The Ancient City

Greece and Rome were quintessentially urban societies. Ancient culture, politics and society arose and developed in the context of the polis and the civitas. In modern scholarship, the ancient city has been the subject of intense debates due to the strong association in Western thought between urbanism, capitalism and modernity. In this book, Arjan Zuiderhoek provides a survey of the main issues at stake in these debates, as well as a sketch of the chief characteristics of Greek and Roman cities. He argues that the ancient Greco-Roman city was indeed a highly specific form of urbanism, but that this does not imply that the ancient city was somehow 'superior' or 'inferior' to forms of urbanism in other societies, just (interestingly) different. The book is aimed primarily at students of ancient history and general readers, but also at scholars working on urbanism in other periods and places.

Author: Arjan Zuiderhoek
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 10/31/2016
Pages: 236
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.11w x 0.77d
ISBN: 9780521166010

Review Citation(s):
Choice 06/01/2017

About the Author
Zuiderhoek, Arjan: - Arjan Zuiderhoek is Associate Professor of Ancient History at the Department of History, Ghent University. He is author of The Politics of Munificence in the Roman Empire: Citizens, Elites and Benefactors in Asia Minor (Cambridge, 2009) and editor, with Paul Erdkamp and Koenraad Verboven, of Ownership and Exploitation of Land and Natural Resources in the Roman World (2015).