Urban Space and Urban History in the Roman World

This volume investigates how urban growth and prosperity transformed the cities of the Roman Mediterranean in the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE, integrating debates about Roman urban space with discourse on Roman urban history. The contributions explore how these cities developed landscapes full of civic memory and ritual, saw commercial priorities transforming the urban environment, and began to expand significantly beyond their wall circuits. These inter-related developments not only changed how cities looked and could be experienced, they also affected the functioning of the urban community, and together contributed to keeping increasingly complex urban communities socially cohesive. By focusing on the transformation of urban landscapes in Late Republican and Imperial period, the volume adds a new, explicitly historical angle to current debates about urban space in Roman studies. Confronting archaeological and historical approaches, the volume presents developments in Italy, Africa, Greece and Asia Minor, thus significantly broadening the geographical scope of the discussion, and offering novel theoretical perspectives alongside well-documented, thematic case studies. Urban Space and Urban History in the Roman World will be of interest to anyone working on Roman urbanism, or Roman history in the Late Republic and early Empire.