ABSTRACT
The interactions that characterize the Byzantine neighbourhood seem to have been at the rub between community solidarity and familial privacy. To get a sense of the organization and regulation of neighbourhoods, let us explore Byzantine conceptions of neighbourliness. Ideas of privacy and familial autonomy seem to run contrary to equally prevalent ideas of community solidarity. The victor in local disputes was the person who could bring the greatest combination of social capital, money, or muscle to bear on the problem, which usually meant that he had been most persuasive and had become the person whom the rest of the community wanted to back. The legislation arguing for the necessity of spatial distance between households, and the literary texts expressing a desire for privacy, hint at the tension on the border between household and neighbourhood. The evidence from archaeology suggests that remarkably divergent levels of community solidarity were present in different places.
