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Today, I'm honored to be speaking with a very dear guest, with Dr. Andrew Wallace-Hudrell. Dr. Andrew S. Hodrin has recently published a book with Cambridge University Press. The book is called The Idea of the City in Late Antiquity, a study in resilience. Dr. Andrew Wallace-Hudrell is an Emeritus Professor of Research and Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge and also an Emeritus Fellow. of Sydney Sussex College. Andrew, welcome to New Books Network.
Thank you so much. It's a delight to join you. Thank you. Can you just very briefly introduce yourself, talk about your field of expertise and how you were attracted to this field? And more importantly, then tell us. How did the idea of this book come to you? There are lots of books about classic history or late antiquity, but this is about the idea of the city. It would be great if you could briefly introduce yourself and talk about this book. Sure, sure.
So I'm by trade a Roman historian. You introduced me as emeritus, which means I'm retired. But I've spent a long career studying various aspects of the ancient Roman world. But one thing that's always interested me particularly is cities. I've studied Pompeii and Herculaneum, and I know there are quite a few people in Australia who have been interested in Pompeii and Herculaneum. And for many years, I lived in Rome and I studied the city of Rome.
And when I retired, I thought, it's time to branch out. I want to do something that pushes further the boundaries of what I've been interested in all these years. And I wanted to look at the city after the fall of the Roman Empire. Cities are one of the most amazing features of ancient civilization. You know, they're amazing. The ruins that we see today tell us that... cities were really important in the ancient world. And it's not just the physical remains. I'm very interested now.
But it's also the whole social structures that underpin a city. It's very hard to think of ancient civilization without the city. Hard to think of ancient culture without the city. And there is a sort of standard story about this, which is that basically when the Roman Empire fell, so did the idea of the city. And OK, they may have had cities after antiquity, but they were a pale reflection of the real ancient city. It had lost its gut.
And as one author, a very old friend of mine, Wolf Liebeschutz, as he put it in his title, the decline and fall of the ancient city. It's all a sad, Edward Gibbon-like story of... The ancient world coming to an end and that's the end of the story. I didn't believe this because I look around being in the world and I see so much. that comes out of the ancient city in our cities today. In many ways, the ancient city is alive. And I wanted to have a new project.
And I was very lucky to get some money from the European Union, the ERC, which is very generous. And it allowed me to put together a team of people. working on all sorts of different aspects. archaeologists, historians, people working on the Middle Ages, people working on the Arabic world, on Turkey and Istanbul and so on. And we all worked together for five years. It was a wonderful, exciting period.
which we batted ideas off each other. And one thing we did was we all forced each other to read. Stuff they didn't know already. We were feeding our own knowledge into a joint operation. So I said to myself, well, I've never worked on what happens to the city after antiquity. Let's grapple with this. And that's where this book comes from.
That's a fascinating story how the project started. And when I was reading the book, I guess you talk about the idea of a city in late antiquity, but you also make references to different... parts of the world. So I guess now that's kind of clear to me how that all came together in this book. If I can just interject, in many ways, I'm full of regret because our project covered so much.
that I couldn't cover in this book. I would have liked to say much more about the Eastern Mediterranean, what happens in the Arab world, but I can't. I am not an expert in that. But I could work with the sort of sources who talk the language I understand, which is Latin. Absolutely. Well, maybe that should be a next project.
collected edition of books and cambridge is great at that great as coming up with a collection of essays I'm interested to know, you mentioned what happened to Citi in late antiquity, especially after Rome. Was there a, and I know that how much historians hate the idea of fall of Rome. It's not, it wasn't really a fall. It was transformation. But was there like a distinct. rupture or break in the idea of a city between classical antiquity and then late antiquity.
or even as we go further into the Middle Ages, early Middle Ages, and I understand this is a terribly broad question, so I'm just trying to be as general as I can so that you can talk about this idea of break. Was there a break? really distinct ideas of the architecture of cities in these different time periods. I don't believe in a sharp break at any period. I mean, of course, of course there is change. Of course, there's enormous transformation.
That takes place. But I think you can think of it as a sort of conspiracy between ancient historians who want to keep the ancient world. This is our path. And we really don't accept this later stuff as being the world we recognize. And on the other hand, the medievalists who say, you know, we don't do antiquity. They did things differently then. We have medieval cities which have their own rhythms and they aren't the same. But the truth is that, you know, city is an enormously vague thing.
Sometimes people imagine the ancients, the Greeks and the Romans, invented the city. No, they didn't. There were cities in the third millennium, the fourth millennium BC, in Mesopotamia, in the Indus Valley, in China. The city takes all sorts of forms throughout history. What the Greeks and Romans do is develop a quite particular form of their own, which is a very rich and fruitful form. Does the – after the fall of Rome, do the Middle Ages sort of –
start afresh from a clean piece of paper? No, of course not. They're full of admiration for the ancient city. They keep looking back to it. asking themselves, how can we make our world better? by using the ideas that are out there. And after all, they're on... a lot of ideas that they can easily recover because the ancient Greeks and Romans wrote it down on paper. There's this rich literature that is full of the city.
And they read this literature and it gave them great ideas. And they looked at the monument. And so there are some big breaks. Of course there are big breaks. What about the Colosseum? There's a very clear example of something with... Roman cities, any big Roman city, had an amphitheatre. They had gladiatorial fights. What do medieval cities do with their amphitheatres? They close them down. They're absolutely not interested in gladiatorial fights or beast hugs.
My favorite example is in Tarragona, where there's a beautiful amphitheater and right in the middle of it, a Christian church. Santa Maria del Miracle is built right in the middle of the amphitheater. It's like, stop all this. We've got a different way of thinking and living. Yes, of course. Christianity makes an enormous difference. But that doesn't stop them reaching back into antiquity and reusing ideas.
That is good because I am an amateur, let's say, enthusiast in the history of Middle Ages. and when i was reading your book and like it by no means i'm an expert or anything in the topics that you discuss. But I really like that idea of continuity in history, antiquity, late antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and later on. But unfortunately, there are sometimes there are these let's say, I would call it even a caricaturist depiction of history.
I mean, especially intellectual history and how they are depicted as rupture. But when you were describing about the idea of these, the continuity, the idea of... city and the nature of city in these times. I was really enjoying it. I could see they were all connected. Can you also talk about Just the very idea of the ancient city, the early historiography of the idea of ancient city, where did it come from?
I think it's a fascinating question that if you read books about the ancient world that are written before the 19th century, say, Nobody sort of offers the idea of the city. They see lots of cities, but the idea of the city as an abstraction is a very 19th century one. And the great Fustelle de Coulon. on the ancient city, and he sort of defined the ancient city. Now, when we read it today, Gustave de Coulage's book seems almost mad.
He has ideas about what the ancient city was about. He thinks it's all about religion. and a special form of family religion that's about property and so on. These are very brilliant ideas that we would nowadays call sociological. He's inventing sociology as he goes. And the sociology. of the ancient city, is born with Fustel de Coulanges.
Once he's got that idea, people can disagree about what makes up the ancient city, but they never again challenge that there was such a thing as the ancient city. And I'm a bit... I want to get past that idea of the... There's an idea of the city with a... A kaleidoscope of different variations that feed into each other. So when you look at the medieval paintings especially, ruins or cities, they feature prominently the visual representation of cities.
So what was that attraction or obsession with that visual reposition of the city in paintings and sculptures? And in your book, you also talk about how... This tradition continued into the Middle Ages, this panegyric, the idea, the traditional panegyric of individual cities. Can you talk about that aspect of your book, please? If you think of a city, an image comes to mind, doesn't it? And it's an image of... Some walls, a circle of walls.
And in that image, the walls are always depicted very accurately with battlements and gates. And then you glimpse buildings beyond the walls. But it's a contained and very precise thing, the city. The medieval depiction is always like that. But interestingly, the ancient depiction is just like that. It's a tradition that comes out of antiquity. And many people have said, look, walls really weren't important for cities. The city is an idea. It's not just a lot of stones.
and that that was said very explicitly by ancient authors, including St. Augustine. And of course that's true. There's more to a city than walls. But if you pick up a paintbrush, it's very hard to paint the idea. And the idea of the contained thing, the container, which has something precious inside it, that is a continuity from antiquity to the Middle Ages. And you mentioned the praises of cities. There's an enormous tradition of writing.
of writing about my city and why my city is more beautiful than anyone else's city. And they're wonderfully formulaic. And it goes back to antiquity, and they follow the same formula into the Middle Ages and right into the early modern period. You always start by saying, my city has got beautiful walls. It's set in beautiful countryside. A river runs round it, runs through.
There are a lot of fish in the river. And so on and so forth. And one of the features of the medieval praises of cities is they say, Our city is so magnificent. It is a second Rome. And always that idea is Rome is the ultimate city. We're all aspiring to be Rome. Rome's the lost city. Rome's the city, as you say, that fell. Of course, Rome fell. It was sacked really rather a lot of times.
But cities rebuild, and they rebuild in the same image. And so my city is the new Rome. There's even a wonderful poem about the new city. Charlemagne Bild. Aachen. Actually, it's hard to call Aachen in Charlemagne's day a city. But they went out of their way to say it's just like Rome. It was quite interesting that you mentioned this thing about...
the idea of a praise of a city, a panegyrics of the city. And I think it's still depending on different parts of the world, different countries where... The cities are like Paris, for example, London, New York. This tradition kind, even in Australia that I live. city the city Melbourne or Adelaide or Sydney
They sing a praise to the cities, the local artists. They write about how great their city is as opposed to other cities. And I myself, and I think before the interview, I told you that I studied English literature. It's English literature, and it's just filled with references to cities. It's London, Paris.
Rome, and sometimes they're portrayed as, but more, I guess, more or less, I guess, in Victorian literature, romantic Victorian, especially romantic literary cities are places of decadence, but still, it's there. I am not a very well-traveled man, but I came to know a lot of these cities through movies that I watched, through literature that I read.
And I formed a picture of those cities, a kind of a visual representation, a literal representation of the cities. And it was quite interesting to know that this is not a new thing. It's not a new tradition. It started in Rome. I think it... Sorry. Go ahead, Seth. I think is partly built into the nature of a city. Cities are like individuals. They are all different. And so you can see a city as having characteristics, just like a human being, as having beauty like a human being.
It's a definable entity. You travel through a country and you see a similarity, a generic similarity, just as you see, between human beings. OK, they, you know, I can't say all Australians look similar, but they really don't. But very often the individuals have a generic similarity. The cities have a generic similarity, but a strong individuality.
And that makes it possible to praise a city just as you would praise a human being or describe a city. Yeah, absolutely. And I could be wrong, but I guess... Because with more population growing, different countries are trying to expand the cities or build new cities. And there's usually a lot of backlash against this because... The houses just looked like a prefab cardboard house that is built and thrown in there. And they normally, the criticism against these cities is that
It's listless. It has no life. It has no character. When they use that kind of language, it doesn't have that individuality that you mentioned. They all look the same. And it's not a organic city. I think one of the things about it is history matters. Absolutely. It's just as an individual as they grow up. They acquire their individualities, and you can't really make sense of the individual until they're adults and they're more interesting when they're older.
But an old city is a wonderful thing. I mean, which of us can resist Istanbul? Or Rome. You look at it with awe because you feel, you see, you feel. all the developments, the different waves of history that have passed through. And I think that the ancients were very conscious of that too. One of the rules for praising a city was, you have to say, who founded it?
And what have been its great achievements? You tell the story. They have stories. It's a narrative built into a place. Absolutely, yeah. And especially like in... I haven't been there like I haven't been to London, but I've seen a lot of images like there are. kind of a placard, I guess, on different walls or on different benches in parks that Mary Shelley, who used to live here, Jane Austen used to live here.
This is the street. This guy, Karl Marx, lived for six or seven months. It builds stories, narratives. those local histories that create the history of that big city. And I absolutely love this aspect of London. And I don't know, it might be in other parts of Europe as well, but this is what I've especially seen a lot of these placards in London.
which I think is a fabulous idea. And especially for somebody like me, for example, who is studying English literature, I can relate to that. This is the house, for example, the great, great... uh well poem uh forgot the name of the poem now the with the romantic but in zanadu did kupa khan is stated doing decree
I forgot the name of the author, the poet. Anyhow. Coleridge. Coleridge, yes. Coleridge. Because I've seen a picture of a place where Coleridge lived and the house is still there as a history. And that's what makes it fascinating. But anyway, I'm just going on a tangent here. Let's talk about the rise of Christianity and how, let's say, I'm interested to know if the rise of Christianity created a change in the... ancient ideas of city or not and you have
In the chapter book, you talk about this. You have many examples. I'm particularly interested in... I'll leave it to you to talk about an example of that, but I'm really interested myself in Augustine's idea of the city and his famous Luke, the city of God, and the idea of citizenship, city, citizenship, they come together. Could you talk about that, please? Yeah, sure. There's no question. Christianity changes things. Of course, great religions change things fundamentally.
And Christianity has an enormous impact on the ancient city. The first thing to say is, right, it has an impact in antiquity. Christianity is an ancient religion, and it doesn't spell the end of antiquity. But there is a very curious modern historiography. A set of attitudes to Christianity, a suspicion of Christianity, and part of that idea that the ancient city declined and fell. and this is built into Gibbon, is, and it was Christianity that caused the fall.
that somehow Christianity is incompatible with all the ideals of the ancient city. Now, that's an attitude. I think it's quite a dangerous attitude. And St. Augustine's great book. I mean, it's an extraordinary book. on the City of God. I often say that it shouldn't be called City of God because... The Latin word kivitas means two things simultaneously. It means citizenship and city. And so it's the community of God, the city.
formed by a community of citizens. Now, this is one of the, perhaps the most important feature of Cities of Antiquity, the idea of citizenship. The idea that the people of the city aren't just its inhabitants. They are stakeholders. They are citizens. They have rights in the city. And that is in contrast, of course, of many sort of despotic regimes or even cities which are run by religious. Religious authorities may not have the same idea of citizenship.
And the really interesting thing about Augustine's idea of citizenship is that he thinks this is the best thing the Romans gave to us, better than some sliced bread. They gave us citizenship. And he says it very explicitly. He says that the Roman Empire is regrettable in many ways. There's an awful lot of unnecessary bloodshed, ghastly conquering of people and so on. He is no friend of colonialism. And yet, he says, the great thing they did was to give the inhabitants of the empire citizens.
And he's worried about what happens now that Rome has been sacked. Because the citizenship was the citizenship of a city, the city of Rome. But if Rome isn't there, if it isn't powerful any longer... That whole idea of we're all citizens and share rights and share ideals that collapses. And what he does is to suggest that God, the city of God, Jerusalem, is as good an idea as Rome. We can all still be fellow citizens.
through the church. Now, some people have regarded that as the final stab in the back of the ancient city. You don't need Rome any longer. You've got God. But what's to me really interesting is... That Christian community depends on, guess what, cities. It depends on priests in their villages and bishops in their cities. Augustine is a bishop in a city. The church proliferates cities with bishops. They need cities. So they haven't thrown away the idea of having cities.
They've made it not necessary to have Rome. You still have cities. You just don't have Rome running everything. So that's the decline and fall. Bye-bye, Rome. Except that there's a Pope in Rome and he builds up. the city again. So I think it's a very complex relationship. But it's not an abandonment of either the idea of the city or the idea of citizenship. It's a transformation, if you like, an embracing of it, an admiration of it.
And I guess a lot of historians are using the term transformation. And I really enjoy the idea of cities and citizenship that you mentioned. It's that citizens are stakeholders. The city brings citizenship, which is a very democratic idea. And I guess you made a good point that why authoritarian regimes or if a city is run by religious fundamentalists, they may not like the idea of the city itself. I come originally from Iran. And he was born in Shiraz.
And I have read a bit about the history of how the city developed. It's an old city. very close to that city. Well, my city wasn't there at that time, but anyway. But when this university in Shiraz was built, and it was built before revolution, it's a very scattered university. So different departments, different schools are all in different parts of the town.
And the whole idea was not to bring all these places together. And they're all surrounded by walls. So when I moved to New Zealand to do my PhD, I was just surprised. I entered the university, I asked my friend, where is the university? They said, here it is. So it's the middle of a street. People are walking among them, right? The shoppers who walk through the university, well, that's the university. It's part of town. But in Iran, the universities are kind of walled.
And even before evolution, as I said, the whole idea was that if... If there is a student uprising, it's difficult for them to organize and assemble. There's a patch of students in one school, there's another patch, 20 kilometers in another school. It's just all over the place. Yeah, and the idea of university, at least in my hometown, is that it's a place where students go and come. And if you're not a student, you have no business to even enter there. And there's a...
There are a couple of guards at the entrance of each university. So if you don't really look like a professor or a student, they want to approach you and say, well, who are you? What's your business here? But I had quite a different experience in New Zealand and also in Australia. Even when I visited Melbourne University many, many times, and it's a beautiful campus. I just love walking through the campus, looking at the buildings, going to the library.
Yeah, I just wanted to highlight that idea of a unique city and citizenship. I'm very interested in the relationship between cities and universities. And interestingly, in antiquity, they didn't have universities. The idea of the university, you can't take it much earlier than the 11th century. And yet, education was a fundamental part. It was, as you describe, education dispersed throughout the city rather than an institution trying to cut itself off from the city.
And I think a city without education was almost inconceivable. Justinian was famously a criticized by his historian Procopius. People said Justinian has done so much for cities, and Procopius said, yes,
but he's cut back state funding for education, and this is causing the end of the city. I think it's an important part, especially in a more cosmopolitan city, because... students who come from different cities or even different parts of the world they are part of the makeup of that city and especially in the small cities which are
built around the university, maybe small cities, which are defined. Like Oxford, the moment I hear the word Oxford, it's Oxford University. Or Cambridge, it's Cambridge University. I'm sure there are many cities similar to this in Italy, in Germany. And it's the idea of education that brings that. It's a hub of learning. It's a city of those great men or women who we studied in.
We studied there and they make up the history of that, the local history of that city. You also talk about someone, I hadn't heard of that character before myself. And I could be mispronouncing the name, so you would forgive me. Cassidores, I guess. And you talk about a series of letters. his letters in which he attempts to preserve and support the fabric and tradition of city life after he's gone through some changes in after Rome. Can you talk about that part of the book?
And who were these letters written to? And what did they tell us about the fabric of city life then? Castios, he's a really fascinating character. At the end of the 5th century, beginning of the 6th century, power passed to a military commander of Germanic origin. a Goth, an Ostrogoth called Theodoric. So Theodoric was the new Roman emperor, so to speak. And though he took care not to call himself an emperor, he called himself a king because he was the king of the gods.
He behaved incredibly like a Roman emperor. And he wanted a whole bureaucracy around him, as a Roman emperor would have done. And he appointed this character called Cassiodorus. to be his chief of staff, shall we say. He moves through various grades. He's his secretary, his treasurer, his prefect, the senior commander. And Cassidorus, through a long career, working under Theodoric and his successors.
writes letters on behalf of the king, and he writes letters very frequently to cities, to the people in charge of the cities, the councillors of the cities. And he is very emphatic that they must keep their cities in good condition. They must look after their fabric properly. They must make sure their walls are not crumbling. One thing he's particularly obsessed with is aqueduct. They mustn't let the aqueducts, because if an aqueduct crumbles, then you have no water supply coming into the city.
You must give constant attention to your aquatics. You must pull out the weeds. because if you neglect them, in no time at all the weeds turn into bushes and the bushes turn into trees and they'll rip the fabric of the aqueduct apart. So part of it is this determination to keep the fabric of the city. But he also is very enthusiastic about city life. And at one point, he writes to a city council and says, it really won't do. to let people live away from the city.
that the rich people must live in the city and have their children educated in the city and take part in proper city life. And he represents city life as full of delight, dinner parties, civilized life. Now, of course, that let us a bit ambiguous because you might say that is very good evidence that people were abandoning cities. They didn't want to live in cities any longer. They were happy to live in the countryside.
Well, of course, that's part of the story. And the conditions in Italy... were not so irish as they had been under the Roman Empire. But the interesting thing is that a Gothic ruler... a German-speaking Gothic ruler, is as determined to maintain the fabric of city life as any emperor had been before him. And I think that's a theme that runs through. the post-imperial period. The emperor's gone. The Western Empire breaks up into a series of kingdoms.
under rulers of Germanic origin. The Ostrogoths in Italy, the Visigoths in Spain, the Franks in Gaul. And each of these so-called barbarian rulers shows a determination to support cities, city life. The old way of life. If cities didn't matter anymore, what on earth were they putting all this effort into it? Not only do they do that, they actually make new cities.
Not just the old ones, but why not create new cities? Theoderic actually in Italy, he doesn't. But then Italy was so full of cities, there wasn't boom for another city. You get the wonderful Yuvigild, the Visigothic king, who in the end of the 6th century, in 578, creates a new city, Rokopolis. And even the name Rokopolis tells you how determined this Gothic ruler was to be like a proper Roman emperor.
Because that's what, from Constantine onwards, Roman emperors did. Constantine made Constantinopolis. You take your name and you give it to a new city, Opolis. And there are dozens of new cities created by Roman emperors, not dozens created by the Germanic kings, but a handful. And Rakopolis is a jolly good shot at creating a new city in a less prosperous era.
But there it is, a beautiful city on a bend of a river, looking from a high hill down on the river. And there is the royal palace at the top and a church. and a piazza, a public square, and then houses laid out in rows below it. is still a sign of real success and power. I'm sorry, I've rather leapt from Cassiodorus to the Rekopoulos. No, I guess that was an important thought.
sandwich them together. They're an important part of the story, right. I'm also interested to know about the role of administrations and local councils. city administrations and local councils in the fabric of the city. And again, there are many examples in your book. You talk about places like Italy or France. So I'll leave it to you to choose which place you want to talk about. But in general, what was the role of city administration in maintaining that fabric of the city?
Part of the story that suggests the city was in decline. It says the problem is that... Local councils were in decline. Cities were no longer run by a properly constituted council. and they were just run by the local big men, and there was no formality to it. And the strange thing is, this is almost the opposite of the truth. There are a whole series of wonderful papyri.
from Ravenna. And Ravenna is a lovely example of a city which itself really flourished in late antiquity. All those wonderful buildings of mosaics in Ravenna. a sign of the investment in a city. And in Ravenna, the archbishop was a particularly rich church, and he acquired many bits of property. And we have a series of his documents proving ownership of property. And they show us the rituals by which you could do a property transfer.
On the face of it, no more interesting than going into a solicitor's office and asking to look at the conveyancing document. But for us, buying a new house, buying a bit of land is just a technical legal thing. And you fill in the right documents. And as long as the paperwork's there, you're OK. But what these amazing papyri show is that it was a really important public ritual. Everyone who bought or even donated property to the church had to appear before the town council.
in a very ritualized way, and they had to ask permission of his honor, the chief magistrate, to speak. And he would be given permission to speak and would say who he's representing and describe the property he wants to transfer. And there is a long ritual that takes place, and all the other counsellors are around. They have to witness it. And only after this extended ritual can the property actually be transferred. What this shows us is curiously enough.
The formalities of the ancient city surviving long after Roman emperors, long after the legal structures of antiquity. We even find them in France. In the day of Charlemagne, So though, of course, cities weren't the same, they had a lot of the same rituals as before. And I think we think of rituals as something unimportant. To imitate a ritual is already symbolically to embrace something.
And that's what I see in these documents. There's numerous documents from Italy, from Spain, from France, which show people... doing the ritual, going to your council and saying, I wish to donate this property to the church. You don't just sign it over, no, you do it formally in front of the town councillors. And it's little rituals like that that make up a society. And that is the society, the Kivitas, that makes the city the Kivitas. This is a very interesting point again.
And I'm just thinking that everything has become so much digitalized. I don't know if I'm right, but I'm just thinking that everything has become so digitalized.
As a matter of fact, it was a historian who once mentioned that with the rise of internet, when, for example, dignitaries or... religious authorities in seminaries communicate with one another if it's true through all these emails the next 200 years we're going to lose a huge huge source of information i don't know how it's going to preserve but when nowadays when you look at those archives
You come to learn a lot about, not necessarily about religions, but about how everyday life was conducted. Those, all those little rituals that you're talking about. So I'm guessing... You're quite right. I guess you know what I'm doing. You can look today at a bit of papyri. that was written out in, say, 700 AD. And you can still read. the legal thing that gave the property. And what I love is the fine detail of it. There's a lovely example of a chap donating his house.
And he doesn't just say, here's the address and here's the house. No, he describes it. in loving detail, how there's a ground floor and an upper floor and a bath building. And a path down to the river. And there, suddenly, you have in front of your eyes the reality of an ancient house. Absolutely right. Yeah, yeah. Let me ask you about... Sorry, go ahead. No, I was going to say...
the importance of the oral. What survives is the written. But the written in all these documents is recording the spoken word. the ritual of people meeting people. and agreeing things, and then saying, let's write it down, and that'll make it forever. And that is, in a sense, what our digital era... evaporates. I remember when my wife and I bought our first house. We had to come back from honeymoon on a certain day because the solicitors said, you have to be in the office on this day.
And we booked our flight to be in the office on that day. And the flight was cancelled. And we arrived on the next day and we had agonized conversations. So, you know, will the conveyancing go through? That's a modern ritual. And what delights me is seeing little bits of ritual from the ancient world and the medieval world. And I'm really, myself, I'm interested really in how, you know, in medieval work.
scribes were put i mean the scriptures were put together books were compiled and put together and there were many scribes And I've read numerous books and we don't know even the names of those scribes, but there are examples where those scribes were writing on the margins of the pages that here is an anonymous scribe who has written this. I mean he has put the words on a paper. He was not the author.
and hope his mind memory will live for eternity. And he just come to understand they were human beings, were not the author. At one point, I thought, for example, works, say, written by... oh god my mind is going blank i'm forgetting everything Canterbury Tales written by Chaucer. I thought that it was Chaucer himself writing that, but no.
Charles didn't write it. Yeah, he came up with the poems and everything, but it was a scribe who was putting all those words on a paper or papyrus or whatever. or a vellum, whatever he used to write it. And then he would write on the margins. And when you look at these archives... the literature of the time, but it also tells us something about the process where these books or scriptures were compiled. And I guess in digital age, as you mentioned, this is what we're losing.
But again, this is the new age anyhow. You're right. I agree. You're quite right that there's nothing like the handwriting of a human being in the past. And these wonderful documents from Ravenna, They all have signatures. Everyone had to sign up. So you get, oh, half a dozen, a dozen different signatures on a document. You get the man who was the secretary to the council and he names himself.
And he says, I wrote it, and it's also witnessed by, and then the other people at the meeting, right? And there's one lovely document where... half of the people are goth. they aren't latin speakers And they have a struggle to sign their names, but some of them sign in Gothic and some of them sign in Latin. And you suddenly are in touch with the people. Let me ask you another question about So you've gone through a lot of text, a lot of pieces of history to write this book, to understand.
more about the ideas of cities. In a chapter of your book, you also talk about archaeological discoveries of the cities. I'm interested to know how do historical records, written records, compare with the archaeological, modern archaeological discoveries about the cities? What do they tell us? Do they corroborate one another? Do we see, let's say, distinctions between them or contrast? To me, it's really important to look at archaeological remains at the same time as literary writing.
Because they do tell the same story, but they always tell it from different angles. And so a possibility is that I find all these authors who seem to think cities are important, but you might find that on the ground there was a different story. And partly, sometimes archaeologists have argued exactly that, that if you look, if you excavate... What you find is the ancient city crumbling away, being abandoned. falling to pieces visibly at the end of antiquity.
And in a sense, that's inevitable because as things move on, of course, they're not using it anymore. It's pointless. But that doesn't mean the city has ceased to exist. And I thought it would be useful, instead of looking at cities that have been there in antiquity, to look at new cities. If their interest in cities... How do they build them now? And there are a whole series of fantastic new cities, of which, of course, Constantinople itself is the most important example.
in establishing a new capital. He builds a new image of a city. It becomes an incredibly powerful image. And it's essential to Constantinople that it be a sort of reproduction of Rome. It has to be distinctive. But it's in competition. It's in direct competition with Rome. It's going to be even better than Rome. It has all the features of Rome. It goes beyond Rome.
And then you get Justinian, who is a terrific emperor. He probably did more damage to the cities of Italy than anyone else because of his... determination to reconquer Italy, to take it out of the hands of those Gothic rulers, Theodoric's family. And his army underbellished Italy and caused enormous damage to the whole fabric, the whole urban fabric of Italy.
But it's not that Justinian wanted to destroy cities. He was busy building new cities. And he built a new city in the little village in the Balkans where he was born. And that can be seen today. And it's a little Constantinople. And just in the same way, when Ljewigild builds his new city of Rakopolis, it's a little Constantinople. So, Constantinople becomes the model of the new city.
I have one final question. The idea of a city is usually associated with... civilization and sometimes there are also ideologically driven analysis of that i've seen it here on australia why indigenous people have never built a city therefore they were not as civilized as europeans but the idea of building a city requires a lot of it requires resources it requires
even trade routes with other neighboring cities for a city to be able to develop. I'm interested to know in... in that old model of civilization based on cities is that model do you think is still with us or has it gone through through some transformations or maybe despite all these transformations that idea of Civilization based on cities is still with us. Can you talk about that place? I guess we contrast the developed world with the...
undeveloped or less developed worlds, don't we? And in the end, it's uncannily similar to the Greek and Roman contrast between a world of cities and a world of not-cities. Ancient authors always speak in terms of barbarians being... uncivilized, but without cities. And it's a very striking fact that you find cities up to the Roman front here. The Romans drew a frontier along the Rhine and Danube, and there are cities like Cologne, Mainz, along the Rhine.
and over the Rhine there were no cities in antiquity. And it's only really from Charlemagne onwards that you begin to get new cities coming in the 8th century onwards, the barbarians. start building cities. So for the ancients, yes, to be a barbarian was to have a civilization without cities. You can't have cities without enormously complex structures of control. You have to raise money.
You have to control labour in really complex ways. Now, of course, you can have pyramids. You can build complex things that aren't cities. But nevertheless, unless you have a really complex and partly hierarchical society, It's very hard to build what we would call a city. So, yes, the ideas of being civilized for the ancients were all wrapped up with the idea of living in a city. In a city, yeah.
Having said which, they loved the countryside too. Yes, absolutely. And they often idealized a country life. and thought of the city as the centre of corruption, of depravity. of evil. The country is the source of purity. And they... were capable, too, of regarding the barbarians as being morally superior to themselves because not corrupt. The barbarians had freedom. And I think there was a whole genre. So these debates.
Sorry, carry on. Go ahead, please. No, I've lost. Well, I was going to say, these debates play out, for instance, in Tacitus' description of the conquest of Britain. And his great rebel hero, Karataka, He stands up and says, look, the Romans claim to be creating universal peace. What they're doing is creating a wasteland. So the Romans were well capable of seeing the not-city as superior to the city.
They're actually really ambivalent about it. The city is... is the embodiment of everything that's best. about their society and everything that is worst about it. Absolutely right. I was about to say that there was this whole idea of idyllic literature, pastoral poetry, which I guess started in Greek, and it was also quite popular in England during romantic literature, whereas you mentioned the idealized, the countryside, you know, all that William Blake.
uh sorry word words and and cold rich poetry about idealizing the countryside you're absolutely right Before we come to the end of this interview, I'm just asking a question out of curiosity. I don't know exactly where in England you live. I'm guessing you're in Cambridge. Cambridge. You're in Cambridge. Right, yeah. Well, I... To tell the truth, I live in the countryside just outside Cambridge. We're four miles outside Cambridge. I sometimes ask myself,
why I'm so interested in cities when what I love is the countryside. So is it a sort of morbid fascination? The city, the countryside is peace and quiet. The city is frenetic activity. Yes. And of course, it's fascinating. But sometimes it's good to look at it from outside. You're right. I love them both. Where I live in... i live in one of the outer suburbs in melbourne you know it's a big city of course
The area where I live, it's still, it is a city, but if you drive outside, you can see big farms, you can see cows, you can see sheep. So it's a mix of, it's Melbourne, outer suburbs, a mix of rural areas and urban areas. And, you know, and I quite like it here, but every now and then I do work in the CBD in the city.
But every, you know, during the weekends, I prefer not to go to this city. I prefer to drive around, go to the, you know, beautiful hills or seaside here. The question I wanted to ask is... I, like I told you, I was born in a city called Shiraz in Iran. I lived there until I was 28 or, yeah, 20 or 30 years old and then I moved out, moved to New Zealand. But during that time that even I lived there, my city went through a lot of transformation. The area where I lived was...
There were lots and lots of gardens. They were all chopped down. They started building apartments. large apartments and this the whole fabric of that neighborhood chain and then big shopping malls modeled like the shopping malls you see in europe The fabric of that city changed. And there was an expression I learned when I was doing my PhD research.
called Solastalgia, which was a play on the word nostalgia. Nostalgia is when you leave your country or hometown and you feel nostalgic towards it, but Solastalgia is... When your hometown, where you live, you haven't left it, but it goes through dramatic changes. Everything changes that you feel it's not the same land. You don't get solid. So it's a pain of loss of solace. And it was a word used to describe Western parts of Australia where there was large Indigenous communities there.
And they were mining companies. Main mining companies were just plucking the land, plundering whatever they could find, even destroying religious or, let's say, sacred sites. So the indigenous people who lived there said, well, this is not the land we knew before.
So they felt a psychological condition called nostalgia. And when I was reading it, reading more about it, apparently it has been recognized as... a psychological condition even in england when there was uh this disease uh with cows cow madness i guess so they had to call lots of animals so i think 15 or 20 years ago And then the people who lived in rural areas, they woke up one day, all these animals were gone.
The landscape had changed and they had nightmares. They heard noises or sounds. They imagined noises or sounds. It's a condition anyhow. So I'm just curious to know, you lived in Cambridge, you've been to London. How do you see, we have five minutes maybe, but briefly, how do you see all these transformations? I'm sure London has changed a lot since the early days, you might remember. This is characteristic of cities have a complex relationship with the country around them.
If you ask an archaeologist, you can't have a city without agriculture. A city is a sort of conjuring trick. How can people live all packed together? They need food. You've got to bring in food. And a century. They brought it in from the countryside, Iraq. And you have to have enough people to produce a surplus of food, not just to feed themselves, but to feed the people in the city. And you can't do it without making your agriculture more intense.
So the city always transforms the countryside and the countryside always transforms the town. The town grows by growing over the country. But then again, The countryside invades the town. Part of the nostalgia is people have gardens. Think of it, the urban garden. I am a beekeeper. to keep bees here in the countryside. But you can do it.
In the city, too. And there is a great movement to encourage people to plant a few wildflowers in their garden and to give the bees a chance. Because you need... those elements of the countryside even in the city. So I think there's this extraordinary ambivalent relationship between city and country that is going on all the time. If we're in the city, we miss the country. But if we're in the country, we miss the city.
That's the story that Horace famously told in one of his satirical poems, the story of the town mouse and the country mouse. Each of them thinks the other has got it better off.
Great. Thank you so much. I really, really enjoyed talking to you, Andrew. It was a great conversation and I'm sure that listeners will also enjoy it. And I do strongly recommend... this book for them to read the idea of the city in late antiquity it's true that i guess it's really writing about in a way, history of the city.
When I was reading it, I was able to make connections with what's happening around the world today in terms of, again, I was able to relate it to my contemporary experience of the city. I think it's one of the great things about great books that... make you feel all those connections or make you think about how we can relate it to your contemporary situation. So the book we just discussed was The Idea of the City in Late Antiquity published by Cambridge University Press.
Professor Andrew Wallace-Hardrill, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us on New Books Network. Thank you very much indeed. It's been a pleasure.