ABSTRACT
The last two decades have witnessed a significant interest in the role of the city in antiquity, with the views of Finley still very much to the fore in debate (Finley 1977; 1985). His approach, based on Weber’s construct of a series of ideal types of city, has characterized the ancient city as a ‘consumer city’: that is one where the major income for the urban consumers came from rural rents, where the products of local rural labour supplied the subsistence needs of the urban population and where manufacturing and inter-regional commerce were ‘essentially petty’ (Weber 1909; 1921). Many ancient historians have found the model very attractive in that it seems to fit well with literary testimony of the ruling classes on their economic outlook and urban-centred lifestyle. The ideal type of the consumer city has continued to be most influential in recent historiography, with several powerful restatements of the case by, among others, Jongman and Whittaker. 1 Yet objections have also been raised. 2 Most notably, we must acknowledge that Weber’s ideal types were essentially designed to model the economic characteristics of pre-industrial cities. As Grahame has perceptively noted: ‘a theory that seeks to understand the economic function of a city has been habitually taken for a theory of the city itself. 3 The physical manifestations of the ancient city were equally the product of social processes, in which human agency had a major part to play.
