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

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. Rome had a population of nearly a million under the Emperor Augustus. By the sixth century AD it was down to 10,000. Troy, one of the great Bronze Age cities, was buried by the time Byron visited: ‘Where I sought for Ilion’s walls, the quiet sheep feeds and the tortoise crawls.’

Still, plenty of cities have staying power. Athens has been continuously inhabited for nearly 4,000 years, and Rome, Naples, Marseilles and Alexandria are all well over 2,000 years old. Even so, the overwhelming feeling one has on reading this sobering history is how fragile cities are, and how vulnerable to invasion, economic collapse and, of course, rampant disease.

Despite this fragility, mankind has moved steadily towards them. Today, half of us live in them — but why exactly? The Prime Minister once said it was because ‘there are more fucks in the city’. Statistically, Boris Johnson must be right. But if you’re looking for a longer argument this is the book for you.

The creation of the city was a haphazard, centuries-long affair. It depended on humans deciding to farm in a methodical way on a single spot. Enough military and economic command of the surrounding countryside was also needed to produce the supplies required to provision such a settlement.

Woolf, the director of the Institute of Classical Studies, convincingly argues that, although the Mediterranean basin was the cradle of Egypt, Greece and Rome, its ecology was so shaky that it made urbanism risky.