Where was Valentia?

Roman Britain was a single province from AD43 to sometime after Septimius Severus won control of it from Clodius Albinus, that is about AD198. Then two provinces were created: Britannia Superior (capital London) and Britannia Inferior (capital York). The use of the ranking adjective was also used for Germania and Libya. In Germania it referred to the relative height of the land, and we still use the terms High German and Low German.

However, the north of England is not lower than its south, but the reverse, so we can only suppose that the terms meant ‘better Britain’ and ‘worse Britain’. Had the terms meant ‘hither’ and ‘further’ (from Rome) they would have been citerior and ulterior. But they weren’t.

We know nothing about the boundary of the two provinces, other than each capital must have lain within its territory. It is customary to divide Britannia at the Mersey-Humber line (which runs from Liverpool on the West to Kingston upon Hull in the east), but there is no evidence to support that.

Another possibility is the approximate line of the Severn-Humber economic divide (SHED), a much more significant and ancient division. This is clear from Later Pre-Roman Iron Age (LPIRA) contrasts and remains potent to this day, as seen in the work of the Social and Spatial Inequalities Group (SASI Group) (see www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/maps/nsdivide/) at the University of Sheffield. For anyone not familiar with the geography, the Severn Estuary runs into the Bristol Channel, a wide tidal piece of sea which

In the LPRIA period, coins were used south and east of the SHED line (the Lowland Zone, or LZ) and not north and west of it (the Highland Zone, HZ). Similarly various types of pottery were made and distributed  in the LZ, and no pottery has been found in the HZ. It is also the divider for LPRIA forts versus no forts, with all forts again found in the LZ south and east of the line (Millett, 1992, various pp). Todd notes that certain architectural features such as souterrains exist only in the HZ, north west of the SHED line (Todd, 2008, p.20) North and west of the SHED line agriculture is to this day dominated by stock rearing, as opposed to the mainly agrarian nature of south and east.

The SHED line was also the line of the Fosse Way, for a generation the effective border of the Roman Empire in Britain, so the earliest Roman province was the LZ, or a part of it.. Naturally it formed the tribal borders of a number of Brythonic political units. Consequently it also forms an isogloss, because the people to the north and west of that line would operate in different discourse communities to those south and east of it. They would not talk of minting coins, how to make or sell ceramics, or techniques for building or rebuilding earthworks.

The line itself runs approximately along the Jurassic Ridge, which is a watershed for local rivers. It may have had a negative impact on settlements, as here is the highest level of the natural radioactive gas Boron. This runs along the SHED/ Jurassic Ridge line and it is likely that fewer settlements would be made along that line, since the gas permeates through floorboards and has a long-term adverse effect on health, even today. Gas, river access and proximity to potentially hostile neighbours would have reinforced the divide.

All of this leaves me in no doubt that this was the border between Britannia Inferior and Britannia Superior, as overseen by Septimius Severus after beating Clodius Albinus. He stripped the governors of the power to command armies and stripped the armies of the power to levy taxes, thus creating checks and balances.

At some point between AD198 and AD305, the term ‘Britannia’ came to be applied to Britannia Inferior only, and the LZ became known as ‘Caesariensis’. Birley suggests this may have coincided with the reception of the Caesar Constantius Chlorus in London in AD296 (Birley); at some point London was renamed Augusta and this may have followed the split. During the reign of the Tetrarchy Caesariensis was split into Flavia Caesariensis (FC, capital Lincoln) and Maxima Caesariensis (MC, capital London), while Britannia split into Britannia Prima (BP, capital Cirencester) and Britannia Secunda (BS, capital York). We can see this in operation at the Council of Arles, where there were bishops from London, York and Lincoln and clergy from Cirencester present; perhaps the bishop was too old or too ill to travel. It was normal for the church to have a bishop in every provincial capital and a metropolitan for every diocese, and London doubled as the seat of the vicarius, so perhaps the bishop of London was a metropolitan (Verona List).

Maxima Caesariensis was the only province of the four to be a consular province; such provinces were held by ex-consuls and were therefore a privileged set. It may be that its tax income was allocated to Maximian and that of FC to Flavius Constantius Chlorus, which is why it was clearly a lot smaller. Because there was a bishop at Lincoln, I would propose that the basic shape of Flavia Caesariensis was that of the medieval See of Lincoln. Since an Anglo-Saxon king could have multiple bishops, but a bishop could serve only one king, this large bishopric which runs from the Thames to the Humber to me represents the original Mercia of the Tribal Hidage and Flavia Caesariensis.

There is a mystery later in the fourth century, and that is Valentia. Its name suggests it cannot predate the reigns of Valentinian (imp. 363-375) and Valens (imp. 363-378). Ammianus Marcellinus says that the province was created after the suppression of the Barbarian Conspiracy (AD 367). We know that this is true because the province exists in the Notitia Dignitatum and (after the event) in the calendar of Polemius Silvius. It too is a consular province, indicating its importance. It is unlikely that a consular province would be a part removed from an ordinary province; more likely is that it would have been a part of Maxima Caesariensis. If MC is south-eastern Britain and FC is the area around Lincoln, I propose that the there is only rational place for Valentia.

I cannot see any reason why a new province would be established in the north west as a subdivision of Britannia Secunda. The provincial governor did not command troops, he only raised the funds to pay for them. A north-western province, roughly modern Cumbria, would have been quite poor and have no other function other than as a military base. Nor can I see an ex-consul traipsing up to Carlisle (Luguvallum) as a civilian leader in what Peter Heather would call the ‘middle of bloody nowhere’.

My argument is that Valentia was a reward, not an imposition. As such, I can only see it as a subdivision of Maxima Caesariensis. My best guess is that it comprised what are now Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Kent, Surrey and Middlesex, with a small area of what is now East Sussex. The coastal areas of this match the reach of the Count of the Saxon Shore. This was a special military command designed to ensure the orderly settlement of ‘Saxons’ in Britain following the events of AD367. I completely refute the idea that it was called the Saxon Shore (Litus Saxonum) because it was the shore from which the Saxons were forbidden, because they were generally forbidden to be on any shore!

The Governor of Valentia would have ruled the province from London, which was part of the tribal area of the Cantii; the four kings of Kent referred to by Caesar ruled were East Kent, West Kent, Surrey and Middlesex. The Saxon kingdom of Kent seems too to have held overlordship over Essex. It will have been noted that the governor of Maxima Caesariensis also worked in London, as did the vicarius who coordinated the whole island, plus, I would guess, officers who reported to the Praetorian Prefect of the Gauls. In addition, now that Britain had a metropolitan, an archbishop of London, he and his clergy would have worked there too.

London in the fourth century was rather different from the vigorous city of previous centuries. At some point it built a fourth wall along the river side, an area which had previously been open land lined with wharves, thus cutting the city off from its own riverfront and landing places, both military and civilian. This wall survived till Norman times, when it was demolished, trapping a coin of that time under its rubble. Late Roman London ought to have been a secure place, although it failed to stop Pictish ships from slipping past the watchtower at Shadwell and seizing the city.

At some point, as I have said above, London was renamed Augusta, the city of the Augustus. This was a singular honour, although it cannot have been taken as such too widely, because the name didn’t stick, unlike similar names in Gaul and Germany, for example (Autun was Augustodunum and Augsburg was Augusta Vindelicorum). I suggest that the reason for the change in name was first to assure the importance of the city to the Empire, and second because it was the base for the consular governors of two provinces, for the vicarius who reported directly to the emperor, for the bishop of London, for the staff of the Pretorian Prefect of the Gauls and probably the headquarters staff of the Count of the Saxon Shore. As there was a mint in London until after the reign of Magnus Maximus (d. 388), this may be associated with the enclosed site. The later location of the royal mint within the Tower of London may reflect an earlier industrial site in that area, as the Normans built the White Tower on top of the Roman citadel, clearing away the strata which had built up in the interim.

London’s soil was cleared of rubbish and relaid over older demolished buildings as ‘black earth’. This has sometimes been interpreted as rotted timber buildings, but if so, the residents of such buildings were so careful they never dropped a chicken bone or a small coin. I think that within the walls the normal inhabitants were moved out (to the extramural settlement later known as Lundunbyrig, perhaps) and an imperial-divine precinct created for the great and the good and their crews. They even built a very large church, probably a cathedral, dedicated it is believed to St Paul, which was discovered on Tower Hill in 1995. The church of Allhallows by the Tower dates from 675 and contains Roman material. It seems likely that St Martin in the Fields, now in Trafalgar Square was a Roman church, and if so its dedication must postdate St Martin of Tours (d. 8 November 397) and may predate AD410. Maybe that was for people displaced from Augusta. The dedication of St Pancras Old Church to an obscure Roman saint may suggest that, as legend insists, it was an old church just outside the walls for local residents, its its later boundaries were from Oxford Street to Highgate, suggesting that a local noble with a sizeable retinue patronised it.

It is notable that there were churches to St Pancras and St Martin at Canterbury when St Augustine arrived in AD597. Augustine brought relics of St Pancras with him to Britain, and since his task was to reopen the See of London (rather than starting a new one at Canterbury), he had presumably intended them for the extramural church near London.

In summary, I see Valentia as the fifth province usually cited, subdivided from Maxima Caesariensis to include the territories bounded by the Saxon Shore forts and run from an imperial precinct set within the walls of what had been London.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Ammianus Marcellinus

Notitia Dignitatum

Secondary Sources

Haselegrove, C. (2008) ‘Central and Atlantic Britain’ in Todd, M. (ed.) A Companion to Roman Britain, London: Wiley.

Hind, J. (1975) ‘The British 'Provinces' of Valentia and Orcades (Tacitean Echoes in Ammianus Marcellinus and Claudian)’ Historia Bd. 24, H. 1 (1st Qtr., 1975), pp. 101-111.

Millett, M (1992) The Romanization of Britain: An Essay in Archaeological Interpretation, Cambridge: CUP.

A Refuge in the Roman Empire (Part 2)

Moving forward to the early second century AD; Trajan fought and defeated the Dacians (101-106 AD), following an earlier campaign by Domitian, and raised a column about it in 109AD. This was the last expansion of the Empire, and proved a war too far. Immediately north of the Dacians were the Goths, who had moved upriver on the Vistula and found themselves at the Carpathians. They expanded into the northern parts of Dacia. By around 250AD this had become a threat to Rome, and its new emperor, Decius, led an army into Dacia to repel the Goths.

It didn’t work. Decius was killed in the marshes on the north bank of the Danube. The Goths went on to raid various parts of the empire, even crossing into Asia Minor and abducting Roman citizens in Cappadocia as slaves. Rome had removed a buffer state when they’d have been better advised to strengthen it.

Amongst the captives from Cappadocia were Christians, and whilst they had started as slaves of the Goths, their offspring gradually became Goths (while still able to speak Greek and Latin). About a hundred years after being abducted, one of those new Goths, Wulfilaz, turned up in Constantinople. His name is recorded variously as Ulphilas or Wulfila, and he was a Christian priest. We will catch up with him later on.

When Constantine took control of the eastern empire, he established a treaty (foedus) with the Danubian Goths, the group later known as the Visigoths. This was something very much to their advantage; the right to trade with Roman Moesia at any point along the Danube; the ability to absorb all and any young men the Goths could spare into the Roman Army, where they would spend twenty years as a soldier; if they came back it would be as  men in their late 30s or above, and if they chose not to return there was the offer of a cash sum, Roman citizenship and the ability to marry a Roman citizen girlfriend and settle as a burgher of the town. The third advantage of the foedus was a regular ‘gift’ of high quality Roman pottery and metalware, of which the king would keep some and give the rest to his higher nobles and so on down the line, securing loyalty in this way.

This pact served both Romans and Goths well. The Romans had to pay for the ‘gifts’ (i.e. bribes) to the Goths, but that was a lot cheaper than fighting them. The real damage was to Roman egotism. The bribes also provided a structure of chieftain generosity and reciprocal service typical of a Germanic war band.

 The Emperor Decius

Wulfilaz appeared in Constantinople in 340, and was allowed to create a translation of the Bible into Gothic, using a mix of Latin and Greek letters with some Gothic runes. By his own admission, he omitted the Book of Kings in the Old Testament because the Goths were warlike enough without encouragement. He returned to Gothland under the protection of Fritigern, but later took a community of Gothic Christians back within the empire in about AD347/8 under the protection of Constantius II; who was an Arian, and so Wulfilaz’s group adopted Arianism, which was legitimised at the Church Council of Rimini; it was probably close to the Christianity they’d practised in Cappadocia when it was still underground.

The Goths ran into difficulty because they were drawn into a dispute over who should be eastern emperor; Valens, the brother of Valentinian, who had been picked by his brother, who had been appointed and acclaimed by the army, rubberstamped by an obliging Senate, was unpopular with Procopius, a cousin of the former emperor Justin. Somehow Procopius persuaded the Gothic leadership that he was the rightful emperor.

Procopius (also claimed as Valens, but probably too young to be him)

In the Germanic system of royal inheritance, Procopius might have succeeded, because that system established a royal pedigree, and anyone within the royal lineage could seek to be king. The principal targets were stability and legitimacy. It was obviously necessary to avoid children, the ill, mad and illegitimate inheriting, and (as was later shown) women were best placed as ‘peaceweavers’. The next one down the age range was usually best, so brothers and cousins often inherited ahead of sons, particularly ones of dubious mental health, which is why Hamlet was sidelined for Claudius in the myth Shakespeare took from Saxo Grammaticus.

Procopius put his case to the Tervingi Goths, under their leader Athanaric, in terms they used and understood, but which was never used by the Romans once the Julio-Claudians had exterminated themselves.

It would have been smart for Valens to have told the Goths to do what their foedus required and rewarded their renewed loyalty, but he was exceptionally dumb, so he punished them, ending the open trading along the Danube, cutting it to one place, and closing the army to Gothic recruits, thereby trapping youths of fighting age in Gothland kicking their heels resentfully. By doing this he impoverished the Gothic farmers and built up a reservoir of young men who blamed their rulers. By ending the bribes, Valens was able to cut taxes in the Eastern Empire, the first emperor to do so in a century, and was praised for it by the orator Themistius, although he may not have known about it, since Themistius spoke Greek by no Latin and Valens the reverse, so they probably smiled politely at each other as the Empire destroyed itself.

The struggles of Christian Goths and the adverse reaction of the ‘pagan’ Athanaric towards Rome is seen in the martyrdom of Sabbaz (St Saba) in AD374 by drowning. Within two years, this 38 year old Arian Goth had been made a Roman saint, another cause of war with the Arian emperor Valens. An official hagiography The Passion of St Saba has been discussed by Peter Heather in his book The Goths in the Fourth Century (1991). No doubt such murders by Athanaric eased the decision of Fritigern’s Goths to emigrate to the Roman Empire in AD376, less than two years later, at just the moment that Bishop Basil of Caesarea in Moesia. We can see some similar push factors to the murders by ISIS of Christians and Yazidis in recent times in Syria and Iraq.

Unknown to Valens, the Huns had parked themselves to the north of Gothland, having found a way across the Pripet Marshes at the mouth of the Volga. The Goths had a new power to crawl to, so some of them, under Athanaric, asserted that they no longer needed the Romans, now they could get what they wanted by offering services to the Huns. Other Goths – those nearer to the Danube, possibly no further than 30 miles from the river – thought if they offered themselves as even more dogged than before in devotion to Rome, they might receive their old favoured position once more.

Those southern Goths were led by Fritigern, and they sought refuge within the Roman Empire.  It sounded reasonable, but it was the beginning of the end.

They petitioned Valens to let them enter the empire, and this was permitted. The numbers – perhaps 50,000 – were rather more than had been intended, These were however not all men of fighting age, and included women, children, the elderly and the sick. In that respect, they resembled the sort of migrants fleeing conflict seen in the movements of 2014.

Valens allowed them to be placed in transit camps, where they were ripped off and half-starved for some time by the local governors, Lupicinus and Maximus, who sold them food at high prices, claiming there was a famine. They led their menfolk out to acquire illegally what they could not legitimately obtain. They hoped to get to Adrianople (modern Edirne on the Turkish-Greek border), where some Goths had already settled (echoed by modern migrants desire to get to Britain or Germany because they have relatives there). But Valens had already killed their relatives in the city. With some irony, as I write, the Turks are stopping astern migrants at Edirne from entering Greece.

On 9 August 378, Valens led Roman troops against the local Goths and lost, possibly burning to death in an agricultural worker’s hut as he fled the battlefield. Fritigern lived on for some time, and over time, the successful Goths were settled in Thrace and many of the young men joined the Roman army, helping Theodosius I win the Battle of the Frigidus on 8 September 394; by doing so, they showed the Western Imperial Army could be beaten, as the army of Valens had been.

Most of those who followed Alaric in the early fifth century were born within the empire and were therefore full Roman citizens. We have no evidence to say that any of those ‘Visigoths’ spoke a word of anything except Latin and Greek. They had been absorbed and transmitted their energy to the Romans.

A Refuge in the Roman Empire (Part 1)

A Refuge in the Roman Empire

The large-scale movement of people into the European Union reflects movements in past eras; numbers were smaller, but so were the numbers of people on earth.

The Romans were never like the Greeks in the classical period. The Citizenship Law of Pericles, approved in Athens in 451BC, required that an Athenian citizen had to be the son of an Athenian citizen and of a woman who was the daughter of an Athenian citizen; women did not have citizenship, but could convey it to a son. Scorn was placed on Thebes, whose kings it was claimed were from Asia Minor. Herodotus speculates that the Spartans were part Egyptian, but then Herodotus had a mother with a Persian name. Alexander I, king of Macedon (ancestor of Alexander the Great) took a delegation of Macedonians to the Olympic Games, but while he was admitted, because he could prove he was a Greek, the others were turned away because they couldn’t. Any Athenian resident of non-Athenian ancestry who did not match up was categorised as a ‘metic’, and any Athenian man who had not completed the course as an ephebe was excluded from citienship, as were men who owed certain debts, or whose ancestor had. They still had to pay taxes, however.

Rome was always different; they believed that they were descended from a group of Trojan refugees, and had themselves been founded by immigrants. Being a Roman citizen was always a juridcal matter, not one of birth. They were told that Romulus had offered to protect on the Capitolium any man who would follow his rule; Emma Dench of Harvard calls it ‘Romulus’ Asylum’. The earliest Rome featured thre different groups with differing languages – including a bunch of Sabines who spoke Oscan, not Latin; Rome’s second king, Numa Pompilius, was a Sabine, and of course the incomers had already married Sabine wives. Later, not only was Attius Clausus Romanised as Appius Claudius, he was made a patrician and a senator.

The secession of the Plebians in 494BC to the Mons Sacer (Sacred Hill) three miles away in protest again debt imprisonment and bondage showed even at the early date how people were prepared to quit Rome if the conditions weren’t right. It took Rome a long times to achieve suitable conditions, for there were secessions in 449BC, 445, 342 and as late as 287BC, when they moved to the Janiculum. Removing the labour of the lower orders could remove agricultural production and manufactures.

The settlement of Germanic and other groups within the empire is known by two contradictory names in different languages: the French refer to les invasions barbares, the barbarian invasions, whilst the Germans call the process the Völkerwanderungen, the wandering of the people. Such titles are modern and reflect political differences centuries after the events. But the movements were now new, even in the fourth century.

The first settlement clash was with Germanic tribes who were moving south. This resembles the sort of movement we see today when a modern calamity strikes a particular region. In the case of the Cimbri and Teutones, it was a tsunami which hit northern Jutland around 130-120 BC. We know this because one of them gave an eye-witness description to Posidonius, a Greek geographer (fl.100BC), who was told that the sea retreated and then the tide came in faster than a horse could run. That’s clearly a tsunami, for all that Strabo poo-pooed the idea, because Mediterranean tides aren’t so powerful (Strabo 7.2.1).

The reason for the tsunami is unknown, but might have been due to a shift in the rocks on the bed of the North Sea, known as the Storegga Slide. It flooded nothern Jutland and broke of the northern tip into islands, flooding good farm land with salt water. The loss of their land seems to have set the Cimbri and their neighbours the Teutones on the move. It is unlikely that they marched all the way down the peninsula; perhaps they were transported by boat (by the Aviones, the ancestors of the Saxons) to the mouths of the Rhine. At the foot of the Jutland peninsula was (and is) the Danwerk, a large earthwork which it would not have been possible to cross without permission, so that route is unlikely.

The Cimbri and Teutones probably walked up the Rhine towards its source and then down the Danube. Given the confused accounts of Cimbri turning up in wht are now central France and Spain, it is feasible that all movement of unknown people was counted as them. The Romans had never encountered Germans before. They thought they were Gauls, and compared them to the attack on Rome by Gauls in the early fourth century. Given that Gauls had taken over northern Italy c.500BC, the displacement probably affected the Roman kingdom.

As the Cimbri made their way up the Rhine, they seem to have left some members behind: the Atuatuci, who lived in the Meuse valley near Namur, claimed to descend from those Cimbri and Teutones who stopped there. Since what is now southern Germany was populated by Gaulish speakers first, there were probably many such stopovers which turned out to be permanent.

Did the Cimbri and associated groups even know who the Romans were? They must have heard tales about a big and rich land down south, and severely misjudged what that meant. For them, a big country was viewed in Iron Age terms, maybe twenty miles across. They would have no idea that a realm could be hundreds of miles across. This is similar to the viewpoint attributed to Prince Jugurtha, the north Asfrican price who said he would never have attacked the Roman Republic had he known how big it was.

The Roman involvement began in 113BC, when the wandering Cimbri made it down the Danube as far as Vindobona, modern Vienna, where the king of Noricum, a Celtic kingdom in the eastern Alps, roughly modern Austria, called on his allies, Rome, and were forced to retreat, but turned and defeated a Roman army that had underestimated them. A further attempt to reach the Mediterranean by means of the Rhone must have involved retreating to western Switzerland, where the sources of Rhine Danube and Rhone are very close.

This must have taken years to complete, because they next met a badly-led Roman army at Arausio (modern Orange in the middle Rhone) in 105BC; the Romans commanders could not agree on tactics and the Romans were defeated. A battle against Germnaic people at Burdigala (Bordeaux) in 107BC was probably a quite separate group, but assigned to the Cimbri.

In 103BC, the Romans defeated the Cimbri at the Isère in Gaul and captured their king, Teutobod. The rest of the Cimbri entered Gallia Cisalpina, where in 101 they were completely defeated at Vercellae and those who survived were enslaved.

As a result of several bad decisions and drastic underestimation, the Romans had been defeated by ‘barbarians’ in their own neck of the woods for the first time since Hannibal. Henceforth all northern invaders – if that’s what they were – were to be regarded as hostile.

The Cimbri seem to have attracted incomers – possibly given inferior rank below that of the warrior elite which can only have developed as they encountered obstacles. Young men inspired by a spirit of adventure and young women fancying available Cimbri will have joined them as they moved across the land, taking what they wanted. The destruction of their heimat (homelad) would have meant the Cimbri had nowhere to return to.

This was a Völkerwanderung in the true sense. They did not set out to attack the Roman world, and probably had little or no awareness that it existed, but had nothing to lose by pressing forward. A lesson should have been learnt that inbound settlers will fight when they have to, but if given a reason not to could be turned into settlers, eventually into taxpayers.

One reason for Roman weakness here could have been the fact that the armies were loyal to their general providing he won and they could earnt a living out of it. There was nothing to be made by fighting off armed settlers, so there was nothing to motivate the soldiers.

Seeing Rome defeated and no income deriving from them backing Rome would have been a good motivation for the Social War; indeed, Pompeius Trogus reported that the removal of the Socii led to an outbreak of Cimbric raising in Gallia Cisalpina. The rise of Marius and Sulla to supreme power as a result of both wars helped see off the last democratic parts of the Roman Republic.

Roman Cities

Roman Cities

The Roman idea of a city is civilisation; the civilised person (cives, plural civites) lives in a city (civitas), a constructed place for a human to live in. Aristotle said that those who live outside the city are gods or monsters; Romulus allegedly offered his followers a deal: follow my laws and you will be protected by me and free of all previous obligations.

We think we know what a Roman city looks like: a grid of streets, with the cardo and decumanus crossing at the place where the temple and law court denote a central square. By that token, the one city which fails that is, of course Rome. It had grown up long before the idea of planning a town had reached Italy and around several cores.

Three groups, two of them incomers, had settled on the seven hills above the marsh. The incomers were the Rhames, a bunch of runaways and malcontents led by a small core group of young men who’d recently left the village of Alba Longa to prevent overpopulation; the second group was a contingent of Sabines looking to populate the coastal region. They both kept themselves to themselves away from those who’d settled there, the so-called ‘aborigines’. Where they had to work in common, the three groups voted by threes, tribus; that ablative plural became a noun, giving us ‘tribe’.

As Andrew Wallace-Hadrill has recently pointed out, few Romans lived in villas or even town houses which presented a blank face to the street, but which surrounded a beautiful atrium in the centre. The vast majority lived in an insula, a multi-storey block of flats, often hundreds of years old. There would be shops on the ground floor, including cook shops for those who had no ability to cook for themselves. The poor maintenance led to innumerable court cases and to several spectacular collapses. Don’t think of a modern western block, but more of the jerry-built blocks still being out up in places like Bangladesh and Nepal with poor building standards and backhanders to officials to turn a blind eye. Fourth century estimates cite up to 46,000 insulae and only 1790 houses. This must mean that, even though the city of Rome had a declining population, everyone who was not a senator or senior member of the imperial or city bureaucracy must have lived in one.

Remains of insulae from Ostia Antica, second century AD

Pliny the Younger brought a case to the attention of Trajan in Book 10 of his collected letters: the city of Nikapolis in Bithynia-Pontus had erected an arena as a showpiece for the city, hoping to raise its status in Asia Minor. But they had built it without foundations and it soon collapsed, prompting Pliny to ask Trajan to endorse an official investigation as to how this had happened.

The truth about the layout of cities and towns in the Roman era is that the central concept of a regular planned urban space was perhaps an ideal, but many cities already existed and had to be accommodated. Nevertheless, the ideal was that the city you were born in was your citizenship: they used the same word: civitas. We might call this a city-district, since it comprised an urban core in which a number of higher-function activities took place (justice, religion, politics) along with different types of industrial activity. Dirty and noxious industry was often moved to the outskirts, downstream from the places where people drew water to drink, cook and clean themselves and their clothes, and ideally down the prevailing wind from the city is foul-smelling (rendering animal fats and fulling cloth being good examples).

People who lived in dependent communities outside the city would come there in the spring to bring animals to sell, and again in early autumn with grain. The political control of the city would extended to their journey inbound and going home, with the laws and gods invoked to depend the honesty of the market. Mis-selling goods and short measure were forbidden and the safety of all was protected. While in the city, the area’s farmers would look for any additional farmhands in a hiring fair, hear the latest news and gossip, eye up potential spouses for their children, ask the elders to settle any local disputes and perform for the gods what they had promised in the event of good fortune.

Such things have happened in many sorts of cities all over the world from the earliest days and still do. Rome’s rising cities fulfilled the traditional function.

When Augustus rebuilt Rome and other cities, he filled in the democratic spaces some had made use of. At Rome, he built a memorialised quarter over the Field of Mars; the Campus Martius had been the mustering place for the citizen army each spring; many places had a March field. It was also the area where citizens went to vote, through stalls like those used for some horse races. Now Rome’s wars were elsewhere, the legions stationed for hundreds of years in provicial cities, and democracy was dead. So how better to obliterate that apace than by building over it.

In Athens, the historic agora, where citizens had voted, was filled up with temples transferred their from across Greece. The democratic space in Athens was killed, as in Rome, by religion.

Around each city was a dead zone. It was considered unhygienic in a hot climate to bury the dead within the urban area; the idea of burying the dead near a sacred place only arrives with Christianity, so the burial of early Christians are the Vatican (Mons Vaticanus) is possible because it was ‘trans Tiber’; to this day the area is called ‘Trastevere’; curiously, this was a place where vates, Gaulish priests, performed their rituals. Circling the zones of the living and dead at Rome was a sacred belt, the pomerium, where religious and legal restrictions were enforced. These included forbidding the use of arms within the urbs under Augustus’s’s law (lex julia de vi privata).

Rome was divided into a number of districts, each named for a notable feature such as a monumental fountain, a particular temple or a theatre. Modern cities often do this (Charing Cross, Unter den Linden, Temple Bar, Opéra, Tivoli Gardens, etc.).  We also know that different districts had different status levels; the Subura at Rome is described as a red light district, a working class district (not that Romans had class structures as we would understand the term)

Surviving structures from Rome’s Subura district

However, areas then as now changed over time and it should be noted that Julius Caesar was born in a house in this district. The district lies in a dip between the Viminal and Esquiline Hills at the north side of the city. Then as now, the higher the altitude, the higher the status; the imperial palace was on top of Palatine, one of Rome’s seven hills; the Italian royal palace was atop the Quirinal Hill; today the Italian President lives there.

Walls set boundaries and were obviously available for defence. Rome’s original wall dates back only to the fourth century BC, but was credited to Servius Tullius, Rome’s penultimate king. Clearly, this wall, which survives in places, was not extant when the Gauls seized Rome in c380BC, so the name may have been traditional, or maybe the plans for it were approved by Servius but it was never built.

A section of the Servian Wall, near to Rome’s railway station

The much larger Aurelian Wall, the one which survives today, is built completely outside the Servian Wall, and encloses an area some three times as large. This was built c270–5 for utterly changed political circumstances. Before that, the outer parts of the city must have been entirely extramural.

Aurelian Wall section near Via Veneto

The wall was improved by Maxentius by improvements to forts and again by Stilicho in AD401. This shows that it was in fine condition when Alaric’s Gothic Army turned up in AD410 and that they must have been invited in, as they could hardly have broken through.

It is well known that eventually Constantinople developed a triple ring of walls, which is why it survived till AD1453, when the cannon of Sultan Mehmet II, known as The Prophet and built for him by the Venetians, blew a hole in it.

However, walls could be decorative, and as such might be part of civic eurgetism by social competing citizens. Those of Le Mans in France (Cenomanum) are particularly pretty, with at least four rows of contrasting designs.

The third century AD walls of Le Mans, Maine, France

These are walls designed for display more than four defence. By contrast, the walls of Arverna (modern Clermont-Ferrand) were ruinous in the fifth century when they needed to be strong; they fell down through great age and the city’s bishop, the celebrated letter writer Sidonius Apollinaris, conducted Christian rogations, beating the bounds of the city in a hope that magical thinking would stop the forces of King Euric from seizing it.

Le Vasso Galate, a surviving section of the imperial city wall of Arverna (Clermont-Ferrand)

It the later parts of the empire, cities everywhere shrank and became less multi-functional.

It would be useful to consider the link between cities and early Christianity. In every town where there was a Roman presence, there was a priest; in every city with a governor, a bishop; in cities which were seats of vicarii, there was a metropolitan, what we’d call an archbishop. In imperial capitals and cities of high standing, there were senior metropolitans with overarching authority; some were termed patriarchs, great fathers, a term used civicly for men of high authority just below the emperor: Stilicho, Aetius and Theodoric held such a title. Thus it can be seen that the Christians shadowed the urban authority of the empire. Once legal, the network of clergy stepped forward. Constantine allowed bishops to run their own law courts in parallel with the civic ones. In the late empire, towns generally survived if the bishop stayed; if he left, the city was eventually abandoned, such was his network of patronage. There were no rural clergy at that time, so Christianity was professed as an urban religion and those who had no priest to instruct them were termed pagani – country people.

We discussed before the straight Roman streets of many cities; these remained while there was a city authority of decurions to prosecute anyone who impinged his shop or house onto the public highway. In the earlier empire and before, local nobles had wanted to be on the city council. Latterly, however, they had to be compelled. The praetorian prefect and governor set the tax expectations of the emperor as a precept and it was the job of the decurions to collect it; they therefore were loaned the money by a tax farmer, who then forced locals to pay, skimming off the surplus collected.

In the countryside taxes were harder to collect and there were no Christian clergy to demand a tithe and attendance at church. The fact that being outside the walls with the gods and monsters and at risk of seizures by brigands (Bacaudae) did not stop removal from the city to a country retreat suggests that there was an impetus to leave the city.

The fifth century comic play Querolus (the Complainer) refers to a man fed up with paying taxes is offered a chance to join the ‘free men of the Loire’ who live under the trees and pay no taxes. He refuses because he is civilised.

Research on the city of Antioch shows that the straight, Romanised streets were becoming deviated in the 300s AD, centuries before the Islamic conquest of Syria in the 630s. Shop owners had built out into the city streets, possibly with shaded awnings, narrowing the road and making it crooked.

In Britain, there was a forced removal of skilled artisans after the regime of Carausius and Allectus was defeated. A Latin panegyric poem to Constantius Chlorus from the people of Autun (Augustodunum) in Gaul refers to such people being transported to repair Autun because they were so numerous in Britain. It should be recalled that by the time of St Wilfrid the Anglo-Saxons had to import glass-makers from the kingdom of the Franks because nobody in Britain knew how to make glass. Archaeologists tell us that for a while watermills, a common sight in the Roman world ceased to exist in Britain.

There are curious burials associated with urban buildings at Wroxeter, Shropshire (Viroconium), where high-status buildings were turned into forges and city houses were partly demolished to be turned into cattle pens. However, a change in function need not be read as a social collapse; today we find people living in oast houses, old windmills, maltings, converted stables and barns, even old factories and warehouses, as in the US, and we don’t consider any of that to be a sign of social collapse; if anything some may think it cool.

Climate change in Britain may have exacerbated many other problems. We read in Gildas about severe famines, which would have hastened departures from cities. A typical small town like Ixworth, Suffolk (Sitomagus) may have suffered from earthquakes; in the 19^th century the town underwent severe quakes, and people may  have left the Roman town of Sitomagus for similar reasons. It is quite clear across Britain that there were no resources to repair dilapidated buildings, that urban life with its high taxes, controlled labour, nosy clergy and the possibility of being transported to Gaul on a whim would not have been attractive to building workers. The rise of rural villa life in Britain in the fourth century, something that is well attested, may have been a way for pagans and discontented people to supply skilled labour to others who had opted out of the Roman system.

In some places, cities retreated back into their cores, with a barrier built across exit roads. Populations shrank away, but as long as the priest stayed there and the ruler at least went there to administer ritual and justice, the community might survive. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle records kings with British names losing the Battle of Dyrham in AD577; their kingdoms were the towns of Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath, which suggests highly local rule, based solely on a town.