Late antique encroachment in the city centres of Asia Minor: economic bustle and socio-political significance (original) (raw)
Himmelwärts und erdverbunden? Religiöse und wirtschaftliche Aspekte spätantiker Lebensrealität (Band 1 des Clusters 7 des DAI)
This article focusses on the appearance of shops and workshops around and on agorae as well as along major colonnaded streets in the city centres of Asia Minor. It presents an overview of the literary and epigraphic sources for such encroachment and stresses the ever-growing contribution of archaeology in our understanding of the phenomenon. It is argued that commercial encroachment was already common long before Late Antiquity and that it was virtually always tolerated by the local government, as long as the shops and workshops did not hinder traffic or pose any other threat to their surroundings. In Late Antiquity, the proliferation of secondary structures in public space became more intensive, more of these shops and workshops were now built in durable materials, and it can be hypothesized that civic municipalities were actively involved in the phenomenon. The size and appearance of all shops and workshops was in any case still controlled by law. The appearance of city centres in Asia Minor no doubt changed drastically, but it is quite clear that the settlements were thriving into the sixth century and that there was often still a balance between aesthetic concerns on the one hand and commercial interests and pragmatic approaches to the urban fabric on the other. The article further touches upon the social status of the owners and occupants of these buildings and spaces. It explores three possible scenarios: that merchants or artisans had acquired ownership of public space themselves, that they rented the space from another, wealthier, individual, or that they leased the space from the civic government. An evaluation of all the evidence suggests that individuals of middling fortune played a significant and active part in the evolution of the urban landscape and civic life in Late Antiquity.
Related papers
2008
Like other volumes in its series, Housing in Late Antiquity owes its origins to two conferences, the Society for Architectural Historians and Late Antique Archaeology, Padua, both in 2003, as well as non-conference contributions. The result is a volume of seventeen chapters, translated into generally very good English, plus two lengthy bibliographic essays and an extensive, useful index. The three editors, aided by Simon Ellis and Yuri Murano, have produced a readable, one-stop-shop for anyone interested in late antique housing. The book’s organization, beginning with broader thematic pieces, continuing with regional surveys, and concluding with individual house studies, allows the reader to sink comfortably from overview into detail, while its methodologies and authorship accurately reflect the state of the field—both in its advances and shortcomings
Commerce and Architecture in Late Hellenistic Italy: the Emergence of the Taberna Row
Shops, Workshops and Urban Economic History in the Roman World, 2020
One recent development in the study of Roman crafts and retail is that there seems to be a slight shift away from studying the actual work installations towards studying the architectural environments within which these were situated. 1 This development seems to offer a number of opportunities. One of these is that, while comparative approaches to actual work installations or retail practices are often highly complex if not impossible, the study of the architectural and spatial contexts in which they were situated makes it considerably more straightforward for scholars working in varying geographical and chronological contexts to actually confront each other's observations. Moreover, an increasing focus on the place of work in the built environment also makes it easier to engage in debates with scholars working on other topics: more than anything else it is architecture that connects the study of crafts and retail to broader debates about Roman urban communities. It needs no arguing that this is important: not only were there many people spending their working days in shops and workshops, in many places, these people also were, in a physical way, very central to the urban communities, in which they lived, and could be a defining part of the urban atmosphere-particularly in Roman Italy, but to some extent also elsewhere in the Roman world. This article aims to push the role of architecture in debates about urban crafts and retail a little bit further, and brings up the issue of how these architectural contexts changed over time, and how this is to be understood economically. As Steven Ellis has recently argued, this requires a bit of caution: even if we want to think of the construction of shops and workshops as 'investment', we should be wary of uncritical 'economistic' interpretations of these processes as ancient realities may have been more complex. 2 Nevertheless, several developments in Roman architecture and urbanism seem to highlight the flipside of the coin, namely that we also should be wary of too easily dismissing profit as the leading motivation behind certain categories of building projects. Put more strongly: this article argues that one key development in the history of retail and manufacturing in the Roman world lies precisely in the emergence of several architectural forms that seem directly rooted in the desire to invest commercially for profit's sake. If it is true that, to some extent, we may still think of crafts and manufacturing as 'embedded' in social structures and cultural norms-one can for example think of the continuing scholarly emphasis on the role of freedmen in business apparent from the work of Mouritsen and Broekaert-it is precisely their gradual dis-embedding that is the historically unique development of the era. 3 The emergence of commercial elements in architecture, and of truly commercial building types, illustrates how crafts and retail increasingly became a socio-cultural sphere of their own.
Place Making in Hellenistic Athens: Beyond Decline and Foreign Patronage
Classicum, 2009
The study of cities is integral to the study of the Hellenistic Age, the period bounded by the deaths of two legendary rulers: Alexander in 323 BC and Kleopatra in 30 BC. 1 Modern scholarship has followed in the footsteps of Johann-Gustav Droysen, who coined the term 'Hellenistic' in the nineteenth century and associated it with the diffusion of Greek culture through the founding of new cities in the East by Alexander and his successors. 2 Hellenistic Athens, traditionally discussed under the rubric of its Classical legacy and/or in contrast with thriving cities, such as Pergamon, has been presented as a backwater exemplifying the demise of the polis. My objective in this paper is to criticise these negative sentiments by exploring how the built environment of Hellenistic Athens could potentially become an indicator of city vitality. I shall assume that cities have identities, which are reflected in peoples' frequenting of buildings. Beyond a consideration of architectural form and function, Hellenistic buildings, especially in central Athens, were important in their sociality. By sociality I mean that built spaces invited and facilitated social interaction. First I shall outline the traditional approach to Hellenistic cities, second discuss a number of building projects in Athens and finally criticise the two prevalent interpretive models of Hellenistic Athens as a foreigners' puppet and/or a cultural Mecca.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.