Textual references to Roman towns in Greece are twofold. Inscriptions inform us of public affairs or family and personal history, whilst official histories by near-contemporaries offer details of general conditions. But such documents become much rarer in MR-LR times. The “epigraphic habit” of erecting inscriptions declines dramatically following Emperor Caracalla’s gift of citizenship in 212 AD to all free inhabitants of the Empire, removing the stimulus to advertise one’s citizen status (Meyer 1990). Although archival history becomes thinner and the geographies and tourist manuals fade away after the second century AD, the letters, saints’ lives, and formal records of the Christian Church form a new, compensatory source for general and local conditions.
For local civilian elites heightened taxes and crises made public service as councilors and other official urban positions increasingly unpopular. To compensate, authority over cities gradually shifted to a pairing of state representatives and (from the fourth century AD) the local bishop and clergy. This caused a widespread decline in the traditional ostentatious erection of urban inscriptions and inscribed secular public monuments by local grandees, together with statues honoring them. There are rare examples of honorific statues in LR towns, but these now focus on powerful representatives of the state (Poulter 2007).
The outstanding exception to all this is an extraordinary burst of church-building, consuming most of the funds and motivation for prestigious urban construction. Nonetheless, we should not overestimate the speed of Christianization within the Empire: edicts continue till the end of the seventh century to ban pagan practices (Chrysos 1997) and it seems that a significant degree of tolerance in the fourth and early fifth centuries accounts for the fact that most of the typical basilican churches of the Aegean were built from the mid-fifth century onwards (Oikonomou-Laniado 2003).
Our textual sources allow historians to paint a general picture of MR-LR urban life. During the MR era, most Aegean cities remain dominated by an elite, often one or two powerful families. Increasingly, especially in the LR era, rising taxation and currency instability, taken with escalating costs of urban maintenance (such as the need to rebuild and maintain city walls during the Barbarian incursions), cause many such families to emigrate to the great cities (after the early fourth century, especially Constantinople), or to great estate-centers. However, it is frequently from the ranks ofregional wealthy landowning families that the Church recruits its bishops, who often assume the neglected role of the urban managerial elite (curiales). It is also argued (Heather 2007) that the former urban elites have turned to serving in the imperial service as officials in the same regions, remaining an important force despite withdrawal from central roles in urban management.
These historical trends do not allow us to estimate the overall state of city life in Greece in the mature to late Empire, but do provide a helpful background to the decline in public secular building (defenses excepted) and a corresponding flourishing of urban church construction. For a more realistic take on the scale of town life we need to turn to surface survey and major urban excavations.
When field survey revealed the dramatic changes in many parts of the Southern Aegean countryside between Classical-Hellenistic and Roman times, indicating a severe decline in rural population and land use, some scholars suggested a flight of peasants into expanding Roman towns, with little change in total demography. As we saw in Chapter 13, this argument was challenged in Central Greece when the Boeotia Project followed up rural survey with the complete survey of three town sites, Thespiae, Haliartos, and Askra (Bintliff and Snodgrass 1988b). Contemporaneous with rural depopulation came abandonment or dramatic shrinkage of all three nucleated sites. Subsequently the same result was demonstrated at the city of Hyettos. Notably, although surrounding rural sites pick up in number and size through MR and chiefly in LR times, these urban sites do not recover their Classical-Hellenistic size (except for the village-town of Askra).
On the Argolid Survey (Jameson et al. 1994), the city of Halieis was abandoned during Hellenistic times, and on its ruins, significantly, by LR times a villa with a bath-house was erected, with 26 poor graves probably marking its labor force. Another city, Hermione, survives but in a shrunken size from its Classical Greek peak. On the Methana Survey (Mee and Forbes 1997), two of the three nucleated sites of Classical-Hellenistic times lose that status, whilst the remaining example, the town of Methana, loses two-thirds of its former extent by Roman times. In the Patras region of Achaea, extensive survey and excavation (Petropoulos and Rizakis 1994) evidence population and economic growth in ER times, in both town and country, far beyond Classical-Hellenistic levels when the region was not highly developed. However in LR times not only does the town follow the Greek norm in shrinking in size but rural sites buck the wider trend and decline in number by a half. The island of Kea (Cherry et al. 1991) seems to have lost three out of four of its Classical towns by LR times, with only loulis retaining its urban character.
Yet an intriguing contrast emerges if we focus on the traditional subject-matter of Classical archaeology: art and architecture. All investigated Late Antique towns in Greece look flourishing if we ignore the widespread evidence for their contraction and focus on monumental buildings. With the arrival of Christianity as the state religion, whilst pagan sanctuaries are converted to churches or more commonly demolished for building material (recycled as spolia into city-wall renewals, private houses, and church construction), a great spate of new churches, monasteries, and baptisteries sweeps over every surviving urban center and every village. At Patras, where we just noted urban shrinkage and declining rural site numbers, the LR city has nonetheless well-built baths and Christian basilicas. Corinth boasts in its port at Lechaion one of the largest basilican churches in the Roman world (Rothaus 1995). Yet Corinth shows a decline in its urban fabric progressively over the fifth and sixth centuries, reflected in a shrinkage in its public bath facilities, piecemeal disuse of its agora buildings, and then displacement of the town center, leaving the former agora outside the final fortified settlement, whose size indicates a community perhaps a third of its ER predecessor. The Lechaion basilica was probably paid for by the emperor and major improvements to its harbor are recorded as the gift of the provincial governor. Decaying civic centers may be left to encroachment by housing and industry, while a church complex can form a new urban focus elsewhere, such as at Cretan Gortyn (Francis and Harrison 2003). In Athens (Figure 15.2b) a new city wall of reduced circuit leaves the Classical Greek Agora outside it, no longer in active civic use, whilst pagan temples and secular public buildings in the remainder of the town are converted into churches (Camp 2001). At Argos around 400 AD (Oikonomou-Laniado 2003), the city center (including the agora, baths, theater, and odeion) loses its role and is taken over by houses and workshops, whilst the focus of life shifts to the east around new church buildings; the mid-sixth to seventh centuries see urban shrinkage and further decline in town life. For Thessaloniki, the agora and its public buildings appear to go out of use from the fourth century onwards, allowing pottery kilns to colonize the civic center in the fifth century: again the contemporary creation of churches in new areas and wealthy mansions indicate drastic urban reorganization (Velenis 1990-1995, Poulter 2007).
For most Aegean towns a combination of surface prospection, planning of surface architecture, and small-scale excavation now offers the best insights for the MR-LR era. Till the 1980s all that was known of the large Greco-Roman city of Thespiae in Boeotia was a largely demolished LR stone and tile fortress of an irregular shape (kastron), 12 ha in extent. Total urban survey showed that it lay central to a much greater Classical Greek city, almost 70 ha (see Figure 11.3). Shrinking drastically in LH-ER times, the city saw a modest re-expansion in the LR era (Figure 15.1). In the center of the artificial surface collection grid an irregular circle marks the fort built in the late fourth to early fifth century out of recycled architectural pieces from the earlier city. The surface finds indicate that although activity was most intense within the fort, a large extramural settlement existed to the east of it, whilst to the far east, and to north, south, and west, scatters of LR sherds denote the extensive cemeteries of the town, with dispersed foci of activity (including probably cemeteries) in the intervening formerly built-up areas. Within the eastern extramural settlement three small basilican churches survive as surface ruins, whilst a fourth lies within the Kastro. It may be
The Late Roman wall of Athens.
Figure 15.2b
Author.
Suggested that the restricted Kastro served as the residence of a militia, the bishop and his entourage, and the imperial officials now responsible, together with the Church, for urban management. To judge by the remarkable concentration of ceramic wasters (production debris) in the Kastro and hardly anywhere else, and their mostly LR date, we can suppose that this locality, the former civic center of the Classical town was also a significant area for industrial production. The town of Sparta appears to have had a similar kastro plus extramural domestic zone (Zavvou 2006).
As well as encouraging urban refortification and village fortification, the state was compelled from the third century onwards to set up military bases within provinces well behind the frontiers, as Barbarians succeeded in penetrating the borders (Gregory 1982, 1992). A weH-studied example is the fifth-century AD Hexamilion wall that ran across the Isthmus of Corinth, guarding northern approaches to the Peloponnese and the provincial capital of Corinth (Gregory 1993). A major military base attached to it has also been subjected to intensive analysis (Kardulias 1992, 2005, Gregory 1993). The land wall and fortress utilized pillaged blocks from the nearby major Classical Greek sanctuary at Isthmia. Surface architectural debris and geophysical tests allowed the American research team to make an internal plan of the major buildings within the fort, which also showed a considerable amount of industrial activity. In the LR period military bases made and repaired much of their own equipment, but it is common, especially in the sixth and early seventh centuries, to see a blurring of the use of urban space in general, where “dirty” productive activities colonize formerly “clean” public spaces such as the major streets and agoras of Roman towns (Potter 1995, Liebeschuetz 2001). Perhaps similar trends are active in Thespiae and the Hexamilion fort, mixing military and domestic life. For the latter, the finds indeed support the idea that the military unit included resident families, and was involved in artifact production, whilst international ceramic imports and mosaic floors all add
Up to a small town-like community, probably representing a local militia and their households combined perhaps with imperial troops. Kardulias (2005) suggests that the fort is a microcosm for a late antique society where the traditional Greco-Roman cities and their associated cult-complexes, with their civic or ritual architecture and infrastructure, are widely replaced by such kastra: small defended communities oriented around defensive militarism and the Christian Church.
The detailed stages of such urban decline or abandonment due to Barbarian invasions and Slavic colonization are still archaeologically unclear, whilst the historic sources are suspected of exaggeration and are often contradictory. There is also evidence for a major blow to urban prosperity already with the Gothic invasions of the late fourth century, such as at Corinth and Argos (Oikonomou-Laniado 2003). Slavic colonization into the imperial Balkans seems to have begun by the later sixth century, and Slavic raids into Greece likewise, but despite earlier claims for urban destructions at this time, scholars today appear to favor a permanent and large-scale loss of imperial control over much of the Mainland countryside to Slav settlers as occurring later, in the seventh century. The so-called “Slav Ware” (see Color Plate 17.1) in its sporadic sixth-century appearances in the Aegean is perhaps a local, hand-made supplement to traditional Roman-style wheel-made wares, although later variants genuinely seem to represent the typical wares of the Slav settlers in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, most notably in the Slavic village which was erected on the ruins of the sanctuary of Olympia. In any case, there seems a general agreement that between the mid-sixth and late seventh centuries nearly all of the numerous towns of the Aegean suffered shrinkage, infrastructural decay, and demographic collapse. Most would not survive as cities: only a minority, with powerful defenses, a sizeable population, and/or on the coast and protected by the imperial fleet, remained in any sense urban into the next, Early Byzantine era.
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