ABSTRACT
Looking over the literature produced at the interface between the disciplines of archaeology and ancient history, there lies a preoccupation with the subject of ‘the city and the country’. Often these are seen as almost discrete entities interacting with each other, but that are fundamentally separate. Michael Rostovtzeff, as a Russian exile, saw this as a dichotomy that made sense of his homeland in the early 20th century, but it is also a dominant mode of discourse within European culture. It is a discourse that is implicit in the model of the consumer city familiar to ancient historians from the work of Moses Finley and a generation of scholarship that includes both Wim Jongman's discussion of Pompeii and Neville Morley's discussion of Rome and its hinterland (Morley 1996), while also encapsulating perspectives of towns and the countryside in Roman Britain (for example, Rivet 1964 or papers in Miles 1982). The centrality of the relationship of the city and countryside was established in the first ever social and economic history of the Roman Empire, which was written by Rostovtzeff originally in the 1920s and then re-issued through to the end of the 1950s. At the heart of the discussion lie two paradigms: one a conception of history based on the experience of the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and second, the use of archaeological evidence. The latter had been a feature of Tenney Frank's earlier work, in which ‘large-scale factory methods’ and ‘industrial capital’ were incorporated into the interpretation of garum and textile production in Pompeii (Frank 1918: 233–34) and a comparison between the Eumachia building and the Blackwell Hall in medieval London with an associated cross-comparison of the collegia of Pompeii with the guilds of the Middle Ages – a subject that was duly developed by Moeller (1976) more than half a century later – a study anticipated by Rostovtzeff (1926: 514–15).
