowering of urban civilization was not simply the result of imperial edict; it had a grassroots energy as well. A spirited competition among the various cities sparked lavish new building projects, theaters, and stadia. Rome allowed considerable self-government to individual cities; the empire itself, notes the historian Robert Lopez, functioned as “a confederation of urban cells.”
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Europe would not again see such a proliferation of secure, and well-peopled, cities until well into the nineteenth century. People, products, and ideas traveled quickly through the vast archipelago of “urban cells,” over secure sea-lanes and fifty-one thousand miles of paved roads stretching from Jerusalem to Boulogne.
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Wealthy and highly mobile young Romans thought nothing of going abroad for their education, to Athens, Alexandria, Massilia (Marseilles), or Rhodes.
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Commerce and technology also spread to the frontiers. Craftsmen from the Mediterranean brought with them the techniques for the manufacture of glass, pottery, and farm utensils. By the third century A.D., the Rhineland had emerged, for the first time, as a major industrial zone. The frontiers of trade, through both sea and land routes, expanded to the previously untapped markets of India and even China.
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At its height, Rome turned the ideal of a cosmopolitan world empire earlier conceived by Cyrus and Alexander into a living reality. Emperor Claudius himself, Tacitus tells us, observed that the gradual extension of citizenship constituted one of Rome’s greatest advantages over the more restrictive Athenian state. “The grandsons of Gauls” who had battled Julius Caesar, Gibbon comments, now “commanded legions, governed provinces and were admitted to the Senate.”
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By the third century A.D., Roman citizenship was made available to free men throughout the known world; less than half the Senate now came from Italy.
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Foreigners, starting with the Spaniard Trajan in A.D. 98, now rose to the supreme post of emperor. Over the ensuing centuries, the heads of state came from such varied places as Gaul, Syria, North Africa, and Thrace. All these diverse men stayed and ruled from Rome, the sacred capital of all other cities. “Rome,” declared Aristeides, a Greek writer in the second century, “is a citadel which has all the peoples of the earth as its villagers.”
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This universalist notion was perhaps best expressed by Marcus Aurelius, the emperor and philosopher, who assumed the principate in A.D. 161 at the death of Antoninus Pius. Aurelius, like a classical Roman, considered his “city and fatherland” to be Rome. But as emperor, he saw Rome’s mission in the broader sense to “do the work of man” across the entire breadth of the known world.
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CHAPTER SIX

THE ECLIPSE OF THE CLASSICAL CITY

By the time of Marcus Aurelius, Rome’s imperium was already under assault. One primary cause lay in Rome’s increasing dependence on slavery. Although always an important part of the classical world, slaves now increasingly replaced the artisans and shopkeepers who had made up an important middle element of Roman society. Many of these then became debtors and dependents on the state; eventually as many as one in three residents of the capital lived on the dole.
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In the past, conquest had provided opportunities for displaced Romans. Now the empire, no longer capable of acquiring new territories, was on the defensive, struggling mightily, and at great expense, to protect its vast network of cities. With the breakdown of security and easy communication, long-distance trade declined. Over the ensuing centuries, the currency, the denarius, was consistently debased.

Perhaps even worse, Romans of all classes seemed to be losing a sense of moral purpose. Cynicism and escapist ideas infected the culture. Many in the elites openly despised Rome’s harried urban life, choosing instead to escape to their villas in the rustic countryside or along the Bay of Naples. “There is in the city,” noted one observer from the eastern part of the empire in the late 300s A.D., “a Senate of wealthy men. . . . Every one of them is fit to hold high office. But they stand aloof, preferring to enjoy their property at leisure.”
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The Roman middle and working classes increasingly lost themselves in the ever more lavish entertainments put on by the state. Many Romans filled their idle hours with the spectacle of exotic animals, brutal gladiatorial displays, and theatrical performances. “The Roman people,” the moralist Salvian complained, “are dying and laughing.”
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A series of epidemics, some contracted from troops returning from Mesopotamia, increased the sense of gloom. One particularly bad outbreak in the third century A.D. reportedly carried off five thousand Romans a day for several months.
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Amid these woes, some found solace in religion. Many attached themselves to exotic cults from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and other centers of the ancient world. One new import from the East, Christianity, proved more enduring than any of the others. Over time, it would take over the empire itself.

To the remaining contemporary pagans, and later to Gibbon, the growing influence of these new belief systems fatally wounded the classical urban civilization. The fall of the empire, Gibbon would write acidly, represented “the triumph of barbarism and religion.”
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In this Gibbon is correct, but only to a point. The new ideas themselves—most particularly Christianity—did not destroy Rome. Without a collapse first of the old values, the ascendancy of the newer ones would have been unthinkable.

Ironically, Christianity’s rapid growth could not have taken place without the empire’s expansive urban infrastructure. Paul, the primary architect of the faith, was himself a quintessential product of the Roman urban world. A Hellenized Jew and Roman citizen from Tarsus, a major trade crossroads, Paul traveled the sea-lanes and roads connecting various cities of the empire—Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Damascus, Athens, and Rome itself.
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Christianity utilized Roman means for its evangelical ends, but the faith itself rejected many of the city-empire’s core values. Borrowing its theology largely from the Jews, the Christians rejected the old place-based notion of
religio
for faith in a single, transcendent god. “When they persecute you in one town,” Christ is quoted in Matthew, “flee to the next. . . . You will not have gone through all the towns of Israel, before the Son of Man comes.”
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Such a notion clashed directly with the culture of classical paganism. The concept of civic patriotism so passionately expressed by Cicero meant little to Christians, whose own God, while on earth, wandered homeless and died like a common criminal.
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“Nothing is more foreign to us than the state,” the Christian writer Tertullian insisted.
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The Christians were further alienated by long periods of Roman persecution. Rome was, as one Christian writer put it, “a city created for corruption of the human race, for the sake of whose rule the entire world has undeservedly been subjugated.” Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage in the third century A.D., celebrated the plagues visiting Rome and other principal cities of the empire as just retributions for its crimes and infidelity.
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This antiurban perspective was most famously expressed by Saint Augustine in his
The City of God.
Like Cyprian, a Carthaginian, Augustine portrayed Rome as the “earthly city,” or
civitas terrena,
that “glories in itself ” and whose own wickedness deserved punishment. Rather than propose a program to reform the dying metropolis, Augustine urged Romans to seek entrance into another kind of metropolis, “the City of God,” where “there is no human wisdom, but only godliness.”
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By the fifth century A.D., when Augustine wrote his great treatise
,
neither the flock of Christians nor the church, now headquartered at Rome, could have prevented the collapse of the empire. Birthrates were falling and cities emptying, particularly in the more exposed cities closer to the frontiers.
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Rome itself was increasingly isolated from the major centers of imperial power.
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Even in Italy, commercial and political focus shifted to other cities, notably Ravenna and Mediolanum (Milan).

Deprived of its imperial role, Rome saw its population plummet. New building stopped and older structures collapsed. In 410, the city was sacked by the Visigoths. The city retained a ragged independence for a bit longer, until it was seized by the German king Odoacer in 476.

Worse indignities were to follow. Racetracks turned to grain fields; aqueducts were abandoned; the baths closed permanently. By the seventh century, Rome was reduced to a city of thirty thousand. “Once the whole world gathered here to climb high,” observed Pope Gregory, surveying the devastation. “Now loneliness, desolation and mourning reign.”
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Following the fall of Rome, city life in Western Europe began slowly to fade. For centuries there developed what one historian calls a “simplification” of culture, a moving inward, “a time of narrowing horizons, of the strengthening of local roots, and the consolidating of old loyalties.”
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Deurbanization did not happen at once and everywhere. Pockets of Roman city life persisted in some areas for centuries. Sporadic attempts were made to restore the empire. But by the seventh century A.D., the old trade links between the old imperial cities were severed. The great port of Marseilles, thriving for centuries after the empire’s collapse, fell into disrepair.

Western Europe and nearby parts of North Africa now devolved into a mosaic of warring barbarian fiefdoms. Virtually all the West’s great cities, from Carthage to Rome and Milan, experienced deep population declines.
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In the periphery of the empire, the losses were, if anything, more catastrophic and lasting. Trier, a bustling German provincial capital with a population of roughly sixty thousand in the early fourth century A.D., devolved into a set of rural villages clustered around a cathedral. As late as 1300, after the restoration of walls and an improvement in the economy, the city still was home to barely eight thousand people.
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