Town and Country Relationships in the Normalurbs
Roman Gentrification - The Transformation of Town and Country on the Italian Peninsula - Peter de Graaf
Peter de Graaf [+]
Description
In Chapter 3 I will compare the Archaic and Classical poleis of the Greek homeland to the official Roman towns, defined in this study as the coloniae and municipia, on the Italian peninsula in the time of Augustus. This comparison is based on the inventories of poleis by Hansen and the official Roman towns on the Italian peninsula by De Ligt. The list of official Roman towns by De Ligt is leading in my analysis. A complementary source of information on higher-order settlements on the Italian peninsula south of the Po River is the Romurbital database. The justification for this comparison between Greek and Roman towns is based on the observation that most Roman towns were of modest size, often evenly distributed over the landscape and with a relatively large hinterland. This in contrast to Greek homeland poleis. Those towns were also relatively small, but more densely distributed in the landscape. This made small towns the norm and large towns the exception in Early Imperial Roman Italy. The large towns have received most of the scholarly attention because of the available archaeological and epigraphic evidence and the important role of these large towns in the economic network of Roman Italy. The German tradition of landscape research and geographical studies referred to the typical polis of the Greek world as the ‘Normalpolis’; in analogy, the typical small Roman town is called ‘Normalurbs’. I will define and put into context the size-ranges for the dimensions and populations of these two ideal types. This chapter will also review the origins that led to what is known as the Greek model of urbanization, in which 70–80% of the population of Classical Greece lived within the polis walls and consisted mainly of commuter-farmers. I will compare this Greek model to the Roman model of urbanization, in which 80–85% of the people did not live in towns, but in the countryside. This comparison will provide insights into the composition of both Greek and Roman urban populations and their activities.