Asia Minor is generally thought to be one of the most highly urbanised provinces of the Roman Empire, but Rinse Willet's work is the first full-scale study of the chronology, extent and character of this urbanisation. That a comprehensive analysis of urbanisation in Asia Minor has been so long in coming is hardly surprising, given the challenges of synthesising the disparate and wide-ranging archaeological, epigraphic and literary evidence for Roman-era settlement across Anatolia. Nonetheless, given the richness particularly of the archaeological data available, Asia Minor may be the only region of the Roman Empire for which such a study is currently possible. The book is explicitly quantitative, and its emphasis on the exposition and analysis of numerous datasets may render it less accessible to general readers than a more qualitative work would have been. Yet both specialists in the archaeology of Asia Minor and scholars of Roman urbanisation more generally will find much of interest in W.'s methods and findings.
The first, second and third chapters provide, respectively, a chronological and geographical overview of the area of study and a consideration of methodological issues (including the ever-thorny question of how to define a city); a summary of urban development from the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic period; and a diachronic analysis of urbanisation from the Hellenistic to the Roman period, based on W.'s dataset of 1500 self-governing cities and secondary agglomerations (enumerated in the Appendix). Unsurprisingly, W. finds a substantial increase in the number of cities from the beginning of the reign of Augustus (98–100).
W.'s analysis is most stimulating when it turns to the broader settlement networks of Asia Minor. The fourth chapter examines the spatial patterning of ‘secondary agglomerations’ and their place in regional settlement networks, particularly as elucidated by case studies of the territories of Ephesos, Sagalassos and Kyaneai. The fifth chapter explores the nature of the urban hierarchy of Asia Minor. Not all of the sophisticated analytical tools — such as rank-size analysis based on both the observed and the modelled sizes of cities — that W. applies in this chapter bear full fruit, due largely to the difficulties of estimating the size and population of individual cities. Here, too, the regional case studies prove to be more revelatory, as W. evaluates the potential of the territories of Ephesos, Sagalassos and Kyaneai to achieve self-sufficiency in their food supplies and uses the distributions of tablewares to analyse the extent and nature of the urban markets of Assos, Ephesos, Perge, Anemurium and Tarsos. In ch. 6 on the distribution of monumental buildings, W.'s scaling methodology yields the rather unsurprising result that the size of cities was closely correlated to the number and variety of public buildings found within them. Nonetheless, his thorough presentation of the quantities and combinations of public buildings found in the cities of Asia Minor clearly and valuably demonstrates that most of them, while small, were not simply cities ‘on paper’, but underwent considerable monumentalisation in the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods (249). This chapter also offers brief but thought-provoking insights about the different types of monumental projects (and combinations of structures) embarked upon by cities of varying sizes.
W. ends with brief conclusions about the historical course of urbanisation in Asia Minor in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, particularly contrasting developments in Greece. Drawing on the work of John Bintliff, W. attributes the diverging urbanisation of these two regions in the imperial era in large part to their histories under the Hellenistic monarchies, arguing that the newer cities of Asia Minor (and their elites) were better positioned to adapt to the new economic realities of the Roman Empire than their older counterparts in Greece (252–3). Though this explanation is reasonable, it could helpfully have been foregrounded in the analysis of the previous chapters, for example through discussion of the Roman-era development of the cities established as capitals by the diadochi in Asia Minor.
W.'s arguments in each chapter are built upon an impressive and extensive body of data. He applies innovative, interdisciplinary methodologies particularly to the examination of the economic underpinnings of urbanisation. The individual and collective impact of humans, institutions and events on urban development (what I take W. to mean by ‘historical path dependency’) tends to play a minor role in the analysis. This is perhaps to be expected in a book explicitly focused on the geography of urbanisation, but the absence from W.'s account of the cities of Roman Asia Minor of the individuals and groups who dwelt and traded in them, and who used their resources to embellish them, is nonetheless conspicuous.
On the whole, the book's main draw for scholars of Roman urbanisation is likely to be its explanation and application of promising methods for quantifying the development and operation of urban networks. Many of these methods should become more feasible as the published body of archaeological data for settlement in Asia Minor and other regions of the Roman world grows. Numerous well-produced data tables, photographs, maps and graphs provide effective accompaniment to the text throughout. The extensive bibliography and appendices of settlement data will be a valuable resource for further quantitative studies of urbanisation in Roman Asia Minor.
