TWO WORLDS?
State Space and Marginal Peoples in Late Antique
North Africa
MA-Thesis
Two Worlds?
State Space and Marginal Peoples in Late Antique
North Africa
Thesis submitted for the degree of Ancient History (Research Master)
At the
Institute of History, Universiteit Leiden
Thesis by: Jip Barreveld Student number: 1310275 Thesis supervisor: Dr. L.E. Tacoma Second reader: Dr. F.G. Naerebout
Words: 30,000, excluding primary source quotes, bibliography & footnotes Credits: 40 ECTS
2 Cover image: Chieftain scene from tomb NC at the late third/early fourth century tombs of
Ghirza, in Tripolitania. The sculpture draws its artistic elements from Roman imperial art, but may have equally referenced to local cultural and religious values. It shows the bestowal of gifts, or regalia, to the powerful figure seated in the middle. The intermediate role of chiefs (and the giving of regalia) is discussed below in chapter four.
Source: D. Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity. Experiencing the Roman Empire
3
Contents
List of Figures and Tables ... 4
Acknowledgements ... 5
1. Introduction ... 7
1.1. Two Worlds Paradigm ... 8
1.2. Romanisation and its Alternatives ... 12
1.3. Methodology and Scope ... 16
2. Geography of Empire ... 23
2.1. Frogs around a Pond ... 24
2.2. The Problem of Distance ... 32
2.3. A Mediterranean State Space ... 38
2.4. Micro-Ecologies and Connectivity in Roman North Africa ... 40
2.5. Concluding Remarks ... 45
3. Traces in the Landscape: The North African Surveys ... 47
3.1. Town and Country in Late Antique North Africa ... 47
3.2. Methodology ... 49
3.3. Landscapes of Opportunity ... 54
3.4. Landscapes of Resistance ... 64
3.5. A Late Antique Consumer Revolution? ... 67
3.6. Concluding Remarks ... 71
4. Mauri and Romani: Negotiating Identity ... 73
4.1. What’s in a Name? Berber Revolts in the Fourth and Sixth Centuries ... 73
4.2. Ammianus Marcellinus, Procopius and Corippus ... 78
4.3. Othering the Berber ... 81
4.4. Imagined Geographies: The Berbers and Loca Horrida ... 85
4.5. Reading Against the Grain: Berber and Roman ... 88
4.6. Byzantine Conquestand the Marginalisation of Mauri ... 96
4.7. Concluding Remarks ... 99
5. Conclusion ... 101
4
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
1.1. Map of Late Antique provinces of North Africa ... 18
1.2. The three ‘cores’ of geography ... 22
2.1. Towns of the Roman Empire ... 28
2.2. Map of urban culture ... 28
2.3. Settlement hierarchy of North Africa ... 29
2.4. Distribution of cities in the Latin West, 400 A.D. ... 30
2.5. Population density and the Tabula Peutingeriana ... 32
2.6. Price cost to transport goods to Rome ... 37
2.7. Price cost to transport goods to Rome, alternative visualisation ... 37
2.8. Map of relief in North Africa ... 45
3.1. Map of survey locations ... 51
3.2. Map of site distribution in Segermes survey ... 61
3.3. Identified settlements in the proximity of Thugga ... 62
3.4. Region around Iol Caesarea ... 62
3.5. Zones of occupation in the region of Caesarea ... 63
3.6. Map of Cilium-Thelepte ... 63
3.7. Map of Tripolitania ... 64
4.1. Speculative map of sixth-center Berber principalities ... 76
4.2. The Praesidium Sammacis inscription ... 91
4.3. One of the Djedar mausolea ... 95
Tables 1.1. Structure of the thesis ... 20
5
Acknowledgements
Scholarship is always a group project. This thesis would not have been possible without the support of my dear friends and family throughout my studies. I have had the pleasure of being part of a fantastic community of bright students and aspiring scholars — the Research Master Kamer (‘the Office’) has been our intellectual home for the past years. Together, we have had plenty of needless distractions and inspiring discussions.
This thesis is wide in scope and by necessity I have not been able to include all of the vast literature on the topics I chose to study. Following Braudel, ‘I hope too that I shall not be
reproached for my excessive ambitions, for my desire and need to see on a grand scale’.1
My thanks to Emily, Key, Markus, Neilabh and Yannick for their comments and suggestions on the final draft of this thesis.
And of course, my special thanks to my supervisor, Rens Tacoma, both for indulging my wild ideas and for helping me find my way in academia.
1 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, volume one
7
1. Introduction
Reading St. Augustine’s pseudo-autobiographical Confessiones, one gains the impression that his
world was decidedly Mediterranean and urban in its outlook. On his journeys he moved between cities: Thagaste, Carthage, Rome, Milan and Hippo Regius. From the port city of Hippo Regius, he engaged in epistolary exchanges with learned men across the Mediterranean in Latin and in Greek. Yet he rarely journeyed inlands, and he remained ignorant of the ways of the countryside, needing others to translate the local Punic. Peter Brown remarks that, as Augustine would look inland from the city walls of Hippo Regius, the land would appear increasingly alien to him: the estates in the plains surrounding the city where local strongmen ruled; then the villages in the hills with roving bandits and fanatics; and finally, the even more primitive mountains of inland
Numidia.2
From this perspective, Augustine and his friends anxiously held on to a Graeco-Roman, urban life in the narrow North African coastal strip. In another work, Peter Brown thus
summarises: ‘the Roman empire always consisted of two, overlapping worlds’.3 If so, then the
Roman Empire essentially consisted of a world of Graeco-Roman urban cores on the one hand, and a heterogenous and native, inland world on the other. The Roman Empire, essentially a
‘federation’4 of self-governing cities based on the coasts, then also consisted of large ‘inner
frontiers’,5 home to marginal(ised) peoples.
However, the Roman military held sway over much of the pre-Sahara further south. Since the Early Empire, the native population had been pacified, local elites co-opted into hierarchies of power, and local men incorporated into the army. Some of these men would eventually rise to the pinnacle of Roman society. Emperor Septimius Severus came from Africa, and Augustine’s mother
Monica may have been of Berber ancestry and hailed from the inland city of Theveste.6
Therefore, positing a simple dichotomy between city and countryside, Roman and native, will not do. However, it is just as unlikely that everyone in the African hinterland participated equally, or in the same way, in Roman society.
2 Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley, reprint 2000) 186, 187. 3 Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (London, reprint 2013) 13.
4
M. Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (2nd edition; Oxford 1957) 131. 5 Owen Lattimore, ‘The Frontier in History’, in: idem ed, Studies in Frontier History (New York 1962)
469-491: 472-475.
8 The opposition between lowland, coastal terrain on the one hand, and inland montane marginal terrain on the other, features prominently in the historiography of North Africa, as we will see. The opposition between these two has recently been conceptualised by anthropologist James C. Scott as ‘state space’, the world of state power and culture, and ‘shatter zones’, difficult
and marginal terrains where autonomous peoples live in opposition to the state.7 This opposition
forms a useful starting point for my question: to what extent were the large Mediterranean cities and the African hinterland really ‘two worlds’? How far did Roman civilization extend outwards from ‘state space’ into the ‘shatter zones’ of the North-African interior hinterlands?
1.1. Two Worlds Paradigm
The notion that North Africa is divided into two worlds is an ancient idea which has played a prominent role in thinking about the region’s history. For centuries, scholars have treated North Africa as a land of opposites. Indeed, the idea goes back at least to the Middle Ages, when in the fourteenth century Ibn Khaldun, himself from North Africa, posited a fundamental tension
between barbarian nomads and sedentary peoples.8 According to Ibn Khaldun, North Africa could
be divided into the ordered rule of the state, as opposed to the anarchic isolation of nomadic
tribes.9 In early modern Morocco, such a divide was in fact embedded in the local political
culture, where the makhzen was understood to be the ordered space of cities, literacy and the
state, as opposed to the anarchic and mountainous siba.10
The opposition between a simple, native culture and a cosmopolitan, urban culture is
often framed in geographical terms.11 The basic premise relies on a simple schema of opposition
between a coastal zone and the desert: ‘Climate and geography divide the Maghreb into two zones, which differ very markedly in their natural features: in the north there is the Maghreb
proper, the cultivable mediterranean and subtropical areas; in the south, the Sahara’.12 Jean
7 James C. Scott, Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven
2009).
8 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah. An Introduction to History vol 1., Franz Rosenthal transl. (London 1958),
e.g. I.221= pp. 249-250.
9 Cf. Charles R. Whittaker, 'Land and Labour in North Africa', Klio 60.2 (1978) 331-340: 332; Chris
Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400-800 (Oxford 2005) 18.
10 Ernest Gellner, Saints of the Atlas (Chicago 1969)1-29. Cf. Braudel, The Mediterranean, 40; Scott, Not
Being Governed, 125, 126;
11 R.I. Lawless, 'The Concept of Tell and Sahara in the Maghreb: A Reappraisal', Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers 57 (1972) 125-137: 125-127.
9 Dresch speaks in dramatic terms of a ‘struggle’ between a Mediterranean climate and the world of the desert: ‘[…] monde méditerranéen entrent au lute avec la rigidité et l’aridité du desert
africain’.13 This geographic division is then transferred to a social dichotomy ‘desert’ and ‘sown’,
or pastoralists versus sedentarists. For example, according to the geographer Jean Despois, there is a fundamental tension between the nomads, who are attracted to the fertile pastures of the coastal
plains, and the farmers of the coast.14 North Africa, then, could be seen as divided land, where the
social and climatic forces belonging to the Mediterranean realm engage in a continuous conflict with the interior and its inhabitants.
This geographical determinant has often been used in the explanation of historical trends. Ch.-André Julien writes, from the French colonial point of view of the 1950s: ‘Si la civilisation romaine conquit […] les cités du pays plat, elle ne mordit même pas sur les îlots montagneux du Maghreb’; in contrast to the Roman civilisation of plains and cities, the native Berber uplanders
still lived in shabby huts together with their cattle.15 More recently, M. Rachet posited the
distinction ‘Berbérie humide’ and ‘Berbérie aride’ as essential fact of North African geography.16
Yet he divides the local Berber populations into the four groups of sedentaries, grand nomads, semi-nomads and transhumants, with especially the latter two forming an obstacle to the power
of Rome.17
Anglo-American scholarship, too, has characterised African history in terms of opposition. In J.B. Bury’s monumental monograph on the Late Roman Empire, he writes: ‘the
leading feature of the history of North Africa […] is a continuous struggle with the Moors.’18
Another dichotomy was put forward by Frend, who saw a huge divide between the Catholic, Roman inhabitants of Africa and the indigenous, Donatist population, also framed as an
13 Pierre Birot and Jean Dresch, La Méditerranée et le Moyen-Orient: tome premier, la Méditerranée
occidentale (Paris 1953) 452.
14 ‘L’afrique du Nord apparaît donc bien […] comme une contrée faite de la juxtaposition d’un domaine
méditerranéen […] et, d’autre part, d’un domaine de steppe, antichambre du desert et voué comme lui à une vie pastorale plus ou moins nomade […[ les nomads sont toujours attires par la richesse en pâturages et par les cultures des pays sédentaires et il est rare qu’ils n’abusent pas de leur force dès que faiblit l’autorité centrale’; Jean Despois, l’Afrique du Nord (Paris 1964) 108.
15 Ch.-André Julien, Histoire de l’Afrique du Nord. Des origines a la conquête Arabe (647 ap.J-C.) (Paris
1951) 219.
16 M. Rachet, Rome et les Berbères: un problème militaire d'Auguste à Dioclétien (Bruxelles 1970) 15, 17. 17 Rachet, Rome et les Berbères, 24, 27.
10
opposition between ‘Carthage’ and ‘Numidia’.19 Thus, Frend states: ‘[T]he inhabitants of the High
Plains remained out of touch with Roman civilization […] The Berber peasant used the same plough, dressed in the same type of hooded burnous, carried the same heavy club, and spoke the
same Libyan language as he does today’.20 Imagined as perpetually distinct from urban civilisation,
the inland inhabitants are thereby turned into a people without history.
The most prominent and forceful proponent of this notion of two worlds is Christian
Courtois in his Vandales et l’Afrique. Roman Africa, according to him, was only partially
‘Romanised’, and essentially divided into an urban, Roman culture and the world of ‘l’Afrique oubliée’. Again, geography played a prominent role, since the history of Africa was determined by ‘natural frontiers’, where Roman civilisation could only spread unevenly:
La civilisation romaine s'était répandue à la manière des eaux. Elle avait envahi les plaines sans recouvrir les montagnes. Si bien que l'Afrique se présentait comme une sorte de puzzle dans lequel se juxtaposaient les fragments du monde berbère et ceux du monde romain. 21
Recent scholars have increasingly questioned a strict dichotomy between desert and sown (tell
and sahara),22 but the idea has not completely disappeared either. Brent Shaw still claims a
plain/mountain opposition for Roman Morocco (and compares it to Isauria in Asia Minor).23 Chris
Wickham partially follows Ibn Khaldun in defining the contrast between settled agriculture on the coast with nomadism in the interior, although he emphasises that it is not a strict dichotomy
between desert and sown, because of the existence of intermediary areas.24 A recent publication
on Byzantine North Africa carefully notes that the region was ‘pulled by at least two major
19 W.H.C. Frend, The Donatist Church (Oxford 1952) 25-31; 333, 334. For criticism, see e.g. Peter Brown,
‘Christianity and Local Culture in Late Roman North Africa’, The Journal of Roman Studies 58.1-2 (1968) 85-95.
20 Frend, Donatist Church, 31.
21 Christian Courtois, LesVandales et l’Afrique (Paris 1995) 65-128; Cited from page 113.
22 E.g. Whittaker, 'Land and Labour, 332-337; A.H. Merrils, 'Introduction. Vandals, Romans and Berbers:
Understanding Late Antique North Africa', in idem ed., Vandals, Romans and Berbers: New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa (Aldershot 2004) 3-28: 7-8 calls it a ‘simple opposition’.
23 Brent Shaw, ‘Autonomy and Tribute: mountain and plain Mauretania Tingitana’, in: P. Baduel ed., Desert
et Montagne: Hommage à Jean Dresch. Revue de l’Occident Musulman et de la Méditerranée 41-42 (Aix-en-Provence 1986) ) republished in: Brent D. Shaw ed., Rulers, Nomads, and Christians in Roman North Africa (Aldershot 1995).
11 gravitational forces’ [my Italics], namely an imperial system of cities and farms based on
Constantinople and Carthage, and a heterogenous, North African, Berber hinterland.25
There has been strong critique against the Two Worlds Paradigm. R.I. Lawless has
criticised the essentialising notion of tell versus Sahara, noting that other dichotomies could be
important too, depending on the time and place.26 Philippe Leveau goes further and rejects any
kind of geographic determinism, which he recognises as a relic of colonial thought. Indeed, the French colonisers brought with them a European mindset and technology which privileged the plains; they were primarily interested in the plains for economic gain, marginalising the interior
landscape.27 Geography could play a role in justifying French colonisation as a return of
civilisation as a follow-up of the Roman Empire.28 In effect, French colonialism was the heir to a
long line of maritime empires of Carthage, Rome, Arabs, and Ottomans that had dominated the
region. Their idea of mission civilisatrice was consciously conceived to be an heir to Roman
imperialism. Such an ideology has indeed informed the scholarship of the era.29 Yet, as we will see
in chapter three, despite his criticism, even Leveau sticks to a variant of the Two Worlds Paradigm.
In sum, various binary distinctions have dominated the historiography as interpretative frameworks for North African history: Roman versus native, Catholic versus Donatist, urban
versus rural, sedentary versus nomadic, coastal versus inland, and montagnard versus
plain-dweller. For all of these dichotomies, one part of Africa is supposed to be backwards, native, rural and located inland, the other is progressive, cosmopolitan and urban. It bears saying that there
have been attempts to show integration and symbiosis rather than opposition, 30 yet the idea of
25 Susan T. Stevens and Jonathan P. Conant, 'Introduction: Reimaging Byzantine Africa', North Africa under
Byzantium and Early Islam (2016) 1-12: 6.
26 Lawless, 'Tell and Sahara’, 125-137.
27 Philippe Leveau, 'L'opposition de la montagne et de la plaine dans l'historiographie', Annales de
Géographie 474 (1977) 201-205; Lawless, ‘Tell and Sahara’, Wickham, Framing, 18, 19.
28 Pascal Clerc, ‘Les formes de la domination: paysages ruraux de l’Afrique du nord colonisée’, Mappemonde
91 (2008) 1-10: 7; Patricia M.E. Lorcin, ‘Rome and France in Africa: Recovering Colonial Algeria’s Latin Past’, French Historical Studies 25.2 (2002) 295-329.
29 Wickham, Framing, 19, and below on the Romanisation debate.
30 For example, Andrew Merrils states that we can now emphasis symbiosis rather than polarities for
Romans and Berbers in North Africa. Merrils, 'Introduction’, 14. Cf. Wouter Vanacker, 'Differentiated Integration Trajectories of the Nomadic Population in Roman North Africa (1st-3rd cent. A.D.)', in: Gerda de Kleijn and Stéphane Benoist ed., Integration in Rome and in the Roman World: Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop of the International Network Impact of Empire (Leiden 2014) 197-216.
12
‘two worlds’ remains a prominent school of thought.31 I will call this idea the Two Worlds
Paradigm, and one goal of this thesis is to examine it critically both historically and historiographically.
1.2. Romanisation and its Alternatives
A related and overarching issue at the heart of the Two Worlds Paradigm is the notorious Romanisation debate. The key issue in this debate is how to interpret the distribution of a Roman ‘way of life’ throughout the provinces. Traditionally, the word ‘Romanisation’ has been used to describe this trend, but in the last decades the concept has been heavily criticised.
The word ‘Romanisation’ first gained notable usage in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. The eminent Romanist, Theodor Mommsen, devoted a volume of his History
of Rome to the history of the provinces of the Roman Empire.32 As a unifying element in the
western provinces, he found the deep penetration of Roman institutions in local society. His work would inspire a generation of British scholars, one of whom was Francis Haverfield, who
recognized within the provincial epigraphy and archaeology a culturally homogeneous empire.33
Dealing with this topic and inspired by Mommsen, scholars like Haverfield remarked on Rome’s ‘gifts of civilisation, citizenship and language to almost all its subjects, its establishment of a stable
and coherent order out of which arose the western Europe of today'.34
The first criticism, therefore, is that Romanisation as a concept is a product of a
nineteenth-century intellectual milieu.35 For nineteenth century British and French, the Roman
past came to be inextricably linked to their own time. Since Roman culture was seen as the direct predecessor of European culture, Romanisation also served as a historical model for the ‘civilising mission’ of nineteenth-century colonialism. Thus, for many modern scholars, Romanisation has
never lost, and will never fully lose, its imperialist trappings.36 Like the modern concept of
31 For example, Wickham: ‘In my view […] the opposition between state and tribe is a more useful way of
understanding Africa in our period than that between desert and sown’, Wickham, Framing, 22.
32 T. Mommsen, The History of Rome: The Provinces, from Caesar to Diocletian (William P. Dickson
transl., New York 1904).
33 P.W.M. Freeman, ‘Mommsen through to Haverfield: the origins of Romanization studies’, in: D.J.
Mattingly ed., Dialogues in Roman imperialism: power, discourse, and discrepant experience in the Roman Empire (Journal of Roman archaeology. Supplementary series 23) (Portsmouth, R.I. 1997) 27-50.
34 F. Haverfield, ‘Theodor Mommsen’, English Historical Review 19 (1904) 80-90: 86. 35 Freeman, ‘Mommsen through to Haverfield’, 47.
36 R. Hingley, ‘The “legacy” of Rome: the rise, decline, and fall of the theory of Romanization’, in: J.
13 civilization, Romanisation was seen simply in terms of linear moral progression from primitive to cultured. Secondly, the Romans themselves had an imperialist discourse that dehumanised the “Barbarian” other. The ancients used the word ‘humanitas’ in a way similar to modern
‘civilization’.37 The term of Romanization is therefore built upon a double imperialist discourse –
both Roman and modern. For the twenty-first century scholar, it becomes difficult to dissect the term from its imperialist connotations, and using it may moreover make us rely too much on the
simple linear-progressive metanarrative of our primary sources.38
Romanisation presumes a unilateral movement of acculturation, in a top-down, one-way process of culture radiating outwards from the centre (Rome) to passive, native recipients who embrace the new Roman way of life. This way, Romanisation denies agency to the local people,
obscuring why they chose to adopt Roman forms, and how they conceived of the new cultural
repertoire.39 Instead, modern theory of cultural exchanges stresses that acculturative processes
always work (at least) two ways, so a distribution of Roman culture is always accompanied by
local cultural elements in turn changing the Roman element.40 Romanisation also ignores the
continuity in native culture besides the adoption of Roman forms.41
The concept is also too much of a blanket-term, ill-defined and even ambiguous, and therefore has little explanatory force. It is used to explain a wide range of social phenomena seen
across a wide variety of sources.42 It presumes a sharp dichotomy between Romans and natives,
rather than allowing for a complex interactions between a multitude of groups (including various groups of ‘natives’). When concerning the ‘native’ group, the focus usually lies exclusively on a top-down process of the elite becoming progressively more ‘Roman’, at the expense of a bottom-up approach considering the population at large. It presumes the existence of a “pure form” of Roman culture which can be found in the provinces to lesser or greater degree, rather than seeing Monographs 3) (Leicester 1996) 35-48: 35-40; Greg Woolf, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (Cambridge 1998) 4, 5.
37 R. Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture. Unity, Diversity and Empire (London 2005) 62-71.
38 R. Laurence, with responses by A. Snodgrass, M.J. Versluys, D. Krause, R. Hingley and R. Laurence, ‘The
writing of archaeological discourse – a view from Britain?’, Archaeological Dialogues 8 (2001) 90-122.
39 Hingley, ‘the “legacy” of Rome’, 35-39, 44, 45; D.J. Mattingly, ‘Introduction. Dialogues of power and
experience in the Roman Empire’, in: idem ed., Dialogues in Roman imperialism: power, discourse, and discrepant experience in the Roman Empire (Journal of Roman archaeology. Supplementary series 23) (Portsmouth (R.I.) 1997) 7-24: 7-11; J. Webster, ‘Creolizing the Roman provinces’, American Journal of Archaeology 105 (2001) 209-225: 209-211, 216-217.
40 Mattingly, ‘Introduction’, 8, 9.
41 D. J. Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity. Experiencing the Roman Empire (Princeton 2001)
38-39.
14 Roman culture itself as an ever-changing, multifaceted and unbounded entity. Finally, Romanisation does not adequately explain the regional differences we find and the ‘divergent
experiences’ people can go through.43 In brief, ‘Romanisation’ is very much a modernist term,
presuming simple teleological progression and a fixed identity, whereas current academic thought
stresses ideas of agency, relativism and fractured identity.44 While some think that the concept of
Romanisation can be salvaged by shedding the colonial connotations,45 many scholars consider
the concept to be unredeemable.46
Historians are products of their time. The critique on Romanisation was itself part of a growing post-colonial discourse. Post-colonialism, as a school of thought, attempts to ‘decentre’ academic discourse, emancipating the ‘colonized’, and to deconstruct the binary distinction between ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’. Some ancient historians and archaeologists have directly used
postcolonial theory in their works.47 However, more notable is the influence that the postcolonial
paradigm has had on the concept of Romanisation. If previous scholars of Romanisation theory, and the Two Worlds Paradigm, were themselves part of an imperialist discourse, the latter half of the twentieth century saw scholars scrutinizing their own subjectivity and that of their predecessors. After the experiences of the Algerian War of Independence, M. Bénabou wrote an
extensive monograph from an African point of view, focusing on resistance to Roman rule and
culture.48 However, his work has been criticised for once again being too lopsided and one-sided,
only this time privileging the local point of view.49 Modern scholars have, therefore, tried to come
up with new ways of conceptualising the cultural exchange happening in the Roman Empire. One example is J. Webster’s bottom-up approach of ‘creolization’, taken from studies on the early modern colonial world. This framework sees material culture as ambiguous, since an item may have different meaning and significance to different people. What looks like ‘Roman’
pottery to us, may not at all have been perceived in those terms by the people using it.50 However,
Webster’s model has its own drawback, by disregarding the elite too much. Another theoretical
43 Webster, ‘Creolizing’, 209-211, 216-217; Mattingly, ‘Introduction’, 9, 11-20; Hingley, ‘The “legacy” of
Rome’, 40-42; Woolf, Becoming Roman, 7-16.
44 Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture, 31-45.
45 P. Le Roux, ‘La romanisation en question’, Annales (HSS) 59 (2004) 287-311: 293-297, 303-311.
46 E.g., Mattingly, Imperialism, 40, 41; Woolf, Becoming Roman, 6; Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture 2. 47 E.g. P. van Dommelen, On colonial grounds: A comparative study of colonialism and rural
settlement in the first millenium BC west central Sardinia (dissertation; Leiden 1998).
48 M. Bénabou, La résistance africaine à la Romanisation (Paris 1976). 49E.g. Woolf, Becoming Roman, 23.
15 framework that allows for local agency but with a broader view on various layers of society is Mattingly’s ‘discrepant identities’, which emphasises the heterogeneity of response to Rome, and
the fact that identity is complex and multilayered.51 Both of these frameworks are compelling, in
that they show the diversity of response to Rome, allowing a local perspective on what it meant to be part of the Roman Empire.
However, both creolization and discrepant identities fail to really explain the process by
which the vast area of the Roman Empire came to share a cultural repertoire which, to us at least,
seems increasingly homogenous.52 The question then is: 'How should we understand the growth
of this common civilisation throughout the area ruled by the Roman Empire’?53, or, with some
more attention to local agency: how can we explain ‘the universality of structure and practice in the Roman world, while simultaneously explaining the dialogues and divergences that defined
local experience’?54
Globalisation theory has been one of the more fruitful pursuits in going beyond a Roman-native dichotomy, connecting a ‘global perspective’ with ‘regional cultural diversity’. In brief, globalization theory applies the interconnectedness of the modern world to the ancient world. It sees culture as unbounded and flexible. By the virtue of connectedness, cultural elements are transferred over a wide geographic space, and adopted by localities each in their separate way, which then interact with the global again. Thus, local and global are in a constant feedback loop
in a process also termed ‘glocalization’.55
One may wonder if the term is not too anachronistic for ancient history, since the ancient
world never experienced a space-time compression on the scale of the post-industrial world.56
Still, heuristically it goes in the right direction, by emphasizing the interaction between local and
cosmopolitan, native and elite, with the acknowledgement that it always is an ongoing process,
not a linear movement from “native” to “Roman”. In doing so, it adds a geographical dimension to other theoretical alternatives like acculturation theory. In the end, I think it is important to
51 Mattingly, Imperialism, 213-245. 52 Woolf, Becoming Roman, 1-4. 53 Ibidem, 3.
54 Martin Pitts and Miguel John Versluys, ‘Globalisation and the Roman World: Perspectives and
Opportunities’, in idem ed., Globalisation and the Roman World. World History, Connectivity, and Material Culture (Cambridge 2014) 3-31: 10.
55 Hingley, Globalizing; Pitts and Versluys, ‘Globalisation and the Roman World’.
56 F.G. Naerebout, ‘Global Romans? Is globalisation a concept that is going to help us understand the Roman
16
recognize that the Roman Empire enabled a kind of connectivity that allowed cultural exchange
between various distant localities, widening the cultural repertoire available for each locality.57
It is not my aim here to solve the Romanisation-debate, or to pick a theoretical replacement. I will be avoiding the term ‘Romanisation’, and will rather speak in terms of ‘integration’ or ‘convergence’. While these terms are not perfect either, they at least avoid many of the pitfalls of Romanisation. In my understanding, then, the Roman Empire facilitated contact between local and supra-local (‘global’) communities, which led to the sharing of ideas and
material culture over a vast geographic area.58
It should be clear by now that Romanisation as a concept is thoroughly connected to the Two Worlds Paradigm, even if not always explicitly. Both are concerned with provincial culture under the Roman Empire; both find their roots in European colonial discourse, both make a simplistic distinction between Roman and native, and both have been criticised from a post-colonial perspective. There is an important difference: if the Romanisation-debate was concerned with the people whose lives were affected by cultural contact and connectivity under the Roman
Empire, the Two Worlds Paradigm, and this thesis, are interested in the people left outside of the
imperial network, who did not participate in a cultural exchange, or only on its very fringes.
These people rarely leave detailed evidence behind, so a problem emerges: how can we study ‘invisible people’?
1.3. Methodology and Scope
The overarching themes of this research cover an enormous geographical area and a vast field of
scholarship. Yet, Roman Africa is somewhat of a pars pro toto; it has been a key area for the
Romanisation debate, and while the Two Worlds Paradigm has been a leading interpretative schema for North Africa, its implications are relevant for the entire Roman Empire. In many ways, Africa embodies many of the problems of Roman provinces, particularly in the West. Its rich history and tapestry of cultures and geographies make Late Antique North Africa an excellent
case-study for the Empire as a whole. Late AntiqueNorth Africa offers a compelling area of study
57 F.G. Naerebout, 'Convergence and Divergence: One Empire, Many Cultures', in: G. Kleijn and Stéphane
Benoist ed., Integration in Rome and in the Roman World. Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop of the International Impact of Empire (Leiden 2014) 263-281.
58 Narebout, ‘Convergence and Divergence’, passim; Greg Woolf, ‘Afterword: the local and the global in the
Graeco-Roman east’, in Tim Whitmarsh ed., Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World (Cambridge 2010).
17 both geographically and chronologically, because native peoples are both relatively visible in the
primary sources and the subject of lively debate. After all, Courtois’ classic statement on l’Afrique
oubliée was in the context of a monograph on Vandal Africa.
With North Africa, I refer to a specific geographic entity, smaller than the common modern sense of the word, in which North Africa is used for the whole Mediterranean-facing part
of the continent, divided by a vast desert from sub-Saharan Africa.59 Roman North Africa
excluded Egypt and eastern Libya or Cyrenaica — and in Late Antiquity, these were administered by the Eastern Empire and spoke Greek, whereas the regions to the west of the Gulf of Sirt were administered as part of the Western Empire and spoke Latin. What the Romans called Africa, the area stretching from Tripolitania to Morocco, roughly corresponds to the modern term ‘Maghreb’ (Arabic for ‘Place of the Setting Sun’), (fig. 1.1). However, Mauretania Tingitina, approximately modern-day Morocco, remains mostly outside of the scope of this thesis, primarily because it is marginal to the written sources and because it was administrated as part of the Diocese of Hispania rather than the Diocese of Africa. Chronologically, my main focus will lie on Late Antiquity, here approximately the fourth to sixth centuries A.D.
Late Antiquity as a period is usually neglected in discussions on Romanization and provincial society, perhaps because the era is associated with the decline of Roman civilisation rather than its “diffusion”. In fact, the Late Antique period should be more central to the discussion, precisely because the issue of “native” cultures remains prominent to the period. Throughout the Empire, many local cultures seemed to have survived in one form or another, or
at least we know of surviving languages such as Galatian in Anatolia,60 Coptic and Syriac in the
Eastern Mediterranean, and perhaps Punic/Berber in North Africa.61 In the fourth century, the
Roman Empire was still relatively stable and flourishing. Yet, its inevitable but slow disintegration in the fifth to the seventh centuries can reveal underlying spatial and social patterns invisible for the Principate, and the various late antique ‘successor states’ in the Western Mediterranean can reveal socio-political alternatives under similar geographical and social conditions, all within a reasonably brief span of time.
59 According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica the definition of North Africa is ambiguous, as it may or may
not include Egypt, although as such it is more commonly referred to as ‘Northern Africa’. Michael Brett, ‘North Africa’, Encyclopaedia Britannica (online 2017) seen on: 19-9-2017.
60 S. Mitchell, Anatolia: Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor I (Oxford 1993) 172-174. 61 Brown, ‘Christianity and Local Culture’, 87.
18 Fig. 1.1. Map of the Late Antique provinces of North Africa. Mauretania Tingitana, part of the Diocese of Africa, is not shown on this map, but consists of a small area around modern Tangier. Source: Claude Lepelley, 'The Survival and fall of the classical city in Late Roman Africa', in: John Rich ed., The City in Late Antiquity (1992) 53.
Rather than focusing on any particular historical event or source, this thesis instead takes a geographical approach, asking in principle a question of historical geography. Whereas the ‘Romanisation’-debate covers wide-ranging themes, from legal issues to cultural identity, the Two
Worlds Paradigm is essentially a spatial dilemma — to what extent can we recognize geographical
patterns in the provincial culture of Roman North Africa? In other words, would a cultural map of Roman North Africa truly show a sharp divide between Roman and ‘native’?
To that end, I ask three different, but related geographical sub-questions. First, the Two
World Thesis relies on dichotomies such as tell versus Sahara, or desert versus coastal terrain. To
what extent did physical geography (ecologies, terrain, climate, and so on) influence where and
how people lived, and how connected they were? This needs to be followed up with a second
question: the physical geography might hint towards certain trends, but what patterns can we empirically observe? Finally, such data needs cultural interpretation: were these geographical patterns recognized in the ancient world as cultural differentiation between two worlds?
Each of these questions can best be answered using a different type of evidence. First comes an investigation of the actual landscape itself, whether directly through physical geography, or indirectly what we know about the ancient physical geography through other
19 best be observed through survey archaeology. Finally, to best interpret these patterns we must turn to the minds of the ancients, as far as possible, through written texts. It will be seen that North Africa has much to offer in all of these fields: the physical geography is of prime interest, there exists a useful corpus of publications on survey archaeology, and the area is rich in epigraphy and literary texts which shed light on the relationship between Romans and native peoples, particularly the accounts of Procopius and Corippus on the sixth century wars between Justinian and the Moors.
Each of these sources demands its own methodology. Such an approach may seem eclectic, but I have chosen to draw on theory most useful in discussing each type of evidence. Thus, the next chapter on physical geography will use modern theory concerning connectivity and micro-ecology, linking it to Scott’s analysis of state space and shatter zones. Following this, survey archaeology depends on ‘reading the landscape’ in the context of its micro-ecology, and a critical reading of written texts demands a discourse analysis to dissect the ideology often inherent in ancient sources.
Each of these types of evidence also demands a different ‘level’ of investigation on a
temporal scale. Fernand Braudel, in his La Méditerranée, is well known for putting geography at
the core of historical interpretation. He divided history into three temporal scales: longue durée,
l’histoire conjoncturelle and l’histoire événementielle, or: the history over the very long term, the
medium term, and the history of events.62 These different scales of history are useful here too,
except that each of them corresponds to a different type of geographical analysis, type of evidence, and theoretical framework (table 1.1).
20 Table 1.1.Structure of the thesis, with the links between the various chapters, timescales, types of evidence and types of geographical analysis.
An old English schoolboy’s saying goes: ‘geography is about maps and history is about
chaps’.63 Yet, before the fragmentation and institutionalisation of academic disciplines in the late
nineteenth century, history and geography were often seen as two closely related bodies of knowledge. Afterwards, they have much gone their own respective ways; but there have been
frequent calls for closer reintegration. The French Annalistes were keen on doing ‘Geohistory’;
more recently there has been a ‘spatial turn’ in history, which stresses geography not merely as a stage for history to act in, but space itself as historically contingent and imbued with meaning by
humans.64
Geography itself is an incredibly diverse and expansive discipline, split since the mid-twentieth century over many sub-disciplines. The basic division is between physical geography (investigating phenomena pertaining to the natural world) and human geography (concerned with the spatial analysis of human societies), but each of these has further balkanized into various specialisms, and each has ties with various disciplines outside geography, ranging from psychology to history. Human geography, like the humanities, has undergone various paradigm shifts, from a quantitative turn in the 1950s to structuralism and post-modernism in the late
63 John A. Matthews and David T. Herbert, Geography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2008) 8. 64 Alan R.H. Baker, Geography and History: Bridging the Divide (Cambridge 2010) 2-36. For the ancient
world, see for example: Paul J. Kosmin, The Land of the Elephant Kings: Space, Territory and Ideology in the Seleucid Empire (Cambridge 2014).
Chapter Timescale Evidence Type of Geography Theoretical Framework
2 Longue durée Physical landscape
Physical geography Connectivity &
micro-ecology 3 L’histoire
conjoncturelle
Survey archaeology
Social Geography Landscape-analysis
4 L’histoire événementielle
Literary texts and epigraphy
21 twentieth century. Human geography nowadays features an immensely hybrid and eclectic
collection of approaches, including cultural studies.65
It does not come as a surprise, then, that geographers have historically struggled with
defining their incredibly broad discipline. One key element is perhaps its holistic nature,
eschewing specialization and seeking connections between various facets of reality.66 Yet, history
is also incredibly broad and connective, so this definition is not particularly helpful in setting geography apart from other disciplines. More important is geography’s special concern for the
spatial dimension of processes (whether it concerns, say, mountain formation or human
migration).67 In other words, if history asks when, geography asks where.68
According to Matthews and Herbert, geography gravitates around three core concerns:
space, place, and environment. Space is simply the location as appearing on a map, either absolute (as on a satellite image), or relative, as in the time it takes to reach a place. In other words, this is what is usually portrayed on maps. Place, on the other hand, is bounded space, for example a neighbourhood or a country. It only has meaning by virtue of the meaning ascribed to it by humans, and is also often contentious between various groups of people. ‘Mental maps’ may reveal that people draw the borders of their neighbourhood differently, or may reveal a landscape being imbued by special significance. Finally comes environment, the natural, biophysical world with
which humans interact (fig. 1.2).69
Each of these ‘geographical cores’ comes to the fore in this thesis. An investigation into
the physical terrain in the first sub-question is concerned with space (relative distance) and
environment (the biophysical constraints on society), whereas the last sub-question is about the
meaning ascribed to locations and their inhabitants in the ancient world, i.e. place. For the purposes of this thesis, I also distinguish between physical geography (with a focus on the natural constraints), social geography (quantitative analysis of distribution patterns), and cultural geography (qualitative analysis of meaning).
65 Matthews and Herbert, Geography, 50-68.
66 Alastair Bonnet, What is geography? (London 2008) 87-88.
67 E.g. Larry R. Ford, ‘A Core of Geography: What Geographers Do Best’, Journal of Geography 83.3 (1984)
102-106.
68 Bonnet, Geography, 2, 3.
22 Fig 1.2. The three ‘cores’ of geography according to Matthews and Herbert, Geography: A Very Short Introduction, 14.
‘Maps and chaps’ can, and should, go together. A fundamental premise in this argument will be that to understand a society, past or present, it is useful to not just ask the when of things, but also the where of things. Societies are constituted by individuals acting within the conditions
of (social) structures (agency and structure),70 but the result of social processes differs from place
to place and from time to time. Thus, ‘human geography […] provides an account of the ways in
which complex socio-cultural, economic and political processes act through time and space’ [my
italics].71
So, the aim is that through a geographical perspective the ‘invisible’ people, l’Afrique
oubliée, may become more visible. Such an approach also leans on post-colonial methodologies and sub-altern studies. That is why I use approaches like discourse analysis, untangling the
representations or stereotypes of ‘barbarians’ in classical literature.72 Mattingly’s ‘discrepant
identities’ or ‘experiences’ allows us to distill a local perspective on landscapes and its inhabitants
and mapping cultural differences between groups.73 Finally, I will critically engage with a
geographical analysis by subaltern scholar James C. Scott on marginal peoples.
70 Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the theory of structuration (Cambridge 1984). 71 Michael Dear and Steven Flusty, ‘Introduction: How to map a radical break’, in idem ed., The Spaces of
Postmodernity: Readings in Human Geography (Oxford 2002) 1-12: 2.
72 Cf. Van Dommelen, On Colonial Grounds, 22-24; Webster, ‘Roman Imperialism’, 9-15; Mattingly,
Experiencing Empire, 3-5, 13-22, 270.
73 Mattingly, Experiencing Empire, 219-245; Garrick Fincham, ‘Romanisation, Status and the Landscape:
Extracting Discrepant Perspective from Survey Data’, Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference 99 (Oxford 2000) 30-35: 30.
2. Geography of Empire
It has long been known that the Mediterranean sea was central to the functioning of the Roman
Empire. Already in 1925, Henri Pirenne called the Empire a ‘Mediterranean Commonwealth’.1
The central question of this chapter, then, is to what extent native people participated in this Mediterranean network we call the Roman Empire. To do so, I will look at theories of Mediterranean connectivity, as ultimately put forward by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell. Here, Scott’s research on the relationship between physical geography and the role of marginal
peoples allows us to conceptually link connectivity to the position l’Afrique oubliée.
The ‘evidence’ of this chapter is perhaps unorthodox to a historian, namely the physical landscape itself. Recently, (ancient) historians have paid renewed attention to the role of the
physical environment in human history.2 The key premise in environmental history is that that
humans, as part of their wider ecologies, are strongly dependent on their natural environment.3
This inevitably gives rise to the problem of environmental determinism: to what extent are societies the product of their environment, and to what extent do humans have agency over their own lives?
In the early 1900s, it was quite fashionable to determine historical processes from the physical environment in a law-like manner: one French philosopher claimed, ‘Donnez-moi la
géographie d’un pays et je vous trouverai son histoire’.4 While offering a much more sophisticated
analysis, Fernand Braudel too edged towards preferring determinism over human agency.
So when I think of the individual, I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand, fixed in a landscape in which the infinite perspectives of the long term stretch into the distance both behind him and before.5
1 Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: their origins and the revival of trade (reprint 1952; Princeton 1925) 3. 2 J.D. Hughes, Environmental History of the World: Humankind's Changing Role in the Community of Life
(Oxon 2009); For the ancient world, see for example Lukas Thommen, An Environmental History of Ancient Greece and Rome (transl. Philip Hill, Cambridge 2012); W.V. Harris ed., The Ancient Mediterranean Environment between Science and History (Leiden 2013).
3 Ecology is about the relationship between organisms and the flow of energies between them. Cf. Paul
Colinvaux, Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare (London 1980) ix-x, 3-27; for the embeddedness of people in their natural environment in the ancient world, see e.g. Robert Sallares, The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World (Ithaca 1991) 4, 5.
4 Baker, Geography and History, 16-19. Quote from Victor Cousin, as seen in Baker, Geography and History
19.
24 These days, environmental determinism is usually condemned for its simplification of historical complexity by emphasizing mono-causal relations, reductionism, ignoring the role of culture and human agency, and for placing too much explanatory power on environmental causations at the
expense of others.6
On the other hand, it is indeed hard to grow a lush garden in the desert. Part of the problem may be avoided by keeping in mind that environmental constraints (and possibilities) function on a different analytical scale of time; to consider the role of the environment is to do
history of the longue durée. Most historians are much more interested in what Braudel terms
social and individual time,7 which is where social structure, culture and human agency come to
the fore. On the opposite end, the pitfalls of determinism may be avoided by recognizing a
reciprocal interaction between people and environment: seeing environment as one simply one of
many interrelated factors influencing society.8
2.1. Frogs around a Pond
To see the Mediterranean Sea itself as a key actor on the stage of history is perhaps somewhat of a curiosity. It was Braudel who made this approach famous, boldly waving off the traditional history of great men, their actions merely ‘crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their
strong backs’.9 Already in his metaphor, the Mediterranean sweeps generals and emperors aside
with its history of the longue durée. In recent years, Horden’s and Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea
has reintroduced this theme to students of the ancient and medieval world.10 Horden and Purcell
describe their work as a history of the Mediterranean (as opposed to a history ‘in the
Mediterranean’), taking the sea as a subject rather than merely a backdrop for people. The Mediterranean sea is large and frequently seen by researchers and locals alike as an aggregate of
6 James M. Blaut, 'Environmentalism and Eurocentrism', Geographical Review 89.3 (1999) 391-408; Sarah
A. Radcliffe, ‘Forum: Environmentalist thinking and/in geography’, Progress in Human Geography 34.1 (2010) 98-116.
7 Braudel, The Mediterranean, 21.
8 Matthews and Herbert, Geography, 90-91. 9 Braudel, Mediterranean, 21.
10 Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of the Mediterranean (Oxford
2000). Criticism towards Horden and Purcell’s model mostly rests on the fact they reason away ecological and temporal boundaries, ignoring human agency and episodic history, and assume an ahistorical steady-state, harmonious balance. B.D. Shaw, 'Challenging Braudel: a new vision of Mediterranean' (review of P&H, The Corrupting Sea), Journal of Roman Archaeology 14 (2001) 419-453; James Fentress and Elizabeth Fentress, 'Review: The Hole in the Doughnut', Past & Present 173 (2001) 203-219. For a response to this criticism, see Peregrine Horden & Nicholas Purcell, 'Four Years of Corruption: A Response to Critics', in: W.V. Harris ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford 2005) 348-376.
25 sub-seas (the Ionian, the Aegean, etc.). Yet, according to Horden and Purcell, the Mediterranean is united into a single region by the virtue of two paradoxical traits: fragmentation into micro-ecologies and connectivity. ‘The distinctiveness of Mediterranean history results […] from the paradoxical coexistence of a milieu of relatively easy seaborne communications with a quite
unusually fragmented topography of microregions in the sea’s coastlands and islands’.11
The Mediterranean is divided into a myriad of small localities, or micro-ecologies, regions like islands, valleys and peninsulas functioning like islands, bounded as they are by mountains, deserts, or seas from neighbouring micro-ecologies. Furthermore, every micro-ecology is distinct in an ecological sense, ranging from mountain valleys like the Biqa in Lebanon, to fertile lowland plains such as Etruria. Within every micro-ecology there can often be found a variability of further ecological sub-regions. Thus, in the Biqa the distribution of groundwater and relief create an intensely local pattern of environments. There is not just geographic, but also strong temporal
heterogeneity, such as in the inter-annual variability of rainfall.12 The micro-ecology, therefore, is
a “definite place” with a distinctive identity arising from the ecological means of production and
the resulting human responses to the environmental conditions.13
Yet, these small regions are not autarkic, isolated units, but are instead fundamentally connected. There are, of course, the great trading routes which connected Egypt to Constantinople and Africa to Rome, carrying the yearly grain dole. Especially for Late Antiquity, these great routes were key to constituting the dynamics of the late antique Mediterranean. The city of Rome, after all, could not even exist without its grain dole, and the presence of this route
spurred on further economic boom.14 Yet, behind the great shipping routes was the mundane,
every-day shipping or cabotage from port to port.15 Braudel has already noted that sailors avoided
the open sea and hugged the coast as much as possible, so that in effect the coast-line functioned
much like a river, with ports (or toll) at frequent intervals.16 The yearly variation in weather also
11 Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, 5. 12 Ibidem, 178-179.
13 Ibidem, 79, 80.
14 Raymond Van Dam, 'Big Cities and the Dynamics of the Mediterranean during the Fifth Century',
Michael Maas ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Attila (Cambridge 2014) 80-97: 86-89. Cf. Wickham, for whom the western Mediterranean is held together by the Roman-Carthaginian ‘tax spine’. Wickham, Framing,709.
15 For a more detailed investigation on cabotage and sea-borne traffic in the Roman world: Gil Gambash,
‘Between Mobility and Connectivity in the Ancient Mediterranean: Coast-Skirting Travellers in the Southern Levant’, in: Elio Lo Cascio and Laurens E. Tacoma ed., The Impact of Mobility and Migration in the Roman Empire (155-172).
26 meant that the inhabitants of the various micro-ecologies were strongly dependent on one another for exchange in years in order to stave off food shortages as strategies of risk management. Therefore, in Horden and Purcell’s model, regions can be intensely local while interconnected at the same time; the Mediterranean is like a mosaic of countless but different
stones, a ‘tessellation of places’.17
If the Mediterranean united all these various localities, then the Roman Empire is the ultimate product of the Mediterranean sea. It has long been known that towns were unevenly distributed across the Roman Empire, with the cores of Roman urbanism being centred around
the Mediterranean.18 Plato noted that classical Greek poleis hugged the Mediterranean shore like
‘frogs round a pond’.19 Cicero repeated, ‘The shores of Greece are like hems stitched onto the
lands of barbarian peoples’.20 Greece and Rome differed little in this respect. A glance at a map of
Roman towns reveals very dense clusters of urban networks in locations close to the Mediterranean, like central Italy, Greece and Asia Minor, North Africa and Baetica (fig 2.1). Clusters of cities may also be found next to rivers, linking them to the Mediterranean sea, like the Nile, the Rhône or the Rhine. Yet, vast areas of the Empire were sparsely urbanised, like northern
Gaul, inland Anatolia, or most of the Balkan.21
The Empire’s biggest cities, Rome, Carthage, Antioch and Constantinople, were all at or
near the sea. Compare that to the medieval primacy of northern Gaul,22 or the ‘blue banana’ of
(post-)industrial Europe, the belt of economically powerful urban conglomerates stretching from
Manchester through the Randstad and the Ruhr into northern Italy.23 The different spatial
configuration of urbanism in post-classical Europe has led to different historical dynamics.24 No
doubt, then, that the location of Roman cities was of historical significance.
17 Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, 80.
18 M. Finley, Ancient Economy. Updated Edition: With a new Foreword by Ian Morris (London 1999) 30,
31.
19 Plato, Phaedo 109b.
20 Cicero, De Republica 2.9, translation found in Irad Malkin, A Small Greek World: Networks in the
Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford 2011) 15.
21 Carlos F. Noreña, 'Urban Systems in the Han and Roman Empires: State Power and Social Control', in
Walter Scheidel ed., State Power in Ancient China and Rome (Oxford 2015) 181-203:184-186.
22 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (London
1993) passim.
23 Gert-Jan Hospers, ‘Beyond the Blue Banana? Structural Change in Europe’s Geo-Economy’,
Intereconomics (2003) 76-85.
27 The map of Roman urban density is further complicated by an analysis of urban culture. Miko Flohr, in a provisional map (fig. 2.2), tracks inscriptions and public buildings which indicate a flourishing civic culture characteristic of the classical Roman Empire, such as euergetism and leisure. The results are striking: only a select few centres really present themselves as dense centres of classical urban culture: central Italy, Africa Proconsularis, the Aegean, with a few smaller clusters found in places like Southern Spain and the Levant. It turns out that a mere 10%
of the surface of the Roman Empire encompasses 48% of places where evidence is found.25
Problems with the data aside (such as the epigraphic habit, and the anomaly of Egypt), the image presented is clear overall: there was a huge spatial discrepancy in the Roman Empire, in terms of dense zones of urban culture as contrasted with mostly ‘empty’ areas. Contrary to Plato’s ‘frogs round a pond’, cities are not evenly spread along the Mediterranean shore in general, but cluster in specific places. Yet, it is telling that every single cluster is nevertheless firmly Mediterranean.
The situation had not changed much by the time of the Late Empire. Peter Brown maps the cities of the Western Empire in 400 A.D., reasoning back from early medieval bishoprics; again the same pattern is found (fig. 2.4). It turns out we can distinguish three regions of urban density in the Roman Empire: the densest core of cities in regions pointed out above, where cities are found no more than ten miles apart. Outside this zone, there are areas of medium urban density, with cities found every twenty-five miles. Finally, beyond this zone, cities were much further apart, with great stretches of countryside between them. These were not per se ‘empty’ of people, but they were largely devoid of classical urbanism. Here, one found villages, estates, rural sanctuaries, and military forts, but no cities. Still, this zone is ‘empty’ in one more sense: the principal actors of history, the emperors, tradesmen, literati, aristocrats and so on who feature in most works of ancient history, and who have produced most of our textual evidence, lived and
acted a significant part of their lives in the first two zones.26
25 Miko Flohr, ‘A Map of Urban Culture in the Roman World’ and ‘A Clustered Empire? Mapping Roman
Urbanism (II)’, Building Tabernae, http://buildingtabernae.org/2016/06/a-clustered-empire-mapping-roman-urbanism-ii/#more-288 seen on 02-06-2016.
26 Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in
28 Fig. 2.1. Towns of the Roman Empire. Source: Noreña, ‘Urban Systems’, p. 186. Based on the Barrington Atlas.
Fig 2.2. Map of urban culture. Source: Miko Flohr, Building Tabernae.
29 F ig . 2 .3 . Set tleme nt h ier ar ch y of N or th A fri ca p rodu ced for th e ‘ E m p ire of 2 00 0 ci ties: ur b an net works an d ec ono mi c i nt eg ra tion i n th e Ro man E mp ire’ . Set tleme nt s cla ss ifi ed accord ing to s iz e (h a), p res ence o f p ub lic mo nu ment s, an d jur idi cal stat us ( muni ci pi um , colo ni a , ci vitas or ab sent /unkno wn). E ve ry cate gory down to 4 a eith er h as muni ci p al /colo ni al stat us or a si gni ficant monu ment al cor e. Source: Ma tth ew Ho b son, fort h com ing
30 Fig 2.4. Distribution of cities in the Latin West, 400 A.D. Based on the distribution of bishoprics in 600 A.D. Source: Brown, Eye of a Needle, 7.
Looking at Africa, the same three zones can be identified from the previous map, as well as from a recent GIS survey performed by Matthew Hobson (fig. 2.3). We find a dense, urban core in what is now northern Tunisia, or ancient Africa Proconsularis, snaking inwards following the Medjerda river, and following the Tunisian coast. The second zone of medium urban density consists of towns dotting the Numidian and Mauretanian coasts, and several inland highways parallel to the coast, primarily in Numidia and Mauretania Sitifensis. This is significant, because it shows that not all of Roman urbanism was concentrated on the Mediterranean. Finally, the third zone consists of huge swaths of land in inland Numidia south of Lambaesis-Timgad-Theveste, such as the Aurès mountains, most of inland Mauretania, southern inland Tunisia (Byzacena), and all of Tripolitania. Africa presents a more urbanised landscape than say, Roman Gaul. Even so, the contrast between African provinces remains. Nevertheless, even less urbanised areas were filled with villages and Roman forts.
Another piece of evidence on ancient settlements is the Tabula Peutingeriana. One problem with the Tabula Peutingeriana is that not every ‘settlement’ on the map is a Roman
municipality, and many may represent castella located along the limes. Another problem is that
the itinerary is mostly focused on land-routes and omits maritime routes. The Peutinger Table is not necessarily a good representation of ancient mobility, since it is not even certain whether it was used at all for navigation. Still, when plotted on Google Maps, many of the same patterns
