Reviewed by: The Afterlife of the Roman City: Architecture and Ceremony in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages by Hendrik W. Dey David K. Pettegrew Hendrik W. Dey The Afterlife of the Roman City: Architecture and Ceremony in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 Pp. 296. $99.00. This is a bold, ambitious, and innovative work. In just 250 pages of text, Dey offers a wide-ranging survey of the transformation of the ancient city and the persistence of late antique urban forms from the third to ninth centuries. He does so by presenting a vast array of evidence from regions as distant as Arabia and Germany that shows the centrality of colonnaded avenues and processional ceremonies in post-antique urban centers. Porticated streets, Dey argues, were the common stages for expressions of civic authority in late antiquity, and their development, elaboration, and maintenance well into the early middle ages point to the continuity of the urban habit and civilization itself. Dey’s argument is built on the recognition of three predominant patterns of ancient cities: patronage, processional ceremonies, and linear architectural schemes—which together came to form an essential expression of urban topography in late antiquity. As emperors multiplied after the establishment of the Tetrarchy and created new capitals, they increasingly sponsored the construction of colonnaded avenues for staging ceremonies such as the adventus. Ceremonial processions from city gate to palace along crowd-lined avenues functioned to create distance, awe, and authority between the potentates and their acclaiming publics (Chapter Two). Other agents of power adopted this pattern in the fourth to sixth centuries by constructing and embellishing porticated streets and the symbolic monuments between or along them, such as city gates, commemorative arches, palaces, baths, circuses, and theaters. Ecclesiastical authorities especially partnered with secular powers to commission episcopal residences, cathedrals, and significant extramural churches, and to stage liturgical processions and the translation of relics along porticated avenues (Chapter Three). This new architecture of power persisted in most regions of the former Roman Empire, including the western Germanic kingdoms, even into the murky seventh and eighth centuries, when cities were materially poorer, smaller, and less connected, and when power concentrated among an even smaller class of ecclesiastical and political elite. Despite the sharp decline in new urban investments, porticated colonnades continued to be maintained for public procession; Dey presents evidence that encroachment and demonumentalization date to the ninth century or later (Chapter Four). Indeed, Dey makes the case that monastic centers and palace-centers of Carolingian Francia (e.g., Centula and Aachen) dating to the late eighth and early ninth centuries were modeled on the colonnaded topography still prominent in Christian capitals such as Jerusalem, Rome, and Constantinople (Chapter Five). Porticated avenues remained important as far as (and as long as) emperors, kings, bishops, patrarichs, and state officials needed to express their authority through ceremonial processions. The Afterlife of the Roman City is compelling because its integration of multiple and diverse sources (textual, material, and iconographic) creates a broad [End Page 162] and consistent picture of a persisting urban topography, ceremony, and authority, despite the very real gaps in evidence. The author’s extensive coverage gives him liberty to pivot from detailed, technical descriptions of urban topography to colorful stories about specific ceremonial processions to discussions of the image or idea of cities. Swept along by the lucid presentation of the material, the reader can easily forget that, apart from a few cases like the fascinating inscribed acclamations from late antique Ephesus, the evidence of architecture (a colonnaded avenue) and ceremony (e.g., adventus) rarely aligns for the same contemporary urban context. Dey’s general and broad picture of persistence, moreover, raises a number of questions about real differences in contexts across space and time. For example, how did the subtle differences in late antique urban topography speak to distinct evolutions of ceremony between regions and cities over six centuries? What did the absence of porticated avenues in cities indicate about authority and its expression in those urban centers? And how did the development of porticated streets and ecclesiastical ceremonies in cities relate to the development of the (distinctly linear) early Christian...
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Mar 18, 2024
Nicholas Skopal + 9
Open Access
