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

by Joel Kotkin

Carthage in North Africa was the greatest of these colonies. Tradition has it that Carthage was founded in 814 B.C. by natives of Tyre. Known as Qart Hadasht, or “New Town,” it served as a base for the expanding Phoenician trade with the lands rimming the western Mediterranean. Gradually, the burgeoning trade center’s influence was felt from the Atlantic coast of Spain all the way north to Cornwall and, by some accounts, the coast of Guinea.14

  By the fifth century B.C., Carthage’s population surpassed that of Tyre and Sidon combined. It was now among the powerful states in the Mediterranean, with an impressive fleet and a series of alliances with various regional powers, including the Etruscans in Italy. Other Phoenician outposts in the west looked to Carthage for leadership and protection against opposing city-states, largely those established by the Greeks.15

  This shift in allegiances away from the home cities undermined Phoenicia itself. Without the help of their progeny, the old cities could no longer stave off assaults from the increasingly aggressive Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires. Eventually, the cities lost both their independence and their place as the primary trading hubs of the ancient Mediterranean. The Phoenician “golden age” was coming to an end.16

  In time Carthage, too, would succumb to the limitations inherent in a purely commercial city in ancient times. Proud bearers of Phoenician cultural and political values, the Carthaginians—whose number reached a peak of between 150,000 and 400,00017—operated a system of government scaled for a city-state, with elected consuls, or su fetes, a senate, and a general assembly. This constitutional format was usually dominated by the commercial aristocracy. Slaves and servants did the dirty work, soldiers and sailors fought, priests propitiated, but the wealthy ruled. 18

  As was true with their Phoenician forebears, Carthage’s stubbornly commercial character contributed to its fall. It lacked any broader sense of mission or rationale for expansion other than profit. Even as they maintained ties to other colonies, the Carthaginians did not seek to incorporate into a coherent empire. They remained, first and foremost, a nation run by business interests.19

  In the world of antiquity, a metropolis designed for business was no match ultimately for a city built for conquest. An ideology based on profit and narrow self-interest could not stand up to the imperial vision that would dominate urban history until the dawn of the modern era.

  PART TWO

  CLASSICAL CITIES IN EUROPE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE GREEK ACHIEVEMENT

  During the earliest period of urban history, Europe was a backwater, home to primitive, fiercely contentious people. The earliest evidence of cities close to Europe was in Crete, an island off the Greek mainland. Here the long-oared ship served to bring critical trade goods, notably olive oil and tin, the latter needed to make bronze implements and weapons. Enriched by this commerce and by ideas brought from Egypt and Mesopotamia, a distinct urban culture emerged here.1

  CRETE

  Like many Near Eastern civilizations, the Cretans worshipped the Earth Mother as a principal deity, but their cities expressed a new kind of spirit, one that later would help define the classical urbanity of Europe. The island’s principal city, Knossos, was home to both a vibrant commercial culture and a highly naturalistic art. Secure in their island redoubt, the city’s light, airy houses stood in stark contrast with the darker, more somber domiciles common in the Near East.2

  Crete awakened the Greek mainland to the possibilities of urban civilization. The rough adventurers of archaic Greece now experienced the comfort and affluence of a successful trading city.3 By the sixteenth century B.C., Crete’s power was fading, likely the result of natural disasters and invasions from hardier, more warlike people from the Greek mainland.4

  MYCENAE: GREEK PRECURSOR

  Building on the accomplishments of Crete, the first builders of major cities in Europe, the Mycenaeans, displayed many of the basic patterns that would characterize Hellenic urbanism for the next millennium. Warlike and contentious, they fought with one another and with foreign peoples throughout the eastern Mediterranean; the most celebrated conflict of this time stemmed from the war with Troy, as described by Homer in The Iliad.

  Their contentious spirit also was a reflection of the country’s environment. The rocky country of Greece, with its chains of mountains and compact valleys, promoted political fragmentation and discouraged the creation of sprawling city-empires. Generally the sea provided the only convenient avenue of expansion. Early cities such as Athens and Thebes began to colonize surrounding islands, including Cyprus, Melos, and Rhodes. Trade took them even farther out, as suggested by the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, to the forbidding reaches of Europe, all the way to Jutland, in present-day Denmark, where precious amber was procured.5

  THE CLASSICAL POLIS

  In the twelfth century B.C., barbarous, warlike nomadic invaders destroyed most major Greek settlements, including Mycenae itself. Trade collapsed, cities were abandoned, and a dark age ensued. It took four centuries for Greek urbanism once again to flourish. True to the past patterns, Greece remained an archipelago of small city-states, tiny countries anchored around an urban core and its surrounding hinterland. Competition between each city, or polis, was intense, expressed not only in conventional warfare, but in vying over foreign markets, skilled labor, the arts, and even in athletic contests. As Plato would later observe: “Every city is in a natural state of war with every other, not indeed proclaimed by heralds, but everlasting.” 6

  Driven by this competitive spirit, the Greeks created a highly individualistic intellectual culture encompassing art, sculpture, and drama that to this day defines much of the Western urban ideal. They incubated an aggressively urban consciousness that would resonate with city dwellers for centuries to come. Socrates expressed this new sensibility when he remarked: “The country places and the trees don’t teach me anything, and the people in the city do.”7

  Unlike philosophers elsewhere, focused on divinity and the natural world, Greek thinkers pondered the role of citizens in guaranteeing the health of the koinonia, or community.8 Citizens, Aristotle noted, were like hands on the deck of a ship. Their duty was to assure “the preservation of the ship in its voyage. . . .”9 In Athens, this led to an even more radical notion—that, as the Athenian legislator Solon would remark, citizens should, by right, be “the masters of the state.”10

  This ideal was made practicable by the relatively small size of Greek cities. In the fifth century B.C., no Greek city, with the exception of Athens, was home to more than 150,000 inhabitants. And only a fraction of the residents in any city were citizens. Even Athens, the largest, never had more than 45,000 citizens11 out of a total population of 275,000. 12

  Unlike the Phoenicians, the Greeks traditionally had little respect for commerce. Hermes, the god of thieves, performed simultaneously as the god of merchants. Craftsmen, whose works we still admire today, fared little better. Their minds, Plato complained, were “as cramped and crushed by their mechanical lives as their bodies are crushed by the manual crafts.” 13 Nor was the status of women particularly elevated. Greek romantic idealism worshipped (if anything) not love between men and women, but friendship as well as homosexual relationships between men.14

  Everyday life in cities such as Athens must have been, even for most citizens, mean, dirty, and uncomfortable. In the shadow of great buildings like the Parthenon, houses were small, alleys narrow and filled with every kind of vermin. “The city is dry and ill-supplied with water. The streets are nothing but old lanes,” wrote one shocked visitor. “The houses [are] mean with few better ones among them.” Not surprisingly, pestilence was a constant fear. Intermittently, plagues would sweep through the city, killing far more Athenians than armed conflict; one epidemic in 430–428 B.C., according to Thucydides, carried off a quarter of the Athenian armed forces.15

  THE GREEK DIASPORA

  Given the harsh conditions at home, it was natural for Greeks to seek a better life elsewhere. In contrast with t
he environs around Babylon or even the Phoenician city-states, the country surrounding the Greek city-states was generally unproductive; the overgrazed and depleted Greek countryside was increasingly incapable of supporting the growing population. To bring in new sources of food and raw materials, Greek cities planted colonies from the west coast of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) to Sicily and southern Italy. By 600 B.C., the Greek influence had reached the Gallic coast at Massilia, modern-day Marseilles, and as far as the Catalonian coast.16

  At one time the Greeks had looked down on the mercantile-minded Phoenicians, but necessity forced them to outdo them as traders. The change could be felt in the heart of the Greek cities. The agora, once simply a place of assembly, had evolved by the fifth century B.C.—to the dismay of some philosophers and aristocrats—into a large, boisterous, and increasingly complex marketplace.17 The great Persian king Cyrus, Herodotus tells us, described the typical Greek agora as “a meeting place in the middle of their city where they gather together, swear oaths, and deceive each other.”18

  Greek expansion depended not so much on market savvy as on brute force, particularly naval power.19 For a moment, Athens under Pericles possessed the military might to siphon off foreign wealth to initiate massive building programs and still subsidize the incomes of much of the citizenry. “Because of the greatness of our city,” Pericles boasted, “the fruits of the entire earth flow to us.”20

  In the process, the Greeks promoted a rapid expansion of the urban frontier from present-day Messina in Sicily to Marseilles, Nice, Monaco, and Byzantium on the Bosporus, later to grow into the great capital Constantinople. Greek city-states provided a model for these new towns, each of which developed its own agora, theater, and temple.

  Some colonies grew to be large cities themselves. Syracuse, initially a colony of Corinth, eventually became many times larger and far more powerful than its early founding polis. Under the rule of Dionysius I, it emerged the largest city in Europe, controlling most of Sicily and parts of southern Italy. Another important new city, Rhodes, founded in 408 B.C., was a model of classical planning, with broad avenues, drains, and a well-placed harbor.21

  THE TWILIGHT OF THE CITY-STATES

  These achievements ultimately could not protect the Greek city-states from the threat posed by larger, well-organized empires. Like the Phoenicians, they never developed an overarching ideology or governmental structure allowing for a stable confederation among themselves. Dismissive of other races as inherently inferior, they evidenced a profound difficulty relating to people of different cultures.

  No matter how fearsome in war, these parochial cities were not well suited to fend off empires that had evolved more tolerant and expansive governing systems. The founder of the Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great, possessed a remarkably cosmopolitan vision. Rather than annihilate or enslave his opponents, Cyrus envisioned a multinational empire where foreign cultures were to be respected and preserved, albeit under Persian supervision.

  This policy worked remarkably well, even among those Greek city-states conquered by the Persians. Many, particularly the merchants along the Ionian coast, welcomed the security and greater access to markets created by an alliance with a wider empire.22 The expansion failed only when Persia tried to assault Greece itself. Threatened with the loss of their traditional independence, the Greek city-states under Athenian leadership expelled the multinational Asian foe in 480 B.C. in Salamis, one of the landmark battles of European history.

  But even such a heroic victory could not unite the quarrelsome city-states. Shortly after defeating the Persians, they returned to fighting among themselves, sometimes spurred on by the subtle diplomacy and gold of the Persians. By the end of the Peloponnesian War in the later part of the fifth century B.C., Athens was defeated by a Sparta-led coalition of cities. Thousands of slaves and many metics, foreign residents critical in several of the trades, fled the city. Reeling from the disaster, Athens became increasingly repressive, executing or exiling many of its greatest minds and persecuting the economically critical metics. Although democracy was restored by the end of the century, the era of leadership by the Greek city-states in the ancient world was over.23

  ALEXANDER AND THE HELLENISTIC CITY

  The final blow fell not from the Asiatic east, but from the rough-hewn north. In 338 B.C., armies of the obscure northern kingdom of Macedonia, under King Philip, overwhelmed the last resistance of the city-states.

  The Greeks could take solace in the fact that Philip’s son and successor, Alexander, was a student of Aristotle and an avid admirer of Greek culture. But Alexander was hardly an uncritical follower of Greek practices. Having seen the failures of the Greek cities, Alexander fostered an imperial vision closer to that of the Persian Cyrus. In a way irritating to both Macedonians and Greeks, Alexander sought to create not an empire of conquered peoples, but a commonwealth of races. Once he decisively defeated the Persians, he quickly co-opted their officials and integrated a large part of their infantry into his expanding army.

  Alexander’s vision of a cosmopolitan world empire posed a lethal threat to the independence of the city-states. When the ancient city of Thebes rebelled against the Macedonians, this normally enlightened conqueror burned it to the ground and sold the inhabitants into slavery.24 The remaining Greek city-states, including Athens, never again emerged as powerful independent entities.25

  ALEXANDRIA: THE FIRST GREAT COSMOPOLIS

  Alexander exported Hellenic urban and commercial culture beyond its previous spheres of influence, even into India itself. The economic impacts were dramatic. The widespread diffusion of coinage minted by Alexander and his successors provoked an explosion in transnational trade,26 among whose primary beneficiaries were former Greek colonies such as Rhodes and Syracuse. 27

  Alexander’s greatest urban legacy, however, lay in the new cities he and his successors founded. Antioch, Seleucia, and most notably Alexandria employed rational planning principles on a scale rarely seen in older Greek cities. Starting from scratch, each city was designed with a proper agora, temple, and government buildings. Here we see the systematic, planned development of large-scale public works.28

  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. 29

  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.30

  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.” 31

  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.

  UNRAVELING OF ALEXANDER’S VISION

  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.32 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. 33

  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. 34