ABSTRACT
The Weberian model of the ancient city championed by Finley (1977) rightly lays emphasis on the tight nexus between urban centre and rural hinterland in Greek and Roman antiquity. One of the consequences of this nexus is to determine the character of the ruling elite. Because town and country were united politically, and because the locus of politics was the heart of the town, the agora or forum, the great landowners, who (on any account of the ancient city) formed at least the core of the political elite, lived in and played a dominant role in the organisation of the town. In its crudest form, the model makes the landowners the sole members of the elite; the corollary is that specifically urban economic interests carry virtually no weight in the political process, and that no specifically urban elite can emerge. In place of merchant princes, the town can only produce a frustrated elite of nonpolitical and only partially enfranchised rich, in the form of metics and freedmen. The contrast with the medieval city, or at least that of northern Europe, is marked: the separation of town and country leads there to the development of two competing elites, the barons of the countryside and the big merchants of the town.
