ABSTRACT
An understanding of urbanization is central to understanding mechanisms of Roman rule in Italy, and the processes of acculturation. It is also crucial to our understanding of the operation of Roman society, and in particular élite society. Given this degree of importance, it is clearly an area which requires serious investigation. However, the most influential theorists of the pre-modern citySombart, Weber, and most recently, Finley-have perhaps, in some senses, constricted rather than enhanced the scope of the debate. The continuing emphasis on the Weberian ideal types of consumer and producer cities, however valid these may be for understanding ancient economics, has had the effect of restricting the debate on the nature of the ancient city very largely to the sphere of economic history.1 However valid the consumer city model may be for ancient economic behaviour, cities were not, then as now, purely economic constructs. They were just as much the arena for social and political interaction as for economic exchange, if not more so. Paradoxically, this point was stressed by Weber himself in his earlier works, but is much less prominent in his later (and better-known) work The City (Weber 1909; 1921; Capogrossi 1995). More recently, interest has been divided between attempts to refine or replace the consumer city model and exploration of other avenues of research with a greater emphasis on the social structure of the city and how it operated. The aim of this chapter is to examine the physical form of the Italian city, as it evolved in the first century BC and first century ADwhat public buildings were being constructed, who was undertaking the construction, and why-and to suggest some ways in which this
can throw light on how the Italians thought about cities, about their social dynamics, and about the role of the city as a vehicle for acculturation and Roman unification of the peninsula. Few cities have been preserved in a state which allows detailed studyPompeii, Herculaneum, Ostia, and to a lesser extent, Paestum, are very much the exceptions rather than the rule. Nevertheless, examination of urban development can give some clue as to how élite perceptions of a city changed. This may, in turn, suggest something about changing social and political conditions within cities, and about relations between Italian municipalities and Rome.
