ABSTRACT
Along the length of the Danubian frontier from Noricum to the Black Sea, the public and private monuments of Roman cities reflect increasing prosperity for the majority under the Antonines and, for some, little short of extravagant indulgence under the Severi. In their adoption of Roman forms of civic organization and their display of material wealth, cities in the hinterland of the Danube were remarkable for their rapid development during the second century AD. Three factors, in particular, encouraged urban development. The first was imperial interest. During each successive stage in the consolidation of the Danubian frontier, territory in the hinterland was released from military control and the responsibility for local administration and taxation was handed over to newly created cities. Whatever the higher motivation may have been behind the foundation of cities, there were obvious advantages for Rome: conferring municipal status transferred financial and administrative obligations to civilian communities at no cost to the imperial treasury. It is no coincidence that the periods of rapid urban development in the Claudian, Flavian and then Trajanic periods were also times during which the army advanced towards its permanent second-century bases on the right bank of the Danube. The process was further encouraged by Hadrianic reforms which granted municipal rank to existing settlements and official status to the growing extramural settle ments (canabae), many of which
also acquired urban rank under the Severi (Mócsy 1974, 218-21; Poulter 1983,
78-85). Secondly, once established, the cities, municipia as well as coloniae,
attracted veterans from the legionary and auxiliary garrisons, swelling the number
of citizens with money to invest and the status to assume curial office.1 If
imperial interest and the steady influx of new citizens promoted the rapid
development of the Balkan cities, the new villa estates established within their
territories must have profited from the proximity of a military market for
agricultural and industrial goods, providing landowners with the wealth which
Until recently, archaeology has contributed little to our understanding of
urbanism in the Later Roman Empire. Our perspective has been determined by
ancient sources. Drawing upon the literary and particularly legal evidence for
Late Roman urbanism, A.H.M. Jones concluded that the classical city survived
in the East as late as the reign of Justinian and, in the West, probably even later
(Jones 1964, 759-61). For Jones, the hallmark of the classical city was the
maintenance of local autonomy in the form of curial administration and it was
the very tenacity with which cities clung to their civic institutions which
demonstrated the essential continuity between the cities of classical Greece and
the poleis of Justinian (Jones 1940, 251-8; 1964, 724; 1971, xii-xiii). This
conclusion has been supported by recent interpretations of the archaeological
evidence: although it is universally accepted that the cities of the Balkans suffered
destruction and economic decline during the Gothic invasions of the third century,
it has also been held as axiomatic that the Diocletianic reforms of army and
administration revitalized cities throughout the Balkan provinces (Alföldy 1974,
198 and 205; Mócsy 1974, 297; Velkov 1977, 77-80). For the sixth century, a
Justinianic revival of towns has been claimed, although admittedly, less widely
accepted.1 However, our literary sources are biased towards the Eastern Empire
and, for the fourth century, as Jones admitted, there must have been marked
differences between those cities where the curial class was able to raise imperial
revenue and cover the cost of local public expenditure without resorting to
burdensome levies from decurions in the form of liturgies, and those cities which
could not (Jones 1964, 737). Where the curial class was subject to excessive
taxation, it may be presumed that the decline of urban government would have
rapidly followed.
