"The difference between the best bee and the worst architect is that the latter always conceives of his work in his mind before he builds." Karl Marx
Everything is Architecture
I would like to begin with a polemic that derives from Marx's observations: All acts of human settlement are the result of a plan. No matter how unpremeditated or how organic and natural looking a cluster of pre-industrial buildings may appear; no matter how chaotic the edges of modern cities may appear, everything has been planned, because someone imagined it first. Every urban condition is the result of planning.
There is a difference, however, between an urban setting where neighbors negotiated their contingencies in 2nd Millenium Ur or Classical Athens, resulting in meandering streets that are spaces left over as new buildings are added piecemeal, versus a case where everything was planned all at once, like capital cities or colonial cities, Khorsobad with its primitive grid and Paestum with its grid of long blocks. Piecemeal plans deal with the relationship of the individual parts to each other; integrated plans determine the relation of the part to the whole.
In the few examples that we've examined the major acts of planning were reserved for religious compounds, palace complexes, and fortifications. To this criteria we can now add planning for public space, which was the particular concern of the Greeks and the Romans, who participated in a general cultural project, the subject of this lecture, known as Hellenism. In the experience of Hellenist planning we will find a curious tension between the provision of an overall structure for the city and the realization of meaningful urban fragments that generate or imply a structure beyond the limits of their program. Consider, for example, how the major institutional buildings of the Campus Martius in Rome--the Pantheon, the Baths of Nero, the Stadium of Domition--seem to conform to an orthogonal grid. The only coordinates that preceded them were the straight highway of the Via Lata, and somewhat perpendicular to it the Via Recta, the boundary road beyond which it was forbidden to build. The strong sense of order in this area is created by the placement of each of the large projects. The planning was done accretively over the course of 100 years, and when we got to the reign of Hadrian (117 AD), it becomes obvious after looking at his rennovations and additions to the area that he had interpretted the order of this part of the Campus Martius and tried to conserve it and give it more articulation between the parts.
Perhaps a more elementary example would be to look at the regularization of the forum of Pompei, carried out about the time of Augustus. If you look at the alignments of the various structures, the curia house, the basilica, the market, the temple, they are not quite in sync with each other, they have been added piecemeal. But as a collection they imply an orthogonal void that has been concretized with the placement of a peristyle colonnade, organized according to strict proportions and right angles. The parts suggested a greater unifying order that was laid on top of the existing area to articulate it as a whole.
This tension between the piecemeal and the integral works in the other direction as well. In a Hellenistic city that has a total plan such as Miletus, the rebuilding of which began in the 470s AD, strong parts are able to change the equilibrium of the objective order of the plan. The individual agoras as they were built, created a series of enclosed spaces between the two ports that were antithetical to the openness and objectivity of the initial grids. And the walls of the city, the most functional elements, were built with no relation to the logic of the grid but only according to the strategic use of topography.
Coordinated planning may have always been present for cosmological issues out of respect for the genius locii or for the primary functionalist concern of the military, but a general consciousness about the urbs, about the appearance of urban form was the particular mandate of Hellenism. To borrow a term from the 19th century city planner Camillo Sitte, they aspired to "the art of building cities." If there is a single word that could capsulize Hellenistic city planning, it would probably be "control"--control of the land or topography, control of geometry, control of imagery, and control of psychology. Whereas the Greeks of classical Athens built their city as a space for unrestrained dialogue, the practitioners of Hellenism built their spaces to manipulate actions and emotions.
Alexander the Great
Hellenism begins properly with the figure of Alexander the Great in the mid-4th century BC. The Greeks, who fought the Trojan War to regain fair Helen, were known as Hellenes, and their cultural output is called Hellenic, but those who aspired to the cultural level of Classical Athens, be they Greek, Roman or otherwise, became practitioners of what is called Hellenism, a sort of self-conscious simulation of the products of Greek art; works that were achieved without having gone through the political and historical process surrounding the originals. If Post-modernism is often defined as the self- conscious return to historical forms detached from their historical contexts, there is an obvious precedent in Hellenism.
Alexander, born in 356 in Macedonia, north of the Greek city-states, probably due to his brilliant tutor, Aristotle, had an inordinant love for Greek culture and science. He infused the Greek world with a heightened sense of time by exporting Hellenism as a consequence of conquest. The Greeks of the Classical citystates were intent on dealing with themselves, returning to their oracle at Delphi and their quadrennial Olympic games, and considering all non-Greek speakers to be barbarians. Alexander broke their isolationism, turning his subjected barbarians into Greeks through language and architecture. His love of Greek things, by the way, did not prevent him (or really his father Philip) from dominating the Aegean as the first step for conquering Persia.
Vitruvius, writing his architectural treatise about 300 years after Alexander's demise, tells a story about the architect Dinokrates, that serves well in capturing the Hellenistic mentality. In order to gain an audience with Alexander, Dinokrates dressed up in a Hercules costume, wrapped in a lion's skin and carrying a club. To Alexander he proposed "...a design for the shaping of Mount Athos into the statue of a man, in whose left hand...(is) represented a very spacious fortified city and in his right hand a bowl as that it (runoff water) may pour into the sea." Alexander, although he was vain, was much too practical to go for such an overly symbolic scheme, but apparently hired Dinokrates to plan his capital city of Alexandria. So there must have been some sympathy with the role of the city to represent; a common understanding of the city as the product of art.
Hellenistic architecture is show architecture. It narrates, it acts, it pretends, it deceives. All of the buildings on the Akropolis might be seen as precedents for this attitude. The Parthenon, for instance, although it might seem an unlikely precedent for this category of show architecture is highly narrative and stagey. The apparent uniformity of the Parthenon is in fact an amazing deception (the crest of the platform is 4 inches higher than the edges, the columns lean in 2 inches, the outer columns are thicker and placed closer together than the inner ones)--it is not the objective building that it appears to be, and thus is a critical representation of the conventional Doric temple, whose refinements have been planned to compensate for the faults of one's cone of vision. The Erechthion, was a hybrid stuck off to the side of the Parthenon, even more explicit in its desire to represent, narrating in its plan and iconography the importance of female sacrifice to the community. The young girls holding up the porch of the Karyatids are a tragic depiction of this fate.
Consider another temple as an example of a search for ways of making architecture represent. The great temple of Apollo at Didyma, built circa 300 BC in the hills overlooking the rebuilt city of Miletus on the Ionian (Turkish) coast. From a distance it probably apeared to be like any other peripteral temple, like the temple of Apollo at Bassae. Close up, however, we realize that it was produced with a play of scale: the steps are as tall as a man's hip and the threshold of the immense doorway is head height. The design was thus a representation of a temple, like a huge billboard, meant to be seen from a great distance. The real temple built at human scale is inside the area of the big, empty representation. There was a deliberate attempt at Didyma to control the psychological and perceptual experience of this temple, making it an ironic representation rather than the real thing.
As to city building, the Hellenistic mindset worked in a similar way of synthesizing the spatial experiences of the polis--in particular Athens--and creating a new representation of them. We could start by analyzing Priene, a city that had been destroyed and rebuilt around 350 BC on the Ionian coast not far from Miletus but more inland. The tradition of the grid with regular blocks seen in Greek colonial cities is applied here with an interesting variation since it is laid on a sloping site. Like Miletus the blocks are square. The sloping sides of the blocks are reserved for stairs that negotiate the hill, while flat streets run the length of the blocks. The Agora is placed in the exact center of the city. The broadest street leads to this space, and an archway (built in the 2nd century and thus under possible Roman influence) marks the entry into the district of the Agora. Unlike Athens where the Panathenaic way made an awkward diagonal through the space, the throughfare forms the upper border of Priene's agora, leaving the rest of the space free. There is a stoa lining this northern edge and a U-shaped colonnade shaping the rest of the space into a geometrically regular rectangle. The space is raised as a terrace over a retaining wall in order to keep the ground level. The center of the U-shaped colonnade is pierced to allow framed views to the valley. Looking up the hill from the center of this principal public space one can find a view to the major city temple, dedicated to Athena Polias (an obvious reference to Athens) on the left, and a view to the theater, carved into the hill, on the right. The single break in the grid occurs for the gymnasium which required flat terrain and the more flexible spaces found in the lower reaches of this hill town. As in Miletus the walls of Priene do not follow the dictates of the grid but loosely adapt to the topography. Priene in its packing of the grid with a collection of the conventional elements of a Greek city, the Agora, the temples, the stoas, the gymnasium, the theatre demonstrates the Hellenistic art of city building, where control of the land, through terracing and retaining walls and stairs, and control of perception, through framing of views and the setting up of oblique exposures, were quite intentional.
The rebuilding of Priene occured a few years before Alexander's rise to power, and it seems an exemplum for the type of city that will be built throughout his empire, during and after his reign. Alexander came to power at age 20 after his father's assassination. It should be noted that men did not have political rights until they reached the age of 30, and thus Alexander was transgressing time in many senses. Young, handsome, dynamic, intelligent, Alexander fit the order of the Middle-Eastern "soter", a savior figure appointed by the gods to bring peace and prosperity, and treated like a god himself. This may partially explain his phenominal success, as a respect for Alexander as a divine presence was common throughout the eastern part of his empire. He swept the Mediteranean, North Africa, the middle east and pushed as far as Persia and India. If there were time we would discover that a conflation of Greek and Indian architecture occured in Afganistan, where Greek culture continued for at least 1000 years, and elsewhere.
The construction of his own capital at Alexandria in the Nile Delta seemed to address two conditions: first, the economic and political one, for Alexander was most certainly a pragmatist first. The site was the part of the world where you could best control the major agricultural surplus of the Mediterranean, since the Nile was the bread basket at this point. But equally important would have been the cultural reason to settle in Egypt. The Greeks, we know from her historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides, revered the Egyptians as the oldest and highest culture, esteemed especially for the sciences. Respect for the Egyptians is proven by the assimilation of Egyptian dieties into Greek and Roman religion: the cult of Serapes in particular, but also the synthesis of Osiris with Dyonisius. The idea of a unifying king was more easily inserted into Egypt with its long tradition of central monarchy than in Greece.
Alexandria was planned as a capital, a grand city, and a place to start over without the competition of existing authorities and forces in an already large city like nearby Memphis. The design was allegedly by Dinokrates, but Alexander rejected the allegorical city in the shape of himself proposed for Mt. Athos and elected for a city efficiently distributed on a grid that carried his name. Alexandria would be the center of his administration, the site of his mausoleum, and a place that would generate commerce and culture. The major east- west street, known as the Canopian Way (remember Hadrian's Canopus at the Villa?), was allegedly 100 feet wide. An open space was left at the cross roads. The infrastructure of the new city was planned to encourage commerce. Two ports were shaped between the island of Pharos and the city by building an isthmus causeway; they were each served by a canal which led to the inland lake and facilitated connection to the delta. On the island, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the great lighthouse of Alexandria, known as the Pharos, was erected (and still in Latin languages this lighthouse is remembered in the name for street lamps and headlights). As with the Pharoahs, the palace complex was the major artifact of the city, but in this case it was integrated into a more Greek set of features. Adjacent to it was a library and a museum, two institutions that became famous throughout the world and made Alexandria an important cultural center. The library was burned during Julius Caesar's seige of the city 200 years later. Not far from it was a greek theater. Due to the scanty remains it is impossible to reconstruct much of Alexander's city but we know that wherever he made his conquests he imposed Greek customs and brought the agora, stoas, columnated temples and the cultural baggage of the Greeks. We also know that he forced his Greek troups to intermarry with the local populations, speeding up the integration process. His short campaign of 13 years galvanized the civilized world causing a major syncretic conversion of Greek, Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures.
Hellenism is thus not simply the pursuit of things Greek, but it is infected with the grandiosity and soterological trappings of the eastern potentates. Consider, for instance, the Akropolis at Lindos, on the island of Rhodes. Rhodes became an important city in the Hellenistic world, first through piracy and then through legitimate protection, and it maintained its independence as a citystate throughout much of the period of Hellenism. The temple of Athena aspired to the position of the Parthenon in Athens, placed in an early moment (probably 6th century) on the highest point of the rock. During the age of Alexander the temple mount was reshaped by a coordinated series of platforms and colonnades. Terraces raised on vaults were surrounded by symmetrically placed U-shaped stoas. A central axis is marked by a succession of symmetrical column screens foregrounded by terraces marking the passage of the axial sets of stairs and masking the fact that the temple at the top point is off the axis, perhaps preserving the oblique experience of the Parthenon, but framing it in a much grander more controlled package.
Alexander died of a plague in Babylon at age 33 with no successors, and his empire was soon subdivided by the Ptolomies, Greeks ruling Egypt, the Seleucids, Greeks ruling Persia, and the Macedonians, no-Greeks ruling Greece and the Aegean. There were also a few client states such as Rhodes ruling the eastern mediterrenean. One of these client states in particular, Pergamon, reached a remarkable level of wealth and autonomy and pursued an artistic production that consciously rivalled Classical Athens.
Pergamon
Pergamon is on the Ionian coast, much farther north than Miletus and Priene. It was located somewhat inland, like Athens and held a sizable dependency of land as well as a formidable navy. Through astute alliances with the Hellenistic monarchies, the kings of Pergamon, known as the Attalids, were able to maintain relative independence and build an independent city of high cultural pretensions from about the years 250-180 BC. The city rises on a very steep escarpment that reaches about 1000 feet above sea level. The walls enclosed a lower city and an upper monumental district that in turn had its own walls. The lower city was dedicated to the more secular functions, a lower Agora measuring 100 by 200 feet surrounded by a colonnade, a collection of houses with peristyle courts, and a large complex known as the gymnasium, the educational center for the city, with areas for training the mind and the body, the upper edges of the gymnasium are dotted with small devotional temples, including a tiny temple to Asklepius, the god of health who will become important to the city's economy. Each of the pieces of the lower city are discrete and symmetrical, shaped by terracing, and tied together by ramps and roads that follow the geomorphic lines of the hill.
The upper city likewise is made of a series of discrete colonnaded courtyards, but it is packed more densly and unfolds like a fan around an extraordinary nodal hinge of the theater, which in the Greek tradition is built into the hill. The upper city is set up at its lowest point by an L-shaped stoa surrounding an agora about the same size as the lower agora. Here one could proceed to the terrace that led to the orchestra of the theater or move up a ramp to the great sanctuaries. The first of these was the colossal Altar of Zeus, a U- shaped structure with arms extending on axis to the orchestra of the theater below. The immense reliefs on its lower regions depict the battle of the Gods with the Giants and art historians love to compare it with the more serene statuary like that of Praxiteles of Classical Athens, expressions of an ideal, to conclude that there was a marked intellectual difference in intention. The contorted poses of the bodies on the Pergamon friezes are quivering with emotion, highly theatrical; they are an attempt to engage the viewer's senses rather than the intellect.
To reach the terrace about the great altar one had to pass a shrine to the heroes, the Heroon, and be admitted through the fortified gateway to the upper city. Then you entered a propylaion transitional gate like that in Athens and entered a large colonnaded temonos, about the same size as the agora. At the edge of the terrace is the temple of Athena Polias, making direct reference to the cult god on the Athenian Akropolis. The temple is skewed from the axis of the surrounding colonnades and aligned so that its porch is on axis with the great altar below, while it would be seen on the perfect oblique from the orchestra of the theater. The royal palaces continue the march up the hill, a final terrace finishes the fan shape around the theater and was the site of another temple which was replaced during the Roman occupation of Trajan with a temple to a deified Trajan, probably built by Hadrian. At the top of the hill was the arsenal and the baracks for the military. The layout of the upper city follows Aristotle's suggestions for tyrants to occupy the top of a hill. However, it should be noted that the institutions that trickle down the hill are open to the public traditions experimented in Athens, the agora, the theater, the gymnasium. The Attalid kings of Pergamon thus offered a model to the Roman emperors of how to be a first citizen, a princeps, administrating through trusted appointed officials drawn from the elite of the military, while providing the illusion of a free city with a wide range of public institutions. Pergamon assimilated the forms of an open society while subtely changing the content into a means of social control.
In this respect we should return to the Agora in Athens and re-examine the gift of the Attalids to that city. The great stoa built on the eastern side around the year 210 BC. The stoa of the Attalidscarries out in a similar way the desire to use the conventional forms of Greek democracy, the stoa, but to improve on it artistically and urbanistically. In the act of positioning this long colonnaded structure the design creates a strong orthogonal relationship to the southern stoa and begins to control the space through geometry.
The spatial order of Pergamon was to have a strong influence on Roman practice. Pergamon had switched allegiance from the Seleucids to the Romans in the 2nd century which only increased her fortunes. She in effect became the police force for the Romans in the Aegean and was exonerated from the tribute that other subjugated territories had to pay. When the last of the Attalid kings was about to die in 133 he bequeathed the city to the Romans as the best means of maintaining the city's status quo. Buildings were built in Pergamon for the next 200 years, including the great temonos for the Asklepion, about two miles from the lower city. This was a famous healing shrine where pilgrims with health problems would come to spend a night, and while sleeping in the sanctuary would have a revelatory dream about their cure.
Roman Hellenism--the Urban Armature
The first evidence of Hellenistic spatial order in Rome is in the great altar built at Palestrina by Sulla in 80 BC. Like the terracing at Lindos it uses vaults to work up the hill, introduces biforcated stairs that helped push a strong axis, note the scooped out niches or exedra on its second terrace. The axis is then girded by symmetrically arranged upper colonnades that set off a theater, very small but perhaps a reference to Pergamon, and the tempietto of the shrine above the exedra of columns. What is new in this arrangement is the pragmatism of Roman know-how and organizational skills. The substructures are built of concrete and constructed by battalions of workers.
The relation of the fragments of Pergamon that fan up the hill should remind us a bit of the relation of the orderly fragments that will be inserted into the chaotic center of Rome with the succession of Imperial Fora. Each is a regular geometric void surrounded by orderly columns, which often shield surprising exedral spaces. This approach to space reflects the fact that the Roman empire absorbed the Hellenistic states and many of their building practices. The Romans continued the policy of building or rebuilding cities as a means of maintaining power after conquest. The creation of a city established a cultural bond between the conquered territory and the center--it was a bond of language, law, and religion. Through the rhetoric of space and architecture, Rome was able to project her legal and cultural system to diverse peoples in a fairly efficient manner. They convinced them both through the high technology of roads and acqueducts--analogous to today's freeways and satellite communications--and through the pleasures of Roman culture, the theater, games, baths, and cults.
The establishment of colonial cities was a necessary function for the parasitical essence of the city at the center of the empire. In order to sustain the steady and progressive influx of foodstuffs and slaves that pumped Rome up into the world's first uncontrollable metropolis, the supply lines needed to be kept clear. The orderly planning of the Roman cities was the obverse of Rome herself. The rigorous art of city building was extended by Rome to her dependencies as a means of nurturing her own chaotic growth.
Often the Roman cities established ex novo were the result of land grant promises to loyal soldiers. These military grants almost always had a regular grid-iron plan with perfectly square blocks. It is much like the US towns settled after the Louisianna Purchase. The grid was so pervasive as an efficient means of measuring land that much of the Po valley, resettled by the Romans, shows a gridded subdivision of the territory into farm plots. The area of Imola still shows this centuriation, or division into 100 unit parcels. The area around Florence shows an extraordinary shift of grids between that used to divide up the land in a practical manner and that oriented to the cardinal points as religious ritual recommended.
The grid was also used to structure military outposts called castrums. In England almost every city that has a "chester" in its name refers to its past as a Roman castrum town, such as Winchester, Silchester, Dorchester (but not Manchester). These towns were rarely larger than a square mile in area and never had more than 2,000 residents. Roman grid towns are founded throughout Italy, Verona and Bologna still showing the ancient pattern quite prominently. In other European countries the Roman grid was also quite common, Barcelona, Arles, andCologne are among the ones where you can still find prominent traces. The best preserved Roman grids are in North Africa where the sands have kept them almost in tact after the water supply of the acqueducts was shut off. Timgad in Lybia is the text book example.
But the Romans built other types of plans as well, especially if they were adapting to a pre-existing town or were building on an irregular terrain, so we mustn't reduce Roman urbanism to the grid. In fact, in the reading for this week you will find that William MacDonald proposes that there is something that transcends the grid or the irregular layout to characterize any Roman intervention. He finds that every civitas is given form by an urban armature of monumental public institutions and their conventional types. This armature is inserted into a grid town like Timgad but is also found in a non-grid Roman town in North Africa like Djemila. The armature was like a language with sentences composed of several nouns--like forum, curia, temple, market, bath, theater-and by verbs indicating direction, linkage, and hierarchy, such as a colonnade, a free-standing column, a triumphal arch, a tetrapylon of four columns marking an important intersection. One curious aspect of Roman cities was that except in dangerous border districts like England and Germany they were almost always built without fortifications. This was both because the empire under the pax romana guaranteed freedom of attack, but was also a good policy, as we saw in Jerusalem, when the Romans did not rebuild the city's fortifications after the seige of Hadrian, to avoid a local dissident population's taking and controlling of the town. Walls will not be built in Roman towns until the late 2nd century when the empire starts to totter. Rome's own Aurelian Walls were constructed in the last decade of the 3rd century AD, a tremendous undertaking that ran circumferance of 18 miles with square guard towers every 200 yards and elaborate barbican gates at the major entries such as the Porta San Sebastiano where the via Appia connects to the city.
The Roman armature whether in a grid town or in more freely laid out towns like Gerasa or Palmyra was an architectural way of installing the Pax Romana on widely ranging levels of culture. Architecture became in this respect a communications medium, quickly Hellenizing in the Roman way both barbarians of little culture, such as the Gauls or the Britons, and those of long standing culture residing in the Fertile Crescent. It is not so different than the way electronic media is Americanizing much of the globe today. The city became a means of persuasion, a rhetorical tool for extending political dependency on the center while ensuring a new level of freedom on the edge. We should not see this as necessarily an evil infraction on people's rights--the presence of Roman institutions often offered much greater freedom, economic, political, and religious than had been previously possible for local populations. For over four centuries Roman municipalities enjoyed the sort of peace and high standards of living that few societies have ever attained. It is only with the decline of the empire, a process that took another two centuries, that the city began to appear as a source of corruption, a tax drain, a spiritial quagmire, a place of human degradation.
Constantinople
This brings us to the last of the Roman cities built with the system of armature, perhaps the most impressive of these cities because it was a second Rome, the new capital of Constantine, Constantinople. Constantine emerged the victor after many years of struggle with competing co-emperors, Maxentius and Licinius. A good strategician, he took Rome in the name of Christ, before actually being converted. About a third of the residents of Rome were converts by this time and thus he found ready solidarity. The last great imperial project, the Basilica of Maxentius, located on the edge of the Republican Forum was still under construction and would be finished by Constantine. It is the last work to use concrete and vaulting extensively. Before leaving Rome, Constantine established the two major cult sites for the new religion that will eventually permiate the Roman empire. St. John's of the Lateran on the Eastern edge, just inside the walls, and St. Peter's on the Vatican burial site across the river from the Campus Martius. Christian institutions were thus discretely out of site. There were quite strong aristocratic forces, the senatorial class, in the center of the city which is one of the reasons Constantine chose not to settle in Rome.
His new capital was situated in a beautiful position overlooking the Bosphoros and Marmara Sea. The site was better situated toward the center of a shrinking empire and the more secure wealth of the east. It had been a small Greek settlement of Byzantium, with an akropolis. Septimius Severus rebuilt it as a small Roman outpost with a stadium. Constantine will set up a new city with all of the trappings necessary for rule. The tradition of the armature, the use of arches, colonnades, columns, shaped fora, and the conventional types was followed. One difference, however is notable. There are no big bath structures, nor theaters, aside from the hippodrome. This reflects the ideology of the early Church which found the baths and theater to be immoral and corrupting. The palace overlooks the hippodrome much like the prototype of the Palatine overlooking the Circus Maximus. There is a forum adjacent to the palace entry where public negotiations would occur.
Constantinople is set on a hilly terrain and thus does not use a grid but is structured on straight streets that follow the crest of its hills. The major street called the mese stretching from the arch of the old city to the new circular forum dedicated to Constantine was lined with double porticoes, like the ones seen in Palmyra. In the center of Constantine's forum was a 100 foot commemorating column with a gilded statue of the emperor dressed as the sun god. This should remind you of Nero, but also of the ancient soterological tradition of the god-sent, god-like savior common in the east. Constantine's conviction as a Christian seems a bit awkward. The same suspicion is present when considering his mausoleum project which situated his grave at the altar of the Church of the Holy Apostles, which seemed a sacrilege to later emperors who had his tomb removed. The city's water supply was secured by extending the acqueduct of Valens, and the first ring of fortifications, was extended in 410 by Theodosius, doubling the size of the city.
Constantine's effort at the art of building cities was the last in a grand tradition. The shrinking of the empire, the uncertainties of military and economic destiny, the plagues, as well as the moral critique of the city will lead to a different attitude toward the city that greatly differed from the formal and social ideal of control that was the program of Hellenism.
Sources:
Mason Hammond, The City in the Ancient World, Cambridge, 1972.
William MacDonald, The Architeccture of the Roman Empire, vols. I & II, New
Haven.
Richard Krautheimer, Three Christian Capitals, Topography and Politics,
Berkeley, 1983.
Zeynep Celik, The Remaking of Istanbul, Seattle, 1986.