Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

CHAPTER 31
BUILDING AND ARCHITECTURE
marlia mundell mango
i. introduction
Buildings are the most tangible witnesses of the character of a civilization.
Their scale, their function, their elaboration and their novelty as compared
to earlier types are all significant pointers. A survey of architecture in the
fifth and sixth century leads to one inescapable conclusion: mutatis mutandis,
life in both city and countryside went on as before in areas under the
effective control of the empire. If a citizen of Ephesus of a.d. 300 had
been reborn in a.d. 600, he would not have found himself in an alien environment.
The forum or agora remained a focus of city life (Fig. 43), as did
the bath (Fig. 47) and circus. Of course, most of these traditional buildings
were not newly built structures in late antiquity, since most cities had
received lavish public buildings in the imperial period. Made to last, they
needed upkeep but not replacement, unless they burnt or fell in an earthquake.
Unless, therefore, a city was expanding (e.g. Constantinople (Fig.
40), Caesarea, Jerusalem, etc.), was a new foundation (Dara, Justiniana
Prima (Fig. 41)) or had been raised in status (Dyrrhachium), there was little
call for new public buildings. One novelty was the invasion of the city
centres by large churches, but even in this domain, the essential structures
had been architecturally developed in the century prior to a.d. 425,
although there was still room for expansion. Other new architectural elements
were monasteries (Figs. 49–50), martyria (Figs. 56–7) and welfare
establishments. Village architecture of this period is also abundantly represented
by buildings, many still standing to roof height, in the limestone
massif of northern Syria: churches, baptisteries, baths, shops, and andron,
inns, monasteries, houses and tombs (Figs. 42, 54, 60–2).
In addition to standing structures and the archaeological record, knowledge
of the architecture in the period is available in a wide variety of narrative
and other sources: the Liber Pontificalis, Sidonius Apollinaris, Venantius
Fortunatus, Gregory of Tours, Malalas, Agnellus and, in particular,
Procopius, who describes in detail building carried out over much of the
empire during forty years (from the 510s to the 550s). 1 This information is
1 Mango (1972) 19–145 for a selection of texts in English.
918
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008