Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

924 31. building and architecture
The numerous inscriptions of the small area of the limestone massif in
northern Syria have yielded a series of named builders (oikodomoi and technitai
) working there between the third and the sixth century (Figs. 42, 62). 8
Leaving aside works of engineering (defensive walls, aqueducts, harbours),
9 several types of architecture, both secular and religious, will be discussed
below under the headings of ‘civic and administrative architecture’,
‘amenities’, ‘communal accommodation’, ‘palaces, houses and tombs’, and
‘churches and synagogues’. Works of building maintenance will also be
mentioned to provide a fuller historical picture of the period. Of the three
principal areas of elaborate or large-scale architecture in late antiquity –
baths, palaces and churches – only the last has been systematically and comprehensively
studied by modern scholars. 10
ii. secular architecture
Until recently, excavation, survey, study and publication of late antique
architecture has concentrated on religious buildings, thus exaggerating a
perceived break in other construction. Yet both archaeology and texts attest
to a continuation of urban life in several cities, particularly in the east, which
would have demanded, at the least, administrative and commercial architecture.
The Miracles of St Artemius are set in a seventh-century Constantinople
little changed since the fourth. The Life of Theodore of Sykeon written in c. 612
conveys an impression of urban vitality at Nicomedia. Other texts praise in
particular the monumental aspect of a city. Sidonius Apollinaris (c. 430–79)
does so of Narbonne, listing its ‘walls, circuit, shops, gates, porticoes, fora,
theatre, shrines, capitol, mints, baths, arches, granaries, markets, fountains,
merchandise’. In c. 592 Evagrius describes as still standing buildings set up
centuries earlier at Antioch: public baths, the law courts, the stoa of Callistus
and four civil basilicas, as well as the ‘beautiful’ palace of the magister militum.
In 739 a poem in praise of Milan mentions its secular (Roman) monuments
with pride – the forum, the paved streets and the aqueduct and bath – all
apparently still functioning. Such accounts prove beyond doubt that the
ideal of the ordered monumental city remained very close to that of classical
times, although excavations, particularly in the west, have revealed the
reality of monumental decay – for example, at Luna (the forum) and Verona
in c. 600. 11
8 Mango, Byzantine Architecture 24–5; Downey (1948).
9 Defensive walls: Foss and Winfield (1986) 3–13, 25–34, 41–52, 125–31; Lawrence (1983) 171–220.
Aqueducts and harbours in Italy: Ward-Perkins, Public Building 119–54, 250–5; at Constantinople:
Mango, Studies on Constantinople i.120–3.
10 E.g. Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture.
11 Constantinople: Mango (1980) 78–9; Nicomedia: Foss (1995) 186–7; Narbonne: Sid. Ap. Carm.
xiii.39–44; Antioch: Mango, M. M. (1984) Gazetteer, i.a.1 592; Milan: Ward-Perkins, Public Building 224;
Luna: Ward-Perkins (1978); Verona: Hudson (1989).
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