The Oxford History of Byzantium

by Cyril Mango

  Public baths at Alexandria. These large baths built on a symmetrical plan in imperial style have adjoining teaching rooms. The positioning of the pools in recesses rather than in the centre of the rooms is considered a late feature. An elevated cistern to the east of the baths provided the water. Second half of the sixth century AD.

  Literary sources and physical remains enable us to visualize the aspect of these cities. Although most written texts have little to say about an urban environment that was taken for granted, a curious saint’s Life gives a living picture, while the ruins of numerous sites put the texts into a real context and at the same time illustrate the striking similarities of urban life everywhere, despite notable regional variations.

  The Life of Symeon the Fool is set in Syrian Emesa in the late sixth century. The saint, who feigned lunacy, wandered through the city. His Life mentions the buildings still considered essential for an urban existence: the walls, market place, theatre, baths, and colonnaded streets, as well as an innovation—the churches—and the mansions of the rich and shacks of the poor, with the shops, stalls, workshops, and cookshops so prevalent in these centuries. Outside the walls were tombs, places for washing clothes (Emesa is on a river), open space where children played, rubbish dumps, and the execution ground. The city was filled with people as well as buildings. Symeon met the full range, from local officials, large and small businessmen, and doctors to slaves, beggars, idlers, and whores. He dealt with teachers, sellers of food and drink, bakers, jugglers, musicians, fortune-tellers, lunatics, and churchmen. Emesa, like its counterparts in Greece, Anatolia, and the Levant, was a busy place full of life and every kind of activity.

  Physical remains put such stories into a material context. The lands of the eastern empire preserve many large excavated sites that enable a way of life to be envisioned in some detail. Notable among them as representing two very different types of settlement are Ephesus in Asia Minor, a busy commercial city on major trade routes by land and sea, and Apamea in Syria, the home of a wealthy landed aristocracy. The evidence these places provide can be rounded out by casting a glance at other sites of Greece and the East.

  Ephesus had all the elements of a Christian Roman city. Monumental public buildings, connected by richly decorated streets, dominated the centre, while the signs of the new religion were everywhere evident.

  Most cities of the Greek East had a central agora or market place; Ephesus was so grand that it had two: the upper agora that functioned as the civic centre, and the lower agora, the main market. Both were products of the first century, and contain characteristic Roman buildings. The civic centre featured an open space for ceremonial, with a temple in the centre. Around it on the north were the council house (which resembled a small theatre), the town hall or prytaneum, and the temple of Rome and Caesar; on the east, a bath–gymnasium complex; on the south, a massive fountain where the waters of the aqueducts were gathered and distributed; a street lined with shops formed the west side. A long portico gave access to the buildings on the north side. The fountain represented one of the basic characteristics of both Roman and late antique cities: provision and maintenance of a dependable water supply, often brought from great distances by aqueducts, and distributed throughout the city in public fountains and the baths.

  Plan of Ephesus.

  In Late Antiquity, the specifically pagan aspects of this square disappeared or were transformed: the prytaneum, where the sacred fire of Vesta was kept burning, was closed, the temple of Rome and Caesar built over, the central temple demolished, and signs of the cross carved on statues of Livia and Augustus that stood in the portico, and over the entrance of the senate house that still functioned. Since demons were commonly believed to dwell in the fabric of ancient buildings or statues, the cross was a useful prophylactic. Thus, the ancient urban fabric was maintained, but Christianized. The new age made its presence felt in another way in the street west of the square, where some of the shops added walls that extended out over the pavement, forcing the ancient classical regularity to yield to the unaesthetic demands of commerce.

  Facing: The theatre of Side was built in the second century AD and later adapted for gladiatorial and wild animal shows. Its continued use into the Byzantine period is indicated by inscriptions on the seats and the addition to the auditorium of two chapels.

  The lower agora, a large open square lined with two-storey buildings built behind colonnades, maintained its shape and function. The square was used for markets, where goods could be brought by a street that led directly down to the harbour. Christianity did not affect business that continued unabated in this dynamic port city. On the other hand, the towering temple that rose on the slope above the market was transformed into a church, and the library of Celsus near the market’s entrance, a benefaction of the first Greek who had entered the Roman senate, changed completely. Its interior was filled with rubble and its façade became the backdrop of a monumental fountain, a popular feature in this period. Not that the people of this age ceased reading or writing, but the entire harbour district had been devastated by a Gothic invasion in 262, and many buildings lay in ruins for a century or more. When the structure was eventually rebuilt, fashions or needs had changed.

  Roman cities had a monumental core connected and adorned by an ‘armature’ of streets and squares. Late antique Ephesus was no exception, maintaining the principle but not the appearance. The most active street, the Embolos (the ‘colonnaded street’ par excellence), connected the two agoras. Colonnades, statues, old as well as new and transformed monuments, and lavish housing adorned it. Ephesus was so rich that its main streets were paved with marble, much of it abstracted from ruined—usually pagan— buildings. Typical of Roman cities, this was a pedestrian street, blocked to wheeled traffic by steps at its upper end. People walked, shopped, read inscriptions, scratched graffiti onto the marble, or simply loafed and played a game like tavla on the boards incised into the pavement. The colonnades, which often yielded to public buildings, were paved with mosaics, featured a mixture of reused columns of different coloured marbles, and had painted walls. Along their length were numerous statues of ancient and modern worthies, notably provincial governors honoured for their real or imagined benefactions. Monumental inscriptions contained the text of recent laws. Here, too, Christianity made its presence felt. A large cross bore an inscription celebrating the triumph of the cross over the ‘demon’ Artemis, while adjacent fountains (which replaced tombs of legendary heroes) were decorated with marble plaques with crosses in relief. On this street as elsewhere, fountains were a prominent element of the urban landscape.

  Strollers along the Embolos could buy food in the restaurants that occupied part of the ground floor of a massive block of elegant dwellings, an insula flanked by streets that turned into steps as they climbed the slopes above the Embolos. This consisted of a series of houses, each of several elaborately decorated rooms. Reception rooms tended to have marble and mosaic on the floors and walls, while more private chambers were painted, often with landscapes or decoration that resembled marble. These were evidently the dwellings of the urban rich, occupying buildings in the centre of town that had seen relatively little change since they were first built in the early empire. Paintings and mosaics are so conventional that they are notoriously hard to date, for this civilization maintained a consistent style of decoration for centuries. Similar blocks, not yet excavated, lined the slopes in this part of the city. On the other hand—and this is true of all the great eastern cities—no one knows where the mass of the population lived. These rich houses hardly represent a typical urban life, and the people could not have lived in the monumental centre, for it was virtually filled with public buildings and spaces. They presumably dwelt in the outskirts, or in less substantial structures scattered around the centre, but their houses have not been discovered (though in St Symeon’s Emesa they evidently lived within the walls). Consequently there is no way to calculate the population of such a city.

  Much gra
nder, and more formal, than the Embolos, was the Street of Arcadius which led in a straight line from the harbour to the square in front of the theatre, the very centre of the city. This boulevard, 11 metres wide and over 500 metres long, contained impressive monuments: a triumphal arch at the harbour, marking the entrance to the city, four huge columns in the middle that bore the statues of the four evangelists, powerful symbols of the triumph of Christianity. The colonnades, paved with mosaics, led to shops whose owners were obliged to maintain lamps to illuminate the street at night. Huge Roman bath–gymnasium complexes lined the north side of the street: the Harbour Baths, with their hot and cold baths and broad inner courtyard, damaged by the Goths and rebuilt in the mid-fourth century; a vast open exercise ground that was given up and built over in Late Antiquity, when the pressures of finance and space no longer allowed such an area to be maintained; and yet another gymnasium at the upper end of the street. Most cities had one or two of these complexes; Ephesus, a busy port thronged with visitors, had no fewer than five, all of monumental scale. These were all Roman constructions, but all were maintained in these centuries. Adjacent to one of them was a large public latrine. In addition, there was a smaller bath, without exercise ground, dedicated by a Christian lady on the Embolos. The fate of the nearby brothel, attested in a Roman inscription, is unknown, but texts that frequently mention whores in other large cities suggest that the profession was still active, especially in a busy port like Ephesus.

  The Arcadian street led to the building that was usually the greatest in any city, the theatre. In this case, the vast semicircular open structure could accommodate some 25,000 people, but they did not come in this period to see classical drama. Performances featured singing and dancing and as often as not had a strong pornographic element. The theatres also served as the venue for public meetings, the only legitimate way the people could make their views known under despotism. Acclamations and riots that started in the theatre were frequent occurrences, especially during the two church councils held in Ephesus in 430 and 449, when mobs, stirred by speeches in the theatre, rushed through the streets in support of one faction or another. They were perhaps more concerned with the power and glory of their city than the abstruse theological doctrines involved. In any case, the theatre was such an essential building that it was constantly repaired and maintained, leaving its classical appearance unchanged.

  The street of Arcadius at Ephesus, named after the emperor, was 500 m long and was lit at night. It led from the harbour (now silted up) to the theatre (seen in the background). In the centre stands one of the four large columns that bore statues of the Evangelists.

  Another venue of entertainment was the stadium, where athletic contests took place. It, too, kept its form and function, though the most popular activity, watching and supporting the teams of chariot races, could not have been accommodated in its narrow course. Graffiti on the public streets attest to Ephesian enthusiasm for the racing teams of Blues and Greens; their activity presumably took place outside the urban centre, perhaps in the open, for hippodromes were enormous buildings that few cities could afford. In the late antique East, hippodromes were built to adorn imperial residences like Antioch and Thessalonica, where they stood adjacent to palaces, following the models of Rome and Constantinople. Several other cities in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, though, had older structures that were still kept in use.

  The baths of Scholasticia at Ephesus bordered the Embolos leading from the lower to the upper agora. The baths were rebuilt at the end of the fourth century by a Christian woman of that name, whose statue was set up near the entrance.

  Finally, Ephesus was a great centre of Christianity. The most important church within the city was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. This enormous basilica, 75 metres long, had an atrium and baptistery and adjoined the bishop’s palace. All were accommodated in what had been one wing of the precinct of the grandiose temple of Hadrian. This was the site of two church councils. More revered, though, was the church of St John, on a hill a mile outside the city. Built over the Evangelist’s tomb, it was famed throughout the empire for an annual miracle in which sacred dust, capable of healing all kinds of ills, issued forth from the tomb. The all-night service when this took place coincided with a fair that brought buyers and sellers from a wide region. Pilgrimage was a main factor in the fame and prosperity of the city. Justinian rebuilt the church as a magnificent domed cruciform structure richly decorated with marble and mosaics and prominently displaying his name and that of his less than saintly consort Theodora. It significantly overlooked the ruins of what had been one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the temple of Diana of the Ephesians. In Christian times, this became a major quarry, the source of the stones used in many public buildings. Its fate was typical of temples that lay outside cities.

  Plan of the ground floor and reconstruction of a dyer’s shop on the colonnaded street by the synagogue at Sardis. When the shops were destroyed by fire in c. 616 the upper storey collapsed onto the lower and pinned down the contents (containers with dye, mortars, steelyards) as shown on the plan.

  Tradition made Ephesus the home of St John, St Timothy, Mary Magdalene, the Seven Sleepers, and many other holy figures. Their shrines, which became important centres of international pilgrimage and attracted huge throngs, lay outside the city. The Seven Sleepers, whose miraculous 200-year sleep ended in the fifth century, were eventually buried in a cave that had been part of the necropolis, for here as elsewhere, the city of the dead stretched outside the gates that separated it from the city of the living. This, too, became a site of great renown for pilgrims.

  Ephesus illustrates urban life at its most prosperous, with a colourful environment that can easily be envisioned populated like St Symeon’s Emesa. Other cities show the universality of such places, though usually on a smaller scale, but their remains often add variations that help to complete the picture. In Asia Minor Sardis, Aphrodisias, and Side present similar phenomena of a flourishing urban life, recognizably Roman yet Christianized. Sardis brings a new element: an important Jewish community. The massive bath–gymnasium complex at the west end of the city included two long structures that projected from the main façade. One of them became a synagogue in the third century and so remained throughout the period. In plan, it closely resembles a basilical church, with a typical rich decoration of marble and mosaics, and numerous inscriptions identifying the donors. It is much grander than the synagogues that formed an important element of the rural landscape in the Holy Land (though in many cities synagogues were converted into churches). Outside the complex, the wall is lined with shops whose Christian and Jewish owners dyed clothes and sold hardware as well as other goods. They did business primarily with copper coins, which have been found there in large numbers. The shops flank a colonnaded street whose mismatched columns and bases display a disregard for symmetry that was common in Late Antiquity.

  Aphrodisias was originally a temple city built around the great shrine of Aphrodite. Under the Romans it acquired the usual complement of public buildings, richly decorated with the marble that was quarried nearby. They included the theatre, odeon, baths, monumental fountains, broad marble-paved porticoes, and a remarkable passageway dedicated to the imperial cult. At the edge of the city was a vast stadium, adjacent to the marble-faced walls of the fourth century. All these were put to use in Late Antiquity, with the usual transformations, but still leaving the city a more Roman appearance than most. Since the temple stood in the centre of the city, unlike those of Ephesus and Sardis that lay outside the walls, it was necessarily put to new use as the local cathedral, a conversion accomplished relatively late, in the fifth century. On either side were two extensive late antique villas with apsidal reception rooms, evidently the palaces of the governor and the bishop. In this case, religion and government symbolically dominated the central urban space.

  At Side, the theatre and agora occupied the centre, connected by broad colonnaded streets to the city gate and to the harbour
. One entire district was devoted to the cathedral and a vast complex of bishop’s palace and related buildings. Another massive basilica towered over the harbour where it replaced two small temples dedicated to Apollo and Artemis. Inscriptions reveal that the city was divided into four districts, each named for a prominent monument, and each with its own council of elders. Inscriptions in the major cities of the East commonly name the provincial governor as a main benefactor. Governors, who served relatively short terms in a notoriously corrupt system, were anxious to leave monuments of their administration in order to win approval and gain ever-higher rank. Since they were in control of the civic revenues, they were in a position to become prime patrons in an age when the local councils were impoverished and the private benefaction of the Roman past had virtually died out. Governors carried out most of their activity in the cities where they resided. Consequently, places like Ephesus, Sardis, or Aphrodisias flourished while others enjoyed far less patronage. Laws actually admonished governors from taking stones or decorations from minor cities in order to adorn their capitals. Cities like Side, though, that were the seats of metropolitan archbishops, also shared in the government’s generosity.

  Above: Plan of Side.

  Below: Plan of Apamea.

  Other sites add other details or follow different developments. In Athens, for example, third-century invasions reduced the city to a small fraction of its ancient area. Eventually, it acquired buildings for its still-famed philosophical schools. Long a centre of paganism, its main temples were only converted into churches in the sixth century. Thessalonica, on the other hand, flourished thanks to its massive walls and its role as a regional capital. A whole district was given over to the palace of Galerius (305–11) and associated buildings, including a grand rotunda, a triumphal arch, and a hippodrome. Later, there was a burst of building activity when the city became the headquarters of the diocese of Illyricum in the mid-fifth century. This included rebuilding and expanding the walls and building two large basilicas, one of which, dedicated to St Demetrius, became a major centre of pilgrimage. Philippi, likewise, was adorned with huge new basilicas, some of unusual plan. Its richly decorated octagonal cathedral, dedicated to the apostle Paul, became the centre of an ecclesiastical quarter, as at Side. In this case, ecclesiastical buildings were dominant; but in all regional capitals, church and government left a powerful mark on the urban landscape.