Alcock’s admirable analysis of Roman Greece (1993) showed how drastically Rome transformed the Aegean, but suggested that instead of an overall decline in town and country, displaced and depressed populations and elites migrated to a few, especially the larger, urban centers. We have seen that most surveyed Aegean landscapes register rural decline, whilst a minority see rural colonization stimulated by Roman favor or previous underdevelopment (Bintliff 1997). On balance I see lower total rural populations, frequently focused on larger estates. But in Classical-Hellenistic times Aegean populations were predominantly urban (perhaps commonly 70—80 percent), so the real issue is the fate of Aegean towns. Here again, most landscapes see shrinkage or even disappearance of the typical small-to-medium Classical town, with more positive exceptions being isolated or in selected regions. A central issue then is whether new “supercities” formed poles of attraction, draining lesser Aegean towns for their own growth, and hence sustaining similar total levels ofAegean urban populations to pre-Roman times.
The two outstanding case studies must be Nicopolis and Corinth, the former created by Augustus by moving surviving Greek inhabitants from many surrounding towns and villages, the latter being a genuine colony of Italians introduced by Caesar. In Acarnania, in the wider region south of Nicopolis, Lang (1994) records urban centers for Classical-Hellenistic times with a total walled area of 630—700 ha. By ER times no towns survive apart from Nicopolis and the other city given a share in that landscape, the Roman colony at Patras across the Gulf of Corinth: villages and villas are the replacement. To the north of Nicopolis, in Epirus, in a region where 70 towns were destroyed and their inhabitants enslaved by Rome in the second century BC and mostly deported to Italy, the ER settlement system is likewise one of villa-estates and small nucleated settlements, with only two towns likely to survive, the earlier cities being either abandoned or shrunk to villages (Doukellis et al. 1995, Murray 2003). Roman Patras is not an extensive city, whilst even the much larger Nicopolis is estimated at 130 ha. The evidence appears to indicate a catastrophic decline in urban populations for Northwest Greece, which Nicopolis and Patras fail to balance.
Corinth, capital of Roman Southern Greece, is given the enormous size of 725 ha by Alcock, based on the Archaic-Classical walls, in which the town itself makes up some 500 ha, with an additional 200+ ha taken up with an area enclosed by Long Walls which ran to and included the port of Lechaion. Even for Classical-Hellenistic times these figures do not represent occupied area. Lechaion possessed no major domestic settlement, neither then nor in Roman times (Rothaus 1995), whilst the Long Walls were to safeguard Corinth’s strategic access to its port during an enemy siege. Classical and Roman sources indicate that the Long Walls enclosed open fields. These were formally set out as a cadastral (estate allotment) grid for agricultural use in the early era of the Roman colony (Romano 2003), although a small part nearest the city on archaeological evidence appears to have been for extramural cemeteries (D. Romano, pers. comm.). Even the Classical 500 ha city wall included the largely barren mountain ofAcrocorinth, while the current excavation team considers the remainder was never fully built up. In any case, using the Archaic-Classical city wall as a guide to Roman Corinth is inappropriate, since we now know from Romano’s urban and rural survey (2003, and pers. comm.) that the new colony had an entirely different plan (Figure 13.4). The Roman colony was laid out at ca. 240 ha, but seems to have been replanned on a diminished scale (ca. 140 ha) within a few generations to match real population needs. In Late Roman times less than half of even this seems still to be in urban use. In conclusion, Roman Corinth was probably one-third the size of its Classical predecessor.
These reanalyses of settlement patterns in Roman Greece do reinforce the point (Alcock 1993, Bintliff 1997) that the different regions and cities of the Aegean pursued radically divergent pathways throughout the historical era. But they also emphatically indicate that Greece taken as a whole in the Early Roman Empire was less populated, less intensively cultivated, and less urbanized than in preceding centuries. This can be counterbalanced by the evidence from sources and archaeology that at least where towns survived, and more rarely expanded (especially during the second century AD), there were major public works (monumental civic buildings, odeia (theaters), amphitheaters and stadia, aqueducts and fountain-houses), lavish townhouses, and, in the countryside, innumerable well-furnished villas. As noted earlier, a polarization of wealth and the occasional intervention by emperors and governors essentially explain this contrast. An even more interesting observation can be brought to bear: current research at Leiden University on the urbanization rate of Roman Italy (De Ligt, de Graaf, pers. comm.) has found a dominant pattern of around 20 percent urban, 80 percent rural population, the exact inverse of Classical-Early Hellenistic Greece. Many towns seem to be occupied by the upper class, officials, and residents servicing rural populations and elites (market central-places), whilst in Classical Greece the majority of townsfolk were commuter-farmers. It may be that the “decline of the Aegean town” under Rome was less a failure to recover a desired pattern than a restructuring of Greece into a more Italian settlement-system. But let us make no mistake: the net effect appears currently, if we take the Aegean as a whole, to have been a smaller population, less intense land use, an enlarged wealthy class, a severely diminished middle class, and a smaller and marginalized lower class.
World History
