The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) (7 page)

Alexandria in Egypt was the greatest of these new cities. Built around the site of the tiny fishing village of Rhacotis, Alexandria was designed as an entrepôt for trade between Africa, the Near East, and the Mediterranean world. Its construction reflected a conscious plan to replace Phoenician Tyre, which Alexander himself had destroyed after a long siege, as the trading center of the eastern Mediterranean.

This ambitious vision required first the construction of a huge new harbor. Later, the Ptolemies, the Macedonian Greek family that took over Egypt after Alexander’s death in 323 B.C., constructed a massive light-house on Pharos island to guide ships safely into the harbor. Alexandria was graced with elegant parks and contained buildings—notably the museum and library—that also made it the intellectual center of the Mediterranean world. The more practical aspects of city planning were also not ignored; the avenues were wide, the streets cleaner, and the sanitation systems more reliable. Unusual for the time, much of the city was built of stone to protect it from fire.
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Alexandria quickly fulfilled its founder’s purpose. Fleets based in the city traded with customers as far away as India and the horn of Africa. Ptolemaic bureaucrats supervised a complex command economy that took censuses, registered cargo holds, and restricted imports to spur domestic industry. The regime also pushed the productivity of Egypt’s famous fertile agriculture—barley, wheat, and papyrus—to unprecedented levels.
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These cities also represented a critical breakthrough in terms of gender. Women gained new property rights. Some even achieved political power, as evidenced by the careers of several queens, including the famous Cleopatra VII, who would also be Egypt’s last Greek ruler. In Hellenistic cities, notably Alexandria, and in Greek-dominated southern Italy, female poets, architects, and even students of philosophy rose to prominence.

In the new urban milieu, large colonies of Jews, Greeks, Egyptians, and Babylonians coexisted, if not always cordially. Alexandria was particularly notable in this sense, becoming, in the words of the historian Michael Grant, “the first and greatest universal city, the supreme Hellenistic melting pot.”
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The cosmopolitan atmosphere spurred rapid cultural and scientific development. Egyptian, Jewish, Persian, Babylonian, and other cultures benefited from exposure to the Greeks; the Greeks, meanwhile, acquired the Babylonian knowledge of the planets, the literature of pharaonic Egypt, and from the Septuagint, the translation into Greek of the Hebrew Bible, exposure to the ancient Mosaic texts.

This great cosmopolitan experiment began to unravel barely a century after Alexander’s death. Increasingly, Greek rulers and settlers, who accounted for no more than 10 percent of the total population in the new Hellenistic kingdoms, refused to share power and prestige with the races among whom they had settled.

By the second century, many Egyptians and Persians chafed against their growing marginalization, sometimes taking the form of insurrection against Greek rule.
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In Judea, local religious partisans revolted against attempts by the Seleucid Greeks to impose pagan worship on the small but stubbornly independent-minded populace. In 168 B.C., the Jews successfully broke away from Greek rule, reestablishing their own independent state.
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Even in Alexandria, conflicts among Greeks, Jews, and native Egyptians worsened. Corruption and palace intrigue increasingly undercut economic progress and weakened the authority of the rulers. Less than two centuries after Alexander’s conquest, his Mesopotamian possessions fell to the Parthians. The Greek Indian colonies dropped even more quickly outside the orbit of the Hellenistic world.
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CHAPTER FIVE

ROME—THE FIRST MEGACITY

Titus Petronius, the son of wealthy Romans and courtier to Emperor Nero, spent his time carousing through the back alleys of the city’s streets, dallying with the prostitutes and loose aristocratic ladies with equal enthusiasm. Later forced to commit suicide because of his alleged complicity in a palace intrigue, Petronius left behind remarkable descriptions and insights into this city and the empire that it had created.
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By his time, Rome had grown to a scale not to be seen again till modern times—a massive, sprawling capital city, a warren of marketplaces, drinking places, temples, crowded tenements, and aristocratic villas. In Petronius’s Rome, we transcend the bounds of antiquity and move closer to contemporary New York City, Tokyo, London, Los Angeles, Shanghai, or Mexico City. With a population of more than 1 million, Rome was two to three times larger than early giant cities such as Babylon.
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Like later urban leviathans, noted Lewis Mumford, Rome suffered from what he called “megalopolitan elephantiasis,” a total loss of human scale.
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Yet to their everlasting credit, the Romans created the legal, economic, and engineering structures that allowed this leviathan to function as the nerve center of the world for roughly half a millennium. At its height, this greatest of city-empires ruled an expanse stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia and contained as many as 50 million people.
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How had the Romans managed this bold step into the urban future? In many ways, they did so by fusing the two great building blocks of ancient cities, religious conviction and organized military power. The Romans were unshakable in their presumption of greatness and relentless in their pursuit of empire. As Petronius noted:

The entire world was in the hands of the victorious Romans. They possessed the earth and the seas and the double field of stars, and were not satisfied.
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Rome’s great power did not lie with its geography or natural endowment. The Tiber, which flows through the city, does not rank as a great river alongside the Tigris, the Euphrates, or the Nile. True, the city’s heart enjoyed the protection of its seven hills, and its inland location provided a shield from sea invasion. But certainly these presented only a modest barrier to a determined and accomplished conqueror.

Rome enjoyed some basic economic assets, but nothing more than many other towns. The mild climate and decent soil supported a small community of shepherds and farmers. The city lay close to a point where the Tiber is most easily crossed, making early Rome a natural trade route for the surrounding peoples, notably the Etruscans, possessors at the time of a more advanced culture. Deposits of salt provided a significant item for the Romans to trade.
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The source of Roman greatness lay instead in their peculiar civic mythology and sense of divine mission. The city was said to be founded in the year 753 B.C. by two brothers, Romulus and Remus, abandoned by the Tiber and raised by a she-wolf. They were bloody-minded from the start, turning murderously on each other. Mars, the god of war and agriculture, developed early a strong following among these rough villagers.
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Initially, toughness alone was not sufficient to resist the Etruscans, who seized control of the little settlement in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. and established a kingship there. In many ways, the Romans benefited from this defeat, which exposed them to a more sophisticated culture and linked both the Greek and the Phoenician worlds.
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Once freed of foreign domination, the Romans quickly reformed their fledgling city-state, which in the fifth century B.C. accommodated barely forty thousand people. By 450 B.C., they codified their government with the Law of the Twelve Tables. The codes covered everything from market days, the relationship between patrons and clients, the rights of aristocrats, and protections for plebeians.

Roman law was designed to shape the behavior of the citizen, preferably through self-regulation, into conformity with deeply held notions of personal and civic virtue. Even the Latin word
religio
itself, suggested the historian F. E. Adcock, was meant to convey the citizen’s obligation to family, civic duty, and the gods.
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The Romans were deeply attached to their place and exhibited a powerful sense of continuity with their past. The household was at the center of everything; each family maintained an altar to honor both their ancestors and the gods.
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Rome’s historic core, noted Livy, was “impregnated by religion. . . . The Gods inhabit it.”
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Identification with tradition remained keen throughout most of their long history. Laws might be amended, but connection to the past lent them inestimable credibility. Something great, in their eyes, also meant something ancient.
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“Here is my religion, here is my race, here are the traces of the forefathers,” wrote the Roman statesman Cicero in the century before Petronius. “I cannot express the charm I feel here, and which penetrates my mind and my senses.”
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The Romans’ commitment to their res publica, or “public thing,” survived even after repeated disasters. Roman armies could be defeated— the city was even briefly occupied by Gallic invaders in 390 B.C.—and the city could suffer numerous fires but was always rebuilt around its ancient site. These attachments helped the Romans nurture their independent identity at a time when Greek culture dominated many other Italian cities.
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What Cicero felt in his “mind” and “senses”—this peculiar identification with the idea and place of Rome—also drove the city’s relentless expansion. Over the third and second centuries B.C., the Romans fought and eventually overcame the Etruscans and the Greeks. Arguably the most critical triumph took place in 146 B.C., with the destruction of Carthage, the city-state that presented the most potent threat to Roman hegemony in the Mediterranean world.

By the second century B.C., Rome already was taking on the trappings of a major city-empire. New arches and temples rose, along with massive port facilities, aqueducts, and an ever expanding Forum in the center of the city. Around the impressive public façades, thousands of crowded tenements, small marketplaces, and shops grew to service the needs of the ever expanding population.
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Over the next hundred years, the successes of the empire would undermine the old republican institutions. Newcomers, including slaves, now accounted for as much as a third of the population. Long-standing conflicts between wealthy patricians and hard-pressed plebeians intensified. The popular leader Tiberius Gracchus pointed out that old soldiers returning to Italy from triumphant wars found themselves landless and forced to live “homeless and houseless . . . with their wives and children. . . . Lacking a family altar or burial plot, they fight and die so that others could enjoy wealth and luxury.”
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A century of political instability and rebellions, including the famous slave uprising under Spartacus, set the stage for imperium. Proclaimed dictator in 49 B.C., Julius Caesar imposed order on the increasingly fractious republic. Caesar was also an urban innovator, determined to make Rome a fit capital for the vastly expanded empire. He legislated height limits for the city’s ubiquitous and often creaky tenements, enforced the use of tiles and open space between buildings to prevent fire, and initiated an ambitious expansion of the Forum.

Caesar’s assassination in 44 B.C. prevented him from carrying out his grand designs. This would be left to his successor Augustus.
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During Augustus’s reign, Rome emerged as a city of grand palaces, temples, and other public buildings. As Augustus himself is said to have remarked: “I found the city made of brick and left it made of marble.”
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Augustus’s triumph at Actium in 31 B.C. over the armies of the last Ptolemaic monarch, Cleopatra VII, and her ally Mark Antony marked the close of the Hellenistic era. The Romans already had subdued virtually all the Greek city-states, the larger part of the old Seleucid Empire, and much else beyond. For the next four centuries, the history of urbanism in the West would be written largely by the Romans and those who submitted to their will.

Some have maintained that the Romans lacked the Greek flair for originality as philosophers, city builders, or architects. This is unfair. Of course, the Romans took what they found in the Hellenized world and built upon it. But they also transformed or rebuilt cities, such as Carthage, and helped restore others, including venerable Athens.
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Rome pushed the frontiers of urbanity to new levels, first of all in Rome itself. The city undertook an unprecedented program of public works—roads, aqueducts, sewers—that made it capable of sustaining its ever growing population. The Greeks, one Roman writer asked, boasted of their “useless” art, and Egypt’s legacy lay in “idle Pyramids,” but what were these compared with the fourteen aqueducts that brought water to Rome?
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Yet beneath these achievements lurked a deplorable reality. Elegant marble work may have covered the great buildings of the new Forum Augustum and its Temple of Mars, but most Romans lived in slumlike dwellings. There were twenty-six blocks of
insulae,
or apartment houses, for each private
domus.
Despite the legislation of the Caesars, many apartment buildings still creaked, sometimes collapsed, and all too often caught fire.
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