Harry Mount

The famous cities of the ancient world were surprisingly small and fragile

Greg Woolf reminds us of how vulnerable urban life has often been to plague, invasion and economic collapse

‘The Construction of the Tower of Babel’, by Hendrick von Cleve. Getty Images 
issue 11 July 2020

Greg Woolf didn’t know his book would come out during an urban crisis. Thanks to coronavirus, Venice’s population, for example, is now somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000 — the lowest for centuries.

Horrific pandemics were nothing new for ancient cities, which, as this scholarly book shows, have gone through heady rises and catastrophic falls.

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