BOOK REVIEWS

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ANCIENT CITIES: A NATURAL HISTORY

- 

Greg Woolf

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, £25 HARDBACK

ISBN 978-0199664733

Greg Woolf is an incisive scholar with an ambition to write grand syntheses. This is to be welcomed. Though he has contributed some very important specialist monographs – like his Becoming Roman: the origins of provincial civilisation in Gaul, a detailed empirical study of the Romanisation process in the Late Republic and Early Empire – he is also interested in general overviews. This latest example is exceptionally ambitious.

Generalism is itself a specialism, and it is as necessary as it has ever been. Many (perhaps most) scholars are reluctant to attempt it, fearful that stepping outside their immediate specialism, their comfort zone, they may trip and fall.

What Greg Woolf, a Classicist, ancient historian, and archaeologist who specialises in the Greek and Roman worlds, offers here is an overview of 3,500 years of ancient urbanism. His focus is the Mediterranean Classical world we know well, but he delves back in time to explore the Bronze Age civilisations of the Ancient Near East, which perhaps provided models for the subsequent development of urbanism. So the Greeks and Romans are foregrounded, but we learn too about Sumerian, Egyptian, Phoenician, Cretan, Persian, and other urban traditions.