This study examines how cities have become an area of significant historical debate about late antiquity, challenging accepted notions that it is a period of dynamic change and reasserting views of the era as one of decline and fall.

The construction of urban defences was one of the hallmarks of the late Roman and late-antique periods (300–600 AD) throughout the western and eastern empire. City walls were the most significant construction projects of their time and they redefined the urban landscape. Their appearance and monumental scale, as well as the cost of labour and material, are easily comparable to projects from the High Empire; however, urban circuits provided late-antique towns with a new means of self-representation. While their final appearance and construction techniques varied greatly, the cost involved and the dramatic impact that such projects had on the urban topography of late-antique cities mark city walls as one of the most important urban initiatives of the period. To-date, research on city walls in the two halves of the empire has highlighted chronological and regional variations, enabling scholars to rethink how and why urban circuits were built and functioned in Late Antiquity. Although these developments have made a significant contribution to the understanding of late-antique city walls, studies are often concerned with one single monument/small group of monuments or a particular region, and the issues raised do not usually lead to a broader perspective, creating an artificial divide between east and west. It is this broader understanding that this book seeks to provide. The volume and its contributions arise from a conference held at the British School at Rome and the Swedish Institute of Classical Studies in Rome on June 20-21, 2018. It includes articles from world-leading experts in late-antique history and archaeology and is based around important themes that emerged at the conference, such as construction, spolia-use, late-antique architecture, culture and urbanism, empire-wide changes in Late Antiquity, and the perception of this practice by local inhabitants.

The city was the nexus of the Roman Empire in its early centuries. The City in Late Antiquity charts the change undergone by cities as the Empire was weakened by the third-century crisis, and later disintegrated under external pressures. The old picture of the classical city as everywhere in decline by the fourth century is shown to be far too simple, and John Rich seeks to explain why urban life disappeared in some regions, while elsewhere cities survived through to the Middle Ages and beyond.

This Element will reevaluate the relationship between monasticism and the city in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages in the period 400 to 700 in both post-Roman West and the eastern Mediterranean, putting both of those areas in conversation. Building on recent scholarship on the nature of late antique urbanism, the authors can observe that the links between late antique Christian thought and the late and post-Roman urban space were far more relevant to the everyday practice of monasticism than previously thought. By comparing Latin, Greek and Syriac sources from a broad geographical area, the authors gain a birds' eye view on the enduring importance of urbanism in a late and post-Roman monastic world.

This book examines neglected architectural decoration from the late antique city of the East Mediterranean. It addresses the omission in scholarship of discussion about the embellishment of non-monumental secular buildings (public porticoes, small public baths, shops/workshops, and non-elite houses). The finishing of these structures has been overlooked at the expense of more lofty buildings and remains one of the least known aspects of the late antique city. The author surveys the archaeological evidence for decoration in the region, with the maritime sites of Ostia and Ephesus selected as case studies. Drawing upon archaeological, written, and visual sources, it attempts to reconstruct how such buildings appeared to late antique viewers and investigates why they were decorated as they were.

The Greco-Roman world is identified in the modern mind by its cities. This includes both specific places such as Athens and Rome, but also an instantly recognizable style of urbanism wrought in marble and lived in by teeming tunic-clad crowds. Selective and misleading this vision may be, but it speaks to the continuing importance these ancient cities have had in the centuries that followed and the extent to which they define the period in subsequent memory. Although there is much that is mysterious about them, the cities of the Roman Mediterranean are, for the most part, historically known. That the names and pasts of these cities remain known to us is the product of an extraordinary process of remembering and forgetting stretching back to antiquity that took place throughout the former Roman world. This volume tackles this subject of the survival and transformation of the ancient city through memory, drawing upon the methodological and theoretical lenses of memory studies and resilience theory to view the way the Greco-Roman city lived and vanished for the generations that separate the present from antiquity. This book analyzes the different ways in which urban communities of the post-Antique world have tried to understand and relate to the ancient city on their own terms, examining it as a process of forgetting as well as remembering. Many aspects of the ancient city were let go as time passed, but those elements that survived, that were actively remembered, have shaped the many understandings of what it was. In order to do so, this volume assembles specialists in multiple fields to bring their perspectives to bear on the subject through eleven case studies that range from late Antiquity to the mid-twentieth century, and from the Iberian Peninsula to Iran. Through the examination of archaeological remains, changing urban layouts and chronicles, travel guides and pamphlets, they track how the ancient city was made useful or consigned to oblivion.

The studies in this volume are based on new archaeological data and provide a full and convincing reassessment of the old image of urban decay and the impact of incoming 'Barbarians' and Arabs on towns. The broad geographical range of towns studied, and the informed and authoritative interpretations offered in this volume, will be invaluable to scholars seeking to understand this complex, intriguing and misunderstood period of history.