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32 The Mediterranean and Ancient History
shortage, over the last generation, of studies of the Greek and
Roman countryside and its inhabitants. 104 ‘Ruralization’, however,
could have the valuable effect of concentrating extra attention
on any number of interesting historical problems. The
history of Greek and Roman religion, for instance, almost
always has an excessively urban focus, and The Corrupting Sea
does well to counteract this tendency in its chapter on the
geography of religion. There are many other questions to explore,
from characteristically rural forms of dispute and cooperation
to rural metallurgy. 105
A town, say Horden and Purcell, implicitly contradicting the
experience of many ancient historians, is not ‘a particularly
helpful category’. They add, still more provocatively, that
‘there is no particular quality of urban space that automatically
colours belief and action within it . . . a town is an address, an
arena, an architectonic agglomeration’. 106 Urban history has its
place, they agree with decided reluctance, and there is ‘scope for
a history of the region which starts from its countryside and,
as it were, looks inwards to the town’; 107 but they have left
their readers with the strong impression that towns and cities
are extraneous to their account. The arguments in favour of
this position are scarcely cogent. 108 I still prefer the Braudel
104 Especially worthy of note: R. Osborne, Classical Landscape with Figures
(London, 1987); C. R. Whittaker (ed.), Pastoral Economies in Classical Antiquity
(Cambridge, 1988) (Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society,
Suppl. 14); Barker and Lloyd (eds.), Roman Landscapes.
105 There is naturally a sizeable existing bibliography on both of these
themes. For some comments see respectively CS 283–84 and 184.
106 Both quotations: CS 90. The word ‘automatically’ is something of a red
herring. In my view, the authors have allowed themselves to be unduly influenced
by R. J. Holton, Cities, Capitalism and Civilization (London, 1986),
who had a specific aim in mind when he diminished the city’s historical role.
To the many works that maintain the importance of the city can now be added
J. W. H. G. Liebeschuetz, The Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford,
2001).
107 CS 91. They are willing to talk about ‘settlements’, however (108–12).
108 There is little point in asserting that scholars do not agree very well how
‘town’ and ‘city’ should be defined (CS 92–6; see rather Fentress and Fentress,
212)—by that route you could argue that such categories are useless in
modern history too. We deserve instead a careful analysis of what in fact
differentiated ancient settlements, taking into account all that valuable French
work about ‘agglomérations secondaires’. One wonders whether Horden and